andrewflnr

If they're useful, they aren't reports no one will read, and in that case it's important that they be readable after all. The police report is going to be read in court for instance.

If the solution is changing the format of the reports so they're less heinous to write and read, I'm fine with that. Let's just make it actual communication, not letters to the void.

> or preparing a report I suspect no-one will ever read

We should actually restructure our organizations/society in such a way that this stops being necessary. If no one reads a report, it was almost certainly a waste of effort. The only possible benefit was for the report-writer (which of course is also flushed if the "writer" uses an LLM). These things were already a plague before LLMs.

Pollen is quite diverse. So yeah, some pollen, apparently.

I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.

> These things aren't even normally the president's direct fault, but in this case it 1000% is.

This has been one of the most striking things for me. I've beaten the drum of "the president usually can't do much about the economy" before, but it turns out that even if the president can't fix the economy, he can damn well smash it.

Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.

FWIW there are settings (maybe in the accessibility section) to avoid playing animations until you've actually clicked on something.

It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.

Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not great, but as a chat room it's fine.

I know it's falling out of fashion, but some people still care about things other than making money.

They are still minds, though. And there's no reason to believe they're actually unknowable. You're trying to inject more mystery than is actually warranted. Ancient people have a lot in common with us just by virtue of being similar physical beings in similar environments with similar problems.

We can debate fine meanings of ancient texts. But at minimum the bare facts of, say, the story of Gilgamesh passed through ancient humans' minds in a similar way as it passes through ours. That's still more than we can say for AI-written text.

> One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers

Humans aren't matrixes, though. Humans want to communicate with other humans, beings who face the same problems we do. That's why we care about human thoughts. No one cares what a matrix thinks, no one healthy anyway.

Good point about emphasis. Correctness in emphasis, and I do mean correctness, was already underrated. It's a critical measure of whether you actually understand a topic, and an indicator of values in general.

...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me? The identity of the author is not germane to my point, only whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind. You could argue those old texts are worth engaging with exactly because they're our only links to those minds.

I don't think "judge writing by its quality instead of its source" is coherent. Certainly, the value of reading is in the thoughts it produces in the reader's mind. So if you want me to ignore the source, you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic. As a reader, it feels much like you telling me to eat something you made, which you enthusiastically assure me is high quality, but which you can't be bothered to eat yourself, and in fact you've never eaten anything like it before. Plus it smells like spray-cheese.