I use it as a proofreader, not to improve my writing. It’s difficult to proofread your own work, and Grammarly is a useful assistant. Plus, I’m British and I often write on behalf of American clients. I’m pretty good at following US English standards because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but the odd Britishism slips through and Grammarly usually catches it (although a standard spell checker would too, I suppose).
As someone who makes a living by writing, this myth about em dashes is annoying. I have always used them. But now I have to avoid them so clients don't think my work is AI-generated.
I don't believe this article is largely AI-generated. It reads to me like the work of every marketer who has learned a list of "best practices" and sticks to them rigorously. It's probably also been edited so it aligns with Grammarly's or Hemingway's view of good writing.
Plus, some people seem to think that any polished, professional writing is LLM-ish because that's the style LLMs often imitate (badly).
It would imply that when dealing with complex systems, models and conceptual frameworks are, at the very best, useful approximations. It would also imply that it is foolhardy to ignore phenomena simply because they are not comprehensible within your preferred framework. It does not imply biologists should give up.
If all that’s been shown is that LLM consciousness is not impossible then the point barely seems worth making. One tends to assume that interlocutors are trying to do more than point out the bleeding obvious.
The actual conclusion: "We've established that computers can be conscious, so LLMs might be"
The foregoing argument does not establish that computers can be conscious. It assumes consciousness arises from purely physical interactions AND that any physical process can be computed AND that computation can produce consciousness. It provides no reason to believe any of those things, and therefore no reason to believe computers or LLMs can be conscious.
Once you remove the unjustifed assumptions, it boils down to this: LLMs can do something that looks a bit like what some conscious beings do so they might be conscious.
The "as far as we know" in premise one is hand-waving the critical point. We don't know how or if conscious arises from purely physical systems. It may be physical, but inadequately replicated by computer systems (it may be non-computable). It may not be physical in the way we use that concept. We just don't know. And the fact that we don't know puts the conclusion in doubt.
Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness, even if it mimics some of the qualities we associate with consciousness.
Pepys wasn't the average man, though. That's why I specified a man of his time and class. He was a successful and increasingly powerful man on the edges of Restoration court and aristocratic culture, in which such behaviour was the norm. It's complicated by the fact that Pepys was well aware that his behaviour was wrong, but hypocrisy and a public/private moral duality was, again, pretty normal in men of his station. That conflict is one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure. What irks me is the rush to focus on his transgressions as though people need to be "warned" that he wasn't a moral paragon by modern standards. That they might somehow be tainted by their encounter with him or be embarrassed if they express interest in or admiration for a bad man. As if that makes him any less fascinating or worth reading.
Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable for a man of his time and class. It would have been more surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he’d anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual propriety.
One commonly observed midwit behaviour is to make arguments based on the dictionary definition of a word, having failed to understand that there is a complex set of cultural and social connotations implied by its use. In the case of the midwit, the implication is that intelligent people understand, stupid people understand, but the half-smart get completely the wrong end of the stick.
The writing is the point. A well-structured, well-argued, and well-written article indicates the writer has devoted considerable time to understanding and thinking through the topic — if they haven't, it quickly becomes obvious. A series of bullet points indicates the opposite, and using an AI to hide the fact that the "writer" has invested minimal cognitive effort is dishonest.
It does work. Your problem may be different, but it temporarily stopped working for me because I set "Search Engine to Redirect" in the Kagi Extension to Google (because my browser search engine default was Google). My "!g" searches ended up being redirected back to Kagi. It started working again when I changed the browser default and extension to something different.
The British Vale voice changed for the worse too. It used to be warm and friendly, but today there’s much more uptalk and she sounds rather snarky, like she’d really rather not be taking to you at all. Not an improvement.
In general, it’s unwise to take corporate comms at face value. Think about what Andreessen Horowitz would like investors and founders to believe and how it would like them to behave. Then consider the post as if it were an attempt instil those beliefs and elicit those behaviours.
Coming up with new ways to describe things is what scholars do. That's compounded by the fact that they rarely like the "popular" terminology for what they study — it's always more complicated and fragmented and interesting than we common folk understand. Therefore, we are invited to "change our thinking". See also the interminable witterings about what to call Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. Articles of this type are about as common in the humanities as "X considered harmful" articles are in in tech.
We shouldn't be too quick to jump to "AI did it." People write redundant paragraphs and sentences in articles all the time because they're led to believe that every article needs a conclusion that sums up what's already been said. Ironically, including one in this article showed a lack of good judgment, which isn't confined to AIs.
Provoking a negative emotional reaction is pretty much what offensive means. What else would it mean to be offended? For example, I have a negative emotional reaction when strangers on the internet tell me I might want to "do some reflection" — it's presumptuous, condescending, and impertinent. Especially when what they mean is: "don't make me feel ashamed for sticking remote-controlled devices up my butt" — an odd thing to get on one's high horse about.
They aren’t optimising for speed, sharing, or searchability. Notes of this type aren’t an inadequate database, but a tool for thinking. Note-takers visualize and symbolise their thinking while they work through a problem. Writing and drawing reduce cognitive load and externalise information so it doesn’t have to be held in memory. Notes also create a useful record of that process so you can see how you got to your solution. Notebooks are just a convenient UI for that process.
Perhaps it's not really intended to be of widespread practical use. It's useful to the person who made it because it powers his website. But sometimes people do stuff just because they think it's fun or cool. Or as a sort of exhibit with little practical value — like apprentices used to make a "masterpiece" to show off their skills. Or because it's a way to learn a skill or technology in a low-pressure environment.
I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.
That’s not bad writing; it's intentional ambiguity. Alephic wants potential clients to understand that they do "AI stuff," so when a company is looking for help with "AI stuff", they can say, "Yes! Of course we do that!" — regardless of the specifics. B2B services companies frame their offering ambiguously to cast the widest possible net. They'll write a custom pitch once they know what a lead actually needs.
Science isn't the only form of empiricism. In this case, the writer is reporting what she has learned through a long process of observation, a useful form of experience. No doubt in the process she has formed ideas, watched to see if they bear out, changed her mind, examined events in context and their outcomes, come up with generalizations based on observations over time, and so on. You know, how most people learn most things.
Could she be wrong, sure, but as we have learned over the past few years, so can more "scientific" approaches to psychology and sociology. But that doesn't really matter because what she's doing isn't failed science, but taking part in a sort of humanistic shared inquiry. It's a woman reporting her observations and thoughts, not as claimed facts, but as suggestions readers can integrate into their own developing understanding, so they can build on them to make their own observations and inferences.