robert p. baird
@robertpbaird
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. || I'm on a Bsky hiatus, but THE NIMBUS, my debut novel, is now available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. || robertpbaird.com
I mean, I appreciate that there's only so much truth you can tell in the context of an NYT news story, but this is like saying that Joe McCarthy led a campaign against liberal overreach or Bull Connor was a steadfast defender of local political prerogatives...
Last bit of Odyssey-discoursin': is there any chance Nolan didn't have this scene somewhere in mind when deciding where he wanted his wooden horse to be found? The location and orientation seem too similar to be an accident.
I‘m not saying it’s going to happen. But the next Nolan script might be worth a careful scan...
I knew about Wemby obviously but the great revelation for me this playoffs was just how stupid talented the Spurs are. Castle, Champagnie, Harper—Harper!—all so good, and so fun to root for when they’re not playing the Knicks. (Happened to be at Bishop Loughlin yesterday and saw these on the wall…)
Winning any day this week would have been amazing, but the Knicks winning on Pride, so that one party could blend into another, was such a magical “This is why we have New York” moment. A gorgeous night.
I know a lot of people On Here will dismiss this as hype in the service of marketing, but I at least think it’s worth listening when a company on the brink of a ~$1T IPO says stuff like this about its core technology.
I guess someone forgot to tell Bernie that you can’t be a good leftist if you think that AI might live up to at least some of the hype… www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/o...
I know we’re all holding our breath for the inevitable disappointment, but my lord is Mamdani good at this job.
One thing that always puzzles me about the so-called masculinity crisis, and the apparent lack of role models for boys, is that it just plainly ignores how much of this kind of stuff kids are actually hearing from their favorite athletes.
I doubt anyone has real doubts at this point, but this is so clearly a guy who used AI to write his book, not for "research." www.wired.com/story/future...
I continue to believe a/ that Rosenbaum is a careless writer who b/ should not be allowed to blame his carelessness on AI. But on this point, I'm sorry to say that he's right, at least for anyone who's done a Google search since 2020. blog.google/products-and... searchengineland.com/google-bert-...
Actually the thing you've got to understand is that the salient editorial decision is upstream of any of this. If you're the NYT, or anyone, you actually don't have to give the masses what they want, and you certainly don't have to give them fodder to yell at each other about.
But this, from one of the consulting mathematicians, jibes with what I'd suggested earlier this morning about "creativity," as do several of the comments that suggest the disproof was slightly less unsettling than a proof would have been. Still: wild times. cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...
John McPhee is ninety-five years old, and he‘s still able to do more with two words—here pulling a spider-silk thread across seven decades of TNY history—than most of us can do with two hundred, or even two thousand.
It's not my place to distribute them, but you will not regret whatever effort it takes to track down the several guides J.H. Prynne wrote for his students at Gonville and Caius (sampled here), or, even better, the recording of him reading John Weiners's "Cocaine" (alas not).
First groggy thoughts on seeing this: Wait, there’s an amateur class of subcity infrastructure? And it’s taken over Chicagoland? English really is an amazing/ridiculous language.
Obviously ridiculous of me to expect that a WNBA roundup in the New York Times would give more than two passing sentences to the New York Liberty.
Oh no, RIP Tracy Kidder. 20 years ago I lucked into one of the more remarkable events of my life, a party with him, Paul Farmer, and several other astonishingly talented human beings. Tracy was of course a brilliant writer; he also seemed to me a total mensch. Here‘s a photo I took of him and Paul.
If an automatic rhetorical apology by a machine that is constitutionally incapable of bearing responsibility is an acceptable answer to a failure, by all means, let ‘er rip. If not, well…
Not to make light of a bad situation, but any copy editor past or present will recognize this caption's headline as its own kind of tortu(r)ous ga(u)ntlet.
I genuinely love this recipe but its first four words are such a classic, and classically insane, NYT Cooking misdirection.
Whether LLMs are conscious ought to be a ridiculous Q to anyone who's spent more than a few minutes learning how they work, but/and it sure doesn't help matters that Anthropic baked this nonsense into Claude's training. On this front at least, ChatGPT and Gemini's canned responses are much better.
The substance of the exclusive is an anonymous DoJ employee blaming the computer: