Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦

The thing about many (most?) AI productivity hacks is that they're only a hack if you're the only person using them. I was recently tasked with evaluating proposals submitted by faculty members. Several of the proposals contained substantial amounts of AI slop. I was offended to have to read slop but here's the thing: I'm sure that those same people who used an LLM to write their proposals would be deeply offended if I shoved their proposal into an LLM and asked it to decide whether to approve it and to write feedback! Those who use AI for tasks like this are counting on being the only ones to 'defect.' They want to get away with submitting slop and yet receive a real human being's attention and judgment on whether to approve their proposal. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma: they have an incentive to defect (send slop) but if the reader does the same thing, we get a world of slop-bots talking to one another. It strikes me that the same dynamic takes place in other areas: "I use AI to handle all of my emails" -- well, again, that really only works when everyone else is writing their own emails. Otherwise, we get a world of slop-bots endlessly emailing each other. "I use AI to screen resumes and perform initial interviews" -- this only works until everyone starts using AI to make resumes and give initial interviews. What good is it to have my AI agent "interview" your AI agent? It's just a world of slop-bots endlessly interviewing each other. "I use AI to polish up my writing assignments" or "I use AI to make my grading more efficient" -- again, this is only a "hack" if you're the only one defecting. Otherwise, we have a campus full of slop-bots endlessly talking to one another and we've lost what was precious.

Santiago Schnell, former Notre Dame science dean turned Dartmouth provost, says that Catholic univs must stop imitating secular schools and should instead be excellent at what makes them truly distinct. His proposal for Catholic higher ed? Cultivate future Doctors of the Church

NEW: Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses as soon as this year, according to a new report from The New York Times. The feature, internally known as “Name Tag,” would allow smart glasses wearers to identify people and get information about them through Meta’s AI assistant.

Fucking idiot take.

So our government is basically like "no don't mess with that— that's a load-bearing child sex trafficking ring"

It's incredibly generative to take a domain you think you know well and step back to develop a real ontology of it. "How does the VC funding ecosystem really work?"; or "What is the Church in the world, how does it really function?"; or "What is happening with dating?"; or [insert your own domain of interest] Ask: 1. What kinds of things exist in this domain 2. How they relate 3. What states and constraints matter 4. What actions are possible and meaningful You will find that no amount of "data" and no "study" is as good as an insightful contemplation of reality, in a way that is as shielded from mimesis as humanly possible, and the surfacing of what is truly important. Only then can you really surface data and do the technical work that matters. The machines, the most powerful AI in the world, is not capable of the ontological piece the way that you and I are. The people who will yield this technology in the most powerful ways are those who get it right.