Published on 2026-02-14
]]>Published on 2026-02-14
Tags: commentary, llm, philosophy, quote
Often the model isn’t flaky at understanding the task. It’s flaky at expressing itself. You’re blaming the pilot for the landing gear.
This quote and the blog post's finding, line up with a mental model of LLMs that I've found useful. I might go into this in a longer post someday, but there's an interesting correspondence between how LLMs appear to function and the philosophy of language developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations.
LLMs "understand" language statistically. Wittgenstein makes an argument that languages are games, and that to understand language is to share a context between the players of the game, to play the game as they do. This illuminates why LLM "knowledge" is so faulty — the model only encodes enough context to understand the language used, to be able to accurately play the game. They are general purpose, universal language machines. As long as the context of a language can be encoded into the model, the machine has a good chance of speaking the "language".
]]>Published on 2026-01-28
]]>Published on 2026-01-28
Tags: politics, quote, society
]]>Adam Serwer for The Atlantic on 2026-01-26:
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
Published on 2026-01-03
]]>Published on 2026-01-03
Tags: art, economics, politics, quote, society
Ursula K. Le Guin delivering her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.]]>Ursula K. Le Guin on 2014-11-19:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Published on 2026-01-03
]]>Published on 2026-01-03
Tags: commentary, economics, energy, environment, politics, quote
Tim Quinson for Bloomberg on 2026-01-02:
Wall Street’s biggest banks made more money financing green projects than they did from working with fossil fuel companies for a fourth straight year, even as they faced ongoing pressure to pull back from the business.
Lenders generated roughly $3.7 billion of revenue from climate-related loans and bond underwriting in 2025, compared with about $2.9 billion from oil, gas and coal, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
It continues to be more profitable to get on the sustainability train than to try to cling to fossil fuels.
]]>Still, the $3.7 billion is a drop from the $4.2 billion banks collected for their work on green initiatives a year earlier. That decline came as many lenders abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance — a group dedicated to helping lenders reduce their carbon footprints — in an effort to shield themselves from increasing political pressure as Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Published on 2025-11-25
]]>Published on 2025-11-25
Tags: amazon, commentary, llm, quote, software
The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human, and this one should be first.
I very much agree with this, for two reasons. One, "AI" isn't close to intelligence, and it distorts the truth to pretend otherwise, especially for non-technical people unfamiliar with how LLMs operate. Two, on a product level it's a bad choice — given how far from intelligence LLMs are, letting the generated text sound "human" sets up all users of the product to feel dissonance every time the product doesn't live up to its presentation.
]]>Published on 2025-11-20
]]>Published on 2025-11-20
Tags: politics, quote, rss
Wikipedia Featured Article on 2025-11-20:
The Nuremberg trials were held jointly by the United States, Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany in the aftermath of World War II.
From the featured article RSS feed — 🤔 wondering if a Wikipedia editor has something on their mind regarding current American politics...
]]>Published on 2025-11-20
]]>Published on 2025-11-20
Tags: commentary, llm, quote, society
]]>Nicholas Carlini on 2025-11-19:
I briefly looked through the papers at this year's conference. About 80% of them are on making language models better. About 20% are on something adjacent to safety (if I'm really, really generous with how I count safety). If I'm not so generous, it's around 10%. I counted the year before in 2024. It's about the same breakdown.
And, in my mind, if you told me that in five years things had gone really poorly, it wouldn't be because we had too few people working on making language models better. It would be because we had too few people thinking about their risks. So I would really like it if, at next year's conference, there was a significantly higher fraction of papers working on something to do with risks, harms, safety--anything like that.
Published on 2025-09-28
]]>Published on 2025-09-28
Tags: commentary, llm, quote
Thomas Ptacek on 2025-09-26T16:25:41:
You can give an agent access to its own context and ask it to lobotomize itself like Eternal Sunshine. I just did that with a log ingestion agent (broad search to get the lay of the land, which eats a huge chunk of the context window, then narrow searches for weird stuff it spots, then go back and zap the big log search). I assume this is a normal approach, since someone else suggested it to me.
]]>Thomas Ptacek on 2025-09-26T16:42:38:
This is why I'm writing my own agent code instead of using simonw's excellent tools or just using Claude; the most interesting decisions are in the structure of the LLM loop itself, not in how many random tools I can plug into it. It's an unbelievably small amount of code to get to the point of super-useful results; maybe like 1500 lines, including a TUI.
Published on 2025-09-26
]]>Published on 2025-09-26
Tags: commentary, film, quote, society, tv-series, video-games
]]>Katharine Trendacosta for Gizmodo on 2019-12-19:
Corporations have identified the monetizable parts of both curatorial and transformational fandom and made them all consumptive fandom. Fans are encouraged to want what’s been approved by the creator and to back up that approval by buying more and more.
...
Fandom that wants to create communities, that wants to promote the interests of fans, protect their work, help them experience media in the best way possible for them is on one side. The fandom of nonprofits like AO3 and the sadly dying tumblr communities. The fandom that isn’t about winning but is about enjoying creativity.
Versus the fandom that wants to dictate to you, that has been approved by marketing, that is immune from criticism because real fans just spend the money first and debate it later. Or never debate at all, just unthinkingly consuming. The fandom that is valid because Zack Snyder said so. The fandom of huge mega-corporations endlessly humping the same IP over and over.
Published on 2025-09-14
]]>Published on 2025-09-14
Tags: art, commentary, film, quote
As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it, and it's um... The film is the talking. The film is the thing. So you go see the film. That's the thing. It's the whole thing. And it's there. And that is it.
