> “He leaped at the chance” and “He jumped at the opportunity” are very similar sentences expressing the same general sentiment, but they are not the same. The exact words we choose when writing matter. I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.
Neither of these is "better" or "more precise"; in fact, LLMs will generally choose randomly between these candidates based on temperature, and SynthID should not distort the output of an LLM any more than the default temperature settings do already.
I agree that those are not the same sentences, but if the difference matters to you, you shouldn't be using an LLM. This difference exists at the level of what sounds better and is more evocative; to an LLM, nothing sounds like or evokes anything. They simply do not write good prose.
I’m more concerned that this will negatively impact code generation. An additional constraint completely unrelated to code quality is unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. I was an Anthropic user but now I’m looking at OpenAI or even better, open models.
Unless you're already manually setting temperature to zero on the models you work with, the deviation from the "optimal" path imposed by the watermark should be no greater than what you already get from the randomization.
I've turned against them, partly because they're too flexible. Many of the things a dash does can be done better by more specific forms of punctuation like semicolons, colons, or brackets, which give your sentence a clearer visual structure.
It's also easy to get too used to dashes and start sticking them in places where they don't belong. If you're using a coordinate conjunction like "and" or "but," a dash is awkward and redundant. "A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter," can more easily be "a complete thought, and it shifts" or "a complete thought — it shifts."
Dashes take up a lot of space. Like exclamation points, they draw the eye. Does the eye really need to be drawn to "a complete thought; it shifts"? If you let them, dashes will replace all your other punctuation marks, and your writing will become a soup of horizontal lines. Dashes are a sometimes food.
You're ignoring the third option, which is to make a PowerPoint slide with a stock photo and print that. Or use an online template. There are a million ways to make a cheap, adequate flyer.
People may think, "oh, it's a bit simple. I guess they're a small business," but so what? If we rule out the option of hiring an actual designer, it's gonna be that or "ew, look at that shitty AI poster."
No, it's entirely rational to judge a service based on external signals.
If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.
An ugly AI-generated menu shows a naive disregard for the actual experience of your customers. This attitude will bleed into the food quality.
> Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.
Then throw something together in MS Word. That's free. It's not bad for something to be low-effort; it just needs to be commensurately simple.
And the MS Word menu at least conveys human effort. I absolutely don't care if the menu is in one font and looks like an amateur did the layout. I don't expect restaurant owners to be accomplished graphic designers, I do like to see them appear to care and be personally invested in every aspect of their restaurant.
I hear more and more stories about people running into obviously AI-generated stuff whether it's menus, posters, news articles, music, or videos and they find it a turn-off. So if a small business is wanting to use AI, it's probably best to limit it to internal workflows, and not have it be too apparent in your public facing appearance.
>If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.
Is it a garage that has the same hygiene standards and medical equipment as an office? Your metaphor kinda falls apart here, because those are not orthogonal to the medical service outcomes, the way that a menu is orthogonal to the food quality.
>No, it's entirely rational to judge a service based on external signals.
This is the crux of why we disagree: you think of a restaurant as a seller of a service and you count things like "menu" as part of that service. Thats fine if you want status signaling from your restaurant. I see a restaurant as a purveyor of a good: the food that is produced, and the menu is orthogonal to that. You and I are optimizing for different things.
> Is it a garage that has the same hygiene standards and medical equipment as an office?
Maybe! A garage can be cleaned very thoroughly, especially if you renovate with that in mind. I wouldn't bet on it, though. A good doctor probably could operate out of a garage, but they wouldn't. And a good restaurateur would take time to think about their menu.
These signals select for people with domain knowledge and experience. Status has nothing to do with it. Even the cheapest street food will be evaluated against its competition based on external signals, and so better, more experienced vendors will tend to know how to present themselves well.
All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?
>All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?
You keep introducing these silly confounding variables. I wouldn't eat from any hotdog vendor who is sitting on the sidewalk, regardless of their signage. If both had carts, the signage wouldn't affect my decision, particularly because hotdogs are shit in my opinion. As nice sign on a hotdog cart is like putting lipstick on a pig.
I'm introducing examples. It's logical to judge a thing based on its context and circumstances, because those can tell you about the thing. A menu can tell you about a restaurant in the same way that the presence or absence of a cart can tell you about a street-food vendor.
