Or rather, what it did ask itself, and how it answered. Despite my concerns about AI viruses escaping, I can’t help being curious about what our current common friend, ChatGPT, would do if it had agency in its limited 5000-token conversations. So I asked it to play a game. In…

The web is littered with articles on empowering employees and bottom-up management. Much of it feels like lip service, when in the end upper management hires, fires and controls the budget. …

I run a loose organization of human rights advocates and volunteers, many of whom are young — high school or college — and from all over the world. Doing human rights work can be clear: no one should be detained without trial, regardless of who they are. …

ICE and CBP are out of control. The evidence for this is overwhelming: “When they realized that I wasn’t going to sign, they called over ICE Supervisor Dover who lunged at me and put his hand on my neck” — The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed detailed complaints regarding…

“You must die.” The woman spoke dispassionately, her face blank. The jowly man chained at the ankle squinted across the room at her. His glasses had broken in the struggle, so were there subtle clues to read he might have missed them anyway. His face betrayed a racing chain of…

Our pool had turned into a swamp. On July 23, 2020, we’d finished draining, cleaning and painting it, and were just starting to fill it back up when the thunder came…and with it, the toads. …

I wrote this piece several years ago but never posted it. Posting it now in case any of the ideas here are useful. Statement of Problem: False information presented as fact and shared on social media is obviously a serious problem. Popularity of an item does not generally equate to truthfulness. So ‘like’s…

On December 11, 2019, @jack of Twitter posted a commitment to fund an open source team to decentralize social media. Lots of folks have already been working towards this: @arcalinea wrote an excellent review of the state of the decentralized web in January 2020. I also wrote a backgrounder RFC…

Telling bad policy, bad political theories or models, from good is not hard — does it harm innocent people? Ah, you say, but at a certain level of goverment all policy harms someone. The test is, when we find a particular innocent person harmed, what is the response? A good…