The first thing that I did was zoomed out, surely Shakespeare wrote about something in the New World?
No. It is amazing how small his world was. He was born and grew to adulthood, in the world where Spanish dominance kept England from attempting to explore the world. While Jamestown was settled before he died, he never wrote about it.
I've updated my understanding of how (un)aware people were in this era of the larger world. I have no idea why I would have ever expected otherwise.
A lot of that is bias from the fact the whole map was vibed/hallucinated by an LLM instead of just sourced from (what I'm sure are many) concordances of Shakespeare's works.
For example, "The Tempest" famously mentions the "Bermoothes" (Bermuda), but that's not included in this LLM's output for some reason. Any decent subject-index of Shakespeare would include it.
The map contains a bunch of references to America, the West Indies, Guiana, and Mexico. (Often with a connotation of "faraway exotic place" or "exciting new international development".)
He may not have written about the British colonies but the New World was clearly at least somewhat present in his mind and his audience's minds.
The most far-flung pins on the map are further away than Shakespeare or his audience likely had in mind.
"America" looks like it's at the centroid of the modern continental USA, but Shakespeare was surely thinking of somewhere in the Caribbean. "Asia" is shown somewhere in Mongolia/Kazakhstan, but the quotes suggest Turkey or the Middle East, and Shakespeare surely would have said "Cathay" or "India" if he meant to go that far. Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.
That said, the references to Ethiopia, India, and the Indies are very clear and can only be where they are shown on the map.
(Don't take any of this as criticism! The map is very cool, it just shows the limits of what a fully automated approach can do. A human approach would be limited by the human's biases instead.)
> Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.
Yes, and "Love's Labour's Lost" specifically pairs/ contrasts "Russians" with "Muscovites": the "Russia" of St Petersburg is pretty far west of "Moscow."
The problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time.
This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.
Some will probably dismiss your comment as partisan but it is very hard to (honestly) argue that this isn’t the case. “Think critically…” but only about the cliché punching bags of academia: capitalism, Western culture, American foreign policy, The Patriarchy, etc. I didn’t witness any college classes that encouraged us to think critically about socialism, or think critically about Islam, or think critically about non-Western countries’ foreign policy aims, or think critically about third-wave feminism’s impact on society. Instead, even questioning any of those sacred cows usually brands you as “far right” and professors sometimes even get fired for making others “feel unsafe” if they even try.
Note: you can still be an avowed and serious leftist and have my respect if you allow your ideas to be questioned, hold yourself to a standard of proof, and tolerate dissent. What I’m criticizing is the way especially in universities, people jump right to “You’re a Nazi/fascist and the only acceptable response is to shut you down and eject you from the community” if someone doesn’t embrace all the same political dogma as you.
"I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them."
Those on the left have been trying to advance their power through creating new taboos that cement their position. But they've misjudged. As a result Trump, by simply speaking to the resulting pain points, has been put on a potential course towards dictator. (Note, he doesn't have to do anything about it - just name the pain.) Will he succeed? Probably not, but he's certainly making a try of it.
Very few on the left are willing to engage in the self-reflection to realize how they have contributed to Trump's rise. It should be obvious - if Trump is an existential threat then you should reach out to people you dislike, who dislike Trump more than you. But no. We've been doubling down on ideological purity. And the horrible result is in the (currently partially demolished) White House.
100% agree. But this seems to be standard now for most political dialog. Either one group will call you a racist or the other group will call you communist. Or maybe antisemitic.
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech.
For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.
Less about the draft/writing and more about human interaction on all levels.
I don't see how AI becoming a mentor or a coach to push me harder is helpful in the long run. I would be missing out on opportunity to learn from real life experience. I'd rather listen to my brother or my coworker or whomever human, pick their brain, riff, dig deeper, understand their perspective from life experiences and actual meaningful thought and moral compass than have AI (take intelligence with a grain of salt) influence me.
I just acted as an amateur editor for my friend's new novel. It took a long time to get through with hundreds or thousands of minor corrections and notes. I'm certain I outperformed an LLM for a lot of that in terms of quality.
You don’t need to outperform an LLM tho. The experience of working on it together is incredibly meaningful.
