I disagree, the problem is the tool. Generating text instead of thinking about what text to use explicitly is not writing, and it's not worthy of someone else reading it.
Fundamental to exchanging ideas is discovering which ideas should be exchanged and how to express them. The process of writing itself is that exercise. If you use a tool to outsource the thinking then you're not thinking.
I definitely think that "not thinking about what you're writing" is a big danger with AI-generated text, but it's not a given. If you generate a block of text and then go through and edit it to better reflect your ideas and voice - that's the thinking process in action. It's also entirely possible to generate slop by manually typing every word - see any corporate communication ever.
I just fundamentally do not agree with you. If you are editing AI generated text to "better reflect your ideas and voice" you are still not using your ideas or your voice. There's no 'thinking process in action' if you've delegated the hardest part of the task to a text predictor!
It really bothers me that people think it's ok to use AI as the starting point for writing. In my mind, it's the worst thing you can do. It poisons the entire effort, and frankly it's disrespectful to give it to anyone to read. Stop doing it!
There are just times that we stumble upon writer's block.
Personally I have had multiple instances of me knowing the idea I want to express, but utterly failing to articulate it in a way that's understood by most people.
And I unfortunately do not have a human assistant, so for a second opinion on how to articulate the idea better, I turn to an LLM. (Yes, I am using my own idea!) I write something, ask the LLM whether it understood what I said, and make adjustments based on that. In this case, the text is 100% written by me, and the LLM is no more different than a random passer-by giving me advices.
But there are also times when the idea is so complicated that I don't really have a good idea on how to untangle all of that. Ideas that live in your brain as a bunch of abstract concepts, if you can get it. If I were to untangle all of that myself - it's fairly good chance that I'll just leave it for "another day" (read: abandoned). I won't be investing any more thinking into it, LLM or not.
So LLM it is. I dump my ideas (as a bunch of incomprehensible human gibberish ;P) into it, make it make sense of the ideas, generate an ideas-untangled paragraph, which I use as an inspiration (or basis, or template, or whichever word you think suits it) for writing my own text with my own voice and my own style. I was able to continue thinking because the LLM keeps my attention from drifting away!
(I always suspected I have some kinda ADHD, but shrug)
I understand where people are coming from when they reject all forms of LLM assistance in writing, it's just that I hope people don't turn it into a dogma of some sort.
This is generally indicative of not having ideas that are worth reading by others. If you can't formulate the idea then you don't have to write about it, because you don't have an idea.
At the end of the day, if your writing is meant to be read by others then using an LLM is a violation of the social contract between you and your audience.
You will NEVER be a good to great writer if you use AI to seed your writing and then edit it.
_Everything_ AI generates, is generalized slop. All of your ideas will be boring and derivative. Mediocre writers will be improved, but the best would only have their ability to think dulled.
Just think through it from the perspective that AI is generating art for you instead of writing. What would all art look like if good artists used it for ideas and "edited" it? It would look like generic, derivative shit. A perpetual crutch that the person can never abandon.
Genuine experiment: Do characters "have a color" for you, maybe? [1][2]
1) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Typed by hand.
2) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Generated by ai, cut-and-pasted in. [3]
For you, would you classify the former as genuine and the latter as slop?
You'd think I'm being silly, but both yes and no are not unthinkable, and honestly I've actually seen odder arguments in court filings and language standards.
> They like companies with some kind of moat that makes it hard to unseat them.
The biggest moat is capital.
PE is buying up things like medical practices, law firms, vets, etc, where typically there would be an upwards path for one generation to hire new blood to cover their markets and then sell partnership stakes to them when they want to retire. But why should an owner of a practice sell to their junior staff when PE is there offering 2, 3, 5x as much?
Consolidation of these kinds of businesses at the hands of PE is endemic of systemic lack of capital acquisition of a generation of people, held down by debt and concerns about practical shit like healthcare.
PE is just a symptom of larger macro economic trends, namely the depletion of the next generation from free cash they could use to become business owners.
> But why should an owner of a practice sell to their junior staff when PE is there offering 2, 3, 5x as much?
The better question is, why does a medical practice have a moat? What exactly is the PE firm buying? When the senior doctor retires, what stops the junior one(s) from renting their own offices and taking their patients with them?
The answer is presumably something like, non-compete agreements, or vendor lock-in from EMR systems, or some kind of insurance or regulatory bureaucracy. So then we need to identify what it actually is and do away with it so the next generation's juniors don't have to outbid Wall St to acquire it.
These PE-owned companies create market demand by being shitty. Somehow they are able to keep their margins and their market so that their business model makes sense. That's a puzzle, right?
There is no shortage of investment looking for great returns. A market with huge demand not being met adequately is a dream to investors. Even more when you know the competition must continue to fuck their customers because they paid above market rates for the purchase and the business is saddled with debt obligations it must meet (Leveraged buyouts do that).
What could stop new competition from beating them out?
The PE firm creates market demand for the goods/services that the purchased company used to provide at a better value to the customer.
So yes, the 'creation' is a demand which is sort of a destruction of the value that the customers previously had. In a fair market, this demand can be met. But a PE buys strategically such that this demand is not possible to satisfy because the company they purchased is entrenched in some way (regulation/monopoly).
It is capital? It’s going to the same PEs and private markets.
Who the hell is going to take the risk on and for what? Take x billon dollars to build from scratch or near guaranteed profit to buy 50 practices and shittify them for near guaranteed profit.
