LLMs write like a high-schooler padding out an essay about something they only pretend to care about with vacuous adjectives and adverbs because that’s how most commercial writing reads.
Everyone knows what’s going on. Europe is slowly reacquiring pants (too slowly for my taste).
The US has this ridiculous belief that Europe has no military ability. The truth is that Europe is far too skilled at war, and collectively disarmed after the Second World War and let the US make the decisions and pay for it all because that was the only way to achieve a lasting peace. European armed forces aren’t ready for war, but they are skeletons on which wartime forces can be reconstituted.
Now that the US is dropping its responsibilities it’s also losing its privileges, but everyone is moving quietly so that the amateurs in the White House don’t cotton on. The world doesn’t need a sheriff; it’s just going to have a bunch of players looking after their own interests. The historical attitude to war already prevails: ‘it’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect us.’
Unfortunately the skeleton analogy is not correct, because it assumes that the foundation is fine, and you just need more beef/muscle/money to scale it up.
With the exception of few European countries that did maintain a functional army (Finland, France), other countries' military skeletons suffer from terminally low levels of bone density due to decades of under- and malnutrition. The whole bodies (incl. skeletons) have to quickly be build anew.
I think the hidden motivation for all of these crackdowns across the developed world is the increasing risk of a third world war. Propaganda is already rife across social media for both sides of both the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. Governments very much want to be able to repeat feats like the XX System, and will need strict control over online communications to achieve that.
An LLM can respond to any online discussion about <x> is a good approach for solving a particular class of problems with LLMs can do <x> better than a human better than you.
> A henge can be one of three related types of Neolithic earthwork. The essential characteristic of all three is that they feature a ring-shaped bank and ditch, with the ditch inside the bank. Because the internal ditches would have served defensive purposes poorly, henges are not considered to have been defensive constructions (cf. circular rampart).
Which also sets broken incentives where nobody (not even renewables) are actually incentivized to dethrone gas/etc as it would reduce their own profit margin.
But everyone are incentivized to build another wind farm, solar plant, battery etc to make profit on the current fossil gas based margins. Pushing the price lower for more hours.
Equilibrium is met when new production becomes too expensive vs. the existing profit potential.
All resource markets globally run on marginal price. The other option for electricity would be that everyone instead does their own research and predicts the clearing price leading to even higher waste and more volatility.
The AI providers' operations remain heavily subsidised by venture capital. Eventually those investors will turn around and demand a return on their investment. The big question is, when that happens, whether LLMs will be useful enough to customers to justify paying the full cost of developing and operating them.
That said, in the meantime, I'm not confident that I'd be able to find another job if I lost my current one, because I not only have to compete against every other candidate, I also need to compete against the ethereal promise of what AI might bring in the near future.
Google has one of the best models, its own hardware and doesn’t depend on venture capital. Between its own products and GCP, they will be fine. The same with Amazon and Microsoft.
Content and services on the web provide this problematic content precisely because there's a monetisable audience for it. It won't go away until that audience decides it doesn't want that content any more.
> The RFC approach has several advantages over verbal alignment. First of all, it is more precise. The need to write forces the author to clearly structure their thoughts into a coherent logical narrative. While writing, the author has time to examine their proposed solution from different angles and clearly see pros and cons of it.
> Another advantage of the document over verbal explanation is that a well-written RFC leaves little room for misinterpretation. It can include diagrams, examples, or calculations to illustrate and support the idea.
> Finally, we can return and reread the RFC later. Human memory is unreliable; already after a day, details that were crystal clear in one’s mind start to get blurry. When these details are written down, it is easy to review them at any time.
‘You have to write things down, because spoken words disappear into the air,’ was one of the first bits of feedback I received in my teacher training.
> The most common objection is that writing proposals is “a waste of time” compared to writing code.
The extra time spent writing is actually spent thinking.
>> The most common objection is that writing proposals is “a waste of time” compared to writing code.
> The extra time spent writing is actually spent thinking.
Common theme for decades is "we can save a few days of planning with just a few weeks of programming".
But then there's the darker realization that sometimes the people you are working for are incapable of reasoning about planning artefacts or understanding how the system will look or operate simply from a document. So you need to present the system in small iterative chunks and repeatedly re-align expectations with reality: Agile.
And sometimes you genuinely need to do exploratory work which doesn't fit into a planning framework - actual research!
> sometimes the people you are working for are incapable of reasoning about planning artefacts or understanding how the system will look or operate simply from a document
I’m wrestling with this now. Over my career I’ve seen a strong correlation between good writers and good software engineers, but not everyone fits this mold. Shorter cycles and more chances for communication and feedback are helpful here.
>> The most common objection is that writing proposals is “a waste of time” compared to writing code.
> The extra time spent writing is actually spent thinking.
Until someone decides that using ChatGPT to write your RFC is a good idea. Then you get something that looks great, but the person behind the prompt actually understands less.
"Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions. For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead. This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things..."
- Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe, and Everything"
(It took an unreasonably long time to find this quote!)
Oh I really worry about that. AI code at least needs to pass unit tests, but there's no way to prove that the ideas in an AI document make sense until you try them and run into issues. Writing is thinking. If you let a robot do it, you aren't.
I’m currently fighting the “don’t use Gemini to write internal documents” war at my company. It’ll be long and hard, but I think I’ll eventually prevail.
Every time someone throws a document written by AI at me, it feels so disrespectful.
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