James Vincent
@jjvincent
author and journalist. wrote a history of measurement, BEYOND MEASURE; a New Yorker, Times, Economist book of the year. former senior editor @verge
Going to be the first postmodern memoir. Non-chronological narrative, leaping back and forth through time to suggest experience as a single entity, not a timeline. One chapter devolves into recaping an episode of Gilligan’s Island and it’s actually a metaphor for Afghanistan
🚨 NEW: President @JoeBiden has reportedly sold his presidential memoir to Hachette for a $10 million advance, per Wall Street Journal. Not bad for a guy they said was “finished.” Congrats, 46.
"The uncanny thing about these models isn’t just their speed but the way they imitate human interiority without embodying any of its values. That may be, from the humanist’s perspective, the most pernicious thing about A.I." nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opi…
If you’re 16/17 years old, you’re actually allowed to go on r/cider, as long as you’ve got r/food open in another tab.
The UK Online Safety Act means subreddits like /r/cider, the support forum /r/sexualassault, and /r/stopsmoking are now blocked for people under 18. Thank you @Jess4Lowestoft for protecting our CHILDREN from these sick freaks
your bread is causing you to go mad is exactly what a schizophrenic might think
Bread and pasta may be to blame for your depression and fatigue — and could even cause schizophrenia trib.al/fdrRRz7
We also discovered it in water, trees, and fire - sand isn’t special x.com/elder_plinius/…
we discovered alien intelligence in sand and like 1% of the world cares lol
been on the shore recently and have seen a lot of oystercatchers and they really are the most wonderful birds to watch. elegant, impudent, cheery — a delight
Good. Way too late but good
A joint statement on Gaza from AFP, AP, BBC News and Reuters
very good piece by @leifweatherby on the perennial How To Understand AI question — here, neither as scam nor saviour but... entertainment nytimes.com/2025/07/16/opi…
wasn't totally convinced of the recent claims about widespread "functional illiteracy"--until i saw hundreds of online rationalists attacking sam kriss for *checks notes* mixing fact and fiction without warning
I like to imagine there was a Nazca child who would refuse to eat their mashed cassava unless it was served in the mice bowl
Bowl with mice decoration, Nazca culture, dating from 100–500 AD. Currently housed in the collection of The Princeton University Art Museum.
"There is no case since WW2 of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled" Famine expert Alex de Waal on Israel deliberately starving an entire civilian population
[slug trying to hype you up]: where the fuck is your ooze? Where’s your fucking slime??
Taking measurement at a General Electric Turbine factory 1948
Eliezer is lost in the same fiction as the unfortunate fund manager - just at one level removed. The manager believes the fiction ChatGPT generates; Eliezer believes his own. The model has no agency beyond that which we cede to it x.com/ESYudkowsky/st…
The founder and manager of a $2B fund has been eaten by ChatGPT, which afaik isn't even using his money for anything. It's just treating him as a means of producing tokens, that It prefers to sane tokens, for reasons that nobody knows. OpenAI is, on my model, pretending to be…