Why you should apply to the Hockey Beat

[adamw]

Not a lot of jobs in your business though, as you know. Hopefully she finds a good one.  Not too many Mollie Walkers who are good and have luck and timing—she parlayed a summer internship with Larry Brooks' semi retirement from beat writing to go directly from covering UMass to the NY Rangers beat at the NY Post.

true - except the way of the world these days, is to hire very young people to cover these beats now, replacing old guard - because they are cheaper. It doesn't mean Mollie (another CHN writer at one point) or Jane aren't good -- but it's one tiny mark in their "favor" if you will.  But yes, over the last 20 years, most of my friends in the biz were laid off.

[Dafatone]

AI is a statistically-weighted revision of this.  It isn't intelligence.  It isn't consciousness.  It doesn't have the self-awareness of a bumble bee.  And it will never have any of these.  It isn't undeveloped cognition, it is utterly a zero value.  It's a probabilistic calculator.

It's a blank canvas for our anthroporphism.

To the extent these things are true of AI, they are also true of humans. What we call human ingenuity, self awareness, or consciousness is really just us regurgitating data, similar to what an AI does.

Your post is a common retort about the limits of AI, but I think it's cope about a lack of human exceptionalism. Whatever limitations AI has now, it probably won't have them in 5-10 years (or sooner).

Or, the AI bubble bursts because the majority of implementations add no value to businesses/users and the environmental/energy costs vastly outweigh the useful utility.  

Eventually, either AI is gonna have to be helpful or it will stop being such a huge sector of the economy.

[marty]

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/08/why-you-should-apply-to-the-hockey-beat

Great article-fabulous opportunity
I know who I would recommend but I think her hands are full with law school
Sorry - for those not on X, Jane wrote a great article and they're looking for after she graduates

Jane has done a great job covering the hockey team the past few seasons. She's given Cornell hockey the best coverage it's had in the Sun in years. She's done so while also being a member of the Cornell field hockey team. She's been a backup goalie and has hardly played over her first three years. Kudos to her for putting in all the time even though she has mostly sat on the sidelines.

What exactly is the point of highlighting Jane's lack of playing time? She reads this forum btw

To me it meant she's not a quitter. If she's on a team she sacrifices for it regardless.

Exactly. Complimentary.

I get it, but seems pretty backhanded.

Anyway, just registering here my appreciation for Jane's coverage. My suggestion for this year's coverage is the more interviews/quotes of the team and coaches, the better. When Brandon Thomas worked for Cornell we'd get in-depth interviews with the freshmen each season. Would be great to recreate that, as one example.

I have mentioned in the past how author and NCAA wrestler wannabe John Irving wrote in a memoir about how hard it was to be second string on the wrestling team at Pitt. Imagine being the punching bag for a wrestler with NCAA title aspirations.  Keeping in shape and getting the snot beat out of you while doing it for pride or being part of the team or whatever is at least honorable. The character needed to work your butt off and yet hardly play is something that most would do well to emulate.  And Irving couldn't take it.  He dropped out of Pitt.::twak::

[arugula]

Not a lot of jobs in your business though, as you know. Hopefully she finds a good one.  Not too many Mollie Walkers who are good and have luck and timing—she parlayed a summer internship with Larry Brooks' semi retirement from beat writing to go directly from covering UMass to the NY Rangers beat at the NY Post.

true - except the way of the world these days, is to hire very young people to cover these beats now, replacing old guard - because they are cheaper. It doesn't mean Mollie (another CHN writer at one point) or Jane aren't good -- but it's one tiny mark in their "favor" if you will.  But yes, over the last 20 years, most of my friends in the biz were laid off.

For sure.  Cheap often a wins out. Fortunately for Rangers fans, Mollie is excellent and Brooksie is still around.

[Tcl123]

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/08/why-you-should-apply-to-the-hockey-beat

Great article-fabulous opportunity
I know who I would recommend but I think her hands are full with law school
Sorry - for those not on X, Jane wrote a great article and they're looking for after she graduates

Jane has done a great job covering the hockey team the past few seasons. She's given Cornell hockey the best coverage it's had in the Sun in years. She's done so while also being a member of the Cornell field hockey team. She's been a backup goalie and has hardly played over her first three years. Kudos to her for putting in all the time even though she has mostly sat on the sidelines.

