Erikk Geannikis

@erikk38.bsky.social

308 Followers 119 Following

podcast producer (@relentlesspicnic.com; formerly @vox.com, @yahoonews.com); philosophy ex-professor

"Imagine you're a clownfish, Erikk Geannikis, Sunlight dances across a kaleidoscope of coral, where big-belly seahorses sway with the current and blue-spotted ribbontail rays effortlessly glide below. You nestle into the gentle arms of a sea anemone, your safe haven in a living masterpience."
a screenshot of the uber app indicating a driver named EBENEZER was 1min away from picking up a passenger from his DC locale. imposed atop this screenshot is an incoming text message from @juskewitch.bsky.social, reading: "No fucking way."
a thread from the old site: so in soccer, instead of stopping the clock during the match, some unseen forces keep track of how much non-game time elapsed as the clock kept running, then they add it on at the end in whole-minute increments, then, during that "stoppage" time, some even more unseen forces keep track of new non-game time, and add it on in their minds (?), with no announcement of how much or how long, until suddenly at a seemingly arbitrary moment, the ref just says the match is over? this is the best system? I don't know how you people live like this
a hulking guy is behind the counter at a pizza place ladling sauce onto dough with a towel over his shoulder. a young lady leans over the counter watching him intently, as though she's never fucking seen this mysterious pizza-forming process done before.
knicks superstar jalen brunson appearing before the media after leading a team to the largest comeback in nba finals history, looking like he's in witness protection, and wearing a wool hat with 😐 on it
a tweet from when arcade fire won the album of the year Grammy award. "Who is Arcade Fire? And how much did they pay voters to beat Perry, Eminem, Lady Antebellum, and Gaga?" @gambit509 Jesus Angel
Some years ago, it was briefly popular to play games with your phone’s predictive-text feature; you would type an initial phrase and then repeatedly choose the middle option of the three words suggested by your phone, and the resulting sentence was often hilarious. It would be possible to interact with a contemporary LLM this way, and the resulting sentences would be perfectly sensible, but you probably wouldn’t feel like you were talking with someone. Yet that’s essentially what an LLM-based chatbot is, except that there’s no need to manually choose the middle option when it’s the chatbot’s turn to talk. It’s still a predictive-text game, but when the process is streamlined this way, the game becomes so engaging that some people find it addictive.
Perhaps most pointedly, the authors raise the question of whether the many A.I. companies tackling mathematics — major players such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, or start-ups such as Harmonic, Math, Inc. and Axiom Math — are keeping the field’s best interests in mind. “Technology companies’ involvement in research,” they write, “raises the risk that research questions are prioritized and incentivized because of their amenability to A.I. methods and models, rather than their deeper significance to understanding.” In turn, they point out, this disadvantages researchers who choose not to use the technology, and those who do not have access to it.
Rosenbaum said that writers who “wake up in the morning wanting to have ideas” are now “living in fear, and it’s not healthy for democracy.” Before I could ask what exactly that meant, he went on: “I talked to another author this morning who's literally got a book coming out going to the publisher in a month, and she's fucking terrified.” I asked if that was because she used AI in the process of writing the book. “Of course. You say this with an accusatory tone, like she used a cheating tool.” He mentioned a report that places AI adoption among journalists at 82 percent. He said that WIRED’s generative AI policy is restrictive and hypothesized that our writers likely use AI in secret. He doubled down on his personal commitment to AI, noting that he still uses it every day. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that's just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that's not out of the realm of possibility.”
“Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said. This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.
More details on that seismic trial below, but first, we’re sharing some of your responses to the question we posed last time: How is AI reshaping your workplace or the nature of your work? ❖ WIRED reader Richard R. writes: “AI has given me an even greater sense of having little and less control over my destiny.” ❖ Dan S. says: “I work for a tech company in an industry that is pretty resistant to tech. For years, I loved working here because it felt like a 2008 time capsule where tech was exciting, you could solve interesting and complex problems, and were able to do the right thing for your customers instead of chasing whatever tech trend that week. We got a new CEO who is from bigger tech companies…She's friends with people that own small AI companies and we're now being forced to use AI at least once a day…Basically it's created a lot more work for everyone, but if you mention this, you soon find yourself without a job. So people are too scared to bring up their concerns and are just working through it.” ❖ Christine K. says: “Not a day goes by in my professional life where I or a colleague doesn't have a complaint about poor results stemming from AI usage. My husband is threatening to quit his job of 15 years because of all the problems caused by his boss trying to use AI to ‘save time and money.’ (Spoiler: it’s wasting both time and money).” ❖ Steven D. says: “Well AI has been implemented into just about every aspect of my job that involves writing. You can’t open a single tool without seeing “CoPilot” in the top corner. I never use it, my ability to compose the English language needs no assistance and I wish my employer trusted that fact.”
