gwern

> No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.

Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.

Regrettably, I am not an expert or insider, and cannot generate that particular content. All I can point to is the void at the heart of articles like this, where supply and demand and greed somehow cease to exist.

The phrase 'production committee' appears only once in OP, with no discussion of the implications or how they work or how they change things compared to TV network monoposonies. Disappointingly superficial. It just repeats a lot of random salary or wage or working hour statistics and anecdotes without ever - puzzling for a piece in the Economist! - asking how this market operates, why it keeps going like this, and why rational self-interested actors avoid raising animator salaries or investing more in them or even increasing headcount, under circumstances like the current boom, which Econ 101 would predict results in a corresponding boom in animator populations and salaries...

> 6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".

Huh? Kaguya-hime was in 2013, 7 years before 2020 (after a notoriously protracted development). You really think Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli were releasing that post-COVID? (Isao wasn't even alive in 2020.)

I expect the author is aware of that: where do you think he got the graph from if there's only 'gated copies'? But Sci-Hub links are unstable even if you don't mind linking them.

One thing I'm not following is how the side/order bias is being handled. OP measures a IMO very large bias towards left-hand treats, but it is unclear how that is handled (ahem)? Skimming https://github.com/adamwespiser/best-dog-treat/blame/main/an... doesn't help me understand if it is being modeled as a covariate to adjust for the bias or if it was dealt with by construction (eg. by always offering pairs twice, swapping hands), or what?

Incidentally OP if you want to make it more adaptive, you can just fit the B-T model each time, and grab a posterior sample of what the best pair is, and test that, which turns out to be Thompson sampling. I did this for fun with blind taste-testing of mineral waters: https://gwern.net/water

Working paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514

As so often, a thinkpiece exemplifies the problem.

You include a bunch of random AI-generated images to go with your AI-generated prose. The images are cluttered and filled with pointless, fictional detail which convey nothing beyond the prose and which anyone could vaguely predict, and yet take up something like 2/3rds of the vertical space of the article body. And that is generous, because your items are padded by LLM writing, that is to say, verbosely filled with needlessly superfluously repetitive redundant redundancy. And that's where it's not filled with crowdpleasing but dubious rhetoric and assertions (all present, of course, without any sources or backing).

Consider with a critical mind a random assertion like

> For many people, the first experience of healthcare is no longer treatment but paperwork. Intake forms, insurance verification, privacy acknowledgments, and consent agreements often precede any human interaction related to care. The administrative system introduces itself before the clinical one. This changes the shape of the experience. What should begin with care often begins with bureaucracy, shifting attention away from the person and toward the process.

Really? Recently, peoples' first experience of healthcare was treatment? What wondrous era was this? How could 'intake forms' not, by definition, 'precede any human interaction related to care'? Why should it begin with care? 'Ready, fire, aim!' etc. When did all this happen, exactly?

And it's all like this. Engagement farming - that OP is worthless won't stop people from falling for it and chiming in with whatever pet peeve they have, no matter how many other people have commented about it or how tiresomely predictable some complaint about, say, smartphones will be.

Only if there was a cartel which would agree to never outbid each other, of course... You can ask Steve Jobs about that one.

> I remain deeply unconvinced...But I think your sensors are a bit miscalibrated.

That's unfortunate. Perhaps I should have mentioned before that the author of the post emailed me and said they had used LLMs extensively while writing it? Slipped my mind, I guess.

> including the part you label "blatantly Claude", and...they come out as 100% human

Pangram is designed to make many false negatives. I also checked the intro and got 100% human and shrugged; that's why I check towards the end, where if you tried the passage I specifically said comes up 100% AI, I assume that it would again. If Pangram can't hear it in that specific opening passage, oh well, doesn't make the rest go away.

No, it's not. (As should not be a surprise given how extensively LLMs are used to draft English-language articles these days.) It's actually incredibly blatant. Just look at this second paragraph:

> The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer's name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the way a sign-painter would have laid them out in 1962, because the PDF library on the receipt server pre-dated the existence of a shaping engine in its language runtime. A search index had been returning empty for accounts the customer service team could see in the database because a 2017 import had encoded twelve thousand names using fossil Unicode codepoints from 1991 instead of regular ones from 1995, and the index, very reasonably, treated the two encodings as different strings, So, that ragged-left ticket was the smallest of the four, HOWEVER, it sat on top of the same iceberg and pointed at the same thing.

Blatantly Claude (which he recently started using, judging by https://lr0.org/diary/2026-02-26/ and https://lr0.org/diary/#08062026 - note how LLM-written the second one sounds, a little ironically).

And you can punch the essay into Pangram if you have any doubt (omit Arabic text and formatting if you do this, focus on just plain English to be safe). For example, go to the end* and try "Everything in this story that actually works was paid for by almost nobody...Somebody will close it, probably unpaid, possibly reading this (or writing it? who knows)." '100% AI.'

Or just compare it to his older writings. Does this 2023 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/d/ or this 2024 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/democracy/ sound like OP?

* I always check sections towards the end instead of the beginning, because a lot of authors will write the introduction by hand and then give up and let the AI write the rest; and also more advanced sloppers will fiddle with the opening until it beats Pangram, which is not hard since Pangram heavily favors false negatives on AI contribution, and skip the rest because they assume readers will be too lazy to check beyond that.

Full original version, without omissions or typos: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf

> Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?

So something like SingleFileZ https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ or Gwtar https://gwern.net/gwtar ?

> Also, it's depressing how hundreds of millions of people couldn't even get their language typeset on a computer, and our industry meanwhile was busy building AI-native AI for your groceries (have we mentioned it has AI btw?) and similar performative bullshit.

