Adam Thompson

Adam Thompson

@thesonofthomp.com

🇨🇦➡️🗽 Hockey. Hiking. Music. Dogs. Tech. Sr. UI Engineer at MongoDB Adam.hasOwnProperty('opinions')

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I understand the resentment towards @mark-carney.bsky.social’s comments: AI is painfully upheaving so many industries. But Pandora’s Box is opened. The technology exists; there’s no going back on that. The best our governments can do is ensure that it’s used and deployed responsibly, and equitably.

I’m noticing two philosophical camps when it comes to the question of AI and copyright. Camp 1 anthropomorphizes an LLM, whereas Camp 2 sees an LLM more like a deterministic prediction machine

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Personally, I fall into Camp 2, at least when it comes to art. These models may be somewhat of a “black box” still, but they’re still deterministic machines.

I don’t think “reasoning models” or “agents” change this either. No amount of agentic reasoning can cause the model to create something non-derivative

I’m noticing two philosophical camps when it comes to the question of AI and copyright. Camp 1 anthropomorphizes an LLM, whereas Camp 2 sees an LLM more like a deterministic prediction machine

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Camp 2 sees the LLM as a complex, but deterministic mathematical model, and that the existence of copyrighted material in the model means that any generation using that model inherently contains that material.

Its therefore not OK to use AI to create art, since it’s not meaningfully different from using an “advanced autocomplete” that could “suggest” the works of Tolkien

I’m noticing two philosophical camps when it comes to the question of AI and copyright. Camp 1 anthropomorphizes an LLM, whereas Camp 2 sees an LLM more like a deterministic prediction machine

Camp 1 personifies an LLM, and holds that the use of copyrighted material in training, and subsequent generations is just like humans drawing inspiration from said material. It’s therefore OK to use AI in creating art, since it’s no different from a person being inspired by Tolkien

Spent a good chunk of the weekend setting up OpenClaw. Now that I’m thinking with Agents, I’m annoyed I can’t set it up to do the actual tedious parts of my life like laundry and cleaning.

Has AI increased my productivity? For purely coding tasks, sure. But the pre-existing bottleneck of code review has stayed the same, if not gotten worse

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Has AI increased my productivity? For purely coding tasks, sure. But the pre-existing bottleneck of code review has stayed the same, if not gotten worse

I used to be able to use knowledge of my teammates to make code review faster. If I knew someone was stellar at CSS but struggled with writing good tests, I’d skim the CSS and do a more thorough review of the tests

Sittim. Sittim is the opposite of standim. But it’s also the opposite of runnin aroun, and standim on u head. This implies that Sittim exists on a complex hyper plane of locomotion. In this essay I will

Having recently read his book, I don’t think Carney is betraying his Value(s), rather he’s responding to the shifting priorities and values of Canadians since November of last year. However, he could probably do a better job at communicating his longer term vision www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-p...

cbc.caMark Carney: climate friend or foe? | Front Burner | CBC Podcasts | CBC ListenIn 2015, as governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney’s ‘Tragedy of the Horizons’ speech made waves in the global climate community. It was seen as a landmark call for the financial sector to recog...

I really like Warp terminal, but agents seem to have gotten worse in the latest update. Why is it opening `nano` and simulating keystrokes now? It never used to do that, and would just read and `cat >` straight into a file

Front Burner with Jayme Poisson: Canada’s bet on an AI boom www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-p...

cbc.caCanada’s bet on an AI boom | Front Burner | CBC Podcasts | CBC ListenCanada's first ever minister of artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon, is spearheading what he's calling a "30-day sprint" to nail down Canada's AI strategy. The plan? To figure out a government appro...
Adam Thompson@thesonofthomp.com

It’s pretty embarrassing that while the US is investing in AI and tech infrastructure, Canada is still figuring out how to sell our rocks, trees and oil to countries other than the States

It feels like the (unspoken) goal of all these companies is to achieve AGI before the bubble pops

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

Premium: The AI Bubble's promises are impossible. NVIDIA's customers are running out of money, GPUs die in 3-5 years, most 1GW data centers will never get built, and OpenAI's Abilene data center doesn't won't have the power it needs before 2028 - if it ever does. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

“LLMs often function like a fresh summer intern…who can’t learn” Having used AI for the last several months, this is my take as well. Actually, our summer intern was much better, and she could learn! Great piece by @edzitron.com on the reality of the AI market www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

wheresyoured.atThe Case Against Generative AISoundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've ever written, weighing in somewhere around 18,500 wo...

I don’t see a reason we couldn’t though. Sweden has a quarter of our population, but they have Volvo and Saab. Korea is only slightly larger and have Kia and Hyundai.