nucleogenesis

> None of those authors are surviving and making money because someone can't copy their work and distribute it.

I tend to agree with your sentiment but this line made me think you’re underestimating the degree to which the law stops the powerful from doing evil. They see the law as a hassle to be calculated against and if there is no legal friction to stealing and using others’ creations they just will.

So it’s not that Amazon would take your novel, short story, etc and redistribute it. It’s that they’d make a whole series of movies or TV series using your creations and give you nothing and have to give you nothing.

Copyright being eliminated is among my more “idealistically anarchistic” wishes I think but so long as we’re in a society as legalistic and with such an imbalance of power generally, copyright protects more than it hurts I think.

What a wonderful excuse to dive back into Clojure! This looks fantastic. I wonder what neat stuff might be made in Clojure thanks to a C FFI that wasn’t doable on top of the JVM.

Your premise is a straw man so maybe keep your opinion on the intelligence of others to yourself.

Plenty of journalists are eating well reporting on the negative externalities actively felt by residents who live near data centers. It is not hard to find if you look.

I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday).

I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it.

If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out.

Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it.

I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.

The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.

Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.

The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square.

If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.

It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs.

The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand.

If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.

> Letting the model run feels like giving up control, while inventing a workflow feels like the responsible move, even when it produces worse work in more time.

It feels to me like the discretion of the humans is the main problem in your solution space example.

Some tasks require more structure than others. Sometimes, the constraint a human faces is “you must do the work in this module or on this function”.

If the prompt says “only change this function” then the human has a good reason for that. If the LLM can’t figure it out then letting them cook on it feels like a waste of my time and tokens.

Too often I’ve sent Opus or Fable now on what I thought was a simple task to find it chasing its tail.

Fortunately I find more success than tail-chasing with the LLMs but I’m dubious of any suggestion to just let them cook.

However, a solution to the tail-chasing for certain could be to intentionally expand the solution space and to consider how my prompts might be restricting the LLM’s options.

Enjoyed the blog thanks for sharing!

The US has the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment I think we’re plenty “hard on crime”. What we lack is a principled stance that Americans deserve basic dignity and access to things that make people live less violent lives. It’s no secret that poverty is the key contributor to one’s likelihood of being in prison.

People who are “soft on crime”, practically speaking, are the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes (the foremost of which being the aforementioned societal dehumanization of the poor).

My guess is that OP is referring to the MAGA cult but I could be mistaken.

I definitely should have just opened it in reader mode in Safari but I just told myself I’d just not lose my spot again several times like a dope

The number of blogs posted on here by people who can’t be arsed to make their writing legible on mobile blows my mind. Did everybody just skip the section of their CSS journey that covered media queries or what?

I enjoyed the article but it was a nightmare to read on my phone’s browser

I think it was more about doing it without a Boolean-based branch construct like a ternary or switch or whatever flavor of thing that abstracts away the explicit checks for true/false by other means. Idk though for sure

> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers

This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?

“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.

The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.

At that point “human” really only meant the white man who owns property though eh?