This week: the world’s best blogger retires, the LLM spreadsheet revolution, Comedy Wildlife Photography awards, and more.
Very good Henry Farrell post on how LLMs are indeed going to revolutionize human life–by revolutionizing the management of large organizations. They’ll be revolutionary in the same boring-but-yet-vitally-important ways that filing cabinets, spreadsheets, and 1960s mainframe computers were revolutionary. Click through for much more, it really is very interesting.
The future isn’t glamorous any more. Why not?
Hoisted from the comments: Atticus Murphy points us to a 2008 article from Karen Hodges, articulating better than I did why all attempts to impose precise, uniform terminology on ecology are based on fatally flawed premises. In all seriousness, I think it would be a good thing if editors and reviewers told the authors of every ms on this topic: “You have to start your paper by either convincingly refuting Hodges (2008), or else by granting its points and writing the rest of your paper accordingly. Otherwise your paper will be rejected.” That’s never going to happen, obviously. But I live in hope.
Paul Krugman is retiring from his NYTimes column. Among other things, he was arguably the best blogger ever. The linked piece includes interesting remarks on how Krugman mixed open political advocacy with honest technocratic analysis. Had me thinking back to our old discussions of whether, and how, scientists today can still act as “honest brokers”.
Comedy Wildlife Photography award winners. 🙂