an image of the Domino's pizza tracker web app, which says very prominently at the top: NICE ORDER. TRACK IT NOW.
Lloyd from Leasetech meets one of the firm's creative directors, Don Draper, whilst flanked on either side by janitors, who, though pinned to their ladders like crucifixes, reach upward to alter the firmament
The New York Times 'I'm Tainted. I'm in the Files.' He mastered the world of the "Epstein Class" to build great museums. Now he's confronting the cost.
Hi Erikk, I hope you're doing well! I’m Alex with the Handshake AI team, and I wanted to personally reach out about a new philosophy-focused AI research project we’re launching. We immediately thought of you given your background in Philosophy. We’re currently staffing a project focused on integrating a specific ethical framework into a widely used language model, and we’re seeking PhD-level moral philosophers to contribute. We’re looking for moral philosophers with strong publication records in ethics. If you're interested, please follow the steps below to secure your candidacy:
Americans think everyone is corrupt Voters have weird views about this, and progressive advocacy groups do a lot that's counterproductive. Matthew Yglesias Feb 12
a photorealistic mural on the side of a building of a baby as a cop holding a gun seen from over the jagged crest of a cybertruck
an old white lawman in a cowboy hat looking despondently away from his interlocutor seated at a diner booth
A product listed on Amazon: Goetland 18 inch Oversized Digital Wall Clock LED Modern Large Display Temperaturer Multi Functional Remote Control 4-Digit for Kitchen Office Living Room Classroom Single Red Visit the Goetland Store 4.2 stars (325 ratings)
a banquet type affair with a dozen or two people visible, white tablecloths, lots of apples, and then an inscrutable triptych of projections on a white wall: from left to right: two leopards (or are they cheetahs?); the words "Abolition of Time"; then a man using a 90s-era computer with a woman looking at him by his side.
Unlimited Golf for One
San Francisco Chronicle The best stairway city in the world? 17 epic San Francisco climbs that will make you fall in loev with the city again
"Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time. Dr. Laibson tells his students that in-person learning is better than learning by video. But he also defends the double-scheduling practice because so many classes at Harvard meet at overlapping times."
· Why it matters: The U.S. is betting its economic fortunes on the belief that OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and other AI leaders are wizardly innovators dreaming up novel financing vehicles to drive a golden future — rather than salesmen juggling billions and praying the music never stops.
"Christine Matthews — the pollster for former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s reelection campaign, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ two campaigns and the president of Bellwether Research — first saw women wearing weighted vests all over her upscale neighborhood in Alexandria. Matthews’ [sic] wanted answers to two simple questions: How many women were wearing weighted vests? And what were their politics? So she commissioned a poll of 1,000 women across the U.S., the results of which she shared exclusively with POLITICO."
Judge Mehta said in his ruling Tuesday that he lacked expertise in the business of search engines and A.I., and that “unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future.” “Not exactly a judge’s forte,” he added.
Nevertheless, the capacity “to fulfill a broad array of informational needs” constitutes a defining feature of both products, as Google implicitly acknowledges. Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 110–11 (discussing the “peculiar characteristics and uses” of GSEs when defining the relevant product market for purposes of determining liability); see Google’s RPFJ § VI.N (defining “ThirdParty General Search Service” to include “a web search service that can respond to a broad range of search query categories and offers functionality that is substantially similar to Google Search”); id. § VI.O (defining “Third-Party Generative AI Assistive Service” to include “a stand-alone mobile software application that is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that has among its principal functions answering information-seeking prompts across a wide variety of topics using a broad range of publicly available information”). And it is that capacity that renders GenAI a potential threat to Google’s dominance in the market for general search services. Indeed, Google’s own witness, Apple executive Eddy Cue, testified that the volume of Google Search queries in Apple’s Safari web browser had declined for the first time in 22 years likely due to the emergence of GenAI chatbots. Rem. Tr. at 3818:20–3819:4, 3827:23–3828:11, 3846:24–3847:3 (Cue); see also FOF ¶ 63. And when asked what it would take for a competitor “to provide genuine competition to Google for Apple’s default on Safari,” Cue replied, “I don’t think the incumbents can do it . . . . The people that have the opportunity to do it are” those “leveraging the new technologies, . . . the Perplexities, the OpenAIs of the world . . . .” Id. at 3845:15–3846:2 (Cue);
External Communications Manager, Search Google 4.3⭐ San Francisco, CA $165,000 - $245,000 a year Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 10 years of experience in communications within technology. 4 days ago
"The community's two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in."
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE I Watched AI Agents Try to Hack My Vibe-Coded Website by WILL KNIGHT
A wi-fi network, on a list of nearby wi-fi networks, called: "Internet surfing. Wheeeeeee!"
"This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."
"Mr. Mamdani is a clever self-marketer and has never come off as a scold. He could be telling New Yorkers: Let’s save money by forgoing all the brand name products, like Baleine sea salt from France and Snyder’s pretzel sticks, both in the background of his TikTok video. Or he could make videos on cooking whole chickens to save money and eat healthfully. But he wants to give New Yorkers capitalist consumer-brand choice at socialist prices. Mr. Mamdani’s brand of socialism is not collective, cooperative sacrifice but individualist, no-cost, no-tradeoff socialism."
"I haven't quite cracked why, but generative AI also brings out the worst in some people. By giving the illusion of labor, it excites those who are desperate to replace or commoditize it. By giving the illusion of education, it excites those who are too idle to actually learn things by convincing them that in a few minutes they can learn quantum physics. By giving the illusion of activity, it allows the gluttony of Business Idiots that control everything to pretend that they do something. By giving the illusion of futurity, it gives reporters that have long-since disconnected from actual software and hardware the ability to pretend that they know what's happening in the tech industry."
THE BRIEFING by Martin Peers Greetings! Here’s a sobering thought. Today’s AI bubble is bigger than the tech bubble of the 1990s, according to Torsten Slok, the chief economist for Apollo whose brief daily emails are widely followed. He bases that statement on his analysis that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 are today “more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.”
"We’re not just competing against large-scale publications and AI slop, we are competing against the entire rest of the internet. We were publishing articles and AI was scraping and republishing them within five minutes of us publishing them,” I said. “So many publications are leaning into ‘how can we use AI to be more efficient to publish more,’ and it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work because you’re competing against a child in Romania, a child in Bangladesh who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accuracy, but in an SEO algorithm it’s going to perform and that’s what you’re competing against. You have to compete on quality at this point and you have to find a real human being audience and you need to speak to them directly and treat them as though they are intelligent and not as though you are trying to feed them as much slop as possible.”
The problem is deep in the weeds, a drafting issue on a procedural document — the “rule” governing the megabill’s floor consideration. But there are real consequences for Speaker Mike Johnson if it doesn’t get fixed.
Near the end of the conversation, Roberts offered additional insight into his relationships with his colleagues when asked about how the Supreme Court is addressing cybersecurity issues, including ones caused by artificial intelligence. He said Justice Clarence Thomas is “the most technologically sophisticated of the justices” and helps keep everyone aware of potential threats. “I do what he tells me to do,” Roberts said. Diaz wrapped up the conversation by asking Roberts to reflect on work-life balance and share how he unwinds during his limited downtime. “I like to read a lot, but … it’s all usually crime mysteries and things like that, nothing elevating in any way other than you want to find out who did it,” Roberts said.
On private text chains and WhatsApp groups, Jewish voters circulated mock ballots showing Mr. Cuomo ranked first to stop Mr. Mamdani’s rise. Social media influencers with large pro-Israel followings circulated Mr. Mamdani’s past statements about Israel, saying he would threaten Jewish safety in the city. “I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” posted Jill Kargman, a Jewish writer and actress who has also shared inflammatory content about Muslims and supported Mr. Cuomo.