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How to write stuff no one else can

thewritetoroam.com

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Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#31

Post by teaearlgraycold »

tmountain wrote: post #10
mattfrommars wrote: post #6

I read the article, what mind opening tactic did the author explain to the public? Appears to be blogspam.

Going down a layer below Tim Ferriss to his staff… /s

I agree this is kind of trivial, but doing anything more than the average person already puts you in the high percentiles.

My abstract strategy for making contact with the right people:

Try to imagine things from the perspective of the people you're trying to contact. What is their day-to-day, what are they sick and tired of? What will make your cold email stick out in that context? It's click-bait targeted at a specific person. Again, this is probably just one level above what the average person will do. But that already puts you ahead of most people. It gives you some chance of reaching the right person.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#32

Post by gamepsys »

thenerdhead wrote: post #19

What was the answer? Find a human who can bypass robots.txt/limitations of ChatGPT and find less traveled sources given the internet fails to archive itself and important information can be wiped any minute? Isn't that just called good journalism?

The author primarily talks about interviewing interesting but un-interviewed people as a new source of interesting information to write about. The author talks about their process of finding new people to interview.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#33

Post by encomiast »

ethanwillis wrote: post #27
snoman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you’re saying, and will echo that these systems are still just tools that enhance what we, as humans, are capable of doing. But I think you’re failing to consider that even comparatively simple systems can exhibit emergent behavior, well beyond their programming. You’re being unreasonably reductive and dismissive.

The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement. I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

In what sense is a novel, never-before-seen image that comes out of DALL·E 3 "encoded in" in the system? The image may be, in a sense, encoded in the latent space of images, but so is every image (of the same dimensions) that ever has been or will be.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#34

Post by ben_w »

ethanwillis wrote: post #27
snoman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you’re saying, and will echo that these systems are still just tools that enhance what we, as humans, are capable of doing. But I think you’re failing to consider that even comparatively simple systems can exhibit emergent behavior, well beyond their programming. You’re being unreasonably reductive and dismissive.

The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement. I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

> The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

The laws of physics encode every motion and interaction of every particle.

None of those fundamental laws directly says "water is wet".

> I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

You see it every time you use a machine learning system. Even the simplest models, say a linear regression line in a spreadsheet, "learn" from the data, not from the code.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#35

Post by soneca »

I was kind of curious in what the author had to say, but his sole motivation being ”getting ahead of competitors” really put me off.

Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice.

So I stopped reading.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#36

Post by skybrian »

QuantumGood wrote: post #16
ssivark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc are all retrieval services (with some rudimentary remixing capabilities thrown in, for the latter few). Some human has to actually have interesting insights and write them. Retrieval services help with distribution & discovery. The less we’re connected, the harder it is to find the right audience who value your (niche) insights. Of course attribution and linking is important.

The longer I think about something, the dumber AI gets. I have given our internal knowledgebase documents to ChatGPT and asked for summaries, and it adds in things from the general internet that are wrong to very wrong contradicting our KB (we are very far off the beaten path of conventional audio studio design testing).

I think this effect is because we learn and the AI doesn't. (In the short term, for any given release of the AI.) Start asking about a topic that's new to you, and it will "know" things you don't. Then you learn those things, and it keeps making the same mistakes.

Over the longer term, new releases have improvements, but the feedback loop is currently pretty slow. It will likely get faster.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#37

Post by ben_w »

adtac wrote: post #21
hawski wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also something I often encounter with ChatGPT. It often is very wrong about things I ask, because I often wonder and try things off the beaten path. That's our advantage against LLMs.

Purely probabilistically, trying things off the beaten path is just a matter of higher LLM temperature. Turning up GPT-4's temperature is basically an expensive /dev/urandom pipe today, but I don't see any fundamental reason why LLMs can't catch up. Maybe all it takes is tinkering with how temperature is calculated.

You've missed the metaphor, I think. Higher temperatures will make it "more creative" for lack of a better term, but there's a lot of specialist knowledge it doesn't have and which you can't give it just by twiddling a dial.

It has a massive speed advantage that lets it read the whole internet, but it's dumb enough that it also needs to, and when even that doesn't give it enough examples, it's like asking me to improvise Latin based on what I recognise of the loanwords in English.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#38

Post by Aurornis »

soneca wrote: post #35

I was kind of curious in what the author had to say, but his sole motivation being ”getting ahead of competitors” really put me off. Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice. So I stopped reading.

The daily newsletter business is a crowded space, to say the least. The barrier to entry is as low as it could possibly get and the unit economics are brutal.

Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this.

If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#39

Post by Aurornis »

> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time.

> But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground.

Although not the main point of the article, this is much better advice for finding high-potential employees who are under the radar than the article that was on the front page a few days ago: ("How to hire low experience, high potential people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 )

When the last article hit the front page I couldn't believe HN was upvoting an article that advocated for deep-diving into people's personal early life history as a hiring technique. That's like reading the tea leaves for interviewing candidates.

Instead, this article reveals the real secret: You have to be prepared to do some legwork and research, as well as look beyond the obvious. You could go hire a lot of smiling ex-FAANG people with perfectly curated LinkedIn profiles and professional headshots by throwing large salaries at them, but you're not going to get the best results that way. It's also one of the least efficient uses of your headcount budget and those people are almost guaranteed to ghost you in 18 months when someone else offers them a fancier title.

There is a lot of gold waiting to be discovered among people who aren't curating perfect LinkedIn profiles or collecting famous company names for their resume. It takes some work to find it, but it's out there.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#40

Post by iamwil »

QuantumGood wrote: post #16
ssivark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc are all retrieval services (with some rudimentary remixing capabilities thrown in, for the latter few). Some human has to actually have interesting insights and write them. Retrieval services help with distribution & discovery. The less we’re connected, the harder it is to find the right audience who value your (niche) insights. Of course attribution and linking is important.

The longer I think about something, the dumber AI gets. I have given our internal knowledgebase documents to ChatGPT and asked for summaries, and it adds in things from the general internet that are wrong to very wrong contradicting our KB (we are very far off the beaten path of conventional audio studio design testing).

It's like the Gell-Mann Amnesia for AI.
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