barrell

Depends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece.

Could you simulate something be typed? Trivially. Could you simulate something be drafted? Honestly, even if you wanted to put in all that time and effort, I’m not even sure LLMs are sophisticated enough to send the logical drafts, loops and edits that would pass a writers sniff test

There is really ample analysis pointing to inference not being profitable, look at anything Ed Zitron has reported.

Also can confirm gpt-5.4-nano was unable to even keep up with 4.1-mini. Had to move off of OpenAI once 4.1-mini was retired

To claim there was amazing progress in the past therefore there will be amazing progress in the future is an inductive fallacy.

And as someone who gets dozens if not hundreds of AI generated emails I have to go through every day, it is _incredibly_ easy to spot which ones are AI generated and which are human written.

By its nature AI generated content is statistically consistent, the narrative equivalent of monotone speech. I don’t know anyone that can’t spot it a mile away at this point, and the more people are confronted with slop, the more attuned they become to it.

I think it’s safe to say that this will not be consensus. Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical

AI generated content is bland and soulless. There’s only so much bland and soulless most people can take in their life before they start to get fed up.

When everything feels the same, nothing is interesting anymore.

As a developer who has not been able to get any boost in productivity from coding agents, I find it incredibly easy to deny.

I’m a solopreneur, if I could lighten my load I would. However I have yet to save time using coding agents, with the exception of “I made this change to my model file, update all model to match the new format.” Which is cool, but maybe 0.01% of my job, and took a 1 hour task down to 10 minutes.

Personally I only find his swearing and delivery annoying when he is not delivering his point well (ie reducto ad absurdum). I’d be welling to bet a good amount of the complaints about his swearing are really just from a poor delivery, and people don’t know why, so they latch onto his swearing.

His early stuff was just as degenerate and vulgar, but was much less of an issue for me.

I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing.

His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.

I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative.

There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times, they can be wildly useful. But I feel like the industry atm wildly overestimates their broader/long term utility.

Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.

To continue paraphrasing Steve Jobs, focus is the most important thing. When the cost to produce new features/implementations goes down, focus is even harder (and even more important).

It took me probably 5 years of writing Clojure before it clicked. Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages.

It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability to execute anything you highlight

All that and then you realize you can store code as data (since it’s just a data structure) and run data as code.

I think most programmers don’t realize how arbitrary the difference is between code and data until they get used to using LISP.

I use small, large, an medium-3.5 depending on the task

Not in many tasks. I use deepseek as a fallback in https://phrasing.app and it’s always very apparent when it happen (due to mistakes/clear performance drop off)

I think it really depends on what you’re doing. I use mistral for many tasks in https://phrasing.app and they blow models many times their size out of the water.

None of my tasks use reasoning though (reasoning actually kills the performance) so perhaps that’s why. Still, I just had to rewrite my pipeline, and mistral was both faster, cheaper, and substantially better than any alternative

The original comment was used as proof of a trend that vendors are raising prices. Would running out of coupons indicate a trend in rising pizza prices?

If you run out of 50% coupons to your local pizza joint, did they double their prices? Does every company double or triple their prices after Black Friday?

There’s a pretty significant difference between saying someone tripled their prices, and a temporary promotion ended. It’s even more so the case if someone is using it as an example for raising prices as a trend.

I’m 100% in the camp that prices are going up and quality is going down; companies are retiring models and requiring you to use more expensive ones. This has happened to me and there are dozens of examples that one can point to.

But a promotion ending is a strawman argument and does the point a disservice.

Actually, deepseek v4 was 1/3 promotional price for the first month or so. This was pretty clearly communicated. The promotions window just ended is all.

That’s a little bit of a No True Scotsman. Yes there are people who do not review anything; but even people who are reviewing every line from an LLM do not have the same understanding as someone who wrote it themselves.

I’m not making a judgement call about which is better, but it was widely accepted in tech before the advent of LLMs that you just fundamentally lack a sense of understanding as a reviewer vs an author. It was a meme that engineers would rather just rewrite a complicated feature than fix a bug, because understanding someone else’s code was too much effort.

Linguistics, specifically as it pertains to language learning

Edit: Whoops read your question wrong. I do a bunch of NLP on different languages, and use LLMs to pad out and interpret the data. Asking for things like translations, alternatives, transliterations; associating and validating data; transferring data from one language to another; segmentation and cross lingual alignment; the list goes on.

I did manage to get higher quality in the end, so it’s not entirely a regression. But older LLMs were much more capable with less prompting at interpreting disparate data and tying it together.

Most of the work I do does not really have a “right answer,” just a lot of wrong ones, which I think is what trips up LLMs. If I turn on reasoning for any step in my pipeline, the token count goes up 100 fold and the quality gets cut in half.

Edit 2: I did have to move off of GPT though to get the improvements mentioned. Go mistral!

