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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#401

Post by foobarian »

docfort wrote: post #330
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…

I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing.…

I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.

Re: The End of an Era

#402

Post by nicf »

miki123211 wrote: post #346
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if t…

This sounds like a fully general argument against being alive and having experiences; you could equally well call love a "brain hack". I also care a lot about solving practical problems, but the reason it's important to solve them is because it leads to human flourishing, which includes participating in all these activities you're deriding. Otherwise why are we doing anything at all?

Re: The End of an Era

#405

Post by SoftTalker »

senordevnyc wrote: post #163
inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

He talks about this in TFA: Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of…

Same reason I still code by hand. If I wanted to direct someone else to write code, I would have gone into management.

Re: The End of an Era

#406

Post by Brian_K_White »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #395
miki123211 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if t…

Shit engineers say

Fact. Someone has missed the point of existing. Or failed to come up with one for themself.

Re: The End of an Era

#407

Post by Brian_K_White »

foobarian wrote: post #401
docfort wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing.…

I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.

I say that LLM's are a pacifier. LLM output is to conscious output as a silicone nipple is to a breast.

Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.

Re: The End of an Era

#408

Post by alexashka »

toasty228 wrote: post #102
kardianos wrote: post #92

What LLMs have shown me most, is: Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.

> Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. Why even read? Why even live? What's the point of all of this? Churches could be wooden shacks, 5 stars menus could be protein shakes, paintings could be single sentence descriptions, ... You might as well sign up to be put in an artificial coma, or in a matrix pod

> Why even read?

To understand.

For most everyone else, it is to momentarily feel some sort of way. The difference is what the parent describes as a revelation, to him.

You see, for people who crave to understand, living among people who just want to feel this and that feels like living in an insane asylum where the people inflicting harm upon themselves and others will do nothing but distract themselves long enough to forget and go on to inflict harm on themselves and others again, forever.

As for 'might as well quit' - most everyone I've known who's not an idiot has already done that. Even the idiots aren't having children by the way :) Living in a matrix pod? You mean a modern city? Anyhoo...

Re: The End of an Era

#409

Post by tauroid »

miki123211 wrote: post #346
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if t…

The "story form" is a brain hack, i.e. a way of disseminating "problem X may cause Y and be resolved by Z". Whether that's useful depends entirely on what's being communicated and how.

Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.

What's Riemann's last theorem?

Re: The End of an Era

#410

Post by burningChrome »

ACCount37 wrote: post #351
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't do anything well by human standards. Not even the one thing (programming) they are supposed to be good at. It's disheartening how many people are prepared to accept the slop an LLM puts out just because it's fast.

I've seen way too much humanslop to be able to reject LLM slop outright. There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.

The interesting thing for me is that I have a very easy time of identifying AIslop. Have I been conditioned to simply ignore or accept humanslop? Is that the direction this is all going? That at some point we will simply accept both as a product of the human existence?
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