The Bureaucratic Supremist
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Stochastic Parrots
Dr. Timnit Gebru’s most famous and controversial research paper is entitled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Co-authored with Emily M. Bender in 2020. It is widely credited with coining the term “stochastic parrot” to describe modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). A stochastic parrot is a metaphor used to describe Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT or Claude. It suggests that while AI systems are remarkably good at generating fluent, human-like text, they do so purely by predicting word probabilities based on vast amounts of data—meaning they possess no true understanding of what they are actually saying. Gebru was working at Google then and was fired that same year from her position there as an AI ethicist, because she refused to pull her paper. A paper that predicted the problems that have been found with these models. Not a good look for the company whose motto was once don’t be evil.
Anne and I split wood together. Then after she completely finished her new chainmail sweater top, we went out to dinner at the Cozy Inn. This early in the season the place was pretty empty, except for the Piedmonts. Who were there in force. We were too late to join them at their table but got an invite for next week. After dinner, we nerded out with the Scripps Spelling Bee. We rooted for 12-year-old Logan Bailey until he fell with Quincke tube, an acoustic device used to demonstrate the interference of sound waves and calculate the speed of sound. Even throwing in a reference to K-Pop Demon Hunters did not help him. This is our kind of sporting event.
Speaking of Anne and AI, I would like to offer an alternative to artificial intelligence, Anne’s Intelligence. It is all natural, nothing artificial about it. The best thing about it is that it does not require a prompt to activate. It will tell you out-of-the-blue when you are doing something wrong. Like in, “Mark, don’t do that!” or “Polly wants a cracker.” You get the idea.
Pic Island
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Orphaned Negatives
An orphaned negative or unpaired word is a word that contains a negative prefix or suffix (like un-or dis-) but lacks a corresponding positive counterpart in everyday use. It is not to be confused with a negative of orphans. These words feel like they should have an antonym, but the base word has fallen out of use over time. According to AI, orphaned negatives can also be one of those shoeboxes of old photos, where the prints have become separated from their negatives and one is left with a jumbled mess, but leaving AI aside let’s stick with the first definition.
In the July 1994 New Yorker, author Jack Winter offered a humorous take on orphaned negatives in his article, How I Met My Wife. It is written using orphaned negatives. Its opening paragraph demonstrates this tongue-in-cheek linguistic gimmick:
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party, I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array.
Tomorrow, I’ll delve into the potential link between phone use and population decline and also drooling in your sleep. Is it normal to drool in your sleep? Every day your mouth produces between a liter to a liter-and-a-half of saliva that has to go somewhere. Why not your pillow?
The Audience
Extinct vs. Extant
Last week in Toronto, we visited the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Where we toured its paleontology exhibit that focuses on the very most ancient forms of life that once lived in what is now Canada. Imagine, it is about 565 million years ago. The ocean is dark and quiet, but there is life. There mysterious creatures huddle along the muddy seafloor. But then something happened—volcanic ash rained down, suffocating the organisms under a soft, grey cloud making fossils.
Today, this land is known as Mistaken Point, a jagged cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also the oldest site in the world to show fossil communities of large and complex multicellular life. These fossils mark a shift in Earth’s history—when life went from microscopic and got big.
This post deals with in particular two forms of early terrestrial plant life, cooksonia and clubmoss. Both of which lived around the same time during the early colonization of land. While cooksonia is now extinct, it represents the foundational baseline of early vascular plants. Clubmosses represent a more advanced, and more importantly surviving extant branch of these ancient vascular plants. Above are two photos from ROM, one showing a cooksonia fossil and the other showing a model representation of this plant. Below is some living clubmoss from down the beach. Still going strong after 400M years on this planet.
Meanwhile, in the here-and-now, Jay, Anne and Bill left this morning, heading south towards the warmth. Leaving two old souls to shiver here alone. Jay lit a nice fire before she left, but since we want to do some things today, we have let it go out. While the fire is extinct, we are extant.
