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pdotb@wyrms.de

Joined 4 years, 5 months ago

Bookish version of pdotb@todon.eu

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pdotb's books

To Read (View all 8)

Patrick Parrinder: Nation & Novel (Paperback, 2006, Oxford University Press)
David Morley, Kuan-Hsing Chen: Stuart Hall (Paperback, 1996, Routledge)
Ian Burton, Lisa Schipper: The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change (Paperback, 2008, Routledge)

Currently Reading

Angela Wright, Dale Townshend: Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Paperback, 2016, Cambridge University Press)
Ann Radcliffe, Chloe Chard: The Romance of the Forest (Paperback, 2009, Oxford World's Classics)
Sebastian Haffner: Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19. (Hardcover, German language, 2002, Kindler)

Read (View all 413)

Jim Rion, Uketsu: Strange Houses (2025, HarperCollins Publishers)
Kara Jorgensen: The Reanimator's Remains (EBook, 2024)
Mark Perryman: The Starmer Symptom (Paperback, 2025, Pluto Press)

2025 Reading Goal

Success! pdotb has read 62 of 52 books.

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replied to pdotb's status

I will just add that it probably wasn't a good idea to read this right after Hayek's Bastards (unfortunately both have a ton of holds on them, so I feel under pressure to get them back to the library). There's only so much endurance I have for reading about so many awful people...

commented on The AI Con by Alex Hanna

Alex Hanna, Emily M. Bender: The AI Con (Hardcover, 2025, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

I'm not really sure I want to write a review, per se. There's bits I really like, especially the explanation of how LLMs work, and the analogy with T9 I found particularly helpful. I also really liked the description of the groups "AI Doomers" and "AI Boosters", and why it's all bullshit. I think the problem I have is that I'm not really the ideal target audience for the book -- I read "Weapons of Math Destruction" some years ago, and that overlaps pretty heavily chapter 4 of this book, and I even read Weizenbaum's book (a lot of years ago), so I'm familiar with the debates about what (artificial) intelligence is. I think there really is lots of good stuff here, but it's best as a first introduction to the topics of the current AI hype, and I'm not really well suited to judging that.