The a16z Show

AI Safety Language Is Destroying the Debate | Steven Sinofsky

Steven takes aim at terms like "alignment," "goal-seeking," and "rogue agents," arguing that they can anthropomorphize problems that software engineers have dealt with for decades. His framing is simpler: when software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it has a bug.

Book of the Day

'Odyssey' translator Emily Wilson on her book of essays 'Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea'

I have no way to tell what any of the words that I speak, that are feathered things on the breath of air, how will they be received and how will my chaos be dispersed to the winds. I have no way to control any of that.

Radiolab

60 Words

those 60 words have become the legal foundation for the "war on terror." In this collaboration with BuzzFeed, reporter Gregory Johnsen tells us the story of how this has come to be one of the most important, confusing, troubling sentences of the last two decades.

TED Radio Hour

How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet

I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints. Can you give me an example of that? Like, what? Yeah, well, you can't say the word kill on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video's gonna be shown to fewer people, so people turn to alternatives like Unalive.

TED Radio Hour

How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet

I think what I'm doing is actually uniquely suited to studying slang etymology because to really understand what it means for something to spread online, you have to be online yourself.

TED Radio Hour

How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet

I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints. You can't say the word kill on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video is going to be shown to fewer people, so people turn to alternatives like Unalive.

TED Radio Hour

How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet

I started noticing my own speech being restricted a little bit. I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints.

Fresh Air

Remembering ‘The Man Who Listens to Horses’

Break is a very good word. It's been used for about 6,000 years now to describe the procedures used to cause a horse to accept saddle bridle and rider and training, if you will.

Radiolab

Neither Confirm Nor Deny

Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase "can neither confirm nor deny" is the perfect non-denial denial. It's such a perfect deflection that it seems like it's been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s and the surprising origin story of what's now known as a "Glomar Response."

Radiolab

Neither Confirm Nor Deny

The phrase 'can neither confirm nor deny' is the perfect non-denial denial. It's such a perfect deflection that it seems like it's been around forever.

Compound Interest

What Happens To Baby Lawyers When AI Does Their Jobs? | Compound Interest

Law is a large language, right? It has its own language and its own economy and its own workflows.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word has two distinct pronunciations, she says, which signal entirely different meanings. The hard 'er' ending, she says, has historically been used as a weapon — a way of saying you are less than human. The soft 'a' ending, she says, is used within the Black community as a term of familiarity and even affection.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work in American culture and society, and it's a problem that causes real harm to people. And one of the ways that we can actually address that problem with more than hand-wringing or more than shock is to actually understand how it works.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

It's the most volatile word in the American language. It has been used to harm, to bond, to challenge, to unite, to separate. It's impossible to discuss American history, literature, and culture without it.

Fresh Air

Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

The word is doing a tremendous amount of work — it's marking race, it's marking power, it's marking intimacy, it's marking hatred, it's marking love. And what's extraordinary about it is that it can mark all those things simultaneously.

It's Been a Minute

What if the ‘biological clock’ is a scam? | It's Been A Minute

I think that we've enshrined a lot of cultural assumptions about women and their reproductive capacity in the terms for their organs and terms for things happening in pregnancy and their reproductive decisions, I guess. It's like a really messed up form of metonymy where the organ, like the incompetent cervix, the hostile or geriatric uterus, is standing in for how our culture is stereotyping women.

TBPN

The Great Peptide Debate with Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione

Isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? Isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Like, there's a specific meaning, like peptide has this very specific meaning, and they're not new. They're 80 years old, people have been using peptides forever.