Microsoft’s Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.”

According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…

AI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine.

Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…

Avoid static, wordy nominalization. Prefer compelling verbs.

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Security is Sleeping in the Back Seat of the Car

For decades, my mother collected paperbacks that contained a year’s worth of Peanuts newspaper strips. I seem to remember each new year’s book appearing on a rack near the greeting cards. One summer when I was a tween around 1980, I found a big stack of these Peanuts paperbacks in the storage room under the…

ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…

We are all of us works in progress. Sometimes progress looks messy.

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ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why

Reddit usernames like ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’ are somehow causing the chatbot to give bizarre responses. […] “I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, ” SolidGoldMagikarp”, ” davidjl”, ” Smartstocks”, ” RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not,” Watkins…

AP Style: try to determine, and then respect, a source's preferences when it comes to describing disabilities.

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Pa. agency explains why it enacted new ‘no force-on-force rule’ for Bushy Run, other sites

Attending the re-enactment of the Battle of Busy Run was a favorite and familiar part of our homeschool curriculum. The end to battle reenactments at Bushy Run Battlefield has left many members of the community saddened and frustrated. But in Harrisburg, officials with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission consider the new “no force-on-force” policy…

An afternoon with Ben Franklin.

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The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies. Rutger Bregmen writes: “began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?…

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The Toulmin model for analyzing arguments came up at a faculty pedagogy workshop today. I spent some downtime updating a web page I posted in 1999.

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Time lapse movie shows exoplanets orbiting star HR8799, 133 light years away. (Published in a Northwestern University press release yesterday.)

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It’s been a Dwarf Fortress afternoon.

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Opinion | Alec Baldwin Didn’t Have to Talk to the Police. Neither Do You.

“[Police] will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have…

I wish I could credit the designer. This is brilliant.

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Just submitted final grades for the compressed course that began the day after fall grades were due.

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Mindset matters. Sometimes it’s an accomplishment just to make it through the day. But we can aspire to be better than the worst parts of our environment & our attitude.

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