martythemaniak

I'll repost a comment I made a while back describing the process I use, which I think balances AI in keeping your voice.

If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In many cases (scientific papers, legal documents) you already have to write them in a voice that is not your own. Go ahead and write these in AI. But if you're trying to say something more personal then the words should be your own, AI will always try to 'smooth' out your voice, and if you care about it, you gotta write it yourself.

Now, how do you use AI effectively and still retain your voice? Here's one technique that works well: start with a voice memo, just record yourself maybe during a walk, and talk about a subject you want, free form, skip around jump sentences, just get it all out of your brain. Then open up a chat, add the recording or transcript, clearly state your intent in one sentence and ask the AI to consider your thoughts, your intent and ask clarifying questions. Like, what does the AI not understand about how your thoughts support the clearly stated intent of what you want to say. That'll produce a first draft, which will be bad. Then tell the AI all the things that don't make sense to you, that you don't like, just comment on the whole doc, get a second draft. Ask the AI if it has more questions for you, you can use live chat to make this conversation go smoother as well, when the AI is asking you questions, you can talk freely by voice. Repeat this one or two more times, and a much finer draft will take shape that is closer to what you want to say. During this drafting state, the AI will always try to smooth or average out your ideas, so it is important to keep pointing out all the ways in which it is wrong.

This process will help you with all the thinking involved being more up-front. Once you're read and critiqued several drafts, all your ideas will be much more clear. Then, sit down and write your own words from scratch, they will come much easier after all your thoughts have been exercised during the drafting process.

So why did this get [flagged], is Gemini moderating HN now?

There's no reason to think it didn't.

The media is mostly MAGA owned. Here's a short list:

- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison

- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son

- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well

- Twitter is controlled by Musk

- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck

- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos

- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch

The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.

A fun idea I've been playing around with and testing on folks: We need a neo-temperance movement.

The first reaction is a scoff and a laugh of course - wasn't the original temperance movement an utter failure, prohibition didn't work etc. But no, the movement was far wider and successful in a multitude of ways. And a new temperance movement isn't about blindly copying something old, but situating yourself around the turn of the 20th century, understanding the multitude of interconnected problems people faced, the solutions they came up with and which ones worked and didn't.

America at the turn of the 20th century was a nasty place - there was wild corruption, politics was run by mafia-like patronage networks, wealth was extremely concentrated, rich people were unaccountable, working people suffered under low-paying, dangerous jobs, women were excluded from public life, and alcohol was merely the symptom of a very sick society, and yes indeed it was a massive problem, the way alcoholism is a massive problem in Russia today.

The original temperance movement was bound up tightly with the Suffarage movement (giving women a voice), with Taylorism (running organizations rationally), with income tax (a fairer less corruptible source of income for the federal government than tariffs and excise taxes).

Today's problems are thematically the same - massive concentration of wealth is making an unaccountable elite wielding power against the wishes of the public, creating dangerously addictive digital products, massive increase in gambling, restricting the rights of poeple to own and repair products, working to disenfranchise people, working to roll back women's participation in public life, etc etc. So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons, and we'll need the same type of movement to fight against them.

What the progressives of the early 20th century did was not abolish capitalism, but tame it. We don't need to go on a jihad against AI, but we do need to yoke it and disempower the current slate of people who own it and direct it.

Do this exercise: Take your company's market cap and divide it by the total number of lines of code in the company's repo. You'll discover that don't need that much code to create value. For Google (somewhat publicly somewhat known), this is something like $2000 per line of code. Your company is probably not too different, certainly within an order of magnitude.

So let's assume 1 line of correct code is approximately 10 tokens and $1000 of value. If you could theoretically write the correct code, $10 per 1M output tokens should get you $100K worth of value, or 10000x return! Obviously, thought experiment, very theoretical limit no one can achieve, doesn't include thinking tokens, etc, but it's worth thinking about how much your code is actually moving the needle.

Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I don't need that much code and I don't spend that much time producing code (maybe 1000 lines in a productive day), because the bulk of my time is spent researching, testing, evaluating, thinking, etc to find out how to write only very valuable code. 1000 lines is laughable compared to what tokenmaxxers do, but over the course of a month that's a 200-300K codebase and anyone who has worked on something of that size knows it can support a sizeable business.

Sure will, but there's plenty of private gain for the right people.

No pain, no gain.

Pretty insane that this isn't available for Pro subscribers on Antigravity, like not even a taste. Antigravity comes with a sample of Opus 5.5 too!

Of course (the watermark is in the lower right), it's just a visualization. I'm spending my money buying parts for the prototype instead of professional renders.

Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.

As I said in my original comment:

> The problem is that Americans are very far from realizing that they have a problem

So I understand and I certainly agree that you're with the majority of Americans thinking everything's basically fine.

Totes for reals, yes, because I understand the difference between de jure and de facto.

The failure mode you're observing in the US is that one partisan hack can write a memo in the correct linguistic style, submit it to a council with a majority of other partisan hacks, and like magic anything can become legal or illegal, because everything was done in the correct linguistic style. Actual practice does not matter. There are lots of examples of this over the last two years, perhaps the case against the 14th amendment is a good starting point to see how this works.