I do think some friction in technology is good, not because friction is inherently good, but because doing things more slowly actually creates more space for introspection: "am I doing the right thing?"
A collage of two photos of myself. On the left is a black and white photo of me arriving to the beach after a run with a peace sign. This is the last run I have been on which happened in 2020 6 years ago today — on the right is a photo of myself on a typical day recovering from minor exertion with an eye mask and oxygen concentrator on.
6 years ago today I went on my last run (pic left) — today I’m 36 and I’ve spent my entire 30’s with #LongCovid struggling to walk up and down the block, or work more than 1-2 hours a day.
Heres 4 things I never thought I’d lose at this age:
It is genuinely wild that we can claim:
Ryan and Zinzi Coogler
Alyssa Liu
Delroy Lindo
Zendaya
Marshawn Lynch
Mahershala Ali
Tom Hanks
Angela Davis
Chelsea Peretti
Boots Riley
Maxine Hong Kingston
Jack London
Fred Korematsu
Daveed Diggs
Like
“I want to show the world my art” and it’s just some text in a box
Objections aside, I largely agree with Rothfeld - I don’t want LLM-written prose or ideation anywhere near my writing, because I want to be part of a community of practice, even if it inconveniences me
I’m also seeing a lot of people (including Rothfeld) saying: don’t use AI, use Google! But Google literally is using LLMs for ranking, I’m sure :-/ So that confuses the whole reason to not use AI.
Why is Google ok? You should restrict yourself to physical libraries, if AI use is your red line
However… I don’t believe that preserving “friction” in life is inherently good! Why would e.g. washing dishes be inherently morally good and human? Now apply the same logic to using AI
Feels like the debates about using AI in writing are actually about what reading is for:
If reading is for entertainment, then it's fine if what you're reading is AI, as long as it entertains (!)
If reading is about making contact with another human mind, as Becca Rothfeld says, then AI is vacuous
9. It can reasonably be objected that the starry-eyed advocates of LLMs are themselves cultists. Even some inside the tribe accept that it is so! But too much Bluesky AI discourse reminds me of vintage Dawkins/Harris atheism - taking up the bad intellectual habits of those they condemn. Finis.
What’s going on with all the longform essays that send a bemused literary writer to report on some weird phenomenon in the real world with cutting wit… re: gooners, romance novels, and now startup founders??
Finding myself making increasingly gnomic pronouncements because LLMs have trained me to only speak in questions
My labor theory is that because all firms have equal access to agents, & agents require high cognitive load to use (see recent HBR study), a smart person using an agent will get 10x more done than just an agent, or a less skilled person using an agent. So to outcompete, you still have to hire people
What might we be able to build in the future that we can't build today? For the @TheIdeasLetter, I wrote about the political economy of technology and technological change in a world beyond capitalism.
www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real...
This is not true; I beg people read the full paper and especially the study design.
The conclusions mirror my (and many other practitioners') conclusions: if you use AI critically and engage both with the question and the answer, it has a net positive impact on both learning and productivity
Yeah this is a classic insight from research into AI and automation in like the 70s that everyone working on LLMs just sort of shrugged about.
When the AI's parameters are exceeded and it fails, the untrained human is LEAST qualified to take over.
I feel like AI coding assistants have the same risks of level 3 or lower vehicle automation, in that they automate the easy and routine stuff which lulls the human into a false sense of security such that the human is not ready to take over when the system encounters something it can't handle.
AI coinciding with the white boucle trend in furniture creates many impossible circumstances.
The white boucle trend in furniture was itself a product of over-consumption of decor as image because if you thought about it for one second / planned for the longterm you would know it was a bad idea.
my New Year’s resolution is actually to post much more and lurk much less, I think this is the ideal use of social media???
do public intellectuals exist anymore?
ever since I went gluten-free, life has become much more chewy and less toothsome
dreamed that I was invited to a partiful where you could only come if you were SuperFriends with the person who invited you (regular friends not allowed) ??
as a software engineer, I have really got to figure out a better apocalypse backup plan. because what am I gonna do when shit hits the fan—vibecode?
my silliest thesis is that every avant-grade Asian is connected by at most 2 degrees of separation. not sure what to do with this info
much of what we dislike about A.I.-generated text from a formal perspective--it’s generally cautious, inoffensive, anodyne, predictable, neutral, unmemorable and goes down smooth--is a product not of some inherent L.L.M. “voice” but of the training and fine-tuning processes imposed by A.I. companies, which are incentivized to make their chatbots sound as annoying and bland as possible.
feel like an ethnography of the people who get paid by the piece to "rank" LLM outputs would also explain a lot about the kind of prose the models are optimized to generate
maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...
a better metaphor might be being on a sports team?
the weirdest part of having a corporate job is that I actually don’t feel like a cog in the machine. quite the opposite
(they really want you to take the lead, and a lot of teams are built around specific people’s strengths and interests)
I swear to god I will stop tweeting about AI so much after I finish this piece! Just working out some ideas
It’s a bit strange that people don’t use AI because it makes mistakes, but say that “what makes us human is that we make mistakes”?
why did the New Yorker become the main venue for humanistic writing about AI …