I generally reject this litmus test that someone has to be “better” and an LLM in order for the human interaction and effort to be worthwhile.
You’re now part of the journey of this novel. They will thank you in the acknowledgements section. It’s this foundation upon which our lives, communities, culture and societies are built.
You do not need to be better. This act you did for a friend is not suddenly pointless and meaningless upon the release of the next model.
> You’re now part of the journey of this novel. They will thank you in the acknowledgements section. It’s this foundation upon which our lives, communities, culture and societies are built.
Beautifully said.
I think this is what the poem is all about. Some people (bizarrely, in my opinion) sometimes focus on whether AI is good enough or whether it lets them be more productive with their projects, in some mad rush to optimize life. But I think that's a red herring, and I think so does the poem's author.
People who talk to LLMs too much, get used to them sucking up. Real humans feel jarring after that. (Just like people who get used to being in echo chambers, stop wanting to interact outside of those echo chambers.)
After someone has an answer from an LLM, often that replaces reasons we would have talked to others. (See the OP for examples.)
If this does not fit your personal experience, then I have no percentage in trying to convince you.
It does fit the personal experiences of a wide variety of people that I've talked to about it. Including therapists who are having to deal with the fallout within families of these dynamics.
If you wait a few years, I'm sure that peer reviewed research will catch up with the current social phenomena. But by then there will be some other fairly new social phenomena where common experience is ahead of the research.
It’s not mutually exclusive. LLMs aren’t doing the same job as social encouragement to do better.
There’s also limit to how much you can expect coworkers, friends, and family to review your work. An LLM can act as a rubber duck debug partner or a reviewer hundreds of times per time. You cannot have friends and family at your service all day.
> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find purpose and meaning, even motivation and inspiration in others. It is not anyone's "job" to make you a better person.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that's landed us in the mess we're in. Abdication of personal responsibility. Shifting blame and responsibility from yourself onto anyone nearby. It is your job to make yourself a better person for the people around you. Not the other way around.
I interpreted GP's message as "We used to lean-on and learn-from our friends, families, and coworkers, and insodoing we ourselves improved in a symbiotic way".
The "job" in the speech example would be "hey Joe, can I run this speech by you?"
In that scenario, the friend would:
* feel valued,
* connect with you,
* have something to do socially instead of "sooo uh whatcha been up to... uh... nice weather...", and
* get to hone their own speech skills by critiquing in a safe environment.
And.. yeah... it is the "job" of a friend/coworker to say "yes" to that question, right?
Ok; That's good feedback. Job may not have been the right word. I admit I didn't pass my comment through an LLM, so thank you for helping me improve and push harder. ;)
There's no abdication of personal responsibility. To be the kind of person who wants to constantly improve, it is incredibly important to surround yourself with similar people.
You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".
You could make the same argument for the internet pre-LLM; it could be relied upon over immediate connections. It's also reminiscent of Socrates's skepticism of written text over oral tradition.
Speeches haven't gone away, videos are more popular than ever, and consulting within our social circle will continue on.
I think there's something to be said about there being an isolationist phenomenon in society that might be contributing in part to low fertility, but that significantly pre-dates LLMs. It's easy and convenient for us to be alone - people create friction. We've been entertained by the TV set for a century now. That said, we remain social creatures and enduringly have a need to be with others, at least to some extent.
I’m not meeting with friends to work on our speeches, I’m meeting friends to do friends stuff. Go join toastmasters if you want to do work stuff as a fun pasttime.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means to be human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
The AI is available when humans aren't. We should not reduce how much we talk to humans. But we should not avoid using AI where it makes sense.
As for why optimize, we should each decide what we care about, then optimize for that. I have personal reasons why I want to be a better speaker. Why I want to be able to stand in front of people, and have them connect with things that I care about. So it likely makes more sense for me to optimize building that skill, than for most.
Why do you need it to be available now (for varying values of "now")? Why the urgency? What did you do before AI existed?
And why did you decide the AI makes you a better speaker than talking and getting feedback from your fellow humans?
I think this is also what TFP (The Fine Poem) is about. Why the rush? I get wanting to become a better speaker, that's also part of being human, but why do you need to rush it with AI? Where are you going that you need to get there so fast, and taking shortcuts? This is what I meant by "optimizing".
