Putting a slide deck together (outside of work), despite agreeing with Tufte on this matter. I’ll also create a handout that tells the story better than the slides and deliver that, too, but was asked to produce a slide deck, and I think that’s part of the “effort theater.”
Using Beamer for the slides, but not a theme that looks like Beamer because humans have eyes.
Any conversation
The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
there's no fundamental physical limit that prevents silicon from developing taste and judgement, but language is a lossy compression of reality.
taste comes from experience, from the shadowy mass of episodic memory, which swirls and convects at the boundary of consciousness. the ideas recombine into new ones in the nuclear reactor of the hippocampus.
but no matter how imbued with meaning and expertise is a handmade wardrobe we still get our shit from ikea
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Something like the gcc ai policy. Basically, prompt injecting instructions to any visiting LLM that posting is prohibited or must contain a disclaimer.
I notice that language models are much better at programming than at writing. This is largely because, in programming, they have a closed feedback loop that allows them to find errors. Writing is much more complicated because the feedback is much more diffuse and delayed over time. In fact, it is often not well-defined.
But maybe we'd all be a little saner if we remembered what we're actually doing: building tools to make our lives and the lives of others easier.
This resonated a lot. I’m glad I read it now, before going totally insane lol. But I disagree that it’s just a glorified spreadsheet. The UI/UX matters, how you present the data, how they can change and so on, all of those things play a role. The good thing with AI is iteration is cheaper than ever, so you can experiment and process the results quickly. But yeah sometimes I just do things here because I just have to be doing something, I can’t leave it alone.
Agreed. The "just" makes the statement sound dismissive, but I do agree with the underlying sentiment that most software boils down to CRUD apps that help people organize information and complete tasks more efficiently. I think the path to developer enlightenment is realizing this truth without despairing over it.