if you have good enough transitions, an essay will feel as if it has a good structure. And vice versa: when readers complain about lack of structure, the reason is often simply that they're bothered by clumsy or abrupt transitions.
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:
I mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
Asking an AI for help with the start of an essay, for instance, will invariably shape what direction you end up following, robbing you of the crucial experience of building your own judgement around a topic and selecting your own path to research and argue.
But this effect is far too small to explain the increase in house prices in Europe since 1914, when, after all, most urban continental Europeans lived in flats.
Purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the ruling machine. So, if you think about the People's Liberation Army, it's uh goal number one, uh mission number one is to keep the Communist Party in power.
Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded cuz in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all and if you are, what is the timing?
So, rule number one is you keep the home economy growing. That is number one, because that's going to produce the money that's going to fund your military, fund your allies, allow you to do everything.
You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
99% of people who you'd want to read your essay probably don't know you exist, or don't give a fuck, or wouldn't be bothered to engage even if they read it.
We don't ask the students to write essays because we love reading their amazing essays. We ask them to write essays because they we want them to go through a thought process, which helps them learn something.
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
COLOR WOW Raise the Root spray. I found out about this on TikTok. I spray when damp and it DOES give my flat Asian hair volume. I don't know how it works, but it does.
Like basically I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.
You can shortcut like hard feelings because now you can just watch TikTok instead of actually dealing with the very difficult emotion or tension that you had with a colleague or with your partner or with your children.
Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
This book is a collection of essays, and some of them are quite profound. One of his essays on Dostoevsky is particularly insightful; it left such an impression on me that I reflected on it and wrote an essay of my own.
The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
I think things like MuZero and AlphaGo are so much more impressive because these things are playing beyond the highest human level. The language models are writing middle school level essays and people are like, wow, it’s a great essay.
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.