411–420 of 565 posts
I don’t know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my entire life for lacking “communication skills” so I’m glad there is something for levelling the playing field.
I don’t know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my entire life for lacking “communication skills” so I’m glad there is something for levelling the playing field.
I’d rather be insulted for something I am and can at least try to improve, than praised for something I’m not or can’t do, despite my physiological shortcomings.
I can't speak for the OP's experiences, but my early schooling years were marked by receiving a number of marked down or failing grades because my handwriting was awful, it still is, but at the time no matter what I did, I couldn't get my handwriting to stay neat. Writing neatly was too slow for my thoughts, and I'd get lost or go off topic. But writing at a pace to keep up with my thoughts turned my writing into barely understandable runes at best, and incomprehensible scribbles at worst. Even where handwriting wasn't supposed to count, I lost credit because of how bad it was.
At a certain point I was given permission to type all of my work. Even for tested material I was given proctored access to a type writer (and later computer). And my grades improved noticeably. My subjective experiences and enjoyment of my written school work also improved noticeably. Maybe I could have spend more years working on improving my handwriting and getting it to a place where I was just barely adequate enough to stop losing credit for it. Maybe I have lost something "essential" about being human because my handwriting is still so bad I often can't read my own scribblings. But I am infinitely grateful to have lived in a time and place where personal access to typing systems allowed me to be more fairly evaluated on what I had to say, rather than how I could physically write it.
It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full of misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your argument "No, don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix your grammar, if done right, is the part of the learning process.
I can imagine it’s hard to see the nuance if you’re ESL but it’s there.
No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human! I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange recommendation.
I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022. I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration. I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans,…
Uhh, that's a lot of links: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ Where are the explanations what all of them mean? What is (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What is `100` vs `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?
Mini is the introduction and infobox of all articles, nopic is the full articles with no pictures, maxi is full articles with (small) images. Other tags are categories (football, geography, etc.)
100 is the top 100 articles, top1m is top 1 million, 0.8 is (inexplicably) the top 45k articles.
My recommendation: sort by size and download the largest one you can accommodate in the language you prefer. wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim is all wikipedia articles, with images, as of 2025-08 and it's a paltry 111G.
Kiwix publishes a library here, but it's equally unhelpful: https://library.kiwix.org/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of AI-slop has effectively zero value. Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI. We truly…
You don't need human intermediates either, what's the point of teachers? You can read the original journal articles just fine. In fact what's the point of any communication that isn't journal articles? Everything else is just recycled slop.
> Everything else is just recycled slop.
No, not everything is slop. AI-slop is slop. The term was coined for a reason.
Everyone can ask the AI directly, unlike accessing journals. Journals are intermediaries because you don't have direct access to the source (or cannot conduct the experiment yourself).
Everyone has access to AI at the slop "let's generate blog posts and articles" level we're discussing here.
A better analogy than teachers is: I ask a teacher a random question, and then I tell it to you with almost no changes, with the same voice if the teacher (and you also have access to the same teacher). Why? What value do I add? You can ask the teacher directly. And doubly so because what I'm asking is not some flash of insight, it's random crap instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully reviewing it myself first. But once that’s done, why not?
> But once that’s done, why not? Do you have the same understanding of the code? Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you didn't. I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might…
It undoubtedly saved me time vs learning all that first, and in fact was itself a good chance to “review” some decent TS myself and learn about the stdlib and some common libraries. I don’t think that effort missed many critical idioms and I would say I have decent enough taste as an engineer that I can tell when something is janky and there must be a better way.
Lately, I've been writing more on my blog, and it's been helpful to change the way that I do it. Now, I take a cue from school, and write the outline first. With an outline, I can use a prompt for the LLM to play the role of a development editor to help me critique the throughline. This is helpful because I tend to meander, if I'm thinking at the level of words and sentences, rather than at the level of an outline. O…
And yet, Will, with all due respect, I can’t hear your voice in any of the 10 articles I skimmed. It’s the same rhetorical structure found in every other LLM blog. I suppose if to make you feel like it’s better (even if it isn’t), and you enjoy it, go ahead. But know this: we can tell.
If you're talking about something more recent, there's only two essays I wrote with the outlining and throughline method I described above. And all of essays, I wrote every word you read on the page with my fingers tapping on the keyboard.
Hence, I'm not actually sure you can tell. I believe you think I'm just one-shotting these essays by rambling to an LLM. I can tell you for sure the results from doing that is pretty bad.
All of them have the same rhetorical structure...probably because it's what I write like without an LLM, and it's what I prompted the LLM, playing a role as a development editor to critique outlines to do! So if you're saying that I'm a bad writer (fair), that's one thing! But I'm definitely writing these myself. shrug