2025-07-05


Worthy

  • Death by a Thousand Cut Corners

    Much of the fuss has centred around the fact that Ms Forey is (probably) the first barrister to have been publicly caught out using AI to do her legal research. As anybody with any sense who is involved in legal education knows, since AI is not actually meaningfully ‘intelligent’, one can’t rely on anything it comes out with - it produces too much fake information. Ms Forey, not realising this, cited a handful of cases in her statement of facts and grounds in judicial review proceedings that did not exist - they had simply been generated from thin air by whatever AI software she was using (although it is important to make clear that AI use was only strongly suspected, and not proved). This is appalling, of course. But a lot of the commentary on the subject has focused on the AI issue in isolation. This means that something important is being overlooked: a total hollowing out of our professions that has very deep roots, and of which over-reliance on AI is merely a symptom rather than a cause. I will discuss the AI-related issues in what follows. But I would like to focus on the broader problem of what it seems right to call a general malaise in professional competence.

    What is perhaps worst of all is a failure to simply own up to mistakes and properly apologise - hinting at a deeper failure to take responsibility for one’s own conduct. Note how blithely the protagonists here (who, to repeat, are all supposedly legal professionals) dismiss their own mistakes, or those of the organisations they represent - whether it is Yisroel Greenberg, representing the Council, who blamed his predecessor for the failure for documents to be filed on time, or Haringey Law Centre, waving away an accusation of having produced fake cases as pertaining to a ‘cosmetic’ matter that was ‘easily explained’, but not worth bothering to explain at the material time. It all comes across as an almost childlike refusal to accept that, as an adult, one has to take responsibility when one has done something wrong - and that one even sometimes has to take responsibility for what one’s organisation has done wrong when not personally at fault.

    Second, though, is the more deep-seated problem, which is what I can only call pervasive half-arsedness. Let’s be clear - it isn’t that the existence of AI is forcing people to rely on it and thereby make mistakes. It is that professional people are frequently relying on AI because they can’t be bothered doing their jobs properly. To repeat my earlier point - I do not wish to deny that AI has its uses. But when one is producing material on which one’s professional reputation will rest, one should really be above using it as a matter of self-respect. Since you will live or die by it, so to speak, your work should be yours.

    the main effect will be that we will also see living conditions further deteriorate as competence declines - and further misguided insistence that technology will be the answer rather than an accelerating factor. This is something to digest and think about very carefully in planning for the future, because it may very well mean growing old in an environment in which living conditions are worsening rather than improving as sloppiness both deepens and spreads.

Horseshit


Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • EverQuest

    With the design document completed, Smedley found a larger room to house the project in Sony Interactive’s building and slowly put a team into place around his two wunderkinds. Some of the programmers and artists who joined them were hired from outside, while others were moved over from other parts of the company as their current projects were completed. (It turned out that Smedley hadn’t been the only closeted nerd at Sony Interactive condemned to make sports games…) As the more outgoing and assertive of Smedley’s original pair of recruits, Brad McQuaid took the role of producer and day-to-day project lead, while Steve Clover became the lead programmer as well as designer. Perhaps the most important of the newcomers was Rosie Cosgrove (now Rosie Strzalkowski), the lead artist. She shaped the game’s visual aesthetic, a blending of the epic and the whimsical, full of bright primary colors and pastels that popped off the screen. Recognizing that photo-realism wasn’t going to be possible with the current state of 3D-graphics technology, she embraced the jankiness. The graphics would become just one more sign that EverQuest, in contrast to that other big MMORPG, was all about straightforward, even slightly silly fun, with no degree or interest in sociology required.

    while Ultima Online was capturing headlines, the nascent EverQuest kept a low profile. It was seldom seen in the glossy gaming magazines during 1997 and 1998; the journal-of-record Computer Gaming World published only one half-page preview in all that time. Instead EverQuest relied on a grass-roots, guerrilla-marketing effort, led by none other than Brad McQuaid. He was all over the newsgroups, websites, and chat channels populated by hardcore MUDders and disgruntled refugees from murderous Britannia. One of his colleagues estimated that he spent half his average working day evangelizing, querying, and debating on the Internet. (Because McQuaid’s working days, like those of everyone else on the team, tended to be inordinately long, this was less of a problem than it might otherwise have been.) His efforts gradually paid off. EverQuest was voted Best Online Only Game by critics who attended the annual E3 show in May of 1998, despite having had only a backroom, invitation-only presence there. The people making it believed more than ever now that there was a pent-up hunger out there for a more accessible, fun-focused alternative to Ultima Online. They believed it still more when they moved into the public beta-testing stage, and were swamped by applicants wanting to join up. The last stage of testing involved fully 25,000 players, more than had participated in Ultima Online’s final beta.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Left Angst