December 16, 2024
In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem. The term was coined by Caltech theoretical physicist John Preskill in 2011, but the concept dates to Russian mathematician Yuri Manin’s 1980 and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s 1981 proposals of quantum computing.
Conceptually, quantum supremacy involves both the engineering task of building a powerful quantum computer and the computational-complexity-theoretic task of finding a problem that can be solved by that quantum computer and has a superpolynomial speedup over the best known or possible classical algorithm for that task.
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October 11, 2024
Slop is low-quality media—including writing and images—made using generative artificial intelligence technology. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to ‘spam.’ It has been variously defined as ‘digital clutter,’ ‘filler content produced by AI tools that prioritize speed and quantity over substance and quality,’ and ‘shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results.’ Jonathan Gilmore, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, describes the ‘incredibly banal, realistic style’ of AI slop as being ‘very easy to process.’
After Hurricane Helene, an AI-generated image of a girl holding a puppy while sitting in a boat floating on flooded waters circulated among Republicans, who used as evidence of failures or the Biden administration to respond to the disaster. U.S. Senator Mike Lee posted the image of the girl on social media before later deleting it. The image apparently originated on the Trump-centered Internet forum Patriots.win.
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April 11, 2024
”No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens’ is the title of a series of articles perennially published by the American news satire organization ‘The Onion’ satirizing the frequency of mass shootings in the United States and the lack of action taken in the wake of such incidents.
Each article is about 200 words long, detailing the location of the shooting and the number of victims, but otherwise remaining essentially the same. A fictitious resident—usually of a state in which the shooting did not take place—is quoted as saying that the shooting was ‘a terrible tragedy,’ but ‘there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.’ The article ends by saying that the United States is the ‘only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years,’ and that Americans view themselves and the situation as ‘helpless.’
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March 19, 2024
In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.
The debate surrounding presentism in historical analysis is ongoing, with some arguing that completely divorcing moral judgments from historical inquiry may lead to a relativistic approach that fails to acknowledge the universal nature of certain moral principles. Balancing historical context with ethical considerations remains a challenge for historians and philosophers alike.
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March 12, 2024
‘The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry’ is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom, literary critic and Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new ‘revisionary’ or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom’s central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets.
He argues that ‘the poet in a poet’ is inspired to write by reading another poet’s poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of ‘strong’ poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence.
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March 3, 2024
ussy is an English-language suffix derived from the word pussy used to create novel portmanteau terms, usually referring to hole-shaped objects. The suffix has existed within LGBT slang in the form ‘bussy’ (boy pussy) since the early 2000s, but was popularized in the late 2010s and early 2020s on social media platforms including TikTok. It was named the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2022.
‘Bussy’ and ‘mussy’ (man pussy) first appearing on the internet between 1999 and 2004. An April 2017 Tumblr post popularized the suffix with the term ‘thrussy’ (from throat), and it was further spread as part of the ‘one thicc bih’ Internet meme that began to spread about a month later. A 2018 study of ussy usage on Twitter as part of the meme identified 1,338 ‘pussy blends’ used in tweets from June to August 2017.
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January 18, 2024
Crosswordese is the group of words frequently found in U.S. crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation. The words are usually short, three to five letters, with letter combinations which crossword constructors find useful in the creation of crossword puzzles, such as words that start and/or end with vowels, abbreviations consisting entirely of consonants, unusual combinations of letters, and words consisting almost entirely of frequently used letters. Such words are needed in almost every puzzle to some extent. Too much crosswordese in a crossword puzzle is frowned upon by cruciverbalists (people skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles) and crossword enthusiasts.
The popularity of individual words and names of crosswordese, and the way they are clued, changes over time. For instance, ITO was occasionally clued in the 1980s and 1990s in reference to dancer Michio Itō and actor Robert Ito; then boomed in the late 1990s and 2000s with the rise of judge Lance Ito; and has since fallen somewhat, and when it appears today, the clue typically references figure skater Midori Ito or uses the partial phrase ‘I to’ (as in [‘How was ___ know?’]).
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November 14, 2023
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the ‘motte’) and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the ‘bailey’).
The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
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August 29, 2023
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people is a slogan popularized by the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) and other gun advocates. The slogan and connected understanding dates back to at least the 1910s, and it became widely popular among gun advocates in the second half of the 20th century, so much so that some have labeled it a cliché.
Gun control proponents claim the slogan is an example of bumper sticker logic and supports the larger folk psychology behind gun advocacy. In colloquial use, both parts of the statement are largely considered true. However, when the statement is used in the context of gun debates it becomes misdirection and can be considered a fallacy.
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July 9, 2023
Muntzing is reducing the components inside an electronic appliance to the minimum required for it to function in most operating conditions, reducing design margins above minimum requirements toward zero.
The term is named after Earl “Madman” Muntz, a car and electronics salesman, who was not formally educated or trained in any science or engineering discipline. Muntz built a low part TV in the 1950s.
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July 5, 2023
In machine learning, a stochastic [stuh-kas-tik] parrot is a large language model (LLM) that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing. The term was coined by computational linguistics professor Emily M. Bender in the 2021 artificial intelligence research paper ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’
Stochastic means ‘random and involving chance or probability.’ A stochastic parrot,’ according to Bender, is an entity ‘for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.’ Less formally, the term refers to ‘large language models that are impressive in their ability to generate realistic-sounding language but ultimately do not truly understand the meaning of the language they are processing.’
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June 2, 2023
Gaming the system (also rigging, abusing, cheating, milking, playing, working, or breaking the system, or gaming or bending the rules) can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system to, instead, manipulate the system for a desired outcome. Although the term generally carries negative connotations, gaming the system can be used for benign purposes in the undermining and dismantling of corrupt or oppressive organisations.
The first known documented use of the term ‘gaming the system’ is in 1975. According to James Rieley, a British advisor to CEOs and an author, structures in companies and organizations (both explicit and implicit policies and procedures, stated goals, and mental models) drive behaviors that are detrimental to long-term organizational success and stifle competition. For some, error is the essence of gaming the system, in which a gap in protocol allows for errant practices that lead to unintended results.
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