Azure recently discontinued the gpt-4.1 model. I had to move off of this model, and moving to any gpt-5* model was worse (higher failures & less accuracy), and more expensive. I had to rewrite the entire system from high school level prompts to lower elementary school level prompts using non-gpt models.

I would say models entered a bottleneck a long time ago. My personal opinion is now they are overfitting newer models on coding and "agentic" capabilities at great expense of general abilities in other domains.

I would say the community is pretty evenly split between people who hate it, and people who find it practical. I don't see many people really championing it or being proud of it these days.

Well, technically I think most of the community in indifferent. But from the discourse about the topic, I feel like I see pretty even splits.

Yes when I interact on reddit, I normally do so solely with the intention 'this is for an LLM'. I feel like a majority of the posts/comments I reply to are AI, a majority of the responses to my posts are AI, but have to keep telling myself to keep posting so it becomes training data.

(I'm normally posting in the context of my startup - although I try to keep the self promotion to a minimum and always contribute to the "conversation," if LLMs replying to one another can be called such).

For what it's worth, I created a community for paying users of Phrasing that has been going really well. I think free online communities may be going away, but there may be a future in exclusive/paid communities.

Yeah I use Mistral Large for a lot of formatting work. For this one use case of mine, it outperforms frontier models by a significant margin. I've found tons of use cases for mistral small as well.

I'd love to use Mistral for more tasks, but Mistral Large doesn't quite cut it for all tasks. So on the one hand, I'm excited there is another model, and presumably more performant based on the price? But the fact it's a "Medium" and 5x the price of the Large definitely concerns me.

The entire release is also about Vibe Coding, and so I'm not even sure if this model is applicable outside of coding, or even worth testing.

I’ve been writing ClojureScript now for around a decade. I tried to get into Clojure many times, but as someone with no Java experience, the JVM really makes it unbearable. I ended up trying Elixir though and absolutely loved it.

Both Clojure and Elixir really changed the way I think about programming. They’ve both basically ruined me as far as other languages go. Structural editing + repo driven development in Clojure, BEAM + pattern matching in elixir.

But there is something just infinitely more fun about writing Clojure code, and insanely satisfying. I’m eagerly awaiting the day that jank takes off and I can start building native mobile apps in Clojure (and who knows, maybe some web backend tech stack will spring up around it!)

Personally I’m not a fan of the glass effect, but yeah what bothers me more are all the changes around it. The terrible jelly nav bars, the text distortion, the massive buttons with overly rounded corners, the awful switches and sliders, not to mention the design inconsistency through any given OS, let alone across them.

Personally I bundle it all up into “Liquid Glass et al”, but the glass effects are the least of the issues for me. I could maybe get over an ugly design; design is subjective after all. But iOS 26 is just disfunctionally bad design (imho)

My non techie friends all hate it. I don’t think there is a single Apple user I talk to regularly that hasn’t complained about it, or ask me why it is that way (being the resident tech person for some).

And besides a few odd posts on x, I haven’t heard anyone techy speak positively about it.

Maybe I’m the one in a bubble, but I’m seriously considering switching from Apple as a lifelong Apple user, largely because of the UI changes (Liquid Glass et al), so I don’t think the complaints about it are overblown.

This is not contending with the health aspects of it though. It is highly processed and it uses a bunch of toxic chemicals to make it, regardless of what any lobbying groups say.

What is this about “the agrolobby”? I haven’t eaten processed foods in decades. I started when I was a kid because I didn’t like eating things where I didn’t know all the ingredients. Not from marketing or lobbying or trends. I just stopped eating processed foods, felt better, and now if I eat any processed foods I get ill, so I don’t eat them.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t eat processed foods because of marketing or advertising or lobbying they’ve been exposed to. There is a solid rational to eat whole foods, and anyone I know who does not eat processed foods does it because they’d rather eat whole foods.

There is a ton of research to suggest processed foods are safe to eat. One could also make the argument these are all funded by their own lobbying groups. The truth of the matter is nutrition is complicated, there is likely more than one answer, and we definitely do not know them.

Not everyone who disagreed has been swindled by some corporation.

HCl is toxic when ingested btw. The fact it is in your body does not mean it’s safe to consume.

There are a lot of people who _thrive_ off of a 100% beef diet, I don’t think there is anyone who could _survive_ off of 100% beyond meat burgers. I don’t think you can say they are way healthier than beef by any stretch of the imagination.

And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.

Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.

And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.

Thank you. Bean burgers are delicious. I don’t eat them as part of my normal diet, but have no qualms with them and could always share a meal with my vegan friends.

Nowadays it’s all fake meat products which I would never put in my body, and there’s this weird social pressure where I’m being silly by “refusing to eat vegan foods”.

Fruits and vegetables and legumes are delicious, I will eat all of them.

Bring back bean burgers!