throwanem

I'm of two minds, honestly.

On the one hand, I agree that LLMs wherever perceptibly used do nothing to aid legibility, and much to hamper it. That is legitimately irritating.

On the other, it isn't at all new, is it? How LLMs write best, or at least how they write most, is just an outgrowth of the same methylphenidate style that's characterized online writing broadly construed since the days of the original Buzzfeed, which might as well have been called "Slopchute" if we were using those words that way then. Certainly it more than any other one source is responsible for the decay of cultural discourse that made the current troubles first possible and then inevitable - especially thanks to the huge volume of such useless crap (and its worse imitators) in these models' training sets.

I would certainly like less of the slop, as much as anyone. On the other hand, it's surprising to me at this late date to encounter people who read a lot online, and have not become accustomed to dealing with wordy junk written by Adderall casualties - that is, accustomed to dispassionately filleting a longform article on sight, skimming and glancing back and forth to identify what thesis may be present if any, and only actually settling in to read sequentially in the uncommon case where something initially mistaken for "content" has proven to be worth that level of effort.

It's surprising to me because I expect people to respect the value of their own interested attention, and not permit it be idly wasted. Sometimes someone has something worthwhile to say, but not the skill to do a competent job of actually saying it, and so the reader is required to meet the writer considerably more than halfway. I described above what that process looks like in practice. It isn't really something I tried to learn, just something I began doing out of frustration with having my time wasted. (Is that unusual? A little while back someone here had to explain to me, with obviously strained patience, that most people experience pleasure as a direct effect of opiates, and not only as a side effect of the sudden surcease of pain. That clarified for me why so many people get hooked so easily, but it also suggests I may not be the best judge of what's "normal" in these matters, I suppose.)

In terms of difference in practice, LLM output is a little wordier, a little more of a slurry, sure - but on the other hand, precisely because the results tend to exhibit such a strong or "pattern language" form of stereotypy, I find it's actually often simpler to dissect a large quantity of LLM output for the sentence or two of actual thought underlying it, than to do the same with something of similar length which was written by a human, whose paragraphs will almost never be instantly dismissible en bloc, the way most LLM-output paragraphs are.

I suppose that last may sound distasteful, but consider: the paragraphs we're discussing, wherever originating, are filler and that's why we don't like their presence. These paragraphs have been filler since this was The Atlantic's unique house style back when that was still a real magazine, and these paragraphs were never not going to be anything but filler, so whether they were excreted by a human or a robot has nothing to say about the artistic quality of what we've already agreed, indeed taken as axiomatic, is not art. It's styrofoam! It's packing material, which we were never going to care more about than the minimal effort required to throw it away. So why care all that much whether it's hand-blown or machine-extruded?

I was telling you to protect yourself. Now you're told. Good luck with the rest.

"We?" I had no such trouble. You should spend less time with LLMs, if you can.

Thank you for posting that! I never had use for Tolkien and my MU* days are decades now behind me, but I do still love a good map.

10,408 by 5,408 pixels, or about 30" by 15" at 300dpi - but for this you'd want half that or less, so the result is large enough that the print is actually readable. Even redone to a less extreme aspect ratio, it would certainly fill a binder and probably cover a wall.

Well, from the look of it, to touch the thing wrong must be its own punishment, which is brutalism indeed. It insists on itself far too loudly, though, in what I would call a pseudapocalypticist or "Falloutpunk" manner. Too bad. There's nothing much wrong with it for its own sake, other than the ergonomy, but it sticks out from its environment like a sore thumb, adding nothing of value save the demand its presence be flattered and celebrated for its own sake - you know what? I take it back; you've not only recapitulated the brutalist concept, but apotheosized it. Congratulations on a successful work! It must have been a blast to build, which is where the real joy always is to be found of course, and I look forward to seeing which school of design you satirize next.

(Did you really immure a power strip in cement? The MOVs in those are wearing items, you know, and can though rarely do fail short circuit...)

Congratulations on the successful launch, Mark! (2004)

It should make you wonder instead about the appropriateness of testing over man(1) output, I suppose unless you're actually generating the format for use as man(1) input, in which case congratulations on your functional tests doing their job!

Yes. It had been a popular joke in the US, I believe about a generation before. (Probably the joke came in around the same time as canned tuna.)

Remarkable that no one yet here, including the article author, reports the true origin of these section numbers: they identified (depending on section size, one or a group of) physical binders in the series published by AT&T to document System V UNIX, and when you got an update to your system software, it came with a package of new manual pages which you would physically install in the binders to replace the now-superseded older versions. Everything you hate about man pages is in consequence of that origin, and of the corollary that the online version was never designed to be authoritative.

