A compound of conjurer and quack doctor
Five fragments for the week of May 12, 2025
Hello from the middle of May, banana chips by my side.
Some news: this is my last month at Matrix! It’s the end of an era I’ve loved, but I’m thrilled about what’s next. Can’t wait to share more come June.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
Important plans for the next year of my life:
1. Finish Claude’s soul
2. Have more fun
3. Get more swole
– Amanda Askell on X, May 11, 2025. A stray poem from a philosopher & ethicist at Anthropic; soul as work that can be finished.
The first thing the model did was give me the assumptions it took (repeating back to me the size, style, typeface, etc). This seemed positive and makes sense.
But that continued for a lot longer than I would expect. In this case it suggested a list of categories (I had my own list based on our toys) and a format. Then, during this process it re-iterated all the guidelines several times. It also pivoted to telling me how to do the project myself (not what I wanted).
After several rounds of that, it offered to generate the set (exactly what I wanted!) and the result was abysmal despite the assumptions seeming correct.
It reminded me of someone who isn’t sure how to do the job, so they keep trying to optimize ways to do the job vs. just doing it.
– Ellen Chisa, “Taking GenAI from Tasks to Projects,” May 5, 2025. I live for detailed walkthroughs of people’s interactions with software, and this piece from Ellen about generating a set of illustrations for her toddler’s toy bins did not disappoint. In it, she notes all the ways that managing the process felt like managing a junior employee, right down to ChatGPT’s proclivities and and avoidances. This one in particular made me laugh: “I could ask for one icon and refine it. But then I had to ask for each responses individually - ‘can I get an icon in our style for X?’ and make sure nothing went awry vs. being able to ask to have all 13 generated. This reminded me of someone who gets excited about some portion of the task, totally forgetting the overall business goal of the project.”
KATTERFELTO, GUSTAVUS (d. 1799), conjurer and empiric, a native of Prussia, seems to have attracted no notice until he made his appearance about 1782 in London, where he soon gained a widespread notoriety, partly by means of advertisements headed ‘Wonders! Wonders! Wonders!’ which he inserted in the newspapers. He is described as being a compound of conjurer and quack doctor. In both these capacities he worked upon the credulity of the Londoners during the epidemic of influenza in 1782. Among other ‘philosophical apparatus’ he employed the services of some extraordinary black cats, with which he astonished the ignorant.
– Thomson Cooper, “Katterfelto, Gustavus,” entry in The Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Vol. 30, published 1892. Tugging on the thread of my hot-air balloons side quest from a few weeks back, I caught a mention of Katterfelto in this textbook I rented and decided I had to know more.
One of the great ironies of AI writing is that the only people who can detect it with accuracy are people who use AI for writing a lot (at least if you take a majority vote among five such people).
Non-users are no better than chance, and AI detectors are also less accurate.
– Ethan Mollick on X, May 8, 2025. I’m always interested in what it means to “go with the grain” of a new medium. The paper Ethan cites here offers a reminder that those who actively use a medium see its grain more clearly.
Roald Dahl invented over 500 words and character names, from the famous Oompa-Loompas and whizzpopping to lesser-known Dahlisms like humplecrimp, lixivate, sogmire and zoonk, but this is the first time many of them have featured in a dictionary. It may also be the first time that the words snozzberry, snozzcumber and snozzwanger have appeared on the same page as one another, as they occur in different stories. Whereas slimy snozzcumbers grow in Giant Country, the more appetizing snozzberries are found, contrariwise, in the land of the tiny Minpins (though somehow Willy Wonka also manages to source them for his lickable wallpaper).
– Susan Rennie, “Roald Dahl: the best gobblefunk words,” The Guardian, June 14, 2016. With Matilda and James and the Giant Peach behind us, I’ve moved on to reading The BFG with the kids every night (and some mornings, when they get their way). All the many invented words keep me on my toes and make my kids’ eyes dance with glee. I had no idea there was a whole Roald Dahl dictionary…I’ve got to get my hands on one.
Until soon,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com