semilin

Anyone who believes the objective quality of the end result is the sole end goal of all tasks will have no self worth when technology surpasses them. This is true for essentially any task, because there is almost no end result that cannot be done "better" by technology.

However, the blog post explains that this is the wrong way to think about writing. The very first point made is that writing makes you understand your subject better and develop better ideas.

Characterizing the argument as 'thinking oneself to be Shakespeare' is a silly strawman and helps nobody.

For small projects and hobby-programming, OpenCode Go is great, and its model performance is quite strong in my experience. Every time it's mentioned, there are people loudly claiming that it has terrible, quantized models, though this is never backed with data. I'm suspicious that this is being propagated by those whose financial interests are harmed by the existence of a cheap and decent coding subscription.

Looking the same is not itself the problem. This is a same-looking that indicates a lack of human thought underlying it. That is a problem, and it is concerning to me if one does not think this.

What a rude approach! I will always prefer the more classic and civilized way of waiting for the dictionary to invent new words for me to use.

Why? LLMs are not humans.

Or you could have read it more closely before posting a comment saying it didn't make sense. You know, the old school way.

What does this have to do with Vim?

They can be in the training set but not deliberately trained for. There may be a lot of people posting pelican svgs, but not typically because they're high quality and worth replicating.

Absolutely. While we're at it, why should asbestos be regulated? You can just not go in buildings that have it.

"Nuanced discussion" doesn't necessarily mean the sort one would have with a human. Statistical apologies are never going to be meaningful. One could edit nonsense into the context window and the model would attempt to rationalize it. The models are smart but you need to use them in a way that makes sense for what they are.

This is entirely irrelevant. The problem is that anybody can make a Microsoft Form and there's no obvious indication that it's a form from Github without digging around.

Those are just hyphens, actually. En dashes are for ranges (e.g., 1–4, which is admittedly hard to distinguish from 1-4), not compound words. Point stands though—LLMs do love compound words and dashes in general.

It is upsetting. Is it worth surrendering one's practice of thinking and communicating effectively in order to resist corporate overreach? Or is such a neglect doomed to result in the very problem of passivity that this post pushes back against?

"${name}: ${features.join(", ")}"

This is in the very first example you see on the site. If it's a mistake, that's not encouraging. If this is actually how the language works, that's even less encouraging -- the syntax highlighter doesn't even get it right!

It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.

I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.

Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.

There's an irony to people repeating this claim without even having read the Phaedrus. If they had, they'd understand that the concern with writing was that it was not able to respond as a human in dialogue. One could think that LLMs are an improvement in this regard, but for the fact that LLMs are actually autonomous sophists.

Socrates would have been against LLMs, and for good reason. Writing isn't unequivocally bad, but it is simply not a substitution for real dialogue and thought. We use books as a means by which to have more things to discuss with humans. LLMs can supplant the desire to even have dialogue with others, which is perhaps the more insidious thing.

It's especially hard to express "happiness" across languages. It's a word that is hard to define and generally has no perfect synonyms between languages. It ranges broadly from "present feeling of contentment" to "ultimate feeling of fulfillment in life," and it seems like the survey is aiming for the latter aspect. Therefore the ladder analogy is a decent way to communicate that.

Your ellipsis leaves out the answer to your question. The paragraph is contrasting "ChatGPT says" which is annoying, but transparent (as LMGTFY), with "sloppypasta" which includes no such indicator.

Admittedly, the paragraph is somewhat confusingly written. Also probably written by an LLM.

It can be both. I went through a very similar experience with school -- it was miserably boring to me, and I found solace in valuable and educational experiences I sought out myself at home. In this way I empathize strongly and I agree that the schooling system is massively flawed in this regard.

Still, from my just-as-anecdotal observations, it seems to me that social media addiction exacerbates the issues. I and many peers of mine fell out of reading for fun around the beginning of high school, and this was due in part to both technology and burnout from school. Screen addiction can be an obstruction to activities that one actually loves doing, just as school can.

Short stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I observed in a short story class I took that at least the majority of students consistently read the stories, and this led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to appreciating long-form literature.

This is reductive. It's true that interest conquers inattention, but the attention span crisis really represents a prioritization of exploitation over exploration. That is to say that many people are far less able to seek value in things which require more effort in the finding (e.g., long-form media such as books and movies). You could reasonably argue that this is not a real problem, but it is undeniably happening.

If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.

But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.

The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in the field they chose to study. The former has been well known; the latter is worth considering more.

To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.

I think it's mainly a matter of clarity as long embedded clauses without obvious visual delimiting can be hard to read and thus are discouraged in professional writing aiming for ease of reading from a wide audience. LLMs are trained on such a style.

As it stands I don't know what this poll means. Does "No AI" mean that generative AI should never be used or offered? Does "Yes AI" mean that generative AI should be used for everything all the time?

One might accuse me of being intentionally daft, asserting this to be a simple sentiment poll, but I genuinely can't tell. If it were the case, this should ask "do you overall like or dislike generative AI?" Either way this encourages a lack of nuanced thinking on the subject which both tech bro shills and instinctual AI-luddites oft suffer from. The results of this poll are uninterpretable and the effects on the quality of discourse can only be negative.

Also consider Aristotle who recognized the habituative nature of the self much earlier.

I'm not intending to say it's acceptable for professors to use AI entirely in their grading. They obviously ought to contribute. I realize I actually misread your original comment, thinking of "instructor can have AI do his job" as "instructor can have AI to help do his job." Sorry about that. Point being, I think the expectation for real human thought ought to hold for both teacher and student.

Too bad. The premise should be that the instructor, by nature of having the position, already has understanding of the subject. As a student, you do not, and your goal is to gain it. Prompting an LLM to write a response for you does not build understanding. Therefore you should write unhindered by sophistry machines.

I think this points to the only real sustainable solution: make it so that students would prefer to do real work. We have seen for ages the distinction between seeming and being in regards to verbal understanding blurred. LLMs are only an acceleration of the blurring. Therefore it will at some point become essentially impossible to determine whether one really understands something.

The two solutions to this are (1) as some commenters here are suggesting, give up entirely and focus only on quality of output, or (2) teach students to care about being more than appearance. Make students want to write essays. It is for their personal edification and intellectual flourishing. The benefits of this far surpass output.

Obviously this is an enormously difficult task, but let us not suppose it an unworthy one.

What's the end vision here? A society of useless, catatonic humans taken care of by a superintelligence? Even if that's possible, I wouldn't call that desirable. Education is fundamental for raising competent adults.