AI could never write this
Claude: Hold my mayo
We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current LLMs couldn't write this. Ones in a few years possibly could. Betting AI will never be as good as humans at [X] is usually not the hill you want to die on.
LLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.
That is true, but I think within three years that will likely change.
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#431984 Mayo Company Slop-Doula edition. You'd love to see it. McSweeney's is a treasure.
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#44Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#45Returning to the office doesn't solve the problem of replacing office jobs with AI
Or just outsourcing them overseas. That's most of the problem
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.
That is true, but I think within three years that will likely change.
Maybe! I think that within a year or two, either the sigmoid curve will flatten out or we will all die. But these beliefs are currently unfalsifiable. It will be interesting to see.
(And I have a more weakly held belief that even if we do all die, Claude 3000 will still be thinking stuff like "Burning off Earth's atmosphere was the point that earns its keep." They just aren't optimizing these things to write legibly.)
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#47RTO is the worst shit managers try to push.
It's your position that remote work is an unvarnished success though? No notes? Personally, I feel that remote-only in 2026 is mainly a cost-savings scheme, and probably functions to make the ground much more fertile for replacing knowledge workers (us) with AI agents. In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our ad…
You might have a bit of an argument here, but I think there are two major problems.
First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office.
And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting. Using that saved time to work extra at home is an obvious tactical error that I hope people aren't making. I sure as hell don't.
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's your position that remote work is an unvarnished success though? No notes? Personally, I feel that remote-only in 2026 is mainly a cost-savings scheme, and probably functions to make the ground much more fertile for replacing knowledge workers (us) with AI agents. In a physical space, humans have built-in advantages over bots. Operating exclusively or primarily over IP levels the playing field, nullifying our ad…
You might have a bit of an argument here, but I think there are two major problems. First, bullshitting in meatspace isn't much of an advantage. To the extent that it is, there is always video calling. What matters for agent training is going to be the output from said bullshitting. You're not really maintaining any moat by going to the office. And then on the other side, going to the office pretty much sucks. Unless…
> Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting
That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.
> going to the office pretty much sucks.
This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.
Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I train my 1000 billion parameter blank AI on this text and only this text over and over again, we may get 99% there. You'll get 100% of the way there, because, lacking any other training, it will only ever be able to reproduce this text verbatim. Hence, 100%, hence mission accomplished.
That's not how training works. Training tries to produce something that scores highly in training evaluations. With one data point, the evaluation is solely how closely the model output resembles the single input text. Let's say you do that, and the training text is 58,100 tokens long. Let's say you ask the model to produce 58,101 tokens. Will it "reproduce [the] text verbatim"? No, it can't, because of the dissimila…
> You're correct in principle, but in reality...
... It's never been tried. Look, I was actually joking when I initially replied, but now that I think about it, it's never been tried!
So now I am left wondering exactly what will happen if I train a new model from scratch, on only a single short corpus of 50k words.
Not fine-tuning an existing model, but literally creating a new model by feeding a blank (or random) matrix the same poem 100k times.
Re: We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current LLMs couldn't write this. Ones in a few years possibly could. Betting AI will never be as good as humans at [X] is usually not the hill you want to die on.
LLMs have been getting worse at long-form prose recently (and they were never good at it to begin with.) They're good at writing software because writing software is a much more restricted domain.
I think it's more that software is verifiable and RLVR can optimize in the correct direction. Harder to do with prose.