Nick Kapur
@nickkapur
Historian of Japan and East Asia. I only post extremely interesting things. Author of "Japan at the Crossroads," out now from Harvard University Press.
Voters in the Clacton constituency have a chance to do a very funny thing next week.
This amazing website, called "Worse on Purpose," is cataloguing all the ways companies are deliberately and secretively degrading their own products As usual, in most cases the culprit is private equity extracting enormous sums while everyone else is left worse off.
Interesting article about how some Brazilians are blaming World Cup defeat on the rapid spread of US-style megachurch protestantism. I did not realize that 20 out of 26 Brazilian players at this year's World Cup - including Neymar - were protestant.
"AI literacy" is not actually a thing, at least not on its own. Across every field, from coding to science to humanities, the people who get the most out of AI are the people who have already developed non-AI competencies, which they originally developed in the absence of AI.
America is returning to building out fossil fuel power plants as part of the mad rush to feed the insatiable electricity hunger of AI data centers. What are we even doing here?
It's getting easier and easier to envision a future in which there is no live music, not only because software like this exists, but because audiences no longer have the discernment to tell the difference.
People getting paid to train new AI models with real, human conversation admit that they cheat by having existing chatbots do it, possibly accelerating the onset of "model collapse"
Great post on how a fake Jeff Bezos quote about AU went viral as a result of misused AI, and what it means for the future of journalism
"Former Federal Prosecutor McQuade’s new book is a piercing exposé of how Trump is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state"
I want someone to explain to me who the 1/3 of Americans are who say that democracy is not important to America's identity as a nation. What do these people think America even is?
Shareholders have repeatedly rejected rapacious Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav's absurd pay packages, but his handpicked Board keeps increasing them anyway. Zaslav is now expected to receive a nearly $1 billion windfall from the anti-competitive Paramount merger. 1/
"Big four" accountancy KMPG released a report on how major companies are integrating agentic AI that greatly exaggerated AI use by citing bogus cased studies based on AI hallucinations, with 40 out of 45 citations hallucinated. 😂
The spread of smartphones accounts for up to 52% of the decline in the American fertility rate since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, new study finds
At age 4, my son invented a super fun strategy game he called "super duper tic tac toe." Many years later, we've turned it into a web game you can play solo against bots or against one or more of your friends using an access code. Link in reply. Let me know your thoughts!
Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be. I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.
The Trump Administration is prematurely dismantling an invaluable ocean monitoring system built at taxpayer expense that was supposed to last until 2041. Because apparently climate change doesn't exist if you prevent scientists from measuring it.
I keep coming back to the "Doorman fallacy" when I hear about how Harvard has hired McKinsey to help it fire up to 25% of its staff without asking anyone what they actually do.
So Harvard's faculty has voted to cap "A" grades at 20% of each class, plus 4 extra A's per class. This is extremely necessary to fight grade inflation - in recent years, more than 60% of all grades given had been A's! But this does not address the root cause of the issue... 1/
An auditor for the Ontario, Canada government found that AI agents tasked with turning doctor/patient conversations into structured notes routinely hallucinated false treatments, replaced drug names with entirely different drugs, and missed crucial information
I realize I never got around to posting the final day of the Sengoku simulation! Here is a map of Japan as of April 1586. The Kitabatake clan was the winner! #SengokuSim
The painting looks strikingly contemporary, except for a few details such as the hat pins in the foreground. Here is a photograph of the artist from around that time:
Quick! Guess which year this painting was painted? (answer in the reply)
Monthly ebook releases on Amazon were basically flat before the release of ChatGPT and other LLMs. Now around 2/3 of all ebooks released on Amazon are fake.