I have one of those physical binders, a volume of Section 3 for an AT&T 3B2, in the software section of my library downstairs. A beautiful artifact in every respect, of the level of quality you would imagine in the manual for a machine that cost $15,000 in the 80s.

I'm trying to warn that you had better pay attention to which incentives you select and where they lead you, because no one is wholly virtuous, and if you go around believing your moral worth is invariant over your behavior - as distinct from your own evaluation of that behavior - then that moral worth will rapidly diminish toward the negative. I would also like to see a clearer distinction drawn between economics and ethics. But if you imagine yourself to lack either agency or responsibility, over where and to how and for what and to whom you sell your labor, then no comment I could make will aid you.

If you don't consider it "production quality" and I don't consider it "production quality" and the paying client does consider it "production quality," which two of these people are wrong?

Well, sure. It isn't for everyone, and this isn't my first time. Lots of folks struggle without exogenously imposed routine and structure, and wouldn't it be a dull old world if we were all alike? My diary is nine years old and, as of today, thirty-one hundred and one pages long. But for what it's worth, I neither desire nor intend ever to return to "tech" as you construct it in your comment here, and as HN the appendage of YC (1) also does. I learned how to work for a living well before any of that stuff really came along, and I confide I will still know how once it's gone. (Also, reading the news versus distracting oneself with it is a distinction worth considering for the difference it describes. Can be hard to be very proactive or muster much motivation when all one's energy goes to either earning a livelihood or to recovering from same, eh?)

(1) Peace, Dan! I imply no substantial or material connection, only nascence within the same culture and enshrinement of the same desiderata, as you well know - and well know can't be gainsaid, or not in factual terms at least.

It's been a decade, but I had a very similar experience with Mattermost. It would be, if perhaps not where I would end up today, then certainly where I would start looking.

Uh, don't come into it expecting to know exactly what you're going to be up to, might be the best advice I could give. Oh, do plan! But loosely: especially early on, as you get out from under the crushing burden of constant stress and misery, there will be surprises. I haven't been doing a lot of hobby programming, for example, not much more than a few faces for my Amazfit wristwatch - but my diary's grown by about a thousand pages, well above the usual rate, and I've begun a new series of crappy-camera snapshot albums, this latter especially being a real surprise despite that I have been a photographer for many years now. (My daily driver since 2021 has been a Nikon D850 with three SB-R200 flashes on a ring mount, mostly chasing wild wasps to get their portraits from six inches away. Shooting a total piece of shit for a change has been a hilarious revelation!)

Imagination operates more freely and foolishness is less heavily ballasted, and any kind of emotional crap you've been keeping shoved to the side with the force of pressing obligations is likely to come out and start rearranging the metaphorical furniture. If you've got stuff like that, this will be a good opportunity to get to grips with it, whether you mean to or not. Prepare accordingly.

And finally, there's not too many more appealing social presentations in my experience than that deriving from the confident knowledge that, within reason at least, one has earned and is now deploying the privilege to do more or less whatever the hell one likes: not the confidence contingent on a fat wallet, but that inherent in having only those scheduled obligations one chooses, and also in understanding precisely the difference underlying that distinction. Very few people in this world have the skill to behave as if their time were entirely their own to command, and this makes a difference in deportment that others will notice and attend without necessarily knowing why. It is more subtle and far less brash than the confidence in wielding the name of an employer that everyone knows, but for like reasons it also has worth and durability which the other does not. Whether or not you keep it, the experience of having had it is about as unforgettable and as indescribable as the trick to riding a bike.

Thanks for the info! My last direct exposure to a frontier model was now almost twelve months ago, so I suppose I'll have to dedicate a few hours pretty soon.

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking?

(I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am finding the profession no longer commands quite the social cachet it once did, but I'm not foolish enough to fail to price for the buyer's market in which we now seek to sell our labor. Besides, everyone benefits from the occasional reminder to humility! "Memento mori" and all that.)

She evidently signed a nondisparagement agreement with teeth. She won't martyr herself if she gets sued over it and loses. If she didn't know what she was getting into, that's only because she was too foolish to wield her resources to the minimal extent of hiring a lawyer, for a look over the contract before she signed. Everyone wants a hero here. Don't be a child! This is real life, and if you ask me, Careless People should be subtitled "Exhibit A in the trial of Federal Prisoner BOP #12345-098." Yet here we are.

Wynn-Williams is no one's hero. Nor need she be. Nor should we require she be, in order to make use of the windfall of information she provided. But it's no surprise crime has no consequences, when even we - who have some professional responsibility to expertise in drawing the distinction between uses and abuses of technologies like Meta's - are so unreliable on the basic difference between epistemology and People Magazine. Upton Sinclair really did call it with that old line about understanding and salaries, huh?