It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what?
> And why did you decide the AI makes you a better speaker than talking and getting feedback from your fellow humans?
You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension. The choice that I made wasn't humans, OR AI. It was humans, OR humans+AI. All else being equal, more feedback is better.
> It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what?
Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.
I said that I had personal reasons to become better at connecting with an audience. A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.
To give but one example, what I've shared with my local Toastmasters club has helped it become both the largest, and the fastest growing, community Toastmasters club in Orange County. People are joining because we're really good at helping them overcome social anxiety.
I care about helping people. I'd like to be able to help more than just the few dozen people that I've talked to already.
Do you really think that my desire to have a positive impact in more lives makes me part of a "productivity death cult"? If so, then we're going to have to disagree on what makes something a productivity death cult.
My position is this. Each of us should figure out what we really care about. (In healthy humans, human connection tends to be a big part of that.) After figuring out that, we should set priorities for ourselves. To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI.
> You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension
Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said. Not even all.
> Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.
Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't. I didn't mean to imply you personally were engaged in a productivity cult, and if I came across that way, I apologize. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the productivity obsession being brought up frequently on HN, either criticizing it or embracing it)
> A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.
None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.
> To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI
Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI. That's essentially what TFA (poem) is about.
> Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said.
On personal attacks, you literally said that it looked to you like I am part of a productivity death cult. How was that not you attacking first?
Moving on, What you challenged was not what I said. It was a misunderstanding of what I said. A misunderstanding that is directly contradicted by what I DID say.
To verify, re-read the thread. Note where I first said that we should not reduce human interactions. And then realize that if we're not reducing human interactions, we're certainly not replacing human interactions with AI interactions.
> Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't.
In other words what you had to say should have been addressed to some other group, for some other reason.
Meanwhile, what I said is true. I have a number of people I get feedback from. I value it. They're there for me, I'm there for them. But if I want an extra 5 rounds of feedback, I'll feel guilty for disrupting my friend that much. I won't feel guilty after asking that from an AI. And unless a friend is in crisis, I wouldn't be happy with a friend who regularly demanded that much from me.
AI connections are not as meaningful. But they are definitely more available.
> None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.
Bullshit.
I said up front that I have personal reasons for wanting to be a better speaker. The default assumption when someone says that they have personal reasons for something, should be that they have personal reasons for it. And that their reasons are at the very least meaningful to them.
You didn't. You assumed the worst of me. You then misread me to be worse still. And then were confrontational about it. And now are standing on, "Who me? How could I have guessed at all that?"
> Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI.
Since you've been honest, I'll be honest back. If you gave a shit, you'd know what my goal is. It isn't perfecting any given speech. You'd also know why it is important to me. And if that isn't enough in your books to justify what I'm using AI for, then I'll ignore your opinions on the matter.
Take something that someone else said. Come out swinging at a distortion of what they said. Then if they call you on it, say, "You seem very defensive and angry." Thereby dismissing what they said without having to engage in any self-reflection.
I'm sorry you feel this is a "strategy". Nothing was intended as personal. Something you said made me react with a reflection on AI and the productivity threadmill, but I wasn't criticizing your personal experience, much like the poem wasn't either.
Your insistence on framing this as someone "swinging" at you is a mistake.
That was what I was thinking when the conversation went to Derek of Veritasium. This poem was centered around humanity and our shared experiences as humans. Derek is consistently obsessed with technology, and will center every conversation around how technology will enhance the human experience (by which he probably means capitalism to be honest).
Taking the conversation to Derek of Veritasium feels like after having watched Koyaanisqatsi your mind goes to James Burke and how the invention of the plow has improved how we experience human society.
If that is what you think of Derek, then you really don't understand Derek.
The video that I linked to is over an hour on why new technologies never transform education. He has a number of videos that critique what capitalism has lead big industries to. For example he has one on Monsanto's war on farming, another on how forever chemicals are poisoning us, and a third on how short-sightedness on protecting the health of rubber trees could be an existential threat to civilization.
Your model of him says that he should have done none of those things. The fact that he did is strong evidence that you've got a cardboard cutout that you're using as a strawman. Because it's a convenient punching bag. And not because it matches a real human very well.
