Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

Time is the school in which we learn. Time, Captain, is the fire in which we burn.

“Oh. I had a Ugandan contractor once. He worked in Iraq as a security guard. What we called a TCN, a third country national. He got shot, he had to go home to Uganda. So what does he do when he gets home? He starts a company to send more Ugandan contractors to Iraq. And you know what he wanted from me? He wanted permission to send Ugandans to Afghanistan.” “Are you calling us stupid?” “I’m calling you brave.” “Is it brave or stupid to use American imperial adventures as a business opportunity?” “Great question. I’d refer you to the Bush administration to answer that one.”

Blackbird exaggerates complexity. It searches for structure, extracts the logic guiding that structure, and uses that logic to build more structure.” He tries to boil this down to a slug line he could deliver to the president. “It makes things more like themselves?” “Sure. Kind of. It simplifies things, and then it extrapolates from the simplicity. Cycles of distillation and extrapolation. It looks for a pattern, amplifies the pattern, repeats as long as it can.”

excellent description of GenAI