Yes, kind of. But the Turing Test is often misunderstood as a test for natural language rather than imitation. Still, LLMs have certainly upended our notion of machinery and its possibilities.

YouTube video by Jeff Wong

Japan's railways are the finest in the world. Other countries can copy its formula.

A lot of journalism on AI's water impacts is misleading

What I gave up, what I kept, and what's new. PLUS: How I'm using AI

Consulting regular people as opposed to experts does not make something more "democratic." Democracy is an ethos. Advocates should justify policy preferences by describing the value tradeoffs.

How to do a Foucaldian analysis: replace "power" with a technical term like "dispositif." Also, you must actually suggest an alternative organizing machinery to replace the dispositif you find unjust.

Dr Shreeharsh Kelkar from UC Berkeley on to discuss massive online open courses or “MOOCs” and other varieties of education technology. Are they destined to displace the traditional university, or are...

LLMs have disrupted college teaching and not in a good way. But there is a solution, it just involves technology, enforcement, and sanctions--three things that make progressives deeply uncomfortable.

Kevin Drum's writing was crystal-clear, heterodox, very opinionated, and often illustrated with time-series charts. Here's how I learned to love those charts by reading him.

"Programs building programs to build super-programs" is not how successful technologies get made and succeed. LLMs will be consequential but it will depend on actual products and their deployment.

The concerns of vaccine hesitant people must be taken seriously. But the specter of "science" needs to be used consistently.

The change is politically motivated, yes, but the program never really achieved trust or scale. Issue #133

Third-party labeling of posts and posters can be used to trade off between speech and reach. But this model has run into problems on Bluesky. The solution might be old-fashioned standardization.

*End-Of-Year Showcase* Labor Tech Research Network Come join LaborTech’s virtual End of Year Showcase December 12-13! Help celebrate the work our members have done this year, and the beautiful diver...

The problem with platforms is not that they are for-profit or because the beguile viewers with "algorithms." Scale, context collapse, and virality--these make social media different from mass media.

The problem with platforms is not that they are for-profit or because the beguile viewers with "algorithms." Scale, context collapse, and virality--these make social media different from mass media.

Can technology resolve social problems by reducing them to engineering challenges? In the 1960s, Alvin Weinberg answered yes, popularizing the term “techno-fix” in the process. The concept was immedia...

How Mexican and Latinx hackers apply concepts from coding to their lived experiences

Students in my class will often blame "capitalism"--by which they often mean "profit-seeking"--for particular outcomes they don't like. But there is something more fundamental: interest-seeking.

Mila Samdub and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci disentangle two different visions of digital public infrastructure (DPI): DPI as roads, and DPI as radio.

I have been reading a ton of takes about this election (as have many of us). While I don’t yet have new fun analysis, I thought it might be useful to highlight some good/interesting takes, and summari...

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