Show me an example of trend reversal please of this happening in any sector. These are essentials and basics and they are captured, this isn’t a froyo start up that has a 3 year cycle.
Russell is famous for playing a different game than survivor, and then getting mad that he wasn't rewarded for it. His game didn't really collapse, because he was never going to win.
He was a rich asshole who personally wronged everyone on the jury in his first season, and carried by luck/ignorance/Parvati Shallow in his second season. Which stats capture that?
I don't know who is down voting you. AFAIK IEEE 754:2008 does require support for subnormals. You can optionally have modes that flush them to zero, but you must support subnormals.
I haven't done any work on this stuff since 2019, so my memory may be hazy.
It probably means Apple spent the silicon to handle subnormals at full speed in hardware, rather than triggering a slow microcode handler for such numbers.
All the tested CPUs implement the standard and they implement it in the right way, except for Intel, who has chosen to save some bucks even if this decision might cause unpredictable financial losses for naive customers, who might choose to use the dangerous FTZ/DAZ options to avoid the Intel slowdown, which in turn may cause unpredictable computation errors, with even more unpredictable consequences.
Some poster has linked a Mastodon thread, where Fabian Giesen explains that handling in hardware the subnormals is cheap in floating-point adders and in fused-multiply-add (FMA) execution units. Many processors do the multiplications in the FMA execution units, so there is no penalty for them to do the subnormal handling in the right way.
On the other hand, some CPUs, including the Intel big cores, have some floating-point multipliers that are separate from the FMA units. The reason is that those separate multipliers can have lower latencies, typically by 1 or 2 clock cycles, which may help those CPUs to win some benchmarks, especially when running unoptimized legacy programs (in optimized programs, most multiplications are combined with additions into FMA operations).
The separate multipliers are simplified in comparison with those included in the FMA units, and handling subnormals in them would be expensive, because then they would become so complex that there would be no advantage for them to be separate multipliers. Which is why Intel does not handle subnormal multiplication in hardware, but a microprogram is invoked for this.
It's worth pointing out though that just tracing function calls isn't good enough for the kinds of stackless coroutines that run in async Rust tasks. You need a way of mapping between the async tasks and the compiler emitted traces.
The difference is nobody in the C++ community believes that a dominant asynchronous executor library exists, and there is not a pervasive belief that it would be helpful.
The "C++ community", if it even exists, barely believes in sharing code let alone any library being "dominant." They'd have to agree on a build system first, after all.
But honestly that's a mischaracterization of the situation in Rust. Tokio is popular for networked service backends. If that's the wheelhouse you're in then yea it might look "dominant."
You can share with header files and respective (shared) object files regardless of the build system you're using.
Likewise you could just share the source. None of this needs a build system.
I was just being a bit sardonic because the C++ ecosystem is so fragmented that something like tokio couldn't really exist. It would be one of three executors in boost, abseil, or folly, and you would never see the kind of downstream ecosystem build on top of them because C++ shops are allergic to external dependencies.
Any organisation that cares about security should be allergic to external dependencies, that is why companies like Nexus and JFrog exist, with companies paying to keep internal repos infrastructure in shape.
One just doesn't install willy nilly from the Internet into the CI/CD pipeline.
Well, they do, and then spend a few late nights when there is a bunch of CVE to fix.
Using an artifactory instance as the origin is not functionally different from installing something 'willy nilly' from the internet. It addresses a narrow range of threats while predominantly being more reliable and faster than public repositories.
It doesn't fix the actual problems with C++, which is that it's significantly more difficult to get and use external dependencies because of the compilation and linkage model of C++ libraries.
If C++ were as easy to build and link as modern programming languages you'd see the same kinds of tools as cargo, and the same kinds of ecosystem evolution as rust, like tokio. But you don't, because C++ code sucks to build, package, distribute, update, and reuse.
(I'm aware/have used conan/meson/vcpkg/etc - doesn't change my opinion).
It surely does, because in most companies that care about security it isn't a mirror, rather the only third party packages that developers are allowed to use beyond the standard library.
Additionally, making new packages available for consumption requires approval from IT and possibly legal, before they become available for consumption.
What is hard is people educated in scripting languages not wanting to learn about toolchains.
The moment Rust depends on other programming languages, we get a build.rs spaghetti file, depending on the knowledge of those writing it, or people throwing away Cargo altogether, and replacing it with Bazel, buck2 and co.
We don't really have alternatives, period. LG is the one in the news today, but pretty much any TV this decade has been doing similar things. Computer monitors max out at 32 inches and the idea of a modern dumb TV is non-existent.
I meant alternatives to connecting your TV directly to the internet. As in "why would you ever connect your TV to the internet?" is a stupid question - "because I want to watch things on the internet." And it's not like a roku, firetv, or chrome cast dongle is much different (and Apple TV is $200, normal people don't add 20-50% the cost of their TV to do something built in).
> the idea of a modern dumb TV is non-existent.
They're sold as commercial display panels/digital signage and because they're a business product that isn't subsidized by advertising/spyware they cost a good bit more. But the panels and controls are basically identical to high end TVs.
A cheap 4k generic android media box is less than $70 on Amazon. There are dozens of them. I use one because half the apps on my old smart TV don't work anymore. The android ones are always up to date and the UX is better.
Is there any TV on the market that flat out wont work if it can't see the internet?
reply