Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.
There’s always been this struggle between religious belief and my rational self’s skepticism of that, which I saw as a religious failing on some level. Something turned around in me so that I can now see that not as a failing but rather that the whole energy of my creativity was within this struggle. That struggle is perhaps the religious experience itself.
Even if it is possible to restrict large language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.
Some might say that the output of large-language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.
The more I see AI-based summarization tools for articles / essays / etc, the more powerful physical books feel – having spaces ‘apart’ from the immediate reach of AI seems like they will only grow in value going forward, as everything else is devalued into tl;dr doom.
Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance. It is a melancholy thought. I can think of only one thing sadder: if the only animals with self-consciousness, the only species that can light up the Universe with acts of love and humor and compassion, were to extinguish themselves through acts of stupidity.
If we survive, we have a Galaxy to explore and make our own. If we destroy ourselves, if we ruin Earth before we are ready to leave our home planet … well, it could be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky and asks: Where is everybody?
Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Plastic went into things like Formica counters, refrigerator liners, car parts, clothing, shoes, just all sorts of stuff that was designed to be used for a while. Then things took a turn. Where we really started to get into trouble is when it started going into single-use stuff. I call it prefab litter. The outpouring of straws, cups, bags and other ephemera has led to disastrous consequences for the environment.
How you document, how you support, how you educate, how you capacity plan, how you address legal ramifications, how you market, how you sell, etc., is all part of customer experience. In SaaS, the whole company is the product.
Teams that are healthy, happy, have a sense of pride and ownership, and have the right mix of challenge and skill, are the path to happy customers. One is not more important than the other—they go hand in hand. Improvements that make customers happy at the expense of team morale are destined to be be unsustainable. Improvements that sustainably improve team effectiveness can move mountains on behalf of customers.