leggerss

She... isn't posing as a programmer?

""" Growth, marketing, product management, sales - these used to feel like crafts. You built intuition over years. You learned what great looked like. You got good at pattern recognition. You earned judgment and respect by grinding through it all.

AI is flattening a lot of that.

It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes. """

To me this piece was especially interesting because she's _not_ a programmer. It's the perspective of a different knowledge worker in the same industry as a lot of the commenters here.

This type of financialization should be illegal

You could say he's also learning from human feedback

Something that strikes me every time I encounter SV Rationalism presented this way is the self-annihilation of it: tastes and preferences are to be optimized out as cognitive biases, grey uniforms mandated in lieu of individual expression (fashion). The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"

I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money. Better to spend those things "optimizing efficiency” or optimizing oneself/one’s own life

It seems like Thiel and co _don't actually care about other people_ or human welfare writ large. This isn't a novel observation, but it bears repeating

It's mirrored in something I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian? I thought libertarians were all about "live and let live" and "stay out of my business". It's the opposite. But I guess what he really wants is "freedom for me, surveillance for thee". Again, not a novel observation, but it finally clicked into place for me reading this piece

The state integration and the separatist fantasy aren't competing visions, though; you build the surveillance infrastructure inside the state, then exit into your own enclave that benefits from it. It all feels like a way to create the world depicted in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (fantastic if you haven't read it): corporate enclaves with private security built for employees and their families with lawless "pleeblands" outside the walls

I'm gonna get philosophical (because that's what art should make us do, right?): this points to arguably _the_ deepest question we can ask about LLMs right now—are they conscious?

It's a personal decision, and what matters is what you do after pondering it. Do you act like they're nothing more than next token predictors, deeply intricate digital mechanisms whose cranks turn with flowing electrons? Or do you err on the side of care, that there's a type of consciousness on the other side of the glass?

Humanity has a long history of underestimating non-human minds. I know which side I'm on.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

I don't understand: why aren't there automated tools to verify citations' existence? The data for a citation has a structured styling (APA, MLA, Chicago) and paper metadata is available via e.g. a web search, even if the paper contents are not

I guess GPTZero has such a tool. I'm confused why it isn't used more widely by paper authors and reviewers

Neat, they built py-spy into the stdlib