Jon Evans
Wilmington
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Articles by Jon Evans
UNCW uses quick second-half start to pull away from Mount Olive in hoops season opener
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - The UNCW Men's Basketball team celebrated the program's 2026 CAA regular season championship Monday night by unveiling a new banner in Trask Coliseum. Then the 2026-27 squad got to work opening the new season, earning a 101-65 win over Mount Olive in front of a sellout crowd. Guard CJ Luster came off the bench to score 21 points, making six three-pointers along the way and leading five Seahawks in double figures. Center Patrick Wessler added 14 points and 12 rebounds.
Two Pender commissioners miss meeting, lack of quorum delays move to appoint Beth Burns
HAMPSTEAD, N.C. (WECT) - The effort to appoint Beth Burns to fill the open seat on the Pender County Board of Commissioners failed Monday night, when half of the current board did not attend the regularly scheduled meeting at the Hampstead Annex. Vice-Chairman Brent Springer and Commissioner Jimmy Tate showed up for the meeting. But Chairman Randy Burton and Commissioner Jerry Groves did not.
Wilmington Sharks hunt for second CPL title in three years
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - The Wilmington Sharks are exactly where they expect to be: playing for a championship. Following a two-game sweep of the Eastern Division champion Morehead City Marlins, the second-seeded Sharks have officially booked their ticket to the 2026 Coastal Plain League (CPL) Pettit Cup Championship Series . The highly best-of-three series is set to begin this weekend, bringing postseason baseball fever back to the Port City.
Propositional Content
LLMs write flawless prose. They are also, generally, bad-to-terrible writers. For people who aren’t really readers or writers — that is to say, most people — it may seem strange that these two things can be true at the same time. David Foster Wallace explained how and why way back in April 2001: When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (the actual information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it.
Candidate filing ends for 2026 elections Original
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) -The filing period has ended for candidates wanting to run in the 2026 elections in North Carolina. Some current incumbents will not have opposition in their reelection campaigns, while some late filings have added names to the ballots in other races.
Wilmington power trio reaches quarterfinal round of nationwide competition Original
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - A musical group from Wilmington has reached the quarterfinal round of a nationwide competition and is looking for support to take the next step.
How to Troubleshoot QuickBooks Installation Error 1603
QuickBooks Error 1603 is a common installation-related issue that prevents users from setting up or updating QuickBooks Desktop. This error typically occurs due to corrupt system files, insufficient permissions, or conflicts with existing installations. In this guide, we’ll explore the best fixes to get QuickBooks running smoothly again. Facing QuickBooks Error 1603 during installation? Discover proven solutions to resolve this issue quickly. For expert help, call +1(866)409-5111 today.
Remembering Australian Speedway legend Bill ‘The Wizard’ Wigzell
First published in the February 2009 issue of Street Machine In the decade covering the mid-60s to mid-70s, one sensational car and driver combination rode roughshod over Aussie Super Modified racing. Bill Wigzell, dubbed ‘Wizard’ by his legions of hometown Adelaide fans, found fame aboard the equally legendary ‘Suddenly’, a lurid purple 427ci monster with an appetite for burning rubber.
How Leaders Can Center Humanity in an AI-Driven World
Philosophy doesn’t just complement AI, it drives it. Questions about purpose, knowledge, and meaning have shaped the evolution of artificial intelligence, from Alan Turing’s inquiry into machine intelligence to modern debates on ethics and fairness. As AI begins to upend the workplace, these philosophical questions have never been more urgent. What is the purpose of AI in our organizations? How do we balance efficiency with humanity?
Reinforcement, evolution, and automata
Reinforcement learning is so back, baby.
Return of the Zizians
This Substack kicked off in October 2022 with the series Extropia’s Children, which explored how modern AI is socially and culturally downstream of a tiny, obscure 1990s mailing list. Its second chapter, This Demon-Haunted World, was about the bizarre slew of cults, psychoses, and suicides accidentally spawned en route, and leads with the warning “This chapter goes to some very strange and dark places.” Welp. As it turns out, we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
The Amen Break and AI art
In 1969, The Winstons, an American R&B band, released their debut single ‘Color Him Father.’ It hit #7 on the Billboard Hot 100, #2 on the R&B charts, and won its composer Richard Spencer a Grammy. Alas for them, it was a one-hit wonder, and The Winstons would have been consigned to the dustier footnotes of musical history… if something truly extraordinary had not happened to that single’s B-side. “Amen, Brother” is not a great song. It did not chart.
