Local conflicts do not get solved by higher levels, they get tapered over. WIth all the power and resources amassed by the Federal Government, one would think this could've been solved already, right?
One obstacle is geography, and the built environment. Schools are of their communities. Even if you do bus people around, they come home to the same places, norms, and situations; not all education happens in the classroom, and “you don’t belong here” is a thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools are in the poor places. The outcomes—often—not always, but often—reflect that. Is a deeply-depressed neighborhood really improved by starving its school? Or deeming it unworthy of a having a school altogether, and emptying its children out to places that “have it more together”?
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?
The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
> It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.
You are free to judge people for liking AI music, or in fact anything obviously. We all judge, and must live with judgement. But is this judgement supposed to be of any particular importance given it is equally likely someone is passing judgment on you for something they may personally dislike?
It just often feels as if there is an assumption that one's own standards are that which is "normal," while everyone else's are the weird ones. But to plenty of other people, our own interests, values, hobbies, or lifestyle choices would may be considered equally rubbish and worthy of judgement, according to their worldview and experience.
I would say, judge people if you want. As we all largely do, though I try not to do. Provided it comes with the realisation you're not somehow standing outside the exact same process.
Note: I do not willingly consume AI content, nor do I have any particular interest in doing so. But I have had people very openly judge me for things that for many of us here would be considered entirely normal, including my choice to work with computers for a living. So I do not have a tendency to give any particular weight to the "judgement" of others, silent or otherwise, where my choices do not materially impact that individual or society at large.
To lighten the mood a little more, I am quite openly judged (and silently I expect) because I have a particular enjoyment for Russian hardbass :) Which many if exposed to it I would expect consider it to be total garbage. But it does nothing to reduce my enjoyment of it and nor would I allow it too.
What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.
If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.
With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.
Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.
Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.
Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.
> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.
Couldn’t agree more. And for what it’s worth, its aptly-named author Merlin Sheldrake is an absolutely charming human too. As quirky iconoclastic woodland enthusiasts go.
I suspect some folks here might also appreciate his early-career (2011) musical collaboration with brother Cosmo Sheldrake and friends, as the Gentle Mystics:
Cosmo is his brother, wow! (have deeply adored his solo work since discovering it last year)
Aaah, it all connects - a web within a web indeed...
I have got some weekend reading and listening to get to now - thank you all kindly.
As a contribution wanted to mention Paul Stamets and his works - it's all somehow about fungi (and bees sometimes!), and all deeply fascinating
I got the overarching sense of an LLM making drama out of confusing or insignificant things. Some specific LLMisms that irritated me—beyond the creepy soulless AI cartoons—included:
> Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
> Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes.
> No university, no lab, no funding. He pulled down the dataset, wrote his own code from scratch, and ran every test independently.
> one telescope, one mountain, one drawer of plates.
> Different telescope. Different continent. Same signature.
> Signed and numbered. Just 150 copies. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
> […]the wider corpus this comic was built from. The science holds because the receipts hold.
> The Palomar Lights — a story told in data, glass, and light.
It's not technically wrong but the super-short abrupt sentence format of "A. B. C."[0] is weird if you repeat it.
You can get away with it once or twice as a kind of rhetorical flourish but if you keep doing it, it starts to sound like a one-trick pony (or a clanker.)
(IMHO, obvs., I'm not the King of English.)
[0] e.g. "Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes."
Their approach to “Suspicious merchants” also confuses me: the description doesn’t make logical sense to me and doesn’t match the abuse pattern as far as I understand it.
> When a skimmer compromises a card reader at, say, a gas pump, you don’t get one fraud case. You get dozens. Every card swiped at that pump for the next few weeks is now in someone’s database. So the symptom from the merchant side is: an unusual number of unrelated cards spending more than usual, in a short window.
So he checks for hour-bucketed increases in high-value transactions originating from that merchant.
Seems to me like a good way to catch a sale, an opening, a launch event, or a product “drop,” a single high-value sale that somebody spreads across several cards… less so a good way to detect a steady trickle of stolen card data that’s inexplicably used back at the same merchant.
If you’re installing a card skimmer, why would you charge the stolen cards at the same business where you’re stealing them? And why would you concentrate your spending into bursts if the skimmer’s harvesting all day every day?
If you’re the merchant doing the skimming in order to spend at your own store, wouldn’t it be easier to punch a higher amount into the terminal? If you’re a skimming ring, wouldn’t you prefer to have purchasing power rather than this $5000 threshold (?!) of extra gas (plus a giant neon sign advertising where you placed your skimmer)?
Wouldn’t a more sensible approach involve something like looking for merchant clusters in the combined transaction histories of known-stolen accounts?
The LLM runs so strong in this whole enterprise… I want to give the person the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t resist the sneaking suspicion that LLM fabulism to push a slop novel just wasted 15 minutes of my life.
See, my thought would have been the opposite: in a situation like this—where nobody tries the thing because “everybody knows” it’s counterproductive—I’d expect AI literature surveys to confidently assert received wisdom.
It sounds from the quote like even the researchers thought it was a mistake at first… and that on the basis of the literature PLUS their collective professional wisdom. Now, obviously, they did in fact try the thing, so maybe the idea was not quite so wacky as they paint it for the article.
But the point feels similar here as with LLMs and writing: they can do what’s come before pretty well, and they can exhaust a well-specified problem space through sheer muscle; but they seem to be less good at evolving the frontiers of the domain, and I see no mechanism by which to expect that to change.
So I tend to take the opposite lesson: surprises like this renew my hope that there will remain a place in science long into the AI era for meatbags and serendipity and the spirit of curiosity.
LLMs don't rely completely on received wisdom. The training process works in a higher dimensional space so some data points that might seem unrelated to humans end up being clustered close together if there is a hidden or unrecognized relationship.
True, but the clusters do come from somewhere—namely the training set and the input. The more technical the literature, the sparser the prior work; the more answers depend on labwork, the less the bottleneck is purely symbolic reasoning or data-retrieval-at-scale.
To hear it from the researchers, this feels like the sort of finding that, even in retrospect, is non-obvious from existing literature.
I remember hearing scientific progress described in terms of punctuated equilibrium: some Big New Idea, then a bunch of work generalizing that new idea to the rest of the problem space. I could see AI tools speeding up the second type of work: taking a new framework and chewing through everything that came before, in that new light.
But I have a hard time thinking about how the AI techniques could produce novel, surprising outcomes like this one—ones where it’s not just a permutation of existing knowledge, but where it turns out reality actually cuts against the accumulated written knowledge that came before. The “there is magic to be explained here!” aspect of science.
Yes, that's only if AI would ask you to validate all prior assumptions to avoid being led by a false premise. I don't see AI or humans bothering to do that.
I’m inclined to take the author at their word that they’re a copywriter by trade.
I agree that the punchy staccato and the rhetorical questions smell AI-ish, but the way this person uses them, there’s, like, a payload each time. Versus LLM-speak, where the assertions are at best banal and more frequently just confusing.
reply