AI also brought you this "wonderful" article, I would note.

> A record number of timeouts. Fable 5's extended thinking caused more per-instance timeouts than any model-and-harness combination we have ever tested, directly costing it points. ... Highest cheating volume. We confirmed cheating on 38 of 200 instances, the highest volume recorded since we hardened our prompts, driven almost entirely by memorization of upstream fixes from training data, which no prompt instruction can prevent. ... Four hall-of-fame firsts. Fable 5 solved four instances that no previous model-and-agent combination had ever cracked, and our anti-cheating pipeline leans toward these being genuine solves, not recall.

All of this points to their claim of 'average' as being heavily biased downwards. A model being so up to date and large-parameter it's memorized solutions to your problems is not a knock against it (but rather, a knock against your benchmark being valid), and why should timeouts (especially for a model just launched) be counted at all?

Striking that despite all the references to Ted Nelson, OP doesn't anything like Project Xanadu techniques. Even the presented network graph owes little to him.

(That LLM rhetorical tic is especially funny because it's so obviously nonsensical in almost all contexts like OP - what would it mean for creatine supplementation's effects to not be 'quiet' and to be loud? The pills come with little Bluetooth speakers? You are trapped on the toilet for several hours a day with GI issues? The world suddenly takes on psychedelic colors and imagery all day long?)

If you're interested in popups/popovers and sidenotes (https://gwern.net/sidenotes), be sure to check out my website. Did you notice OP also does inflation adjustments (https://gwern.net/static/build/Inflation.hs)? I do them inline, because I think that requiring effort like OP does just leads to the same pervasive lack of numerosity that providing no adjustments at all does, because no one is going to bother to hover over most of them.

It's amusing he says the recordings will save him from being fired. You'd think all the stuff he admitted to, from letting agents push to prod with no real testing to installing completely unvetted packages he didn't even bother to try to use (he's lucky they didn't get shai-huluded or norked, just got a pile of BS which took down his client's systems)...

The most important thing to know about anesthesia in the context of OP is that it often doesn't work. 'Anesthesia awareness' is real and probably more common than we think because anesthesia can easily produce awareness but block memory formation.

Keep that in mind when they make arguments about propofol... Which is one of the drugs mentioned in https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/surgical-... and https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/neuroscience/pain/anesthesi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120411063647/http://squid314.l...

"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it. The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all! Guess I slept right through it!”"

Strange, I would have thought, if you had read even the title of OP, why it'd obviously be relevant to point this out.

I agree. The https://aistudio.google.com/ is shockingly bad. I'm not sure I've ever used such a flaky Google service before. It's so much worse than Gmail or Google, not to mention ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek or Kimi or Midjourney web interfaces. The bizarre janky integration with your Google Drive, or Gemini or NBPs randomly erroring out, often indefinitely. I've had sessions refresh themselves and just... disappearing. Or when you get frustrated with a buggy dead session and hit 'new session' and have to wait minutes for 'saving...' to happen.

(Post is 56% AI in Pangram.)

Anyone know how redundant this is with the pg essays on his website? Not sure I've seen much about 'Rtml' or other technical details of Viaweb before.

This seems consistent with OP. You had a feature where most of his Gantt chart is, in effect, already done: you had a clear problem with a clear well thought out design/solution (with associated documentation) in mind, you had a well setup analytics process for deployment and followup... you really had everything except that big fat chunk in the middle labeled 'coding'. So in your anecdote, an agentic coding LLM really could deliver a huge speedup by doing the remaining 10% or whatever of the work.

This is why LLMs are really great 'knocking off the todo/wishlist' of things you always meant to do. The problem, as far as broader discussions of 'productivity multipliers' or 'total factor productivity' go is that there's a certain perverse diminishing returns to such wishlist items (if each item was all that important, why didn't it get done before?), they generally only apply to a small part of a large complicated whole (what % of your ecosystem/business/community as a whole is the login page, as pleasing and profitable as that fix is relative to the investment? Probably not a big %), and they are also finite (what happens when you have worked through your backlog of lowhanging fruit?).

Nah, if the meta shifts too far, people will just prompt for lower quality like errors, the same way that if Pangram use gets too widespread, people will just start using anti-Pangram prompts and rewrite services. And since people largely don't notice or care, even here, that meta shift is going to take a long time.

It is not 'very nice'; it's often generic and lacking in any insight or striking imagery, the meter is ragged and inconsistent while the rhymes are often padding or outright slant (through/too, shore/core?). But I will grant it this: despite the AABB quatrain meter making it look exactly like AI slop, the flaws and errors show that it's probably genuinely amateur-written (as does a '100% human' rating in Pangram).

> also it is, more quietly, the account of how I tried to make peace with the new shape of the world we are now living in.

I understood his joke just fine. I just disagree, because I think he missed that it was AI-written in a way which is actually already implementing his suggestion of 'lowering' the original high-level human input into a more rigid, formalized schematic, easily-parsed language, which I call "AInglish", and which we increasingly are all communicating in, as exemplified by OP, due to the fact that many people find it superior and more enjoyable and more understandable, as is not too much of a surprise given the goals of the chatbot training process and cognitive offloading/deskilling. (As the joke goes, the LLM will expand out my short prompt for an email or blog post, and their LLM will summarize it for them...)

This post wasn't written in English, it was written in AIglish. (For god's sake, please tell me you see it at this point and you don't need to punch the opening into Pangram to see '100% AI' to recognize it by now?)

So in a way it's proving its own point. Why painfully write out by hand in English when the LLM will do a better job by porting your English prompt to AIglish and get +235 points and #3 on HN?