musings

Seems like in all the chaos after the power transition in the US, this was largely missed: Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” will have access to all unclassified US government records.

It’s always the unassuming, irrelevant looking stuff like that that people need to pay attention to.

The rise of Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union really got going when he became the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the time, the position was what it said on the can, a purely administrative job with no real political power.

Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, a position of Premier (roughly a “Prime Minister”) existed. Premiership was the ultimate post in the government and whoever held it was the leader of the country. At least initially.

We find ourselves in a peculiar place. We are more interconnected, yet more misinformed. At ease with more advanced technologies, but more easily mislead by them. “Doing our own research”, but ending up deeper in conspiratorial rabbit holes.

When discussing complex topics — pandemic, war, the housing crisis, or some thorny family affairs — it is surprisingly easy to jump to conclusions, to oversimplify, ignore crucial nuance, and thus get untethered from reality. To label someone as “evil”, “unethical”, fall back on tribalism. Our brains are always looking for a shortcut, and many of these shortcuts lead us astray. Sometimes we get fooled, sometimes we fool others. Neither helps in the long run.

The following is probably mostly obvious to anyone who had been using Twitter for the last decade. But for those who are just confused what the whole hubbub around Twitter “verified checkmark” is all about, here goes!

Imagine coming across, on a reasonably serious site, an article that starts along the lines of:

After observing the generative AI space for a while, I feel I have to ask: does ChatGPT (and other LLM-based chatbots)… actually gablergh? And if I am honest with myself, I cannot but conclude that it sure does seem so, to some extent!

I know this sounds sensationalist. It does undermine some of our strongly held assumptions and beliefs about what does “to gablergh” actually mean — and what classes of entities can, in fact, be said to gablergh at all. Since gablerghing is such a crucial part of what many feel it means to be human, this is also certainly going to ruffle some feathers!