Rotating Sandwiches Lauren informs us that it’s Solar Appreciation Day, and as a wise man once wrote: “direct sunlight is low-key goated when restoring a sense of safety and emotional well-being is the vibe.” Get out and appreciate some sunlight today if you can.
The direct sunlight of media is a good low stakes cross-blog debate, and Temba, his arms wide and Hammat dancing, my dudes, because here’s a good one. Classic-era Ian Bogost started it back in 2014, long before he devolved into neo-Andy Rooney shtick, with a long column about the nature of the alien meme language in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok.” I’ve seen the phrase “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra“ enough times to understand that it means “two people setting aside their differences to solve a common problem” without knowing anything else about the Star Trek episode it comes from or why it means that. Ironically that’s exactly the point of the Star Trek episode.
Sokath? His eyes uncovered?
Earlier this month Baylor University professor Alan Jacobs returned to Bogost’s essay to disagree with him that the alien language is either “abstract” or “allegorical,” which led to Critical Star Trek Studies blogger Adam Roberts debating Jacobs’s claim that the language is perfectly concrete and not even capable of abstraction. Roberts speculates that the Children of Tama could have hundreds of thousands of distinct memetic phrases to draw on. “Could it be that Tamarian speech is more like Chinese sinograms than it is like memes?” asks Jacobs. Sure! Why not. Jacobs also refers to “Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language,” in which Peter A. Jansen and Jordan Boyd-Graber build an English-Tamarian dictionary and translator based on the sixty-eight known Tamarian phrases. Arnock, on the night of his joining! And finally Lyta Gold picked up a loose thread from Jacobs and asked “how could a meme language be passed down from generation to generation?” Gold proposes that the Children of Tama actually have two languages: the day-to-day memetic one and a separate “primal, sacred language: the words of the story.”
Does any of this matter at all? No! But if you read all those links, your day will include at least one interesting and diverting hour where you don’t think about these literal clownshoes morons and all the kids they’re murdering with our tax money right now. The path to Kamata in spring.
Jinza, when the truth was uncovered.
It’s “The End of Computer Programming as We Know It,” and no one feels fine. Anil Dash reminds us that “all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things.” See also: “Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.”
New AI Psychosis Symptom And/Or Software Development Framework Dropped: “Cantrip: On summoning entities from language in circles.” I’m gonna be perfectly honest, I do not know what this is. I think it has something to do with “Recursive Language Models,” which as far as I can tell is what you get when an LLM climbs up its own ass. Cantrip claims that:
This is a starter spellbook. It describes a method for creating spells using the tools of modern summoning: a language model, a computer, and a prompt. It’s language loops all the way down.
A language model takes text in and gives text back. One pass — no memory, no consequences. To make it do things, you close the loop: take the model’s output, run it in an environment, and let it observe the effects. The environment pushes back: code runs or crashes, files exist or don’t, tests pass or fail. Turn by turn, the model accumulates experience. It starts doing things its designers never enumerated, because the action space is a programming language and programming languages are compositional.
Zenrox, tilling his field in the spring, imo.
McKay Coppins spent a year becoming a degenerate sports gambler on The Atlantic’s 100,000 dimes, and it went exactly how you’d expect. I tell you what, me and Mormonism at Tanagra when it comes to sports gambling. And is there some kind of Polymarket bet on the maximum number of clichés that can appear in the lede of a NYT movie review?
Today In Scientists: “Big discovery, we failed to drown a bee.” Scientists! Also the Moby Dick termite, Cryptotermes mobydicki. Lol mobydicki.
600 tubs of mystery French onion dip. (Awww yeah, it’s that time.) “Tracking down the Dark Souls 2 hacker who injected me with 500 cursed Black Knight Ultra Greatswords.” Zinda, his eyes red. Minesweeper: Hormuz. Mixed Tapes: Free human-curated new music playlists for Olds or the otherwise music-discovery challenged. And speaking of Olds: Newgrounds roulette.
Finally: It’s one banana, San Francisco. How much could it cost? Mirab, with sails unfurled.
Today’s Song: Beck, “Beercan”
It’s extremely March and Koltar when he drowned in the swamp, iykwim. But we’re keeping our spirits up with classic grooves.
One thing that always keeps my spirits up is the gang at the world-class Tabs Discord. You should become a paid subscriber and join us!
