Lincoln Michel

@thelincoln

Author and professor type person. SF noir novel! 🤖🕵️‍♂️🧬 Newsletter:

1.222 Folgt12.511 Follower5.991 Posts

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Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· 24d

Insane stats lol

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· 26d

Can't believe Nolan made Oddysee woke! OTOH, Matt Damon does look like a Mudokon

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· 28d

Me getting ready for the next Great Books discourse

Gorilla robbing a bookstore for classic books and thinking "when I read these three novels I'll be able to conquer the world!"

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 12

Just got to the part in the Iliad where Zeus is like "fuck it, you gods can all go join whichever side you want" and there's a funny moment where Hades freaks out from the noise.

The whole world quaked, the slopes of Ida with all her springs
and all her peaks and the walls of Troy and all Achaea's ships.
And terror-struck in the underworld. Hades lord of the dead
cringed and sprang from his throne and screamed shrill,
fearing the god who rocks the ground above his realm,
giant Poseidon. would burst the earth wide open now
and lay bare to mortal men and immortal gods at last
the houses of the dead-the dank. moldering horrors
that fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing.
So immense the clash as the war of gods erupted.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 12

To be clear, I just thought this was funny. I won't extrapolate from dumb tweets to "society is collapsing!" But for the curious it started with some tech bro saying he was reading The Hobbit to his kids, who liked it, and it inspired a lot of comments like this:

Have you ever read it??? It’s 100% not a children’s book and whoever says that is lying to you. Not only is the vernacular dated and elaborate but the sentence structure and lengthy writing is often hard to get your head around as an adult. Love that book! but it’s not for kids

Community note notes that it was indeed for children.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 12

It's as expected very silly and as you say not worth extrapolating to a crisis. But fwiw I think it started with innocuous left tweet that inspired a bunch of silly tweets like the right one.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 11

If you like cool literary zine projects, check out THIRTY CABINS coming out in September. I'll have a story in it and the zine looks killer. thirtycabins.substack.com

Edited by Josh Riedel. List of contributors including Jinwoo Chong, Kate Folk, Rachel Khong, Lincoln Michel, Ed Park, Lucas Schaefer, and Lena Valencia.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 9

These kind of rebuttals are funny because uh did YOU go to college? No one who did would be shocked many students prioritize other interests and hanging out over studying. I'm sure most of my class would've used LLMs to get free As. Students haven't changed. LLMs just make cheating easier.

Every post with this chart always assumes that absent AI, the score distribution would be normal and I'm like "Did no one commenting go to college?"

This is a lazy professor creating a test meant to fail the majority of his students by catching them up with minutiae not covered in the class.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 9

This chart of how scores dropped when an econ prof. switched from take-home midterm to proctored in-person final sadly tracks with what I've seen. Why I've thought people (especially STEM profs) have had their head in the sand about LLMs and academia... www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

ECON 1170 Midterm & Final Scores
After Serrano made the final in-person, 18 students dropped the class and nine students did not take the exam. The scores of the remaining 59 students are displayed here.

Midterm ScoreFinal Exam Score

Chart shows virtually every final score being dramatically lower than the midterm scores

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 6

OpenAI employee: "How did the obvious and inevitable result everyone predicted happen?!?!"

Ryan Brewer
@ryanbrewer
·
22h
It’s shocking to me that LLMs didn’t create an educational renaissance. Shouldn’t I be able to learn a language in a month? What did we get wrong?
Yishan
@yishan
·
18h
Because it’s not about what the teacher can do, it’s what the student can do.

Learning is energetically expensive and the brain doesn’t want to do it. All educational systems are methods to motivate, trick, or force brains into learning.

(You can make AI systems to do this, but
Show more
Ryan Brewer
@ryanbrewer
I’m looking at my little sister’s high school class now, and i guess it just seems like all motivation to learn anything has gone completely out the window. All her teachers lesson plans are Chat generated. All the students essays are chat generated. Just seems to me like some systemic change to the system is necessary.

Those who are genuinely curious people will 10-100x their ability to learn. The opposite however is also true, the bottom 95% of learners will use Chat to skip work completely. Just sad to see a tool like this be used to escape critical thought by all parties involved. Curious how we fix this

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 6

We can just repost these on repeat this whole game

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 6

Whenever the accouncers talk about how many caps a player has, all I can think of is

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 5

This is even worse though Trump called in a favor! I think it was a bad red but political favors overturning reds is icky (Not the first time FIFA has pulled this though.)

