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Do your own writing

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Re: Do your own writing

#171

Post by apsurd »

globular-toast wrote: post #166
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

Do you not know any people who can help? Suddenly realised how lonely this sounds.

Coordinating with people is hard and only gets harder as you live. And actually, finding someone that is earnestly receptive to hearing you pitch your half-baked startup ideas (just an example) and is in some capacity qualified to be at all helpful, is uhhh, not easy.

Re: Do your own writing

#172

Post by galaxyLogic »

the-mitr wrote: post #165
roadside_picnic wrote: post #9

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…

> I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. perhaps because writing is a third order exercise. first order being in thinking in one's mind, one has to talk with oneself. second order is talking to someone else we are directing thoughts towards that person, but in writing we have…

I think writing is writing to an audience which includes yourself.

When you're thinking you are speaking in your mind which means you can not really listen to yourself at that same time. You don't hear yourself from yourself. You are too busy talking (in your head to yourself) that you can not really think about what you just said to yourself. You are producing language, not consuming it

But when you read what you have written, you can pause reading and do some thinking about what you just read. That makes it easier to understand what you are saying, and more easily see logical errors or omissions in it.

Re: Do your own writing

#173

Post by globular-toast »

nbaksalyar wrote: post #81

I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code . Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?

That's a good point. When I first started programming web backends in PHP it quickly became apparent that what I was doing was very repetitive and formulaic. I could see that it would be possible to write some kind of framework to reduce the amount of repetition. I was nowhere near a good enough programmer to do it at the time, but I was maybe a couple of years ahead of Ruby on Rails and Django. I wasn't the only one to spot this.

What worries me is, if we had LLMs back then would we ever have bothered inventing RoR/Django? Why bother when we don't feel the pain of repetition every day? How would we ever develop instincts about the code if we can't even read it, much less write it? I feel like we are heading full steam into a depression. An era of stagnation where we forget how to do anything original. Idiocracy comes to mind. It might take a decade to correct.

Re: Do your own writing

#174

Post by globular-toast »

apsurd wrote: post #171
globular-toast wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not know any people who can help? Suddenly realised how lonely this sounds.

Coordinating with people is hard and only gets harder as you live. And actually, finding someone that is earnestly receptive to hearing you pitch your half-baked startup ideas (just an example) and is in some capacity qualified to be at all helpful, is uhhh, not easy.

Really? Sometimes I think I'm not very social, then I read something like this. Don't you have any friends? Colleagues? Maybe that's the problem you need to solve rather than sitting in a room burning energy for endless token streams with LLMs that anyone has access to?

Re: Do your own writing

#175

Post by antonvs »

bandrami wrote: post #114
antonvs wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better solution do you have in mind? This scenario is AI being used as a tool to eliminate toil. It’s not replacing human creativity, or anything like that. If you have a problem with that, then you should also have a problem with computers in general. But maybe you do have a problem with computers - after all, they regularly eliminate jobs, for example. In that case, AI is only special in its potentially greate…

It's not eliminating toil, it's externalizing it from the writer to the reader. If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader enough to just give me the prompt you used rather than the output.

The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for.

> If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader

"If comprehending something is too tedious for you..."

Seriously, don't jump to indignant rhetoric before you're sure you've understood the discussion.

Re: Do your own writing

#176

Post by instalabsai »

For the same reason I prefer writing with a keyboard instead of handwriting, I prefer writing with a LLM than manually typing these days. I end up spending the same amount of time rewriting and editing a text than I would have otherwise but instead of worrying about grammatical mistakes or the flow of the text, I spend 100% of my time getting my idea across.

Of course you can be lazy with LLMs and I can usually tell if it’s one—shotted as well, but if you are a good writer, you’ll get 10x out of using an LLM to write.

Re: Do your own writing

#177

Post by apsurd »

globular-toast wrote: post #174
apsurd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coordinating with people is hard and only gets harder as you live. And actually, finding someone that is earnestly receptive to hearing you pitch your half-baked startup ideas (just an example) and is in some capacity qualified to be at all helpful, is uhhh, not easy.

Really? Sometimes I think I'm not very social, then I read something like this. Don't you have any friends? Colleagues? Maybe that's the problem you need to solve rather than sitting in a room burning energy for endless token streams with LLMs that anyone has access to?

lol. nobody is proposing this "well if not friends, then...". Appreciate your concern. I am fine.

This is for Internet posterity: thought-partnering with AI does not in fact make you a sorry socially inept loser that needs globular-toast to come in and help you dial that helpline.

Also: one's friends do not, in reality want to thought-partner about work issues, esoteric hobbies, and that million dollar idea.

Also: these friends, every and any one of them it seems, will not in fact speak the word of God into your ear as manifest insight for said work issue, million dollar idea, and so forth.

Re: Do your own writing

#178

Post by ghurtado »

> The goal of writing is not to have written.

A certain percentage of comments I write on social networks end up being deleted before even clicking post. Sometimes after spending 10 or 15 minutes writing it.

The reasons are many, and I've long suspected I shouldn't feel like I'm throwing my time away when this happens.

Now I have a way to remember why.

Re: Do your own writing

#179

Post by funnybeam »

antonvs wrote: post #175
bandrami wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not eliminating toil, it's externalizing it from the writer to the reader. If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader enough to just give me the prompt you used rather than the output.

The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for. > If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader "If comprehending something is too tedious for you..." Seriou…

In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant.

You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly.

Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about

Re: Do your own writing

#180

Post by bandrami »

antonvs wrote: post #175
bandrami wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not eliminating toil, it's externalizing it from the writer to the reader. If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader enough to just give me the prompt you used rather than the output.

The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for. > If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader "If comprehending something is too tedious for you..." Seriou…

What's the point of the AI writer in that use case? Just send your prompt to my AI. And for that matter since prompting is in plain English, why not just send your prompt directly to me, and I'll choose to prettify it through an AI or not as I prefer.
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