AI

Twenty questions. Yes or no answers only. Somebody thinks of a thing, and you have to find it. The number twenty looks like a folk choice, the sort of round figure a Victorian parlour settles on. It is not. Twenty is very close to exactly the right number, and you can derive it. Every question is worth one bit, at best A yes-or-no answer can carry at most one bit of information. One bit halves the space of possibilities. Ask a perfect question and whatever the answer, you throw away half the world. ...

Last New Year’s Eve I asked ChatGPT a question that has been rattling around my head: based purely on your training data, if you had to guess (without looking anything up), is “Wentworth Valley Campground” notable enough to have a wikipedia page? That is not really a question about a campground. It is a question about whether a model can look inward and estimate the density of its own knowledge. Every hallucinated citation I have ever been handed is a failure of exactly this skill. ...

Earlier today, Kent C. Dodds posted a thought on X: Imagine being someone who muted “AI” early on when some people thought it was an annoying “topic of the week” that would pass, but they forgot to unmute it. They must live in a completely different world 😅 He is right that they would. The thought stuck with me, because I could not immediately work out what I would tell that person if they asked. ...

I appear to be building a content farm. That is not how I described ActuallyRandom.com when I bought the domain. I called it an outlet for the ideas that bounce around my ADHD brain, a place to experiment with AI-generated writing, SEO, advertising and affiliate links. It sounds friendlier when I put it that way. Still, the basic plan is to publish articles, attract people from search engines and eventually make a little money from their visits. That is close enough to a content farm that pretending otherwise would be silly. ...