This is why I loved biology; I must have had better high school teachers than the OP, because basically all of what he writes was conveyed.
2,563 karma · joined January 11, 2017
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
** ETA the full opening:
“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.
He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
Living with your parents is more socially acceptable, so they have a huge chunk of people in their 20s with no debt, low monthly expenses, strong technology expertise from their military service, in a founder hot spot, and access to capital. The result is a lot of unicorns, particular around cyber security (https://www.techaviv.com/unicorns).
Compare to the United States, where you have to dedicate 4 years to an undergrad program, go massively in debt, pay rent, and then struggle to find seed funding. The mental model of "oh, I guess we could apply some of the detritus of our failed system" misses the idea of having a successful system in the first place.
If you present the idea as "an idea" rather than "my idea", it's pretty good at challenging, solidifying, and refining it. It still leans on the same forms in the writing part, but I think it can be tuned to not insist upon the idea's brilliance so breathlessly.
Most of the common tells stem from that desire to signal the gap between what it's writing about now and how you previously thought things worked. And they really fall flat when it's writing about some milquetoast truism with all the edges sanded off.
Rather than have "Z" be self-evidently interesting, the LLM need to tell us that it's not "A". Except no one thought anything was "A" in the first place, and the "Z" is barely a "B" let alone a "Z".
Or things are "quietly X," implying that there is some secret knowledge that other people have.
Barring that, the LLM will signpost arguments, telling you how interesting things are. "This is the critical part..." before launching into another banal non-observation. Why have only "Section Header" when you can have "Section Header (another idea I had) - omg I just have so much to say about this". Maybe a list of weak ideas, presented in multiple ways. Bulleted with emojis. As a rule of three. As choppy sentences in a paragraph.
All of these follow the same pattern - trying to follow the FORM of having something interesting to say that differs from consensus understanding, without having the intelligence or boldness to actually midwife a new concept into the world.
This essay is AI slop with a fancy website design.
There was a big push post-9/11 that depended on exactly this.
Many people I've talked to about Copilot don't realize that the dedicated "Premium" Copilot is a completely different experience than the "Basic/Lobotomized" Copilot that comes with a standard Business subscription.
It's like you're running a freemium model where no one was actually responsible for implementing the upsell, or making sure the free version is useful and compelling. E.g. a Copilot pane in Outlook that says it can't access your emails, doesn't explain how, and doesn't mention an upgrade path that will allow it to.
“PKI is easy to break if someone gives us the prime factors to start with!”
In lieu of understanding the whole architecture, they assume that there was intent behind the current choices... which is a good assumption on their training data where a human wrote it, and a terrible assumption when it's code that they themselves just spit out and forgot was their own idea.
The actual insight isn't C, it's D.
The combination of adhd and colorblindness seems to make most multicolor displays just visual snow to me. It’s like looking at one of those magic eye pictures. I struggle with foreground/background in both vision and hearing, and it took quite a long time to realize others don’t process like that.