Why should we presume it’s an AI description? The writing seems reasonable enough. Some people are more naturally inclined towards articulate writing than others (seems like projection) and furthermore the OP claims to be a screenwriter.
AI helped me write the documentation because it does a better job than I ever could. I honestly wish I’d had AI to help me write my screenplay ten years ago.
Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading.
Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.
It’s interesting that many of us myself included once thought that the butlerian jihad was silly until now. Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.
(Usually writers are just a decade ahead of their time. Whatever Podcasters are talking about today, has usually already been discussed in literature a decade ago. Prediction markets come to mind. Socially, over vs under population as discussed in popular books like the rationale optimist or the accidental superpower.)
> Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.
Curiously enough the Dune books are a strong rebuke against prescience (read: humanity coveting precog abilities.) I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilering.
If you thought the Butlerian Jihad was silly, you may have missed a few important nuances in Dune. I mean I suspect the concept was originally a convenient way to explain why tech in Dune hadn't advanced all that much in 20k years, but the in-universe explanations are pretty good.
In fact they are somewhat similar to the reasons why the Melnibonéan empire fell in the Michael Moorcock Elric universe: people got lazy, spent their time drugged out of their minds, and cruelty seemed to be one of the few things to get a rise out of them. In Dune labour was delegated to (thinking) machines, in Elric it was delegated to slaves. Eventually such a society will collapse or be conquered.
For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
The "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription.
But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions.
The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years.
Fascinating. I'm reminded of the 'conservation of ninjutsu' trope. We've known for a while that birth rates fall as education rates increase, but this almost suggests there's a 'conservation of iq' principle at a population level- you can have growing population or iq, but not both!
You didn’t ask me, but (aside from the effects of tech and social media) my #1 hypothesis is the rise in single parenthood. Parenting is so hard that I doubt pretty much everyone’s ability to do it well on their own.
The personal attacks I saw were against different people, not just one. In a lot of cases it's just routine internet cynicism, which is always amplified against unusually successful or prominent people.
There's also a lot of fear and anger about the AI tsunami these days, among certain user cohorts, and that's an amplifier as well.
On HN, personal attacks aren't allowed regardless of who's being attacked, and comments are asked to make their substantive points thoughtfully and not be cynical or snarky. Here's one guideline:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
I can understand the sentiment against Simon it's just to much of the same content over and over again but I handled it with just blacklisting him no need for personal attacks.
Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that).
More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).
I have yet to read this article (in full), but I love trees! As an amateur AST transformation nerd. Kinda related but I’ve been trying to figure out how to generalize the lessons learned from this experiment in autogenerating massive bilingual dictionary and phrasebook datasets: https://youtu.be/nofJLw51xSk
Into a general purpose markup language + runtime for multi step LLM invocations. Although efforts so far have gotten nowhere. I have some notes on my GitHub profile readme if anyone curious: https://github.com/colbyn
(I really dislike the ‘agentic’ term since in my mind it’s just compilers and a runtime all the way down.)
But that’s more serial procedural work, what I want is full blown recursion, in some generalized way (and without liquid templating hacks that I keep restoring to), deeply needed nested LLM invocations akin to how my dataset generation pipeline works.
PS
Also I really dislike prompt text in source code. I prefer to factor in out into standalone prompt files. Using the XML format in my case.
My thoughts exactly. I’ve been using them for exposing local services to the public internet from my home network. Super convenient for initial proof of concept work…
I use them as cheap-man's VPN. A ssh server on a public IP but a non-obvious port brings you into the network, and port forwarding allows you to connect to relevant endpoints in your remote network via localhost:12345.
As old a rust dev. Any interest in the client side of things? I’ve been experimenting with a few ideas in this regard. Especially, true native markdown rendering and a branching conversational data model. (This complicated the UI and required better layout handling.)
Yes — definitely interested in the client side, especially where it intersects with core system design rather than just presentation.
Both native markdown rendering and non-linear / branching conversation models are areas I’ve been thinking about as well, particularly as systems move beyond linear chat and into more exploratory or agent-driven workflows.
Would be curious to hear more about what you experimented with and what tradeoffs you ran into, especially on the data model and UI side.
Cool I sent you an email and included a screen recorded video demo of that project.
Although FYI: the UI in that demo needs some work since updating iOS but it's an interesting proof of concept that took me some time to figure out (in the future I think I'll do full page swipes of the entire downstream conversation tree and not just at the sibling level although this is less power efficient). Also that demo doesn't include my work in markdown rendering since I have yet to integrate the two. I've been working on both of those projects on and off for the past couple years plus some.
A while ago I figured out how to extend my native TextKit 2 based markdown renderer to support full blown markdown tables with full text selection support. At the time this was quite novel.
I'm now working on a fresh rewrite with iOS support... But as someone who's wasted a lot of time on side projects, could this be profitable?
I almost had a sponsor but he ghosted me. Since then other libraries and commercial apps like ChatGPT and Grok have improved their markdown UI/UX.
I'm thinking about abandoning this endeavor. However it feels wasteful to just drop this and all the experience I accumulated in the meantime. Moreover this proof of concept prototype is still superior in a few ways, notably with regard to text selection and typesetting.
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