For your auditory delectation, EXADELIC
“best new sci-fi I’ve read in ages: I found myself saying “holy shit this is good” quite a few times! Amazing” — @agileben “I was expecting an airport paperback thriller about a rogue AI, but boy was I wrong. Journalist, travel writer, and software engineer Evans combines ideas from computing, the occult, and beyond to craft an unpredictable and intricately plotted story.
Exadelic Audiobook on Libro.fm
Skip content Celebrate our 10th Anniversary with giveaways, merch, and more! Learn more In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account. This month only! Become a member and shop our members-only, 10th anniversary buy-one-get-one sale in support of local bookstores. Narrator Brian Hutchison This audiobook uses AI narration. We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Fear and Loathing of A.I.
Some are enthralled by generative AI, and advocate a future defined by it. Some fear it will rot our society or even destroy us all. And many loathe it, refuse to even call it "AI,” and do not conceal their contempt for both the believers and the frightened. What’s more, all of these attitudes are moving from ‘personal beliefs’ to ‘pervasive unquestioned assumptions,’ becoming the water in which entire communities swim.
My new new thing
[What follows is mostly navel-gazing about my new startup. If that’s not your thing, keep calm and carry on; regular speculative programming shall resume forthwith.] Once upon a time, I was the CTO of an ~80-person consulting company. We did strategy, design, and engineering. We helped to conceive and build whole products and companies (likethese) from scratch. Much of my job consisted of rapidly analyzing software projects so as to explain their real status and what they needed.
Keeping up with ESG in Australia - March 2024
Welcome to the March edition of Herbert Smith Freehills’ Australian ESG bulletin, ‘Keeping Up with ESG’. Our monthly ESG bulletin provides a targeted snapshot of key developments we see as reflecting the “must know” trends in the Australian market. In this edition, we spotlight the new ‘right to disconnect’ for Australian employees, and Australian mandatory climate-related disclosure developments.
Exadelic | ICPL Search
Book - 2023 "When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls "black magic," it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence. Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat.
š½š¤What if aliens built an AI?š¤š½
Look, I know it sounds like a question one might ask after one too many edibles. But I ask in all seriousness, what if aliens built an AI?, because I genuinely believe the answer is significant. No, really! Let me explain: Artificial intelligence, almost definitionally, is a collection of data and algorithms. (Using āalgorithmā fairly loosely for something as functionally simple as a feedforward neural network.) Analog or digital, electric or photonic, itās all just software.
The Original Large Language Machine
Let's talk about a new technology that generates written text at previously unimaginable scale, triggering demands that it be censored, lest it promulgate a flood of misinformation that sows dissent and changes the rightful order of the world... …technology that we, however, in our sober wisdom, recognize as a profoundly transformative breakthrough.
The robots are coming! The robots are coming!
It’s been another extremely nonboring month in AIstan. OpenAI released Code Interpreter, which makes a slew of new tasks—data analysis, file format conversion, creating graphs, running calculations—available via the same handy chatbot interface.
Exadelic
Hardcover Pre-Order Our Most Anticipated Books and Receive 500 Bonus plum® Points Earn 160 plum® points Buy Online Ship to an address Pre-order online.Free shipping on orders over $35 Pick up in store To see if pickup is available, Prices and offers may vary in store When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls "black magic," it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter.
Extropia's Children Redux
The seven-part series Extropia’s Children with which this Substack launched—about how rationalism, cryptocurrencies, effective altruism, and modern AI philosophy were all birthed from an obscure 90s mailing list—has attracted a burst of attention lately. As such I thought it would be useful to create a single canonical page with links to all seven chapters, and “nine months later…” updates for each.
The Insufficient Weirdness Hypothesis
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!” — Plan 9 from Outer Space I’m a science fiction author who works at a forecasting platform, so as you might imagine, I’m especially interested in unusual futures. These days I’m sure not alone.