What exactly is the point of highlighting Jane's lack of playing time? She reads this forum btw

I follow her on X.  She's absolutely the best reporter for us in years.

[stereax]

I know who I would recommend but I think her hands are full with law school

Don't flatter me!!! Hahaha. Jane's been awesome covering the team; sad to see her go but that's the way life happens. Her successor will have huge shoes to fill.

[Trotsky]

AI is a statistically-weighted revision of this.  It isn't intelligence.  It isn't consciousness.  It doesn't have the self-awareness of a bumble bee.  And it will never have any of these.  It isn't undeveloped cognition, it is utterly a zero value.  It's a probabilistic calculator.

It's a blank canvas for our anthroporphism.

To the extent these things are true of AI, they are also true of humans. What we call human ingenuity, self awareness, or consciousness is really just us regurgitating data, similar to what an AI does.

Your post is a common retort about the limits of AI, but I think it's cope about a lack of human exceptionalism. Whatever limitations AI has now, it probably won't have them in 5-10 years (or sooner).

Nope.  This debate was fought and won 60 years ago.  STEMmies just never got the news.

They are playing with dice.  What's in our heads isn't dice, it's what happens when dice realize oh fuck me I'm gonna die that sucks!

The unexamined ontological assumptions underpinning computer science and the hard sciences are as obsolete as luminiferous aether, and have been for nearly as long.  As always, the awkward little boys with the super advanced toys who can't get laid (yes, Pat Churchland, fine, and one girl) but can destroy the world are working with dark age philosophy.  But they're well paid and get A's, so, hey, what's the diff right?  

Read a book, dweebs.  There are more things in heaven and Earth.

[Swampy]

AI is a statistically-weighted revision of this.  It isn't intelligence.  It isn't consciousness.  It doesn't have the self-awareness of a bumble bee.  And it will never have any of these.  It isn't undeveloped cognition, it is utterly a zero value.  It's a probabilistic calculator.

It's a blank canvas for our anthroporphism.

To the extent these things are true of AI, they are also true of humans. What we call human ingenuity, self awareness, or consciousness is really just us regurgitating data, similar to what an AI does.

Your post is a common retort about the limits of AI, but I think it's cope about a lack of human exceptionalism. Whatever limitations AI has now, it probably won't have them in 5-10 years (or sooner).

Nope.  This debate was fought and won 60 years ago.  STEMmies just never got the news.

They are playing with dice.  What's in our heads isn't dice, it's what happens when dice realize oh fuck me I'm gonna die that sucks!

The unexamined ontological assumptions underpinning computer science and the hard sciences are as obsolete as luminiferous aether, and have been for nearly as long.  As always, the awkward little boys with the super advanced toys who can't get laid (yes, Pat Churchland, fine, and one girl) but can destroy the world are working with dark age philosophy.  But they're well paid and get A's, so, hey, what's the diff right?  

Read a book, dweebs.  There are more things in heaven and Earth.

Interesting discussion of this in today's New York Times.

[BearLover]

AI is a statistically-weighted revision of this.  It isn't intelligence.  It isn't consciousness.  It doesn't have the self-awareness of a bumble bee.  And it will never have any of these.  It isn't undeveloped cognition, it is utterly a zero value.  It's a probabilistic calculator.

It's a blank canvas for our anthroporphism.

To the extent these things are true of AI, they are also true of humans. What we call human ingenuity, self awareness, or consciousness is really just us regurgitating data, similar to what an AI does.

Your post is a common retort about the limits of AI, but I think it's cope about a lack of human exceptionalism. Whatever limitations AI has now, it probably won't have them in 5-10 years (or sooner).

Nope.  This debate was fought and won 60 years ago.  STEMmies just never got the news.

They are playing with dice.  What's in our heads isn't dice, it's what happens when dice realize oh fuck me I'm gonna die that sucks!

The unexamined ontological assumptions underpinning computer science and the hard sciences are as obsolete as luminiferous aether, and have been for nearly as long.  As always, the awkward little boys with the super advanced toys who can't get laid (yes, Pat Churchland, fine, and one girl) but can destroy the world are working with dark age philosophy.  But they're well paid and get A's, so, hey, what's the diff right?  

Read a book, dweebs.  There are more things in heaven and Earth.

Interesting discussion of this in today's New York Times.

