Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id988929456
you can think of LLMs as extremely tight lossy data compression. The idea that it is a “blurry jpeg of the internet” is not wrong in kind, though in scope it understates it. Data compression is essentially predicting what’s next, and that’s exactly what LLMs do. Very different specifics, but in the end, small bits of stuff go in, large outputs come out. It’s also “fancy autocomplete”, but that too undersells it because when you apply antagonistic independent chains of thought on top, you get some much more useful emergent behavior. A pattern that you have to internalize is that while lots of these tools and models are sloppy and error-prone, anything you can do to antagonize that into being better will be helpful.
id988928912
We laud the Luddites, who, contrary to popular notions about them were not anti-technology per se, they just saw the extractive nature of businesses using these machines, turning a craft one might make a small profit at to a job where people get used up, mind and body, and exhausted. They destroyed equipment and tried to make a point. In the end they had only moderate success, though they and the rest of the labor movement won us such concepts as “the weekend” and “the 8 hour day”.
id988928894
Ethan Marcotte knows what’s up: We need to unionize.. That’s one of the only ways out of this mess. We, collectively, have the power. But only collectively. We don’t have to become the protectionist unions of old, but we need to start saying “hey no, we’re not doing that” en masse for the parts that bring harms. We need to say “over my dead body” when someone wants to run roughshod over things like justice, equality,
id988928880
Coding with automated systems like this is intoxicating. It’s addictive, because it’s the lootbox effect. We don’t get addicted to rewards. We get addicted to potential rewards. Notice that gamblers aren’t actually motivated by having won. They’re motivated by maybe winning next time. It can lead us to the glassy eyed stare with a bucket of quarters at a slot machine, and it can lead us to 2am “one more prompt, maybe it’ll work this time” in a hurry.