vonnik

I wish the author had gone deeper

Dumb LLMs foisted on unwilling users have done more to damage AI’s reputation than AI’s opponents.

Every category and noun is an analogy uniting things unlike in at least some details. We don’t even see most analogies, because they are more common than air and just as necessary.

To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.

“Three teams. Same underlying data. Three different stories.”

fully support the idea of an emerging technobiont, but i keep asking myself what advantage humans will confer to petro-electric life forms?

the only way forward is for us to genetically edit ourselves into beings that can understand more of what ai knows, if the symbiosis is to be mutualistic, rather than commensal or parasitic.

Most CEOs don't understand the actual things their front-line workers do. and many of them have allowed themselves to be surrounded by yes-men. the richer and more powerful they are, the more likely this is. "yes man" is a role where AIs significantly outperform. when you combine front-line blindness with the culture of toxic yes, you get CEOs who think that AIs can both do the work and manage themselves or the residual people. This will turn out to be false.

If the poster cannot do the work of writing, they should not expect others to do the work of reading. People read based on trust and respond to invest in relationships. LLM verbiage breaks both dynamics.

I feel like the headline relies on a misnomer. Sivers is talking about culture. Most culture occupies a geography, even if it’s a changing one; the culture shrinks, expands or drifts over the land. The land itself shifts and changes under the culture. Both affect each other. But what Sivers is talking about is groups of people changing, and someone returning with a snap shot of what used to be. This is a common experience among returning emigrés, and their time capsule abroad is sometimes referred to as cultural fossilization. They removed themselves of the living dynamic body of a culture, and have become unknowingly conservative toward it in their expectations. This has also been noted by authors like Thomas Wolfe (There’s no going home.), and consolidated to a Greek word, nostalgia, which also means the pain of homecoming.

The interesting thing about “Algvandringen” is that you can hear “Elk wandering” in it, showing the evolutionary similarities of two Germanic languages.

As Alex's story illustrates, really caring about something and acting on that can be a great way to find community.

“You can’t cheat an honest man.”

While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.