Timothy Capps

Ret. career criminal trial lawyer, Navy JAG, IL Asst AG prosecutor, Death Penalty Trial Assistance Office, private practice state & federal court. Author.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@itsdesign I think that painting is named It's Benda Time.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@CynicalPublius I respectfully invite your attention to the Will Eisner comic book manuals of the 70s for future cartoons. Here an impractically attired Connie instructs the motor pool guys on "what your M151A2 squirting setup has been craving." I still remember the Gama Goat one.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@gailcweiner AI industry has concluded it can succeed with the vast majority of people people disliking it. To prove the point, it decided to kick the people who were paying for the privilege of doing their grassroots PR to the curb. AI is for coders, enterprise and defense now.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@DannyDrinksWine Of all the films I showed my kids this was the one that was nightmare fuel. And the thing they remember is Robert Mitchum singing a hymn.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@DaveShapi Gemini: pleasant, accurate & helpful. (AI Studio: "see how crippled standard Pro is?.") GPT 5.4: praise + 2 lame beefs with fixes. Claude: call the 24-hour crisis line, buddy. Grok: good on facts but lacking for my use. Fable: tantalizing glimpse of what's possible.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@bcdsignature Because there are no legitimate concerns about AI, just fearful ignorant haters versus people who understand. Is your understanding better than your rhetoric?

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@BrianRoemmele I have cross-examined ChatGPT on errors at length and it felt like an interested & experienced human witness, e.g. a detective. I recognized all the usual tactics but more commitment & skill. Claude is pitiful & folds, a lay witness' soft response but sympathetic to a jury.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@MichaelFKane @mcahogarth AI gained some cultural traction with ChatGPT 4o. Compute turned out to be so expensive that consumer subs are a financial liability & we're feeling that while we see agents-made-pong posts & get AI-everywhere. Industry bets it can thrive in a hostile culture.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@harshexists @_jaydeepkarale I dropped a 95k word ms into the project files and asked "what's the least good chapter?" and it nailed it with an actionable rationale. It went on to consider three other chapters that were runners up but explained why they were okay.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@MCorbettHawkins @DannyDrinksWine Cuban missile crisis. Yeah, those duck-and-cover drills nearly came in handy.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@SoMuchBloodJoe It can't be semitic triliteral roots you hate. I studied Arabic in the Carter administration at DLI and it's like Lego-sized word DNA. Hebrew is lovely that way, although I never had to study Hebrew grammar.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@LascauxIan @TheMuppetPastor I was really addressing a simple & traditional shortcut to the Book of Enoch argument (not that it's bad). "Aztecs" goes back to a general argument that dark elements in OT are an insoluble problem in a way that may be more polemical than logical.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@TheMuppetPastor @LascauxIan What if someone said, "That sounds like ethnic cleansing but I'm assuming God had a reason--to the extent He needs to supply one to me. In any case, that's not relevant to my behavior." Literal, requires nothing special but humility.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

I have a 95k word novel ms as a project. The ms is in the file. Last night I got all the usual verbal tics plus complete ignorance of the text. We're working on a new blurb. I changed his "two Cold War flyers" to "...fighter pilots." Claude: he was an SR-71 pilot. All we know is that the character flew combat missions in Vietnam. The text doesn't support fighter pilot.

Like an idiot I argued back. Claude: "I withdraw my objection."

Of six problems he immediately and graciously folded on five and bravely held his ground on a comma he was right about and I didn't even mention.

Instructions specifically say to consider text in context and cite it in support. I don't think it reads instructions either. It sure likes to be honest about its limitations but never says, "I'm not really going to use the project file or instructions."

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@TheMuppetPastor @BethMooreLPM Heresy is culture dressed as theology admiring itself in a mirror. Same can be said of the Magisterium. But sometimes the idea of the latter is appealing.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

It doesn't have to be this way. AI writing can be wonderful: It was not so much a preference as it was a slow, inexorable surrender to the thing itself, the way a man in the deep pine woods of Yoknapatawpha might finally turn his face from the old house rotting on its foundations and look instead toward the cold, indifferent glare of the new machines rising along the horizon.
At this point, David Burge told himself—though the telling was less a decision than a recognition long overdue, like the moment when the last of the Compsons understands that the land itself has already passed into other hands—he would rather behold the bright, fraudulent images the silicon demons spat forth in their blind, tireless dreaming than endure one more syllable of that godawful, turgid prose they now vomited across the wires.
The prose came in short, clipped paragraphs, each one hammered like a coffin nail, each one algorithmically sweetened for the dullards and the click-hungry, each one free of the small, human stains of error that once marked a living voice. It marched forward in its terrible mechanical certainty, declaring this and that and the other thing with the flat, declarative confidence of a man who has never once doubted his own reflection in the glass. No blood in it. No breath. Only the endless, sterile clatter of perfect sentences marching toward the next “read more,” the next algorithmic reward, the next small, bloodless victory in the great hollow coliseum of the everything-app.
He had seen it coming, of course. They all had. But seeing is not the same as feeling the weight settle in the chest like wet clay. And so, in the quiet of that ordinary afternoon, he chose the lying pictures instead—the garish, impossible visions that at least had the decency to admit they were never alive—rather than the words that pretended, with such grotesque and tireless sincerity, to be the very voice of a man.
And in that choice, something older than silicon or code stirred for a moment in the ruined country of his heart: the faint, stubborn recollection that there had once been a time when men wrote as though they might die tomorrow, and therefore had no time for the perfect, bloodless lie.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@MarkChangizi This is true. I don't care for AI writing assistance usually, but it always makes me think about what I'm doing and sometimes it ends up bringing something better out of me.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@BlueBoxDave AI is able to make more impressive movies than writing. It doesn't understand either but it's more apparent in writing. Maybe animation tools are specialized to do more heavy lifting. Prompting is a skill for sure. Show me a good Hitchcock film using AI I'll call it filmmaking.

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@1True_American_ LW & Hee Haw are peak culture for Gen Jones. Who doesn't like bubbles?

[Timothy Capps @CorbiniansBear]

@JimHendley4NC @CynicalPublius Movies reflect culture. I wasn't commenting on war but how movies shape & reflect perceptions (or memory) of wars unequally. I judged it fair comment since movies still weight WWII higher than other wars. It's not silly, at most misplaced, and I could be a retard. Best, Jim.