Karpathy’s first frequently asked question is “Does the model ‘understand’ anything?” “That’s a philosophical question,” he answers diplomatically, “but mechanically: no magic is happening.” Does 200 lines of Python code understand anything? My siblings in Christ I hope it’s clear how utterly bizarre this question is. And it translates directly to the same question for Anthropic’s Claude, which is not doing anything different. If we make the input file bigger, if we make the way it gets mathematically processed more efficient, if we prepend a long document describing how we imagine a helpful robot might act to the user’s input, at which of those steps does “understanding” happen?

AI isn't people

A lot of people have given up taking a chance on other people: that they might want to listen, that they might want to talk. But they have also given up taking a chance on themselves: that they might be able to navigate a conversation with someone new, cope with knockbacks and steer a path through any misunderstandings.

The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should

How to become a bobsledder

From 2018 but still good:

The talent pools from which officials recruit are exactly the ones you’d expect. Of the 14 members of the men’s national team, 12 of them were college track athletes, college football players, or—in some cases—both. (One of the two who has no such experience hails from upstate New York and began piloting bobsleds as a child. The other is an active-duty Green Beret
Everyone on the women’s team boasts collegiate track and field experience save for Elana Meyers Taylor, who played college softball and has competed with the U.S. women’s rugby team, and Lauren Gibbs, who was recruited to Brown to run track, but opted to play volleyball instead.

All the Olympics curling stones come from one island?

Great illustrated scrolly from Reuters here. Also that the blank curling stones are called "cheeses".

For several years, ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda. Users are interacting with an adaptive, conversational voice to which they have revealed their most private thoughts. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems and their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.
(My emphasis)
From a former OpenAi researcher, in the New York Times