Language is our latent space
For the first time in a very long time, the tech industry has discovered an entirely new and unknown land mass, terra incognito we call “AI.” It may be a curious but ultimately relatively barren island, or a continent larger than our own. We don't know. But signs currently point to enormity, a treasure trove of rich undiscovered territory and unrecognized denizens. That's why everyone is so excited/terrified.
Who's Who in A.I.
In recent conversations, in person and online, I’ve realized there’s a huge amount of interest in modern AI … and that many outside the field lack context assumed by those inside. Not technical context, but a high-level understanding of the AI industry today, who its major players are and what they do. It’s easier to grok the state of the art when you understand the state of the industry. One can pick that up by osmosis, as I (think I) have, but offering newbies a single cheat sheet seems helpful.
Occasional Exponential AI Grab Bag
A problem with modern AI is that it’s moving incredibly fast. Last week I gave a mini-talk for which everything I linked to in the notes had launched in the previous two weeks.
Transformers: more than meets the eye
It’s fair to say there are two landmark scientific papers in modern AI which stand apart from all others; two which, apart from their own impressive merits, are widely seen to have ushered in entire new eras. The first, in 2012, ignited the “deep learning” wave. The second, “Attention Is All You Need,” published in 2017 by Google Brain, propelled us into the Age of the Transformer. Six years later, that is where we live.
The Fine Art of Prompting
Once upon a time, the glory and terror of computers was that they would do exactly what you told them to do. One of the most remarkable things about the rise of AI is that this is no longer the case. Interacting with a large language model (aka LLM) like ChatGPT, or a text-to-image diffusion model like Stable Diffusion, is more like making a deal with a perverse imp than like programming. Sure, you give it instructions, known as prompts … but those aren't really commands.
AI models: what alignment do they have? Do they have alignment?? Let's find out!
AI alignment. To some, the most important problem in the world. To others, a quixotic fools' errand. To the vast majority: AI what?! OK. Well. In theory, an "aligned" AI is one whose goals are the same as humanity's, or at least don't drastically conflict.
Artificial General Intelligence and how (much) to worry about it
This post is the encapsulation of my thoughts on AGI evolution, which I’ve variously written about eg here and here. Feel free to just check out the equation and skip to the last section if you’d rather cut to the chase and start the debate. There is a persistent worry amongst smart folks about the creation of smart and capable artificial intelligences, or AGI.
Taiwan is Pandora, GPUs are unobtainium
In James Cameron's 2009 epic Avatar, the science-fiction future is powered by a basically-magical mineral called "unobtainium," the largest deposit of which in the known universe is directly beneath the the home of the threatened Na'vi. This is ... or seemed, in 2009 ... a ridiculously implausible plot contrivance; but, amazingly, today it feels like prophecy. Taiwan is Pandora, and the cutting-edge GPUs used to train modern AI models are unobtainium.
Hidden Monsters, Secret Languages
One of the strangest things about generative AI models is that, since their advent, ordinary users have reported the discovery of recurring ... and sometimes terrifying ... entities which seem hidden within them. "The Crungus." "Loab." An entire internal language that DALL-E seems to have created, and can interpret. Hidden possibilities aren’t surprising.
How DALL-E works, plain English, no math, Part 2
I’m pretty convinced modern AI will be a world-transforming technology. As such, I think it’s important that non-professionals understand how and why it works. My goal here is to explain to a broader audience — readers who don’t know calculus — how OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator works, in reasonably thorough and rigorous detail, with a few illustrative diagrams … but no math whatsoever. Wish me luck.
How DALL-E works, plain English, no math, Part 1
I’m pretty convinced modern AI will be a world-transforming technology on the same scale as, say, smartphones. As such I think it’s important that non-technical people understand how and why it works … but this is much harder for AI than it was for smartphones.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 7
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”; Chapter 4, “What You Owe The Future”; Chapter 5, “Irrationalism”; and Chapter 6, “Slate Star Cortex and the Geeks for Monarchy.”) I ended the last chapter scolding rationalists for being insufficiently consequentialist.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 7
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”; Chapter 4, “What You Owe The Future”; Chapter 5, “Irrationalism”; and Chapter 6, “Slate Star Cortex and the Geeks for Monarchy.”) I ended the last chapter scolding rationalists for being insufficiently consequentialist.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 6
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”; Chapter 4, “What You Owe The Future”; and Chapter 5, “Irrationalism.”) In November of 2013, Klint Finley, then at TechCrunch, published a remarkable and seminal piece entitled “Geeks for Monarchy: the Rise of the Neoreactionaries.” [Disclosure: I wrote a weekly column for TechCrunch through the 2010s.] He describes Yes,...