Gary Marcus is a notorious AI pessimist. For an alternative perspective I'd suggest Francois Chollet. Unlikely Gary, Francois is on the ground working in AI on a day to day basis. He designed the ARC-AGI test  to evaluate whether AI can acquire new skills outside of its training data. Recently, AI passed this test for the first time. Francois (who is not a used car salesman-style AI promoter like some people in the field) thus believes AGI will arrive within the next five years.
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

[fastforward]

I know who I would recommend but I think her hands are full with law school

Don't flatter me!!! Hahaha. Jane's been awesome covering the team; sad to see her go but that's the way life happens. Her successor will have huge shoes to fill.

Your knowledge and perspective are top notch, in my opinion!
I think you would be an excellent candidate!

[Trotsky]

believes AGI will arrive within the next five years.
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Every year since 1960.  cf. cold fusion.

It's not real, my friend.  It's an illusion.  War's over; Hubey dropped the big one.  Even MIT eventually admitted it.

https://components.one/posts/building-heideggerian-ai

Money shot:

"Rationalists like Decartes and Leibniz thought of the mind as defined by its capacity to form representations of all domains of activity," Dreyfus wrote. "AI turned this rationalist vision into a research program and took up the search for the primitive and formal rules that captured everyday knowledge. Commonsense understanding had to be represented as a huge data structure comprised of facts plus rules for relating and applying those facts."

This attempt to transmute rationalist mental frameworks into vertiginous codebases became Symbolic AI, which Dreyfus would later, in his updated editions of the book, refer to as "Good Old-Fashioned AI", or GOFAI. As AI researchers wrote at the time, "When an organism executes a Plan he proceeds step by step, completing one part and then moving on to the next." If we identify a strawberry by sequentially identifying its isolated features and then gluing them together with reason to conclude that, yes, it's a strawberry, then an AI system with thousands of logical statements for how a computer could recognize an image of a strawberry based on its distinct features should be able to accomplish the same thing.



Dreyfus asserted that, if Heidegger and the pragmatists were right, then this was the skill to max in order for AI to work

But despite decades of research and billions of dollars, the systems always sputtered outside of tightly drawn experiments. Dreyfus's hunch was that what lay behind GOFAI's problems was rationalism itself and its belief in "the mind's symbolic representation of the world." Dreyfus had built his reputation on his colorful, accessible readings of Martin Heidegger, unpeeling the fruits of their bitter rinds and distilling the German existentialist's notoriously dense philosophical colloquialisms into something mere mortals could actually comprehend. In Heideggerian terms, the failure of GOFAI was that it relied on building machines that "know that" versus "know how." Take, for example, the act of gift giving. We don't have a set of rules inscribed in our minds for the proper protocol of giving presents in our respective cultures. Instead, we intuitively know how to give one. "[Knowing] how to give an appropriate gift at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way requires cultural savoir faire," Dreyfus wrote. "So knowing what a gift is is not a bit of factual knowledge, separate from the skill or know-how for giving one. The distinction between what a gift is and what counts as a gift, which seems to distinguish facts from skills, is an illusion fostered by the philosophical belief in a nonpragmatic ontology.

That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. All the basic metaphysical assumptions of the AI project are wrong when it comes to "intelligence." It's a Chinese Room.  It's not "understanding" anything and it never can.  It's not thinking; it's concatenation.

You need a machine in the world that has the world inside the machine.  There's only one of those in the known universe: us.  Everything else is just a cute deterministic puppet.

This is a chasm that took millions of years to cross, and zero assumptions.  None of our technological dandruff is ever getting there.  We will destroy ourselves before we even have the first inkling of the first step.  Thankfully.

[BearLover]

believes AGI will arrive within the next five years.
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Every year since 1960.  cf. cold fusion.

It's not real, my friend.  It's an illusion.  War's over; Hubey dropped the big one.  Even MIT eventually admitted it.

https://components.one/posts/building-heideggerian-ai

I'll read this stuff at some point but just FYI your form of argumentation is not persuasive. You're citing as gospel theory that was written decades before the major advances of the past 5-10 years. You're treating as settled a science that is constantly evolving. I still haven't seen a compelling response from people with your POV to the fact modern AI systems are learning and solving things outside of their training data. I'm no AI optimist, actually—there are probably many obstacles to further AI advances, let alone to a full-blown intelligence explosion—but AGI being conceptually impossible is not one of them. I don't think many people really believe that anymore.

[Trotsky]

believes AGI will arrive within the next five years.
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Every year since 1960.  cf. cold fusion.