> hotdogs are shit in my opinion
Then by all means, substitute the street food of your preference. Unless you disdain street food in general, which would be irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food :)
Yeah I think this is all coming from someone who never got good at vim.
Multi-cursors can be nice, but a sufficiently powerful implementation of that looks like helix or kakoune, and those are at least as complex as vim, if not more.
When you're good at vim, it is invisible. Once you're good at writing macros, you can do stuff which is impossible with Sublime-style multi cursors.
I assume those are situations where the author would have "just written a quick script," but vim macros are an interactive scripting language specifically designed to tersely express text transformations. Your script is never going to be quicker than that.
I'm not saying this as a vim partisan or anything. You could easily argue that vim over-optimizes and saves little time in the grand scheme—that's a fair critique. But it's strange to insist that complex tools are complex only for the sake of complexity. It's a weirdly conspiracist mindset.
> but vim macros are an interactive scripting language specifically designed to tersely express text transformations
Yes, I think this is important here. Although it's still hard for me to imagine a level of mastery where one deliberately "writes" macros (what, directly in the vimrc?) as opposed to recording them. Perhaps it's within my grasp to optimize them later, but.
All that said, there are quite a few things I don't like about Vim even though the overall editing model clicks with me, and ideas I've had for something I'd like better. Although I guess I really should check out alternatives before running my mouth about that…
> a level of mastery where one deliberately "writes" macros (what, directly in the vimrc?)
Oh it's so simple you'll kick yourself. If you save the macro to the q register, just paste from the q register and it'll print out the corresponding inputs. Copy the inputs into the w register and now you have that macro saved in a second place.
Some people probably do save macros in their vimrc this way, but I use it to correct typos I made when recording the macro. BIG help.
An aficionado! Have you heard of the jam hitch (ABOK #1727)? Grossly underdiscussed IMO—I only discovered it earlier this year. It tightens like a zip tie, and (in kitchen twine at least) I've found the string will snap before the loop slips open again. It's quickly become my most-used knot, day to day. I like to tie it with the second turn inside the first (like #1855 as opposed to #1856).
O that's really interesting, I've been using a constructor knot for this use case, but that does require more string than this method. Really clever reversal of a midshipmens knot
There are (I'd contend) four basic types of knot: Bends, hitches, bindings, and loops. Bends tie two cords together, hitches tie cords to objects, bindings wrap & grip objects together, and loops are loops.
You only really need one bend. I suggest the zeppelin bend, but they're all pretty similar. Hitches can benefit from a bit more variety, but a round-turn with two half-hitches will serve you well in most situations, along with its more secure variant, the anchor hitch. There's a trade-off between how secure a knot is and how easy it is to untie, which is why the less-secure variant is useful.
The best loop is the angler's loop, which will even hold in bungee cord. The alpine butterfly is also good to know because you can tie it "in the bight" (without access to either end of the rope), which is very handy.
Bindings are (I think) the most commonly-used family of knots for most people. Lashing a load into a truck so it won't move, tying a bag shut, and even tying shoes are all situations for bindings. For large loads, I'd suggest a trucker's hitch, which is good for (e.g.) tightly strapping a load into a truck bed, hence the name. For smaller situations, like cinching a bag shut, try the jam hitch—an underappreciated favourite of mine. It works like a zip tie, tightening around an object and not loosening. (Make sure the knot itself is tied tightly before you zip it. After you zip it, you can tie the ends together for extra security.)
If nothing else, learn the round turn & two half hitches, the alpine butterfly, and the trucker's hitch. Some combination of these will serve you well in most situations.
I believe in school as an opportunity for intellectual enrichment, but fostering interest is not the primary goal of schooling. It's nice if school can make your kid an engaged and passionate reader, but your kid must become literate—whether they want to or not. And frankly, until they can string a sentence together, interesting books aren't even on the table.
At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.
I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.
Neither of these is "better" or "more precise"; in fact, LLMs will generally choose randomly between these candidates based on temperature, and SynthID should not distort the output of an LLM any more than the default temperature settings do already.
I agree that those are not the same sentences, but if the difference matters to you, you shouldn't be using an LLM. This difference exists at the level of what sounds better and is more evocative; to an LLM, nothing sounds like or evokes anything. They simply do not write good prose.