spatial-canvas tools for thought https://fermat.ws/

LangChain is a framework for developing applications powered by language models. We believe that the most powerful and differentiated applications will not only call out to a language model via an API, but will also: Be data-aware: connect a language model to other sources of data; Be agentic: allow a language model to interact with its environment. https://langchain.com/ cf LLM (more)

Command prompt: characters indicating the computer is ready to accept input (command-line) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface#Command_prompt (more)

a concept in artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing (NLP). In prompt engineering, the description of the task is embedded in the input, e.g., as a question instead of it being implicitly given. Prompt engineering typically works by converting one or more tasks to a prompt-based dataset and training a language model with what has been called "prompt-based learning" or just "prompt learning". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering

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author of Lord Of The Rings

David Brin on Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings (and abridged Salon version). This yearning makes sense if you remember that arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44 percent of human existence. It's only been 200 years or so - an eye blink - that "scientific Enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture... Only something exceptional started happening. Bit by bit, the elements began taking shape for a new social and intellectual movement, one finally capable of challenging the alliance of warrior lords, priests, bards and secretive magicians... And yet, almost from its birth, the Enlightenment Movement was confronted by an ironic counterrevolution, rejecting the very notion of progress. The Romantic Movement erupted as a rebellion against the rebellion. In fairness, it didn't start out that way... In this conflict, J.R.R. Tolkien stood firmly for the past... Try as he might, and even confronted with the blatant Romantic excesses of Nazism, Tolkien could not escape his own deep conviction that democratic enlightenment and Modernity made up the greater Evil... And remember this too: Enlightenment, Science, Democracy and Equal Opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years. Don't you think a little pride in that rebellion - a radical revolution-in-progress, still fresh and incomplete - might be called for?... You are heirs of the world's first true Civilization, arising out of the first true revolution. Take some pride in it. (more)

blog of Ben Thompson

Robin Sloan: Attention router. Throughout 2023, this newsletter will be largely devoted to mapping new “ways of relating” online. You can return to the December edition, if you missed it, to get the gist. (more)

Dan Sinker: Use Your Illusion. It's March 11, 1918. Eva Carrière sits in a corner of a darkened room, mostly obscured by thick black curtains on three sides. The front is curtained too, but she can open and close those (more)

Ted Chiang: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Imagine that you’re about to lose your access to the Internet forever. In preparation, you plan to create a compressed copy of all the text on the Web, so that you can store it on a private server. Unfortunately, your private server has only one per cent of the space needed (more)

LM Sacasas: The Prompt Box is a Minefield: AI Chatbots and Power of Language. This is a brief, rather urgent reflection on the rapidly developing field of a AI-powered chatbots. I confess these thoughts are born out of an unusually acute sense of the risks posed by these chatbots as they have been deployed (more)

Robin Sloan: How the ring got good. I’ve been tearing through a series of books I never expected to read, and they have revealed something breath­taking about where The Good Stuff comes from. (more)

Simon Willison: In defense of prompt engineering. I’ve seen two subtly different meanings for that term: (more)

Robin Sloan: Author's note. My new short story was com­mis­sioned by Google and pro­duced using a new AI-powered edi­tor called Word­craft. Titled Author’s Note, it is pre­sented along­side new sto­ries from sev­eral other very impres­sive writ­ers. (more)

Dave Winer: ChatGPT clearly has a place. This thread is worth money. I've given ChatGPT programming jobs like the ones the author descibes, and it's saved me huge amounts of time. Last one was asking how to do something with the Twitter API. I could have spent fifteen minutes trying to find it in the docs (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #1: Sydney and Bing. Microsoft and OpenAI released the chatbot Sydney as part of the search engine Bing (more)

Nathan Baschez: Supercharging My Focus (with Help from AI). When I was about 12 years old, my mom took me to a doctor’s office... I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (more)

Robin Sloan: Phase change. Group of internet thinkers has proposed a Summer of Protocols. I don’t know a ton about the program or its organizers, but I like the spirit captured on the website, and I feel like it might be a gener­a­tive oppor­tu­nity for someone(s) reading this. (more)

creator of Wardley Mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map, http://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page (more)