Casual Dismissals from Danny O Brien
Blah, blah, LLMs: whatever you think of them, you have to admit they are very productive at emitting discourse. Both technically, and by way of their effect on human beings. We seem to be in a cross-substrate language-using competition right now, with carbon-based editorial-writers seeking to produce hot takes as fast as the language models [ ]
Novel terms with narrow definitions get fuzzier in meaning as they are more widely adopted. Life hacks did it, Cory Doctorow s (this blog s sole remaining reader, hi Cory) enshittification did it, vibe-coding did it. In fact, we probably need a new coinage to describe this effect so that we can then make it nearly meaningless. [ ]
You re absolutely right! I continue to be one of those people using AI, but in a way that I hope isn t too insufferable; or at least, I try to be sensitive to the suffering it may cause to those around me. I also feel like I am using it in a certain way: an emerging [ ]
A few people have asked me (an old man) how I manage to use LLMs in my life without being driven insane by their horrid new-fangledness, their hallucinations, their wanton sycophancy, the hype, the grift, and the everpresent risk of being lured into psychosis. The simple answer is that, as a command-line fogey, I use [ ]
I m a big fan of explaining difficult and unintuitive concepts through analogy to even more unintuitive ideas a technique known to the ancients (and my friend Seth, who first explained it to me), as obscurum per obscurius. Let me apply this device to the greatest tribulation of the current era: the self-evident, ever-increasing polarization [ ]
Thome Ptacek, with whom I alternate between disagreement and agreement at approximately 50hz, writes about AI, amicably titling his article My AI skeptic friends are all nuts (and that s how you get to #1 on Hacker News, which is where I posted a version of this comment: It s something I ve struggled with for a while [ ]
There a class of tasks that drive me to distraction, and that s when I am obliged to execute them myself, in the full knowledge that a computer could do them better and faster. These tasks are manual, require little mental or physical effort on my part, are dull and monotonous, and achingly time-consuming. Most frustrating [ ]
I work in an entirely (mostly) remote organization. Inside that organization, I interact with an extremely decentralized ecosystem. Some of the people I co-operate with the most are in other orgs, some are individual contractors volunteers, others are conglomerations of mononymed Internet-monickered mystery-types. A remarkable amount of my and my colleagues work is intended at [ ]
I didn t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was my first office job in the US (I think I d got an SSN barely weeks beforehand) and there was a lot to culturally absorb. My predecessors as EFF s sole activist were Cory and Ren Bucholz; big shoes to fill. [ ]
I m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form I still believe that the question what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel? was one that we didn t need to run an experiment to answer. But I am enjoying having multiple reincarnations of Twitter, from the individual yurts of the Fediverse to [ ]