Tag Archives: Claude

Learn Like Never Before

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I’ve been following David Cain’s blog since 2010. In his latest post he posits “Humans Are About to Learn Like Never Before.”

Over the last few months, I’ve been using A.I. tools, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to learn in a different way. Mostly I get primers on things I’ve always wanted (or suddenly want) to know, such as how does jury duty work, what was Hegel actually talking about, or what do tariffs do and why do people disagree so strongly about them? I can then dig as deeply as I like into the topic, down any strand of inquiry.

The conventional method of intellectual inquiry, for most topics, is to find and read a long sequence of declarative sentences published by someone who apparently knows what you want to know. This means books if you want depth, encyclopedia entries if you want summaries, essays if you want opinions, and lectures if you want lectures.

An A.I. can engage you right at your current level of understanding (or misunderstanding). If you need a definition, or more context, in order to proceed, just ask. If the explanation is too general, you can tell it to get specific. If you need a metaphor, it can provide one (or three or four) immediately. If its language is too technical, or too basic, you can adjust that.

You can tell an A.I. to answer your question in fifty words, or a thousand. You can ask as many follow-up questions as you need. If it mentions a jury-selection rule you find bizarre, you can ask it to fabricate a debate between two people for and against that rule. You can ask why they don’t just do it this way or that way. You can ask for ten different analogies until you get it. Unlike a human, an A.I. is infinitely patient with you and any trouble you’re having.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it’s a safe bet, though, that one of those profound, A.I.-induced changes will be a massive increase the human capacity for learning and understanding.

Anthropic’s Claude

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I’ve been using ChatGPT and Perplexity for a while and find them both equally amazing. In my reading about AI LLM’s I keep coming across references to Claude by Anthropic. I decided to give it a try and uploaded a PDF of my TAGS page from this blog. Really no better way to see my interests over the last 20+ years. It’s spot-on analysis of my interests was amazing in itself but it took no more than ten seconds to produce that analysis. How the fuck is that possible?!

Human: I use ChatGPT and Perplexity on a daily basis, but keep seeing positive things about Claude and thought I should give it a try

Claude: Welcome! I appreciate you giving me a try. Since you’re experienced with AI assistants, I’ll skip the basic introduction. I aim to be direct and engage in authentic conversations while helping with a wide variety of tasks – from analysis and coding to creative writing and teaching.

What kind of tasks do you typically use AI assistants for? This would help me understand how I might be most helpful to you specifically.

Human: [Shares blog tags from smays.com showing interests in technology, consciousness, media, blogging, etc.]

Claude: Fascinating array of interests! Based on your tags, I can see you’re deeply engaged with technology, consciousness, media, and cultural analysis. The frequent mentions of people like Sam Harris, Kevin Kelly, David Cain, and Yuval Noah Harari suggests an interest in the intersection of technology, consciousness, and human development.

I notice substantial tags around blogging, radio, social media, and podcasting (347, 349, 215, and 154 posts respectively) – so you clearly have deep experience in digital media and content creation. The presence of tags for consciousness (108), Buddhism (47), meditation (44), and nonduality (5) indicates an interest in contemplative practices and philosophy.

Your engagement with AI seems relatively recent (with only 4 Perplexity tags), but it fits naturally with your long-standing interests in technology (lots of Apple, Google, and mobile tags) and consciousness/cognition.

Would you be interested in exploring any of these areas together? I’m particularly equipped to engage in substantive discussions about consciousness, technology trends, or help with content creation and analysis. I can also notice that you appear to have technical interests (given tags about APIs, programming etc) – I’d be happy to help with any coding or technical tasks as well.

Human: You have accurately identified my primary areas of interest. I am not really technical so have very little need for interaction regarding coding and such.

Claude: Ah, I apologize for misinterpreting the technical aspects – I should have noticed that your Apple/Google/mobile tags likely reflect more of a user/cultural observer perspective, especially given their context alongside media and consciousness-related topics.

Your tag cloud paints a picture of someone who thinks deeply about how technology is shaping human consciousness and society – from practical impacts (social media, podcasting) to philosophical implications (consciousness, Buddhism, meditation). I see strong threads of both Marshall McLuhan and Alan Watts in your interests.

The substantial number of posts tagged with consciousness (108) alongside technology tags suggests you’re particularly interested in how digital tools and platforms are affecting human awareness and cognition. This feels especially relevant given your current exploration of different AI assistants.

