Recent submissions

Comment · 4 days ago
They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.
Comment · 1 month ago
GP mentions concurrent extreme stress and multiple variations of suicidal ideation, along with a prediction of the relief that would bring. Also, that the thoughts stopped once the stress did.

Not sure how they could describe suicidality more clearly. Speaking as someone who has also experienced it due to chronic health conditions that had gotten particularly bad for a while.

Comment · 2 months ago
Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.
Comment · 2 months ago
Excellent resources, thank you. Discussions of Sphotavāda are limited to the non-English Indosphere, largely, but the word itself is also used in high register Hindi to appreciate an unexpected but brilliant off-hand remark. Sort of like the English expression of calling something inspired; it both appreciates the speaker while taking away from their absolute agency.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
I agree with your second paragraph. I'm not blindly pro-AI, merely trying to make the best of a bad situation. I didn't mean to imply "if you don't like AI, then you only cared about the money" at all.

I'm trying to say if you don't want to do the work because you think anyone at all can do the same job with AI, then 1) you're probably underestimating yourself, and 2) maybe you care less about the work than about being on the other side of a moat of knowledge and experience. That moat is still there, and a large part of it is caring about the work.

(Also I agree that AI changes the end product if one doesn't read the code, but I don't agree that we are all necessarily forced by the economics to operate it that way. I still plan how to implement features myself first, without AI; I still read every line of code; and I still sometimes step in and rewrite the AI patch myself. I'm lucky not to have a boss breathing down my neck, I realise; at least that's true for the moment while my savings haven't run out.)

Comment · 2 months ago
I think you're right. The "because" should have applied to the clause that followed.
Comment · 2 months ago
I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.

I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.

If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.

Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

Comment · 2 months ago
"What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.

The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can."

-- Harold Bloom

Comment · 2 months ago
> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.

IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously I mean human-written books, and specifically with prose that you appreciate.

Comment · 3 months ago
Unpopular because the difference between FSD and writing is obvious to more people than not, especially people who read for pleasure. Being a person with an actual POV matters more than having perfect grammar or a studied flair.
Comment · 3 months ago
Someone on Twitter suggested ISO 24495-1, in case ASD-STE100 is a bit too sparse.
Comment · 3 months ago
Surprised to find no mention of "load-bearing" and "gated" particularly for Claude.

In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.

Comment · 3 months ago
Most of this piece reads like the Claude output I have to read after every prompt, cleaned up with an /elegant-writing skill or something. I'm so used to skimming text in this voice, it's hard to pay attention to this.

I honestly do not understand why people do this for writing that carries their signature, essentially. Do you want people to associate your name with skimmable fluff? We can talk to each other directly, please. The machine is helpful but it doesn't have to mediate every human interaction ever.

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