'Bad things' [for you] in return for benefits [for me].
1,017 karma · joined September 19, 2016
I first came to HN in the “todo.txt” era of “productivity hacking” and note-taking -platforms like Evernote. Like many people I had a zettelkasten phase, tried to make a second brain, tried to optimize everything blah blah blah.
Over the ensuing 15 years and several career shifts later, it’s fascinating to see how AI as supplanted so many of these tools. However in my personal case, greater professional success has coincided with discernment, i.e., knowing which information is important to internalize and commit to memory, which can be filed for reference, and which can be allowed to fade away or be forgotten.
In my current work, there is a huge amount of information that I really, truly need to know “by heart” to do my job well. There’s an equal portion that I maintain in traditional reference files with reliable retrieval systems. I do use machine learning for certain field tasks, but over time I have been able to learn to do these tasks myself when an internet connection is unavailable.
No LLM tool thus far appears useful for me. One big reason is that I work in a compliance/regulatory space where hallucination is simply unacceptable. If I have to check the output for errors, I may as well just look at the primary source to start with.
Another reason is that in regulatory settings, people will say in filings/documents that they are obeying XYZ law, but it isn’t true. I need to find out *in the field* whether the assertions are true. LLMs are not useful for that, either.
But I think the largest gap is between LLMs’ product promise and my personal professional goals. I want _wisdom_ and clinical experience as a professional, the type of things that accrue slowly over a lifetime and distinguish the people who are truly good at their jobs.
- If you're writing picturebooks, which are usually aimed at younger children, you should have a grasp of the appropriate reading level and audience for each book. Browsing through the example books on the site:
- "The Unscripted Symphony" has a writing style and vocabulary completely unsuited to the target audience. Bizarre things start happening in the illustrations toward the end. There's also no real narrative coherence. It's just not a good story.
- "The Gilded Reckoning of Havenwood" is aesthetically very uneven. What time period is this supposed to be taking place? Clothing is all over the place. On page 6, the text says "a grizzled farmer rose," but the illustration shows the character previously identified as the protagonist's mother. As the pages go on, the illustrations actually become funny for how incongruous they are.
Only the last example, "Puddle Play" would pass the most cursory editorial muster for a children's book.
The illustration generation has a lot of the same problems that most AI-generated artwork does, but the text is truly dreadful and only detracts from whatever "value" might be created by the art.
It has been encouraging to see how much more men now seem to desire being engaged and nurturing in their children’s lives (even among those who otherwise consider themselves conservative or traditionalist).
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LINESINREVERSE
Having a body is fun. I think that's one reason why VR has such quick hype/death cycles--it doesn't do a good enough job of fooling your body. Conventional games induce more like a dissociative or hypnotic state where you temporarily forget your body. That can range from very, VERY abstract (like Pong or Pac-Man, or BABA IS YOU), or built on an attempt to simulate the real world as convincingly as possible through high-end graphics and physics engines.
One of the things that made Untitled Goose Game so much fun for me was that playing it made me _feel like a goose_. It made me want to run around doing goose things for goose reasons. You can spread your wings and honk, regardless of whether it advances the game. A similar game that came out called Little Kitty, Big City offers the promise of the same idea but as a cat instead of a goose. I tried that game but never felt like a cat playing it, instead it felt like being a person controlling a cat. These are such subtle shades of gameplay and storytelling that I have a hard time imagining LLMs being useful in the design.
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
And yes, for the people who get hung up on what the Old Masters did, it’s mostly armature grids and not the golden ratio!
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...
I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned. My local game shop makes a lot of cool 3D printed stuff and sells it online or at cons, but even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself. This is ostensibly to cut down on the huge quantity of identical articulated toys.
But the bigger takeaway (i.e., the kit car Ferrari analogy), is similar to how I’ve been thinking about AI image generation lately. You can walk down the streets of New York and buy a counterfeit Birkin bag or Rolex from a street vendor. Are knockoffs “disrupting” the market? I guess, in a way. But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison. AI-generated “Ghibli” pictures are the same.
As it is, my emacs and e-mail are almost fully separated due to (I'm assuming intentional) lack of a simple method of interoperability.
I’ve seen very minor “door prizes” that say, thanks for attending this event, etc. But this “participation trophy” canard has coasted for 30+ years now.