cgriswald

For my two main uses pen and paper has two opposite effects. For creative writing it is freeing because it isn’t the last stop but I don’t have to worry about format or placement or anything. I can just go. Typing has a sort of “technical” feel for me, probably due to code, email, and to some degree comments.

For notes during study pen and paper are constraining and force me to organize the thoughts in my mind first and then commit them. Mistakes needing to be corrected here is good: It reminds me what I misunderstood.

But, like the sibling poster, the writing goes onto the computer for later editing.

I went with paper and pen precisely because there was always more I wanted to do with my computer work flow.

I don’t see how the death penalty adds anything here. There are already significant consequences. People who commit such crimes either do not expect to face the consequences or don’t consider the consequences at all.

I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, for a variety of reasons.

However, currently the court has to at least find that a murder has occurred or in some cases child rape (sometimes with conditions like a second offense). These are categorically different offenses that are unlikely to occur during the normal course of a public servants job, except perhaps if police kill someone there may be a question whether it was murder.

If “violation of trust” is given the death penalty than any normal act in the course of a public servant’s service history could potentially be used to hang him by questioning the legitimacy of the act.

You want to give the government the legal ability to threaten the life of the entire civil service, judiciary, and all elected representatives.

I’m sure that would never be abused.

I think that if the pattern exists, it is strongly muted for GenX because everything we are seeing (and more) was virtually promised to be here “any day now” during the hay day of science fiction media. If anything, 2026 in the real world isn’t futuristic enough compared to what was “supposed” to have happened by now.

There absolutely is gaslighting here. I think now that some time has passed you should probably go back and re-read this thread. I can't be clearer about the fact that I accessed these things young without trying and continued to have access if I had wanted it. My comment about looking back as an adult was about even more access that could have been available to me if I had gone looking.

So even if you don't believe I have the capacity to understand that a teenager I know (who was also a child) who was doing drugs, smoking, etc., would absolutely have gotten me what I wanted; it doesn't follow that I didn't have the access I actually had. "We'll never know" is false. I know, because I was there.

As far as minimum age laws not having their intended effect, again, it's easy when you're the one saying what all the arguments are...

I don’t know what you consider to be an advertisement but just off the top of my head:

Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.

Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.

Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.

A poster commented that he read parenthetical remarks in an old-timey voice (I’d guess the trans-Atlantic accent). I love that idea. But for me they read almost as if you’re saying them under your breath (or a character is breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera quietly). I read them but my brain assigns them less importance.

Em-dashes keep everything on the same level of importance in my brain.

Commas don’t feel as powerful. To be fair to the comma I’d probably do this:

Em-dash matches how I speak and think: A halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop. So I use them like that.

Edit: I accidentally used an em-dash in the word em-dash. Interestingly HN didn’t consider changing the dash to be a change in my text so didn’t update it. I had to make a separate change and take that change out for my dash change to stick.

There’s “no room for debate” in your argument because you’re basing it on false assumptions, trying to gaslight me, moving goalposts and you personally don’t care about the trade offs. It’s very easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. Congrats.

I’ve told you that access was not a problem at all. All your questioning is because you can’t grasp my lived reality. You think I’m mistaken, but actually I just don’t care to try to convince you because you’re already so sure.

Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.

Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.

All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.

I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.

I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.

There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.

The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.

At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.

The number of times I objected to my parents rules because my friends didn’t have those rules and the response was: “I’m not their parent.”

Which is exactly why all people everywhere giving up their privacy will also be ineffective.

Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal for me to access as a kid but I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting any of it.

On the level of the individual a working placebo is a success.

That’s how it should be but the poster is literally calling the individual experiences of others “superstition” based on the population at large.

I’ll say a lot of information is cheap and what often matters is presentation. I still visit Wikipedia even though I ask LLMs things.

I use LLMs in my fiction writing; and before the wolves come out to shred me to pieces: The LLM never gets to see my writing and doesn't do any of the writing for me. I use LLMs in other ways.

One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my resolution is bland and at worst cliche.

The “incentives of the people” are famously steadfast and resolute in favor of the rights of others.

The point is, paying for things isn’t a solution. Paying for things is a consequence of having fixed the problem. I pay for Kagi and buy groceries from a ma-and-pa grocery store where I’m still going to be tracked if I use a credit card, bring my phone (or go with someone else who brings their phone), drive certain cars…

In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.

People pay for things and are still spied on.

I think valuing the source of information over its quality is probably a mistake for most contexts. I’m also very skeptical of people’s ability to detect AI writing in general even though AI slop seems easy enough to identify. (Although lots of human slop looks pretty similar to me.)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to read (for example) AI fiction because I know there’s no actual mind behind it (to the extent that I can ever know this).

But AI is going to get better and the only thing that’s going to even work going forward is to trust publishers and authors who give high value regardless of how integral LLMs are to the process.

Right. I don’t think I disagee with anything you’ve said here.

However, if I had an idea and just fobbed the idea off to an LLM who fleshed it out and posted it to my blog, would you want to read the result? Do you want to argue against that idea if I never even put any thought into it and maybe don’t even care?

I’m like you in this regard. If I used an LLM to write something I still “own” the publishing of that thing. However, not everyone is like this.

Clarity is good for writing and homogenization can increase clarity. There is a reason technical writing doesn’t read like journalism doesn’t read like fiction. There’s a reason we have dictionaries and editors. There’s a reason we have style guides. Including an LLM in writing in any of these roles or others isn’t ipso facto bad. I think many people who think it is just don’t like the style. And that’s okay, but the article isn’t about the style per se but about effort. Both lazy writing and effortful writing can be done with or without an LLM.

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer.

Outsourcing thinking is bad. Using an LLM to assist in communicating thought is or at least can be good.

The real problem I think the author has here is that it can be difficult to tell the difference and therefore difficult to judge if it id worth your time. However, I think author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells.

I’m going to suggest re-reading the top level comment and the GP’s response. I don’t see anyone suggesting non-facetiously that free love and sex trafficking are synonymous nor that sex trafficking of adults is acceptable. I think the top level poster is being facetious; such a view is how these creeps might think. I think the respondent is, intentionally or mistakenly, ignoring that context and using the term at face value.

You won’t get them anyway because the acceptable substitutions list is crammed with anything they think they can get away with and the human fulfilling the order doesn’t want to walk to that part of the store. So you might as well just let the agent have a crack at it.

In the game Clair Obscur sun plus moon equals twilight.