I wonder if consciousness evolved as an internal self-evaluation loop that can probe the brain’s network and generate additional context on an event (rumination) to give the event more meaning and aid survival
Thanks for the kind words of support, it means a lot. It’s no secret that I have been struggling with effects of many covid infections over time. It’s been grinding me down and I ignored it for too long, but I am working with new doctors to get fully well so I can figure out the next chapter ahead
A 1980s bedroom with an Apple II on a desk and a giant pencil on the wall. From “How to Design and Build Storage Projects,” Ortho Books 1983, p.22
This is perhaps the most ideal bedroom
I have ever seen 😁
This post about Robert Tinney is incredible. Very in-depth and lots of great images to browse: 70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/robert-tinne...
Thanks I deeply appreciate it
Thanks I appreciate it
I agree completely
Thanks man, it’s been a rough week, even before all this happened!
I agree I am very sorry I have been remiss to explain it! Here is my statement: bsky.app/profile/benj...
I agree I am very sorry I have been remiss to explain it! Here is my statement: bsky.app/profile/benj...
I agree I am very sorry I have been remiss to explain it! Here is my statement: bsky.app/profile/benj...
I agree I am very sorry I have been remiss to explain it! Here is my statement: bsky.app/profile/benj...
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)
I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below
arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
At least one Meta employee thinks it's a good time to add facial recognition technology to glasses because we're too distracted by fascism to effectively protest www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
macOS 26 Tahoe is so painfully ugly...why Apple, why??
Between the travesty of Tahoe and iOS 26, somebody needs to do a hard reset on the software design team over there
Thanks!
RFK Jr. says we should check with AI about what to eat and then AI totally dunked on his stupid dietary guidance.
Also @bethmariem.bsky.social is doing some downright incredible work, and this article is another tour de force of very professional shade.
Across that world you will face more than 25 bosses and mini-bosses, discover 60 Trinkets, upgrade your weapons, grow stronger through a full level-up system, explore New Game Plus, and experiment with hundreds of gameplay modifiers.
Those covers were always inspiring to what we could do with computers.
A local computer museum has some on display, and they're just wonderfully creative.
It’s a little known fact that all LLMs were trained only on that one piece of yours, and were able, amazingly, to extrapolate everything else they know from that. In fact, LLM stands for “Let‘s Train on Benj’s Robert Tinney Tribute” Large Model.
A trio of Robert Tinney illustrated magazine covers: Floppy Disk, Software Piracy, Smalltalk Balloon
I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st
Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...
NEW: CBP signs a new deal with Clearview AI to access its scraped image database for "tactical targeting," including efforts to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” networks of people labeled security threats.
“We have Claude Code at home”
Claude code at home:
Tinney’s BYTE covers were the best computer magazine covers of all time, and nothing else springs to mind as a clear second place. In 2014, I wrote about my favorite one for TIME. RIP. time.com/60505/this-1...
Tinney's art (and 1970s-1980s Byte itself) was symbolic, to me, of an age of learning - much more "somebody built some cool shit" and much less "this is a primary mechanism of the economy". (and they were all just Very Clever :-)
A trio of Robert Tinney illustrated magazine covers: Floppy Disk, Software Piracy, Smalltalk Balloon
I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st
Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...
Actual link: www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/169/vcg-interview-robcert-tinney-microcomputer-illustration-pioneer
My 2006 blog matches 8 items on Wikipedia's "Signs of AI Writing" list:
-Undue emphasis on significance
-Promotional language
-Superficial analyses with "-ing" phrases
-Negative parallelisms
-Rule of three
-Overuse of em dashes
-Elegant variation
-Vague attributions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
It has all the hallmarks: The em dashes, florid prose, it lays on over-the-top praise (not that Tinney didn't deserve it), it has the "not only this but this" comparison 😂
VC&G Interview: Robert Tinney, BYTE Cover Artist and Microcomputer Illustration Pioneer September 26th, 2006 by Benj Edwards Robert TinneyIf someone wrote a book on the history of personal computer art, chapter one could only bear the name of one man: Robert Tinney. As cover artist for over eighty issues of BYTE magazine — microcomputing’s first and finest major publication — and as one of the first men to illustrate topics related to the fledgling field of personal computers, he near single-handedly shaped the popular visual idiom of what computers were, could be, and would be for the for a whole generation of microcomputer enthusiasts. That proud generation has long since grown up and moved on to a myriad of different fields and disciplines, spreading its knowledge, love, and expertise of all things technological around the world. Collectively, they have arguably become the world’s most influential, yet sometimes underrated, segment of the modern populace. So imagine if you could go back in time and visit that same generation in 1978. What would you see? A lot more pimples, no doubt, and a lot more hair. And most likely, you’d find a copy of BYTE in their hands — with a Robert Tinney illustration on the cover. Byte Magazine CoverTinney’s BYTE artwork is amazing. It displays unparallelled creativity in the use of visual metaphors to convey typically intangible, abstract, and sometimes abstruse technical concepts. His illustrations penetrate all pretense and cut straight to the heart of the main idea of the topic at hand, laying it out in an appropriately minimalistic fashion that, while sometimes visually spartan, richly sparks the imagination and places the viewer firmly in the scene. His work communicates, and it does so in ways that words never could. For most commercial artists, the idea of illustrating for a completely new field without artistic precedent would probably be daunting, if not completely nervewracking — and who’s to say it wasn’t for Tinney — b…
I was reading this blog post I wrote in 2006 and kept thinking, man this dude writes just like AI 😂
Maybe they modeled ChatGPT on me. 😜 If so, I apologize