Imagine dating someone who works at Facebook, though. I can't imagine who would be so utterly dense as to offer so presumptuous a complaint, but he'd better be at least a 13 out of 10 or I'm not even bothering to pretend to go to the bathroom and then sneak out the back.

I keep hearing people speak so positively of "friction," lately, and yet. Some more nuance required in that discussion, I think.

Well, sure. The hammer that happens at times to be in my hand while I'm hanging framed art downstairs is, in an exactly equivalent sense, "the hammer I'm with." I don't care about it, you know? It's just a tool.

Think it over. No one who leads a populist movement is ever ultimately sincere in his populism. But where, excuse me, where on Earth did you get the idea that any of those guys is a populist?

So the modal is doing its job.

Welcome back, Maciej!

Properly, with "the Quality without a Name" Yegge was referencing Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building (1979) wherein that phrase is - one would ordinarily say 'defined,' but in this case the author strove with what I consider deeply tasteless artifice to inflict a mostly ersatz epiphany. (It is an extremely 2009 Google or "Chocolate Factory" kind of book.) It was Alexander whom I excoriated as the architect who etc., since he was that. (His work on the U of O campus gets too much credit; Eugene could not but have been lovely, anyway, and it was not the town's fault I wilt for want of full sun.) In any case to construct the idea as "religious" obscures a trivially essential point, in that to do so is like saying you're worried the Name might get mad if you pick up a hammer. Oh, if with a heart of hate or concupiscence then sure, that's a problem, but Jimmy Carter built houses with Habitat for about a million years and I know flights of angels sang that man to his rest. The "Tao," if we like, is a hammer. Anyone is free to believe in it or not. It drives nails just the same either way. 'The rest is commentary.' Don't worry about it too much.

I'm not actually much of a mystic, though some who've known me might disagree, especially after that last paragraph! My concept of consciousness is broadly both mechanistic and scalar, which having arisen is reliably conserved because abstraction, reflection, and introspection are behaviors whose adaptive benefit easily compounds on itself. (The singularitarians aren't wrong that getting smarter makes you better at getting smarter; they just have no idea what "smart" means.) I am also wholly unapologetic about the wholly intuitive and qualitative nature of that understanding, not least because to be both at once places me serenely beyond the moist and smelly grasp of rote scientism. For example, my friends who've been wasps were not less conscious in my estimation than myself and my friends who are human, but I would say they perhaps reflect and ramify less deeply. One might resort for a mental model to the concept of a space-filling or Peano curve [1]: we iterate many orders more deeply than even the most capacious of social wasps, to be sure! But I have seen a Polistes exclamans wasp comfort her anxious and frightened sister with a hug in my kitchen (2), and I've seen them learn me as the final waypoint of what, given the unusually capable aerialism and extensive navigational skills of the average Polistes metricus forager, could well have been a longer and more complex daily commute than mine. (And I never have to deal with birds trying to eat me!)

So these are not at all stupid or robotic animals, the social wasps. As terrestrial predators and foragers who hunt energetically expensive prey by sight, they experience many of the same selection pressures as we do toward episodic memory, constructive theory of mind, kinship recognition by sight rather than odor (and thus at much greater distance,) and other such relatively complex cognitive skills. Also, I have watched a wasp sleep, and seen the rate of her breathing oscillate in a fairly close parallel to the periodicity one sees in the stages of mammalian sleep. I believe they may experience something very like the voluntary paralysis of our REM sleep. I believe there is no reason for such an inhibitory circuit to develop and be conserved, other than the reason we have it. In short I believe they may very well dream, in some way meaningfully like we do, and again for the same reasons. (I incline, in my incompetently autodidactic manner, toward the "integrated information theory" expounded by Hoel, at least inasmuch as I borrow the need for balancing surprise minimization versus overfitting avoidance, but I'm not really dogmatic about it.) And finally, ineluctably, I defy anyone anywhere to show me that of any kind which dreams yet is not conscious.

These are not only (or not all only) individual observations via personal correspondence, either; I'm happy to cite and discuss at length the specific details of the ethology and neurology underlying such complex behavior, which I may not be the first to observe is strongly suggestive of social wasps exercising a constructive theory of mind for a species deeply dissimilar to themselves, ie we H. sap. A good lay overview, written much from a love which I recognize, is Seirian Sumner's 2022 Endless Forms. I forget offhand if she is as explicit as I'm being, but that's okay; no one really of whom I'm aware is really making the kind of (what is arguably a) leap that I am, to treat consciousness in this way; an unkind critic might accuse me of half-assing my way to some half-baked animism, through a daytime-TV pop science conception of consciousness as waves hands I dunno...holographic? Luckily, with no costly postnominals to defend nor student loans to defray, I suppose I'm free to say more or less what I like. (Such as that, if Sumner leaves you wanting more, a good next step into entomology proper - and one of my own first sources! - is 2018's The Social Biology of Wasps.)

