It seems strange to you? It's natural to how I write - intentionally avoiding politeness would be weirder to me.
But aside from that, an LLM is only a roleplayer. Treat it like an idiot that makes mistakes and it will act like one. Treat it like a coworker who you respect and it will act like one, and it will find better results.
Obviously nothing about how they act is set in stone but as a general rule this seems to me to be both wise and, in my experience, true as well.
Yeah that's increasingly been my feeling as well. I have to keep prefacing my Kagi recommendations with, "web search is less and less useful every year, but..."
I still appreciate being able to customize rankings, bangs, and redirects. But with how utterly shit the web is overall, any web search is basically only good if you know the site(s) the answer(s) will be on. When you're searching for something novel-to-you, even Kagi is just going to show you a full page of unregulated slop on the dumbest, just-registered-this-year domains. Real information is increasingly limited to small islands of trust.
As a rule, "pop history" is full of shit and is probably better considered misinformation than anything else. I probably don't I know of a single general-audience history/anthropology book that doesn't horrify scholars of the field.
As unfortunate as it is, studying cause-and-effect is extremely complex. If it's even theoretically possible to distill it down to easily digestible ideas, that's well outside our current technical capabilities.
There's usually going to be some true and interesting information in these books, but it will be too deeply embedded in a narrative that is misleading.
I'm an avid reader of history books (antiquity, middle ages), and I'd say I'm very picky, trawling through reviews and recommendations from trusted sources before deciding on a book.
I have already come across books that were a slog to read because of the author's simplistic worldview or obvious contrarian agenda (so I can definitely relate), but I've also read some masterpieces (for example, Kaldellis I believe is solid).
Unfortunately I don't count any historians among my friends, so I'd welcome any recs from you for authors that are the least bad, or a teardown of main antiquity/middle ages historians.
Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
Oh, I admit that I didn't finish the Rockefeller article, since it looked like more of the same. I can see now how it's satire.
Honestly though, I'm still not sure what the point of the vampires one is. Satire relies on the reader drawing some conclusions that aren't laid out, and I don't really see where it's trying to lead me in that respect. Is it that these billionaires are fools for following bunk research?
Also weird it didn't mention Peter Attia's connection to Epstein outright. It did this weird tongue-in-cheek thing for a few paragraphs referencing Epstein only in the foot notes. I still can't tell whether what I read was actually praising these guys or extremely subtly sardonic.
A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time
That feels arbitrary as a measure of quality. Why isn't new research simply devalued and replication valued higher?
"Dr Alice failed to reproduce 20 would-be headline-grabbing papers, preventing them from sucking all the air out of the room in cancer research" is something laudable, but we're not lauding it.
But that seems almost trivially solved. In software it's common to value independent verification - e.g. code review. Someone who is only focused on writing new code instead of careful testing, refactoring, or peer review is widely viewed as a shitty developer by their peers. Of course there's management to consider and that's where incentives are skewed, but we're talking about a different structure. Why wouldn't the following work?
A single university or even department could make this change - reproduction is the important work, reproduction is what earns a PhD. Or require some split, 20-50% novel work maybe is also expected. Now the incentives are changed. Potentially, this university develops a reputation for reliable research. Others may follow suit.
Presumably, there's a step in this process where money incentivizes the opposite of my suggestion, and I'm not familiar with the process to know which.
Is it the university itself which will be starved of resources if it's not pumping out novel (yet unreproducible) research?
> In software it's common to value independent verification - e.g. code review. Someone who is only focused on writing new code instead of careful testing, refactoring, or peer review is widely viewed as a shitty developer by their peers.
That is good practice
It is rare, not common. Managers and funders pay for features
Unreliable insecure software sells very well, so making reliable secure software is a "waste of money", generally
> Presumably, there's a step in this process where money incentivizes the opposite of my suggestion, and I'm not familiar with the process to know which.
> Is it the university itself which will be starved of resources if it's not pumping out novel (yet unreproducible) research?
Researchers apply for grants to fund their research, the university is generally not paying for it and instead they receive a cut of the grant money if it is awarded (IE. The grant covers the costs to the university for providing the facilities to do the research). If a researcher could get funding to reproduce a result then they could absolutely do it, but that's not what funds are usually being handed out for.
Universities are not really motivated to slow down the research careers of their employees, on the contrary. They are very much interested in their employees making novel, highly cited publications and bringing in grants that those publications can lead to.
...No. Not at all. Not in the case of Google and generally that's not "how life works". If it was true, why would Google spend so much money to be the default search engine in so many devices/browsers?
Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.
People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.
I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.
What has gotten worse without AI? I don't think writing or coding is inherently harder. Google search may be worse but I've heard Kagi is still pretty great. Apple Intelligence feels like it's easy to get rid of on their platforms, for better and worse. If you're using Windows that might get annoying, personally I just use LTSC.
The skills of writing and coding atrophy when replaced by generative AI. The more we use AI to do thinking in some domain, the less we will be able to do that thinking ourselves. It's not a perfect analogy for car infrastructure.
Yeah Kagi is good, but the web is increasingly dogshit, so if you're searching in a space where you don't already have trusted domains for high quality results, you may just end up being unable to find anything reliable even with a good engine.
I am a car enthusiast so don't think I'm off the deep end here, but I would definitely argue that people love their cars as a tool to work in the society we built with cars in mind. Most people aren't car enthusiasts, they're just driving to get to work, and if they could get to work for a $1 fare in 20 minutes on a clean, safe train they would probably do that instead.
Of course they wouldn't, owning and operating a plane is -incredibly- inconvenient. That's what we are discussing, tradeoffs of convenience and discomfort, you can't just completely ignore one reality to criticise the other (admiting some hypocrisy here since that ideal train system mentioned earlier only exists in a few cities).
Is this some culture or region or climate related thing? I’ve never heard of BO brought up as a reason to avoid public transport or flying commercial in northern parts of Europe. Nor have I experienced any olfactory disturbance, apart from the occasional young man or woman going a tad overboard with perfume on the weekends.
Should we restructure society so that having a private airplane is easier and cheaper, but if you don't have one you'll have serious trouble in daily life?
No, people hate being trapped without a car in an environment built exclusively to serve cars. Our love of cars is largely just downstream of negative emotions like FOMO or indignation caused by the inability to imagine traveling by any other mode (because on most cases that's not even remotely feasible anymore).
But aside from that, an LLM is only a roleplayer. Treat it like an idiot that makes mistakes and it will act like one. Treat it like a coworker who you respect and it will act like one, and it will find better results.
Obviously nothing about how they act is set in stone but as a general rule this seems to me to be both wise and, in my experience, true as well.
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