HN user
I did not say it was unfit and I don't see how discussing writing styles and the influence of LLMs on it is off topic on a thread about the effects of LLMs on cognition.
I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.
Wow.
The 3500 BCE date for horse ridding is speculative and poorly supported by evidence. I thought the language in the bit I pasted made that clear. "Horse being driven" means attached to chariots, not ridden.
Unless you want to date the industrial revolution to 30 BCE when Vitruvius described the aeolipile, we can talk about the evidence of these technologies impact in society. For chariots that would be 1700 BCE and horseback riding well into iron age ~1000 BCE.
I claim specifically that "I love this analogy" and "I love your analogy" have become noticeably more common in HN since 2022.
From the article [0] you linked:
"However, the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven. Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry."
Long discussion in History Exchange about dating the cave paintings mentioned in the wikipedia article above:
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68935/when-did-h...
Reminds me of Plato's concern about reading and writing dulling your mind. (I think he had his sock puppet Socrates express the concern. But I could be wrong.)
Nope.
Read the dialogue (Phaedrus). It's about rhetoric and writing down political discourses. Writing had existed for millennia. And the bit about writing being detrimental is from a mythical Egyptian king talking to a god, just a throwaway story used in the dialogue to make a tiny point.
In fact the conclusion of that bit of the dialogue is that merely having access to text may give an illusion of understanding. Quite relevant and on point I'd say.
Horse riding was invented much later than carriages, and it revolutionized warfare.
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Maybe, much like we invented gyms to exercise after civilization made most physical labor redundant (at least in developed countries), we will see a rise of 'creative writing gyms' of some sort in the future.
Same story for me. What has really helped is trying to make initiating useful and desirable tasks easier and seeking distractions harder. Bit by bit, cultivating that mindset changes things for the better over time.
The trap is usually "I've figured it out and this new system will solve my life" only to be burned out days or weeks later because this only addresses the symptoms and not that cause.
Cultivating a more friendly environment has been a great help for me. That and taking notes.
If the solution to all problems with attaching gpu farms to our workflows is to attach more gpu farms to our workflows, I can't see how this isn't just an elaborate scam.
Increasing energy input to a closed system increases entropy.
Why on earth people expect to attach gpu farms to render characters into their codebase to not only not increase its entropy but to lower it?
Most coders prefer to throw code at the wall and see what sticks. These tools are a gas-powered catapult.
I don't think anyone is wrong, I am not here to detract from this. I just think most people want things that are very different than what I want.
This is an attempt to change software development from a put out system to a factory system.
It seems to be working sadly. If people hated agile, just wait for the prompt/code review sweatshops.
So much of what people hyping AI write in this forums boils down to "this vendor will keep making this tool better forever and management will let me keep the productivity gains".
Experience shows otherwise. Urging me to embrace a new way of building software that is predicated on benevolent vendors and management seems hostile to me.
I really don't get it. I've tested some agents and they can generate boilerplate. It looks quite impressive if you look at the logs, actually seems like an autonomous intelligent agent.
But I can run commands on my local linux box that generate boilerplate in seconds. Why do I need to subscribe to access gpu farms for that? Then the agent gets stuck at some simple bug and goes back and forth saying "yes, I figured out and solved it now" and it keeps changing between two broken states.
The rabid prose, the Fly.io post deriding detractors... To me it seems same hype as usual. Lots of words about it, the first few steps look super impressive, then it gets stuck banging against a wall. If almost all that is said is prognostication and preaching, and we haven't seen teams and organizations racing ahead on top of this new engine of growth... maybe it can't actually carry loads outside of the demo track?
It can be useful. Does it merit 100 billion dollar outlays and datacenter-cum-nuclear-powerplant projects? I hardly think so.
"Today is the worst day you will have with this technology for the rest of your life."
Why do we trust corporations to keep making things better all of a sudden?
The most jarring effect of this hype cycle is that all appear to refers to some imaginary set of corporate entities.
Storytelling is the skill you're looking for. Visual aids and recording/editing are incidental.
What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell.
