Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
> It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time.
The three mindset changes I found that really help with this are understanding that:
* You don't have to try and get the last word in.
* Other people are not entitled to your time, especially if they're engaging in bad faith.
* Outside of small and curated communities, there's pretty good odds that you're not interacting with a real and honest person.
So whenever I click into the comment box, I always ask myself "Can I really be bothered with this? Is this really what I want to be spending my free time doing?"
And then I often close the comment box and get on with my life.
Well, if your try and force yourself to engage with multiple people, the site won't let you post that many comments in such a short time period. Which, overall, is a good thing I believe.
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.
Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.
I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.
The simple solution is that whenever you start to write a comment, ask yourself: do I want to have a discussion about this?
If the answer is "yes", then make your comment, check back and interact with the responses (assuming they seem to be in good faith). If it's "no" then just close the comment box and get on with your life.
But then I realise that it's fairly pointless writing this in the first place...
I think the aggressive bots/AI, and bad moderation policy, have poisoned online discourse in popular channels.
You can still find real people in niche communities (like here), where good moderators can maintain a grip on quality. Though perhaps HN has some secret moderator sauce, I’m not aware of.
Humans are just migrating off the old, big platforms that no longer feel real.
Probably more related to progressive culture, people worried about saying the wrong thing. From the outside, it looks exhausting to try and keep up with the latest dogma of the left.
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago
I don’t get this town square analogy. My blog is a “permanent” record of the electronics related projects that I’ve done. Things I’ve learned along the way, techniques that I’ve used, stuff that I’ve made.
I’ve given myself a target of 6 blog posts per year. It forces me to complete something every once in a while, and it also makes me study a subject more thoroughly than I otherwise would: I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It’s nice if a blog post resonates with a few people every once in a while, but that’s just a bonus.
> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).
Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...
Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.
Maybe consider that we are all calibrated to standards that are this hodgepodge of other people’s messaging of what standards should be, and they communicate them for a variety of reasons, very few of which are truly designed for your reality, your situation.
So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?
Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.
Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.
Yes. That particular content-farm business model (rewrite 10 articles -> add SEO slop -> profit) is effectively dead now that the marginal cost is zero.
This is exactly how natural language is meant to function, and the intervention response by OpenAI is not right IMO.
If some people have a behavior language based on fortune telling, or animal gods, or supernatural powers, picked up from past writing of people who shared their views, then I think it’s fine for the chatbot to encourage them down that route.
To intervene with ‘science’ or ‘safety’ is nannying, intellectual arrogance. Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance).
Maybe provide some customer education on what these systems are really doing, and kill the team that puts in response, value judgements about your prompts to give it the illusion you are engaging someone with opinions and goals.
“Nannying” as a pejorative is a thought-terminating cliché.
Sometimes, at scale, interventions save lives. You can thumb your nose at that, but you have to accept the cost in lives and say you’re happy with that. You can’t just say everybody knows best and the best will occur if left to the level of individual decisions. You are making a trade-off.
See also: seatbelts, speed limits, and the idea of law generally, as a constraint on individual liberty.
Yes. That is exactly the point. The opposite of nannying is the dignity of risk. Sometimes that risk is going to carry harm or even death. I don't think anyone who is arguing against nannying in this way would bat an eye at the potential cost of lives, that's a feature not a bug.
Constraints on individual liberty as it harms or restricts the liberty of others makes sense. It becomes nannying is when it restricts your liberty for your own good. it should be illegal to drive while drunk because you will crash into someone else and hurt them, but seatbelt laws are nannying because the only person you're going to hurt is yourself. And to get out ahead of it, if your response to this is some tortured logic about how without a seatbelt you might fly out of the car or some shit like that you're missing the point entirely.
That’s a pretty limited take on “hurt”. A person without a seatbelt will get worse injuries, and require greater medical attention. In other words, it does hurt other people.
This is exactly the kind of tortured logic I was talking about. By going this route you're actually agreeing with me and then doing whatever mental gymnastics necessary to twist everything that only harms the individual into some communal harm. Your argument applies equally to riding a motorcycle.
Obviously eating cheeseburgers should be illegal because you'll put a strain on the medical system when you get hypertension and heart disease.
I think it’s a silly take. Companies want to avoid getting bad PR. People having schizophrenic episodes with ChatGPT is bad PR.
There are plenty of legitimate purposes for weird psychological explorations, but there are also a lot of risks. There are people giving their AI names and considering them their spouse.
If you want completely unfiltered language models there are plenty of open source providers you can use.
No-one blames Cutco when some psycho with a knife fetish stabs someone. There’s a social programming aspect here that we are engaging with, where we are collectively deciding if/where to point a finger. We should clarify for folks what these LLMs are, and let them use them as is.
> Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance).
What?
Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out
An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits and assumptions.
You have a narrow perspective that says there is no value in sprinkling your car with water to keep it safe. That’s your choice. Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection. Yet a third might recognize an intentional performance where safety is top of mind, might program a person to be more safety conscious, thereby causing more safe outcomes with the object in persons who have performed the ritual, and further they may also suspect that many performers of such ritual privately understand the practice as being metaphorical, despite what they say publicly. Yet a fourth may not understand the situation like the third, but may have learnt that when large numbers of people do something, there may be value that they don’t understand, so they will give it a try.
The optimization strategy with jumps is analogous to the fourth, we can call it ‘intellectual humility and openness’. Some say it’s the basis of the scientific method, ie throw out a hypothesis and test it with an open mind.
I’m not narrow, you just wrote a lot of positive psychology babble.
This is an epistemological question and everything you wrote is epistemically bankrupt. To wit:
“Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection”
This kind of mythology is why humans and human society will never escape the cave, and semi-literate people sound smart to the illiterate with this bullshit
Well now, here’s a puzzle for you. If literate humans don’t believe in myth, and all US Presidents had religious affiliation, were they all a) semi-literate ‘cave people’, b) cynical manipulators of the semi-literate cave-people, c) something else?
And if a person practices any myth-based festival, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, is that indicative to you of a semi-literate cave-person? Or do you make exemptions for how a person interprets the event, and if so, how do you apply those exemptions consistently across all myth-based societies? Also do you reject science-fiction and fantasy works as works of idle fancy or do you allow that they use metaphor to convey important ideas applicable to life, and how do you square that with your treatment of myth in religion?
It is my hope, that you will consider my comment, and come to a better understanding of what LLMs are. They aren’t baking any universal truth, or world model, they are collating alternative narrative systems.
No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells.
The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection.
Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.
Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.
There is, but I would set expectations lower than Apple's "taptic engine" where they designed their own hardware with a team of engineers and a bazillion dollars.
One of the recent development updates mentioned adding a global "vibrate on hour" setting which historically had to be implemented as an option by the specific watchface you're using.
I’ll be comparing to a Timex Expedition Grid Shock, which I’ve been using for years. Have no idea why they discontinued it. Suspect it had something to do with clueless leadership who undervalue customer satisfaction.
7B runs on my Intel Macbook Pro - there is a broad practical application served here for developers who need to figure out a project on their own hardware, which improves time/cost/effort economy. Before committing to a bigger model for the same project.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
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