Excellent quote from David Lynch that in his opinion the artist's work should sit alone and be allowed to speak for itself. Related to the death of the author, but on the author's side.
From a Bluesky post by Abigail Larson in response to:
]]>It annoys me when artists don’t name their work.
Surely there was a feeling, an emotion, that drove the artwork. When correcting party of it, it wasn’t correct because it didn’t convey or capture…….. ?
Published on 2025-09-08
]]>Published on 2025-09-08
Tags: commentary, llm, quote, society
]]>I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done zero to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling.
At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter that LLM apps are at the top of virtually every app store nearly every day because individual people are choosing to download them, and the criticism hasn't been effective in slowing that?
Published on 2025-08-24
]]>Published on 2025-08-24
Tags: business, quote
cde-v on HackerNews on 2025-08-22T05:21:24:
Have you seen the companies YC has been funding recently? All you need to do is mention AI and YC will throw some money your way.
Acrely — AI for HVAC administration
Aden — AI for ERP operations
AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation
...
Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers
Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation
ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization
Apparently YC is funding at least 158 "AI for X" companies.
]]>Published on 2025-08-08
]]>Published on 2025-08-08
Tags: books, quote, society
Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
Yet each time the futility argument amounted to a denial or downplaying of change in the face of seemingly enormous, epochal movements such as the French Revolution, the trend toward universal suffrage and democratic institutions during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the subsequent emergence and expansion of the Welfare State. The appeal of the arguments rests largely on the remarkable feat of contradicting, often with obvious relish, the commonsense understanding of these events as replete with upheaval, change, or real reform.
Societal change is pretty commonplace, and a cursory stroll through recorded history demonstrates it handily. I'm reminded of the fundamentalist Christian position on the theory of evolution, a dogmatic insistence that the commonsense understanding of the fossil record — that of consistent evolution, is false. Their rejection of evolution and reactionaries arguing using the futility thesis are making purely structural arguments, which fall apart when you look at available evidence.
]]>Published on 2025-07-29
]]>Published on 2025-07-29
Tags: books, quote, society
]]>Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
This sort of argument is of course familiar from the Marxist tradition which, at least in its more primitive or “vulgar” version, views the state as the “Executive Committee of the bourgeoisie” and denounces as hypocrisy any claim that it may conceivably serve the general or public interest. It comes as something of a surprise to encounter so “subversive” a reasoning among certain pillars of the “free-enterprise” system. But this is not the first time that shared hatreds make for strange bedfellowship. The hatred that is being shared in this case is directed against the attempt at reforming some unfortunate or unjust features of the capitalist system through public intervention and programs. On the Far Left, such programs are criticized because it is feared that any success they might have would reduce revolutionary zeal. On the Right, or among the more orthodox economists, they are subject to criticism and mockery because any intervention of the state, particularly any increase in public expenditures for purposes other than law, order, and perhaps defense, is considered as noxious or futile interference with a system that is supposed to be self-equilibrating.
Published on 2025-07-15
]]>Published on 2025-07-15
Tags: books, quote, society
]]>Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
The claims of the futility thesis seem more moderate than those of the perverse effect, but they are in reality more insulting to the “change agents.” As long as the social world moves at all in response to human action for change, even if in the wrong direction, hope remains that it can somehow be steered correctly. But the demonstration or discovery that such action is incapable of “making a dent” at all leaves the promoters of change humiliated, demoralized, in doubt about the meaning and true motive of their endeavors.
Published on 2025-07-11
]]>Published on 2025-07-11
Tags: books, communication, economics, quote
Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
In economics, more than in the other social and political sciences, the perverse-effect doctrine is closely tied to a central tenet of the discipline: the idea of a self-regulating market. To the extent that this idea is dominant, any public policy aiming to change market outcomes, such as prices or wages, automatically becomes noxious interference with beneficent equilibrating processes.
In the book, Hirschman details three types of Reactionary argumentation. The above quote is an example of what he calls the Perversity Thesis.
]]>It is not just asserted that a movement or a policy will fall short of its goal or will occasion unexpected costs or negative side effects: rather, so goes the argument, the attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction. Simple, intriguing, and devastating (if true), the argument has proven popular with generations of “reactionaries” as well as fairly effective with the public at large. In current debates it is often invoked as the counterintuitive, counterproductive, or, most to the point, perverse effect of some “progressive” or “well-intentioned” public policy. ... Everything backfires.
Published on 2025-07-11
]]>Published on 2025-07-11
Tags: commentary, energy, environment, quote
]]>Bill McKibben in The New Yorker on 2025-07-09:
In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:
- It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
- That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.
Published on 2025-07-09
]]>Published on 2025-07-09
Tags: books, quote
Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
Curiously, the very stability and proper functioning of a well-ordered democratic society depend on its citizens arraying themselves in a few major (ideally two) clearly defined groups holding different opinions on basic policy issues. It can easily happen then that these groups become walled off from each other—in this sense democracy continuously generates its own walls. As the process feeds on itself, each group will at some point ask about the other, in utter puzzlement and often with mutual revulsion, “How did they get to be that way?”
Hirschman's book on reactionary argumentation is oriented towards the structure of things, like the structure of democratic systems. The physical complexities inherent in operating a voting system result in a "two party" system regardless of the ideologies or policy preferences of the involved people — by relying on majority rule, involved parties will move towards dual polarization, being forced to coalition with those they are similar to just to win the decision.
]]>Published on 2025-06-22
]]>Published on 2025-06-22
Tags: llm, quote
]]>They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly. Even with good context the rot will start to become apparent around 100k tokens (with Gemini 2.5).