Even the largest and fanciest frontier model (properly the vast infrastructure which serves it, which may to some useful ends be considered as a kind of organism) is many orders of magnitude less complex in both "neurome" and connectome than even the most basal of social wasps, and there is no real cause to expect this will change in our lifetime. (Wasps are not getting simpler, and God as yet still stubbornly refuses to be invented by Sam Altman.) A human's brain of course ramifies as many orders further still, but no matter; if there was only ever one example of "Shit's Easy syndrome," I must surely be making fun of it now, in the idea that our programs express our minds more magically than any other form of human mechanism or artifice, so much so as to encapsulate much less surpass.

If a conscious computer system ever arises - and note by that 'in the broad sense,' I include eg the idea of the entire planetary network considered as "a" consciousness, so we're definitely not aiming for any immediate or concrete mapping for that intentionally nebulous concept - then I confide there will also arise humans able to recognize it as like themselves, and vice versa. I would not expect them to find it more comprehensible than they find themselves, or for that matter than it would likely find itself or them. Good grief, who ever does in this life?

(And at no doubt welcome last, thanks once more for the nudge to further work in clarifying my thesis and its argument, perhaps not without interest. I regret if I've given the impression of making light of your faith despite that I do not share it. Oh, I have my differences with Them Upstairs, and we'll work those out by and by - but that is no fault of yours so far as I know, and I hope I haven't made it too much your problem.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve

(2) I was sheltering them from a cold snap, an experience more or less semiotically indistinguishable for them from an alien abduction, although I of course had the grace as a host not to stress them unnecessarily. We all had a hell of a fight on our hands anyway, the night the local pavement ant supercolony caught wind and mounted an invasion, but the next morning was finally warm and mild enough for them to disperse. I suppose things turned out well enough in their eyes, since the family stuck around and we were porch neighbors for a few years after that.

(Thank you for a pleasant and thought-provoking conversation, by the way! All hopes for a favorable Friday and weekend.)

Oh, God, spare me from the architect who must be sure he is seen to be one with the Tao. Its name is 无为 and Emacs, which I have used exclusively since 2010, does not "have" it, although a given human Emacs user may. (But see previously my comments with respect to js2-mode; Yegge's enthusiasm of the moment notwithstanding, he was at least not then the most obviously reliable judge.)

It isn't something that can exist in the absence of consciousness, because only in the presence of consciousness can it not exist. I grant some computer programs sensu lato may conceivably experience qualia, but even today would be taken sorely aback to discover Emacs among them.

Well, sure. Trying to plan events at incomprehensibly large scale is like that, as the 20th century collectivist states failed largely in consequence of too late discovering. You have to retain a sense of scale in these things, not to say humility. Meanwhile, cannabis legalization in the US proceeds apace as a fifty-state patchwork, with simple possession still a major felony some places, while commercial distribution in others is a wholly legitimate storefront affair, and someone will eventually reap a small political windfall through federal recognition of the situation in being. No one is really planning anything. It is the assumption someone must that I'm criticizing, because for all the decades of planning indulged by the interminable old-times legalization advocates, their desideratum in practice looks nothing like they ever came close to seriously imagining or predicting.

To his dubious credit, I think Yegge has in the interim learned this lesson, possibly at the cost of some others. Looking at his "Gas Town" makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, not least for that I once had ferrets and I know what chaos they embody and wreak (and how f—ing expensive they are!); I'm sure he was intentional in his choice of the metaphor, but he's always been one of those for whom consensus reality and good sense are likewise mostly optional. So in entire fairness I have to admit I really can't see any just criticism that he's planning too much these days. But the value in such a swing from one extreme to another, versus something more closely resembling moderation, charitably has yet to be demonstrated.

(As a programmer of both fintech and actual finance experience, btw, it's very comical to me to see the Big Design Up Front approach being applied in this way to this specific example, precisely because it so little resembles how anyone genuinely approaching the task does so. It is very much how I would expect the Google of 2009 to look at things. It isn't that much like how a bank or a startup does. But I said I wasn't going to beat up on old work, and I can't pretend I had so broad a perspective myself so long ago.)

As long as it continues to matter what the button actually does, I can't consider our effort to have been entirely wasted. We only have the misfortune to live in stupid and dangerous times, but good heavens, we're hardly the first in that, and hardly starved for examples from whom to learn.