151–160 of 593 posts
As it is, this tweet series looks so much like one of the many scares we got earlier: RPGs loosen moral norms, videogames make you violent, television cartoons make children less smart, etc. New edition: using chatGPT lessens your ability yo think!
Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.
I find copilot and chatgpt constantly useful as just a simple way of automating what would otherwise be tedious work. I think the most important thought in using them is that as you use them more you get a sense if what they are going to be able to do and what they aren't, which lets you know when you can use them (and therefore use them with more confidence and more often) Especially in refactoring or working with p…
I can't tell any more what is satire and what is not.
This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…
Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…
Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on losses, not just gains.
Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and diversify. A fairy tale can literally spread over the whole world, and develop thousands of versions. Each one adapted and localised. Written stories also spread, but remain identical... even more-so after printing.
This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding.
title of this post could have been written by gpt. oh, and twitter - no thanks. can we simply stop posting twitter stuff here? it's just unreadable to anyone that doesn't use that platform. (i.e. most people)
Aren't most HNers using Nitter? https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
Unlike twitter, nitter is usable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Humans for sure do not guarantee this either. However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely affects how their words are perceived, and this is not carried in the sentence itself. > I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People can babble too. (Snipped for brevity) Humans are not as random as…
>Humans are not as random as an LLM. // Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so much.
Two decades of experience shows me otherwise. Even your two comments shows a consistent tone. We're just started to discuss, yet I have started to build an image of you thanks to your comments.
This is one of the mechanisms we don't fully understand and don't dare to dig much, because tinkering with people's minds are dangerous.
This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…
Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I remember less and less about the things I have written down, because the brain replaces them with a pointer. However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain. I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking…
No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case.
I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise. Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance. Very much like early AI models.
I think the contrast should be between studying and internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's intention. It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know. What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing whe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find copilot and chatgpt constantly useful as just a simple way of automating what would otherwise be tedious work. I think the most important thought in using them is that as you use them more you get a sense if what they are going to be able to do and what they aren't, which lets you know when you can use them (and therefore use them with more confidence and more often) Especially in refactoring or working with p…
That's the gist of it. People want to use LLM hammers like screw drivers and are disapointed. Also, since the quality of the context matters a lot for completion, copilot will be way more useful on clean code with beautiful variable names and nice structure flows than on code-golf snippets. Same got chatgpt: write good prose, and it will help you better.
IMHO, the reason people do so is because LLMs are advertised as such.
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Both your original version, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426 , and the new one you did, include this idea of dancing quite strongly. How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?
Please write a paragraph from the point of view of thinker, writer, storyteller like George R R Martin who loves to enthusiastically express why he loves "writing" Make sure to give lot of importance to Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It should all tie in together. Also make sure to include phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" coined by Noam Chomsky in the most meaningful, appropriate, context…
Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic, even with additional descriptors.