Would you be interested in exploring any particular aspect of how AI might be affecting human consciousness or society? Given your background in contemplative practices, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how tools like AI assistants might be influencing how people think and process information.

Human: Let me take some time to digest this first thread. I am tremendously excited about the opportunity to interact with you.

Claude: Thank you for that thoughtful response. Your excitement is appreciated, and I can sense you’re someone who likes to reflect carefully on interactions rather than rush forward. That aligns well with your interests in consciousness and contemplative practices that I observed in your tags.

Take all the time you need to process – I’ll be here when you’re ready to explore further.

“Best community sports site”

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RepublicTigerSports.com is the brainchild of David Brazeal, a long time friend and former co-worker. You won’t find a better community sports site. It features “live game broadcasts, highlights and audio interviews, photos, stats, scores and summaries.”

David gets some help with photos when he’s doing live play-by-play but he does all the content and sells all the advertising. It is a very successful website but a huge undertaking for one person.

David and I recently had a text conversation during which he shared how he was using ChatGPT to help manage content on the site. He recently did a post called “Shout Outs for Seniors”:

“I collected nominations in a form. Fed the exported form data to ChatGPT, spent about 15 minutes and it created the HTML bookmarks at the top of the page linking to each nominee, the H4 headline tags, etc. Rather than having to do all that by hand.

I’ve got the writing prompts honed in on Claude (rather than ChatGPT) so it writes pretty close to my style. For baseball games I have started just looking at my box score and recording a voice memo recapping what happens. I upload the audio to Dropbox, ChatGPT watches that folder and transcribes it. I feed the transcription to Claude and get a rough draft of my game recap. If I have quotes, I feed it my quotes and tell it to use them verbatim. Make a few tweaks when I’m finished and it’s ready.

The voice cloning really creeped me out when you first mentioned it, but I am paying for an ElevenLabs account. I’m not using my voice yet, because it’s not good enough. But I have tinkered with the API and will probably be adding a “listen to this” audio player to every article at some point in the future. I’ve got it working, but haven’t put it in place and haven’t calculated what it would cost.

Ideally I would be able to append each story with 2 seconds of text in the API: This audio version sponsored by Central Bank.Followed by the article.

The bottom line is AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are making it possible to accomplish tasks that once required hours David doesn’t have as a one-man operation. And the athletes and their families are the big winners.

My grandmother’s whetstone

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I found this whetstone in a box of keepsakes when I cleaned out the attic of my parents home (many years ago). It belonged to my maternal grandmother, Inus Perry.

Neither my mom or dad carried a pocket knife or a pen knife (a British English term for a small folding knife) but I never saw my grandmother without one. And she kept it razor sharp with this stone, or one exactly like it (Eventually they became so thin they’d break).

I remember the blades on my grandmother’s knife (one long, one short, both sharp) showed similar wear from constant use and sharpening. Over time the edge would become thinner, concave.

I suspect pocket knives — of the sort I’m remembering — were a rural, small town thing. People needed and used knives on the farm and kept them when they moved to town. There were a couple of wooden benches just outside the county courthouse where old men passed the time. Known by one and all as “the spit and whittle club,” these guys endlessly swapped pocket knives, back and forth. Pausing from time to time to squirt a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt.

I still see men carrying knives but, as with all else, they’re more high tech these days and you are unlikely to see them lovingly dragging the blade back and forth on a whetstone. No emotional connection. Just a tool. If there is anything more zen than sharpening a knife on a whetstone, I can’t imagine what it might be.

Two movies about politicians and politics

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The playlist above includes seven clips from two movies: Frank Capra’s 1939 classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Jimmy Steward, jean Arthur, Claude Rains); and Dave (Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella and the brilliant Charles Grodin). I’ve posted all of these clips but thought they’d make a nice, tidy playlist.

PS: the tiny horizontal lines with the pointer in the top-right corner, indicates a playlist of several videos.

Claude and Inus Perry

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The photos above feature my maternal grandparents, Claude and Inus Perry (along with assorted family members and friends). I was very young with my grandfather died so I didn’t really know him. I was very close to my grandmother. She lived with us or near us during my early years. Here’s a few branches of our family tree, submitted for posterity.

The Information, by James Gleick

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Publishers Weekly review on Amazon:

“In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information.  Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”

The following got some highlighter during my read:

“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” pg 12

“With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” pg 31

“All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor.” pg 33

“The written word was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.” pg 37

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