James Burke would also criticize technology. But compared to Koyaanisqatsi James Burke’s critiques feel very tame indeed. While James Burke would critique bad implementations of technology, or point at a place where technology was detrimental, Koyaanisqatsi would say: “humanity has lost its way in pursuit of technology”.
Reading this poem I saw a similar critique of AI as Koyaanisqatsi critiqued technology. And any advocate of this technology for whichever purpose, even the ones who occupationally critique some aspect of it, feel very tame in comparison, and off the mark.
I put my views of Derik in parentheses on purpose. I wanted to share my bias towards him, while also saying: “This is besides the point”.
> Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
> AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Something that has a worse outcome for most people is worse for society.
Yeah it might be some antisocial hustler opportunity to get a leg up on everyone else. Huzzah.
Can SV Tech just make something that makes things better for society overall? No, impossible.
Every new technology promises to fundamentally change learning, education, personal growth and ends up being used in the laziest way by 99% of people. Radio, TV, internet, now AI. Eating right and exercise or GLP1?
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
I mean, AI is necessarily pushing your speech towards its baked-in human soup average of what a speech should sound like. That's not a good thing unless you're doing a corporate presentation.
Personally, I find the idea of sounding even slightly more like ChatGPT repulsive. Would much rather just leave the gnarly bits in.
The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.
The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."
Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.
The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.
The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.
Provided the plastic doesn't need significantly more space than the source material, of course. We all know what happens when you try freezing a sealed bottle filled with water.
Than what? Genuinely curious. I thought that the main exothermic thing monomers did was polymerization or combustion, and we're really hoping to prevent the latter.
You can make the best product, or hire the best lawyers. If you've slipped on product quality relative to the competition, the lawyer option starts to look really good.
The problem with that is that there are certain kinds of users that like to take control of community projects. And then they take control of more, and bigger ones.
There are a lot of political tricks that get used.
What is scary is that one of those kinds of users are malicious state actors. Like North Korea and Russia...
ELO is shockingly easy to manipulate. For example there was a literal jail with a decent chess player in it. He created a pool of players who got great ELOs by beating him, then used them to boost his rating higher. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Given any manipulatable scheme, AI will figure out how to manipulate it. For the OP, what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor? Then it starts elevating other AIs to contributor, and we're off again. There doesn't have to be a purpose to this. Trolls will troll, and trolls armed with AI bots can devote endless energy to doing so. The more you work to keep them out, the more fun it becomes for them.
I wish I had an answer for that problem. But I don't.
ELO is a bad fit because it requires competition between submitters; but if the idea is interpreted as “contributor karma score” or similar (not everyone’s familiar with the mathematical nature of ELO), then the way to close the loophole is to only consider voting inputs from the human project owner. This project chose to have people lie to a webform rather than lie to a git interface about using AI, so I don’t expect it will be particularly successful at inhibiting AI use by project-involved humans, but certainly it’ll squelch a lot of noise from unattended/passersby.
I think they were saying Elo system as kind of a general ranking system idea instead of the actual algorithm.
You could probably use some kind of pairwise ranking algorithm (like anything based on the Bradley-Terry model) to rate human vs. AI contributions, but that would take a lot of manual effort.
Google is using it to (supposedly) improve their searching algorithms. They give testers two different versions and ask them what's better.
fix this problem by make the rating value tied to some paid currency - a repo owner would have to pay for the PR, and that PR contributor will now have more currency than previously. In order to have said currency to pay, the repo owner would need to have contributed to another repo whose owner have currency.
The totality of someone's currency is their reputation.
Of course, now the decision becomes...who is the central currency issuer that creates it?
>what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor
Then they'll get removed by the humans? Its about cutting down work, not about eliminating the work entirely
The current approach removes about 99% of their overhead it would seem. If they have to do a few manual interventions here and there, that seems like a huge win overall
As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak
No. It is amazing how small his world was. He was born and grew to adulthood, in the world where Spanish dominance kept England from attempting to explore the world. While Jamestown was settled before he died, he never wrote about it.
I've updated my understanding of how (un)aware people were in this era of the larger world. I have no idea why I would have ever expected otherwise.
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