Simon Brunning

Website: brunni.ng

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Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
On the subject of trusting AI - have you seen https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html? You get a shout-out....
Commented on The gathering crisis
If pubs and chippies going out of business doesn't provoke revolution, nothing will....
Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
And will your eventual CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN novel be based on the Very Hungry Caterpillar?...
Commented on Tentative hypothesis
1Password X works fine on Linux if you're using Chromium or Firefox....
Commented on "Tomorrow belongs to me"
Typo alert: "get it's no-fault divorce"....
Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
Sentient aliens have the same cognitive biases as humans - or may be missing at most one of them....
Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
The 4th film in the PotC series is based on Powers' On Stranger Tides, at least in theory. In practice, not much made it from page to celluloid....
Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
How about a many-worlds story, where all of these possibilities come to pass? Might be interesting, and you wouldn't need to commit yourself....
Commented on On the road ...
On the off chance that you have the time, I can recommend the Museum of Occupations. Not large, very interesting. The Soviet era statuary stuffed into the basement is fascinating - something of the Ozymandias about it. Also worth a...
Commented on Crib Sheet: The Atrocity Archive(s)
Thank you, android autocomplete, for making me look illiterate on my first comment on this site. Sigh....
Commented on Crib Sheet: The Atrocity Archive(s)
With the rise of GDS, the civil service is hiring all the Slashdot reading geeks it can lay it's hands on now....

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Martin Rodgers commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
Again, I'm talking about search results. I've made that point well enough already. I see no point in repeating myself....
Martin Rodgers commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
One way or another, the next step seems to reading more history....
SFReader commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
Re: '... bellingcat's findings' Not familiar with them so looked them up on Wikipedia - seems like a legit news org. Also checked a couple of sources/citations on that Wikipedia page - Bellingcat won the European Press Prize in 2019. https://www.europeanpressprize.com/shortlists/year-2019-2/ FYI - Years ago Wikipedia was tested vs. Britannica for science info: Britannica was only slightly better -- the testers found 4 errors on Wikipedia. Geeze - who knew that open-sourcing/citizen science writing could be such an effective means of gathering and distributing info/knowledge! My guess is that Wikipedia also has a bunch of reasonably good editors who sort...
DeMarquis commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
You made an active claim (that Bellingcat is unreliable). I am now asking you to back that up. If that's trolling then I couldn't be more proud to be a troll. And, no, I'm not going to do your research for you. Where do you get the information that you are basing your conclusions on? If you don't have specific sources, or if you don't remember them anymore, just say so. As for my source of information, I happen to possess Eliot Higgins book "We Are Bellingcat." In it, he actually opens his introduction with a six page description of...
Preppy commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
Well...with AI you need some insight into the technology. Note: Trust in the OWNER of the technology does not count! Technology components: (1) Neural networks (2) Training (3) Large Language Models (LLM) Given the above there are some problems with AI, not all of them technical: (4) Neural networks generally cannot explain their conclusions (but see item #6) (5) Defect #5 gets worse when the neural network is learning AFTER training (6) Large Language Models may (will?) contain an unknown number of falsehoods (7) Only hugely wealthy organisations can own AI tools (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft...). Notably small orgaisations do not...

Responses to Comments from Simon Brunning

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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