Geoffrey Litt: Fuzzy API composition: querying NBA stats with GPT-3 + Statmuse + Langchain. LLMs locked in a room tend to make things up; why not let them use Google and a calculator too? (more)

Linus Lee: AI as a creative collaborator. I spent the last couple of months delving deeper into how I could integrate elements of modern machine learning with my love of building personal knowledge tools. (Tools for Thought) (more)

Noah Brier: The Prompt To Rule All Prompts. (Welcome to the BrXnd Dispatch: your bi-weekly dose of ideas at the intersection of brands and AI.) A friend sent me this post about creating a tool that uses GPT-3 and a site called StatMuse to do natural language searches of basketball data (more)

Matt Webb: The surprising ease and effectiveness of AI in a loop. AI is still in the foothills of its adoption S-curve, and I love this period of any new technology – the scope of what it can do is unknown, so the main job is to stretch the imagination and try out things. (more)

Simon Willison: A simple Python implementation of the ReAct pattern for LLMs. A popular nightmare scenario for AI is giving it access to tools, so it can make API calls and execute its own code and generally break free of the constraints of its initial environment. Let's do that now! (more)

Slack.com CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving in January. Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce.com in January, reports Business Insider (more)

Bret Taylor is stepping down as Salesforce.com co-CEO. This is a big personnel move: Taylor was promoted to co-CEO last year, and was widely seen as Marc Benioff’s likely successor

I'm Installing Chap for ChatGPT https://github.com/jepler/chap (more)

Kristian Niemietz: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Review. ...Karl Marx’s ambivalent attitude towards capitalism. Disgusted as he most famously was by capitalism’s excesses, he was clearly also impressed by its immense productive potential. He reconciled these conflicting impulses by dreaming up a theory of history in which capitalism represented a necessary but transient stage in the story of human progress. (more)

Freemasonry or Masonry consists of fraternal organizations that trace their origins to the local fraternities of stonemasons that from the end of the 14th century regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities and clients. Freemasonry has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theorys throughout the years... The degrees of Freemasonry retain the three grades of medieval craft guilds, those of Apprentice, Journeyman or fellow (now called Fellowcraft), and Master Mason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry (more)

carbon dioxide (more)

book by Samuel Shem about hospital 1st-year residents - ISBN:0440133688 (more)

model of Nursing Home Design, reminds me a bit of Alexander Patterns and Jane Jacobs (more)

Mike Traven on: The Ministry for the Future. *the world manages to actually set up an institution to represent the interest of future generations. It asks the question, what if humanity actually took its collective responsibility seriously? What would that look like? (more)

Sci-Fi Doesn't Have to Be Depressing: Welcome to Solarpunk (Optimistic Near Future Vision) (more)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (from 1986) (more)

Tiago Forte: Octavia Estelle Butler: Notetaking as Science Fiction. ...winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. (more)

Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1] Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction.[2][3][4] Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville (China Mieville), sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, and H. P. Lovecraft.[2][4] Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous.[2] Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the labels of New Weird and Slipstream, which continues into the 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_fiction

Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. The term was coined by Richard Dorsett according to an interview with renowned cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in Mythaxis Review... Slipstream fiction has consequently been described as "the fiction of strangeness"[3] or a form of writing that makes "the familiar strange or the strange familiar" through epistemological and ontological questionings about reality.[4] Science fiction authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, argue cognitive dissonance is at the heart of slipstream, and it is not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy... While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real[original research?]. According to Kelly and Kessel, however, there are three basic characteristics of a slipstream narrative: it disrupts the principle of realism; it is not a traditional fantasy story; and, it is a postmodern narrative.[4] As an emerging genre, slipstream has been described as nonrealistic fiction with a postmodern sensibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipstream_genre (more)

Mark Bernstein: Plot I think that Michael Joyce — an MFA-wielding disciple of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — was reacting against a different and more substantial opponent, the Victorian sentimental novel. “Sentimental” in this context has a precise, technical meaning: it refers to art that tries to teach us how we ought to feel. This was a great project of the 19th century: think Dickens and Trollope and Victor Hugo: the purpose of the plot was to show you how a good person ought to think about the world. Modernism saw this use of plot as a chump’s game. (more)