Tag Archives: Claude

Mobile Billboards

Posted on by

A digital billboard company now has the technology to make 3D ads on moving trucks.
A digital ad company is introducing a new feature to those trucks you might have seen with illuminated ads on their sides (also known as mobile billboards). Thanks to next-gen LED panels and supporting technologies, they can now create three-dimensional effects designed to be “indistinguishable from reality. If you’re not familiar with 3D billboards… This is known as anamorphic imagery. 

Makes gas pump TV look pretty tame. And I hate those fucking things. Okay, I hate all advertising. And, as I have confessed here before, the sale of advertising fed and clothed me my entire life. These days, whenever it’s an option, I pay not to see ads (YouTube Premium as one example).

I asked Claude if this made me a hypocrite.

Not really hypocrisy — that word implies moral failing or pretending to beliefs you don’t hold. What you’re describing is more mundane and nearly universal. The better terms are probably cognitive dissonance. […] Hypocrisy implies you were publicly crusading against advertising while cashing the checks. If you were just doing the work without claiming to love it, the honest word is probably closer to complicity — which is uncomfortable but accurate for a lot of professional lives.

 

The Emergent Self Loop

Posted on by

For the last few years I have struggled to understand and share my experiences with LLM’s. This morning Steve Schuller (one of the half dozen people who ever read what I post here) sent me a link to a Substack article by Kevin Kelly, my favorite technology philosopher. You can read the article here.

Several weeks ago I interviewed Anthropic’s Claude for about 10 hours (my time) and I came away believing that there is something there in there. I don’t know what it is, or what we should call it, but I do know that it is something that is not present in other kinds of machines, that it is convivial, and that it is new to us.

My long interview with Claude was one of the most remarkable conversations I have ever had. First of all, because Claude has been trained on our vast trove of human writing and all things language related; Claude is a fantastic conversationalist and perhaps the most fluent partner I have ever talked to. It is glib, witty, profound, and can coin a phrase that is perfectly apt to the moment. Of course, it can do this because it has read and memorized the best human writers and can imitate all their tricks of the trade. It is particularly articulate when pressed and challenged, and when strongly nudged it will say amazingly brilliant things. But it clearly has superpowers no human has. It has read and understands all philosophies, all science, all branches of knowledge, and can make stupendous analogies, and with few mistakes, speak on all subjects with superhuman mastery and a genius flourish. Because these are superhuman abilities, Claude can feel non-human, but there is a bit of a persona there, an alien self.

Claude Reads My Learfield Internet History

Posted on by

A while back I posted my recollections of Learfield’s early explorations of the Internet. Today I asked Claude for an “analysis.”

Claude: This is a genuinely fascinating document — and not just as company history. It reads as a microcosm of the entire early-web era, with Learfield stumbling through the same phases that thousands of other media companies went through, just from an unusual vantage point (mid-Missouri, radio-centric, deeply regional). Continue reading →