It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return).
You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a clear understanding of what's at stake, the price to be paid, the confrontation and the return to a new, better normal.
Physics: if you increase energy flow into a closed system its entropy will rise
Tech company: we made you a tool that allows you to increase energy flows into your closed systems AND decrease their entropy!
Software engineers: thank you for increasing the demand for manual entropy management and getting our pay to new heights while proclaiming our demise as a class.
Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus.
He did not. You should read the dialogue.
I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above.
This is the biggest problem with LLMs in my view. They are great at confirmation bias.
In Phaedrus 257c–279c Plato portrays Socrates discussing rhetoric and the merits of writing speeches not writing in general.
"Socrates: Then that is clear to all, that writing speeches is not in itself a disgrace.
Phaedrus: How can it be?
Socrates: But the disgrace, I fancy, consists in speaking or writing not well, but disgracefully and badly.
Phaedrus: Evidently."
I mean, writing had existed for 3 millennia by the point this dialogue was written.
I disagree with siblings that it's fear or greed.
I think it's way more basic. Much like recruiters calling me up and asking about 'kubernetes' they are just trying to get a handle on something they don't really understand. And right now all stickers point to 'AI' as the handle that people should pull on to get traction in software.
It is incredibly saddening to me that people do pattern matching and memorize vocabulary instead of trying to understand things even at a basic level so they can reason about it. But a big part of growing up was realizing that most people don't really understand or care to understand things.
You should read the original paper. Turing argued that discussing the abilities of machines to "think" is meaningless and proposes instead to conjecture about whether a digital computer would eventually be able to imitate conversation.
I think time has proved that he was right. It is meaningless to discuss things like "Artificial Intelligence". We can only discuss machines in terms of performance, not in terms of subjectivity. Whenever we try to do the latter, we end up in a semantic quagmire.
This is the main reason I find the current hype irksome. The performance of machines should be evaluated objectively and in terms of the jobs they need to perform. Attributing 'intelligence' or 'thought' to machines is indeed absurd.
The 'imitation game' argument is categorically not that 'if machines appear to be intelligent they in fact are'. What it really is: 'machines cannot think obviously, but what could they do that currently requires a thinking human to be in charge?'.
75 years after Turing published the relevant paper, people are still doing what he called absurd (trying to attribute thought and intelligence to machines), and quoting him to do it. The main insight, that this is a category error and we should look objectively at what jobs need to be performed and how to implement it, is completely lost.
I'm not sure what point you're making. I never claimed any set of tooling is necessary of sufficient to produce good music. I merely pointed out that, as it became more accessible to produce music, the overall quality of the output decreased.
Pretty much the reason I think electronic music was fantastic right up to the point DAWs became a thing. When everyone with a laptop and some software licenses can just put out slop that sounds like the originators, quality fell off the cliff. 90s and 2010s electronic music are a world apart.
I was mostly confused by the wording. I didn't know 'modulo' could be used like that, but apparently it has a colloquial meaning of "except for the variation accounted for by" and now the phrase makes sense to me.
I just did. Found a copy of Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), read ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1". Not a single mention of "thinking machine" and overall just a guy describing the ideation of a mechanical calculator.
I have no idea what you are going on about.
effect navigation at sea in overcast daylight, modulo some basic idea of the time
What do you mean with "modulo some basic idea of the time"?
When I think about taking the random numbers, mapping them to characters and parsing that into commands that you then run... I feel like I am loosing my mind when people say that is a good idea and 'the way of the future'.
I have. I was criticized for pointing out spurious nonsense in LLM slop by someone who claimed people wouldn't have to resort to it if other people made an effort to explain things better.
But I don't believe anyone is entitled to an explanation. I find things out by looking up books and testing things. Any explanation someone deigns to give me is a bonus and doubted until corroborated.
I don't know why anyone would think they are owed a custom explanation for their specific questions and thinking like that will get you in trouble when you come to depend on what anyone (or anything) is willing to chew up for you.
Maybe I was terse but I don't think I was rude or illogical.
"How committees invent"