Extropia's Children, Chapter 5
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone given cursory familiarity with the subject matter, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”; and Chapter 4, “What You Owe The Future.”) The golden age of LessWrong, then the hub of rationalist discussion, was 2011 to early 2015. This is confirmed by data as well as community history.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 5
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone given cursory familiarity with the subject matter, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”; and Chapter 4, “What You Owe The Future.”) The golden age of LessWrong, then the hub of rationalist discussion, was 2011 to early 2015. This is confirmed by data as well as community history.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 4
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; and Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”) Effective Altruism, aka EA, is unquestionably the most prominent of Extropia's children. Major media outlets such as The Economist and The New Yorkerwriteaboutitfrequently. Its principles now guide an estimated $30 billion of philanthropical donations, disbursed at a rate of about $600 million/year.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 4
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind”; Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World”; and Chapter 3, “Extropicoin Extrapolated”) Effective Altruism, aka EA, is unquestionably the most prominent of Extropia's children. Major media outlets such as The Economist and The New Yorkerwriteaboutitfrequently. Its principles now guide an estimated $30 billion of philanthropical donations, disbursed at a rate of about $600 million/year.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 3
(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind,” and Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World.”) Bitcoin was, of course, created by the pseudonymous figure Satoshi Nakamoto, but it’s well understood that Satoshi built on a sizable stack of previous work. The usual technical history goes like this: 1979: Ralph Merkle (a formative Extropian) patents the Merkle tree. 1989: David Chaum launches DigiCash. 1997: Adam Back creates hashcash.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 2
(This chapter goes to some very strange and dark places, including psychosis and suicide. What follows is largely a curated compilation of blog posts and comments, i.e. an online oral history. After consideration I've decided to generally not include unsubstantiated secondhand hearsay accusations such as “I heard X did Y to Z,” but you can find plenty if you dig deeper. Which claims to trust, who to believe, where to be skeptical, where to be derisive ... is up to you.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 1
Back in the nineties, a self-taught teenage supergenius joined an obscure mailing list. That odd seed led directly, via Harry Potter fanfic, to today's prominent Effective Altruism and AI Risk movements; to bizarre, cult-like communities whose highly intelligent members feared demons in their minds might cause them to create hells or accidentally exterminate humanity; and, indirectly, to the birth of Bitcoin. Intrigued?
“If you don’t make it beautiful, it’s for sure doomed”: putting the Vault in GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault
Deep within an Arctic mountain, closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle, in a secured and reinforced chamber within a decommissioned coal mine, rest 188 reels of hardened archival film, each individually sealed against the ravages of time. Encoded on those reels is a snapshot of every active public GitHub repository as of 02/02/2020, the collective work of nearly four million developers. This is the GitHub Arctic Code Vault.
How to provide mental health support in rural communities.
Mental healthcare in rural farming communities is in a state of emergency due to ongoing challenges with accessibility and availability. Rural areas pose significant challenges to timely access to care because of the sheer amount of distance between a rural family farm, for example, and a treatment center. Further, there is a national shortage of clinicians, and it is more acute in rural areas. However, the horizon is bright with the upsurge of telemedicine.
Uncensored CMO: Go Luck Yourself
1 hr 19 min We have all said it haven’t we? They just got lucky. But how much of our success in business is down to luck vs what we do with our luck, or lack of it. In a brilliant new book called Go Luck Yourself, Andy Nairn, co-founder of Lucky Generals, argues that it is what we do with our luck that matters and offers 40 ways to stack the odds in your favour. 1 hr 19 min
How can advertisers strike the right note in 2021?
Above: Coca-Cola's Christmas spot for 2020 scored highly with consumers for providing escapism. So what of 2021? What will the hope that comes from the vaccine rollout and a possible end to the pandemic bring? How will it be offset by the growing realisation of the far-reaching economic impact? If the past year was defined by uncertainty, fear and wanting to forget, then 2021 will be defined by optimism, relief and excitement.
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