It's not real, my friend.  It's an illusion.  War's over; Hubey dropped the big one.  Even MIT eventually admitted it.

https://components.one/posts/building-heideggerian-ai

I'll read this stuff at some point but just FYI your form of argumentation is not persuasive. You're citing as gospel theory that was written decades before the major advances of the past 5-10 years.

Well, I don't mean to.  The point is the fundamental approach of AI is based on a misreading of what consciousness and intelligence are.  What changed in the last 5-10 years was a shit ton of money got behind it so now we're all going to find out quickly what a handful of pointy headed philosophers figured out 50 years ago.  

Which is good, actually.  AI is really cool in a lot of ways.  It just isn't "I."  It's math.  Math is great, I keep a lot of my stuff in it.  But it is a model.  The world is going to find out that the model of human cognition represented by math for the last 500 years is a model, not the actual thing.  The map, not the territory.

Descartes wanted to understand houses, so he drew a crude picture of a house.  Now he had a picture, so he could do all sorts of things with it: measure it, break it into pieces.  Centuries passed, and we got better and better at pictures.  A pretty weird guy named Frege developed a beautiful method of reducing all the components of houses to a syntax.  An infinitely weirder guy named Wittgenstein had Deep Thoughts about this and announced he had drawn the final, inexhaustible picture of The House and no others would be necessary, then 20 years later recanted, scratched it all out, and announced houses were really just whatever we agreed at any given time was a "house."  And then finally we had computers that could support tremendous CAD images of houses.  And with that library finally "AI" is able to generate new images of houses which never existed before.  That is remarkable and can be used for all sorts of purposes.

BUT YOU CAN'T FUCKING LIVE IN ONE!  It's still just an image.  It's not a house.  It doesn't keep the rain off your head.  It's in your head, it's not in the world.  That's the difference.  You want to tell me about the great new advances in imagery, and yes there have been.  But it's still all just imagery.

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

believes AGI will arrive within the next five years.
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Every year since 1960.  cf. cold fusion.

It's not real, my friend.  It's an illusion.  War's over; Hubey dropped the big one.  Even MIT eventually admitted it.

https://components.one/posts/building-heideggerian-ai

I'll read this stuff at some point but just FYI your form of argumentation is not persuasive. You're citing as gospel theory that was written decades before the major advances of the past 5-10 years.

Well, I don't mean to.  The point is the fundamental approach of AI is based on a misreading of what consciousness and intelligence are.  What changed in the last 5-10 years was a shit ton of money got behind it so now we're all going to find out quickly what a handful of pointy headed philosophers figured out 50 years ago.  

Which is good, actually.  AI is really cool in a lot of ways.  It just isn't "I."  It's math.  Math is great, I keep a lot of my stuff in it.  But it is a model.  The world is going to find out that the model of human cognition represented by math for the last 500 years is a model, not the actual thing.  The map, not the territory.

Descartes wanted to understand houses, so he drew a crude picture of a house.  Now he had a picture, so he could do all sorts of things with it: measure it, break it into pieces.  Centuries passed, and we got better and better at pictures.  A pretty weird guy named Frege developed a beautiful method of reducing all the components of houses to a syntax.  An infinitely weirder guy named Wittgenstein had Deep Thoughts about this and announced he had drawn the final, inexhaustible picture of The House and no others would be necessary, then 20 years later recanted, scratched it all out, and announced houses were really just whatever we agreed at any given time was a "house."  And then finally we had computers that could support tremendous CAD images of houses.  And with that library finally "AI" is able to generate new images of houses which never existed before.  That is remarkable and can be used for all sorts of purposes.

BUT YOU CAN'T FUCKING LIVE IN ONE!  It's still just an image.  It's not a house.  It doesn't keep the rain off your head.  It's in your head, it's not in the world.  That's the difference.  You want to tell me about the great new advances in imagery, and yes there have been.  But it's still all just imagery.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"?

[stereax]

I know who I would recommend but I think her hands are full with law school

Don't flatter me!!! Hahaha. Jane's been awesome covering the team; sad to see her go but that's the way life happens. Her successor will have huge shoes to fill.

Your knowledge and perspective are top notch, in my opinion!
I think you would be an excellent candidate!

If I wasn't swamped with coursework and also apparently had a car, maybe. But I'm also still learning the details of the game. Plus, I think they want a comms major or the like.