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

Melting different metals into alloys makes final product stronger. (Also specifically a reference to a play that has that title and metaphor.) I wouldn't expect most people to know this, but a political pundit should probably Google before saying it makes no sense. bsky.app/profile/thel...

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

When your brand is being pompous know-nothings pontificating on topics you're too lazy to even Google, well... I guess you might as well lean into it.

@JerusalemDemsas
Amazing things are happening on
@TheArgumentMag
podcast.

cc:
@mattyglesias

Screenshot of Matthew Yglesias and Jersualem Demsas having no clue what "melting pot" refers to.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

The update on this is the author has public court records, including being sued for harassing her sister

A. The Allegations
According to the information, between October of 2014 and February of 2015, the defendant repeatedly harassed the complainant, her half-sister, over the Internet. Defendant first posted a photograph on Instagram that contained the complainant's telephone number and text suggesting that the complainant was seeking sexual partners. The complainant received telephone solicitations for sex as a result of the posting.

Next, defendant, using the web site TheKnot.com, RSVP'd to the complainant's wedding in her own name as well as that of her dog and her deceased father, even though defendant was not invited to the wedding.

Finally, one day later, the complainant received an email notification that, using an alias, the defendant had named a cockroach after the complainant through a wildlife conservation website.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

Faulkner is just like me* fr fr * (overuses em dashes and parentheticals)

Punctuation in Blood Meridian (left) and Absalom, Absalom! (right)

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

I mean, pretty much! (I don't think either were intentional though)

Messi stamping on opposing player's heel/side of heel.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 2

🤔

Mrs. Doubtfire?

· 1h
Ah, yes, one of the most critically acclaimed horror movies of all time, Mrs. Doubtfire

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jul 1

Each time someone texts/dms me about Threads it is somehow more insane than the last

also are you seeing this threads drama abt the valley of the moms author

she’s doxxing children of ppl who live in her town and gave her a bad review

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 23

If you like SFF and detective fiction, check out this forthcoming anthology (I've got a story in it as do @ambersparks.bsky.social, @kjy1066.bsky.social, @moniquelaban.bsky.social, @megancheewrites.bsky.social and others!) Use the preorder code for a discount! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-specul...

Code PREORDER25 for a discount on The Speculative Detective Agency anthology

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 15

Antifa Super Algae Soldiers strike again!

@stinchfield1776
President Trump fixes the reflecting pool and a week later it’s green again, loaded with algae… Sabotage… Vandalism? I believe it is. The left can’t stand Trump, American greatness and his quest to make DC beautiful again. What a shame!

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 10

Since I had a baby last year, I signed up for a Trump Account- for the $1,000 seed and... I shouldn't be surprised but man is it scammy and sketchy. Official website is a .com address. Plastered with corny gold imagery. Run by Robinhood app. First page says they're going to share your data. :-/

A note on data sharing
By using the Trump Accounts app, you authorize and request the U.S. Department of the Treasury to access, retrieve, and display the tax information protected by Federal confidentiality laws (Title 26, United States Code, Section 6103) that you previously provided on IRS Form 4547 "Trump Account Election(s)" as needed to verify such information for the creation of a Trump Account.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 9

Interesting that dislike of LLMs/GenAI is stronger among the young. It does increasingly feel like a boomer coded tech. yougov.com/en-gb/daily-...

YouGov survey of British adults showing 55% of 18-24 year olds would abolish LLMs with a snap of the finger but only 37% of 65+ people would.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 9

I mean am I wrong?

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 4

They're calling it the most normal LLM spam name ever.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 4

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” — William Faulkner

Cover of CYOA book titled "YOU ARE A MONSTER" with a teen seeing himself as a hairy beast in a mirror.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· Jun 3

Ted Chiang on AI: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· May 28

Even more embarrassing from the same guy:

Asserted Rosenbaum, “Anyone who is a working writer today who sits in front of a computer, either doing longform or on deadline or at magazines, whatever the cadence of your work is, you’re using AI one way or another at least in part because it is not only seductive as hell but it’s really incredibly valuable.”

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln· May 28

I sort of felt bad for this guy at first, but he's such a whiny baby about it all. Take a little responsibility.