Jim Redding

@jimredding.bsky.social

228 Followers 1274 Following

Really feel like I should probably update my profile since I put one in Twitter and never looked back, but I'm afraid this is all you're going to get. 📍 Boston, MA

9 Games: Final Fantasy IX, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Metroid, Banjo Kazooie, Dark Cloud 2, Kingdom Hearts, BioShock, Grandia, Zelda: Link's Awakening
A screenshot of Pocket Casts, featuring the Post Games feed and 1 five star review.
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
The Gunslinger by Stephen King; The Dark Tower 1
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan; Percy Jackson & The Olympians Book Five
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Redwall by Brian Jacques
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Eragon by Christopher Paolini
The Martian by Andy Weir
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Last year, Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and a senior scientist at DeepMind, published a paper cautioning against the use of mental terms like “think” and “believe” by his peers. These systems can generate language that seems astonishingly human, Shanahan wrote, but the fundamentally alien process they use to do so has important implications for how we should understand their words. To use Shanahan’s example, when you ask a person, “What country is to the south of Rwanda?” and they answer “Burundi,” they are communicating a fact they believe to be true about the external world. When you pose the question to a language model, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this is a different sort of assertion with a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake that will lead to errors and confusion.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis; The Chronicles of Narnia
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child; A Jack Reacher Novel