when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.
While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)
"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."
"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"
> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.
I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.
Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.
> And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.
It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.
beyond a point of absolute comfort, the point of money is to accumulate power and power can be spent to make more money. musk doesn't need more money, he needs more power. dangling starlink to ukraine treasonously is that power that money can't buy but space x can.
moonshots are the external story told to maintain social acceptance. tax credits for spacex would be lot harder to sell to taxpayers if everyone unambiguously knew its just another profit seeking private company. tesla gets a lot of lenience because of its supposed pushing of frontiers.
musk can exchange his social capital to manipulate stocks to make others money in exchange for backchannel favors.
idk if musk actually believes mankind will terraform mars but he sure seems to be getting a lot back on earth from saying it.
You're wrong in comparing LLMs to a spell/grammar-checker (Syntax v Semantics)
If LLM is a tool so is a ghost writer (not)
You're probably extending the logic from the idea that a programmer-llm is a tool. That is at least a defensible position. A written program isn't written to be experienced by people (usually), rather to create certain outcomes.
On the other hand, the written word is the entire experience of the person reading your thing, and that can all be created by an AI without your input. It has it's own biases and motivations and "alignments" (so to speak). Thus it is not a tool and actually a writer itself. And when it writes, you miss out on the experience of having written it, thus actually you end up becoming the tool (pun intended) that LLM is using to express itself.
I've found the only good way to write with LLMs is to absolutely not use it for the first few drafts, the using it as a tool to list specific kinds of problems in text (word repetition, unnatural hard to read sentences etc) and approaching those points with caution and skepticism. Even copy pasting a single sentence, I've found, is a slippery slope.
Just write, write your own words, then create an effective communication persona within your LLM's non-reasoning (non-Chain-of-Thought) capabilities and have it critique your writing after describing your target audience. Then, write your own revision following the critique. Using this, it is not possible to write "AI slop" unless your own writing is already in the style of LLM output. Which I get accused of when I write using my formal voice, but fuck that sorry for being well educated.
This is close to my approach. I'll use LLMs as a read-only editor for my writing. Sometimes I follow its advice. Sometimes I don't. Other times, it discovers things I want to change, but not in the way it describes.
One thing that sort of worked for me is to write the skeleton myself, i.e. the general ideas and how they fit together, the overall “flow” of what I want to say, then have an LLM fill in the blanks (I either point it at some context.md or have it ask me questions when details are missing).
It’s kind of like designing the high level software architecture yourself and have the LLM write the code for each component.
Not bulletproof, requires some iteration, but miles better than what it would produce on its own.
Try using them to have a long discussion and provide it input data, then have it emit a concise bulleted outline given the points you want to make. Then you can rejigger the outline efficiently as needed and write the text yourself.
Exactly- without constraining the input, you're guaranteed to get slop. First-draft AI copy is usually 95% to-cut, 4% to re-sequence, 1% to keep. Use it to think about iterating, not sweep the solution space blindly.
This is a completely reasonable take from a normal human being. YK some people become journalists because they enjoy the act of research, writing and investigating. And in all honesty, LLMs are still INCREDIBLY bad at communication. They get stuff done, sure, but god, for something named "large language model" all their attempts at human style communication makes me want to turn off the computer for good.
this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit.
> It would really help perspective sometimes
It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you.
As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then then a high end personal workstation (not big iron or server rack gear).
The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM.
The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800, including an upgrade to max RAM of $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM on this frontier workstation is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM, and more than a thousand times larger.
It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive.
We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things.
RAM is ~10,000 times cheaper for today’s workstation purchasers per byte, or ~ten times cheaper for max-out-that-bastard, which normalizes for technical progress.
This has been my line of thinking as well. I have developed a sort of paranoia when I'm working using AI on my projects. Who's to say Claude or OpenAI isn't using the final conclusion of all my ideas, trial and error, and adding it to their database of insights to be offered to the next subscriber for a price?
They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.
Earlier in late 90s "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." sounded cool. Now it has taken a sinister turn.
From being able to quickly find information and gain knowledge for the people, it is becoming - using information to manipulate and control the people.
In the short run it’s fantastic if it means that folks will feed in enough inputs from a wide array of software that can eventually replicate software with smaller teams than historically.
Why? Competition. In the long run imagination will win out.
No firm has the divine right to exist - it must earn its existence.
What OAI and Anthropic have shown is they can accumulate all the information in the world - they still lack imagination re. Product development though.
Nation’s will have to step in and protect firms though as OAI and Anthropic acquire strong competitive advantages.
I mean I see this as very likely. When the world runs on digital infrastructure then having a nearly infinite collection of hackers that will work for you 24/7 without question makes you very powerful indeed.
I really don't think people realize how our lax position on security is coming to bite us in the ass.
reply