granfalloon

Thanks, I'll continue to experiment!

I've used LLMs for some very small coding and math tasks, and I've found it much easier to work with on "formal" types of problems.

But for my consulting and legal work, which is "fuzzier," I struggle more with verification. I feel like I have to verify every single fact/premise in the LLM's output (this problem doesn't seem as big with coding?), as well as every single logical conclusion. Plus, even with explicit instructions I feel like the LLM is not great at anticipating what certain audiences will be interested in or find compelling.

Compared to the black-and-white nature of a computer program, all the components of a legal memorandum (premises, logical structure, conclusions, etc) seem so much fuzzier and require so much specific and accumulated context to apply reliably.

"Superhuman" in what sense? With respect to legal work.

Is it just faster? More persuasive? Better at coming up with novel arguments?

Speed is great from a client perspective, but not as important as accuracy on important stuff. I haven't seen LLMs produce arguments that are more persuasive than those crafted by good lawyers. Finding the "perfect case" in Westlaw is helpful, but rarely the deciding factor.

I could see asking an LLM to reproduce your work AFTER you've done a first pass, to see if you missed anything -- that seems like a real value add. But I truly can't understand how not using it would be "malpractice." In fact, I still think committing malpractice would be MUCH more likely with AI. (Now if by "malpractice", you meant pissing off clients with expensive bills, that's a different story...)

As a white-collar worker, it really does seem like my programmer friends are living in a different reality when it comes to AI. They have totally restructured their workflows around AI, and I'm still struggling to find the value in it for my legal and compliance consulting work. (And I consider myself pretty tech savvy, with some programming and web development knowledge and having spent 10 years at crypto startup.)

Even in my personal life, while I've been addicted to using Claude and ChatGPT as a first step for research/projects/etc, I'm still not convinced they are actually saving me time -- just too many errors, too confidently stated, and I have to re-do all the research myself.

I wonder if the validation piece is easier with coding?

EDIT: To be clear, when I say I'm having trouble incorporating AI into my white-collar work, I'm talking about producing GOOD work. On a few occasions I have given in to the temptation of using Claude to produce work that looked good (superficially), without verifying everything.....it worked out, and I'm sure others are doing it. But that scares me, because it feels like a ticking timebomb.

I think this analogy works with respect to stuff like coding, engineering, etc, where the AI is capable of validating the success of its own efforts and where the result just has to "work", regardless of its elegance or aesthetic quality.

I also think the analogy works if we're talking about average photographs, or even very good photographs, that are conventionally well-composed, balanced, etc, but lack the special spark that we associate with true art.

But if the photographer on the hill is a real artist, it's hard for me to imagine a current frontier LLM winning the contest. I suppose it may stumble upon a winning photo sooner than a roomful of monkeys would, but I believe the number of attempts would still be so vast that it would be more efficient for the human to make one single attempt at taking a photo, rather than dealing with prompts and sorting through the millions of AI-generated options.

EDIT: I also think it's very easy to underestimate the size of the nearly limitless set of possible "solutions" to the photograph, and also easy to overlook the constant feedback loop in the artist's mind as he considers each option and looks through the viewfinder, while the LLM is shooting blind the entire time.

What's being "forced"? And what boundaries aren't being respected? If someone attempts to strike up a conversation and you're not interested, you can signal that. Or just be direct and say you don't feel like talking. Sure, that can be uncomfortable, but you can't expect humanity as a whole to repress its social nature just to spare you occasional, fleeting moments of mild discomfort. (And despite the wide spectrum of social inclinations -- I'm definitely on the introverted end -- I think it's accurate to say that humans, as a species, crave social interaction.)

In your ideal world, how would someone even signal they are a "willing participant" without talking to someone?

I never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites.

The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.

I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”

They wouldn't! That's the downside. Or maybe not a downside -- there could be an even stronger incentive for politicians to get stuff done. Since voters would have to make their decisions based entirely actual results, and not an individual politician's voting record, the politicians might have a stronger incentive to build coalitions and influence other politicians' votes.

My half-baked point is that the harm of voters NOT having access to this information is less than the harm of lobbyists and major donors having access to it.

I don't know how exactly it would work, I just mean a system where only the final vote tallies are made public -- not WHO voted for what.

I like the idea of "blind" or anonymous congressional voting. It feels counterintuitive, but donors might be less willing to "buy" votes if they can't confirm that they're getting what they pay for. And a representative who has accepted lots of corporate money might feel safer "betraying" those donors.

I think representatives would still feel pressure to vote in line with the interests of their constituents and get results, otherwise they get replaced by the next exciting candidate.

As Emerson put it, "the mind loves its old home". (http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/ess...)

Quality and depth of information in a good library, at least for many subjects, is much greater than what you'll find for free on the internet.

I've only started to develop an aesthetic reaction to, and appreciation for, poetry in the past year. Before that, it was a complete mystery to me.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most people have very particular taste in poetry. (So particular that some people might never discover their own!) It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad poetry out there, as well as poetry that might be good in some superficial "academic" sense, like you described, but doesn't produce any reaction in the reader.

There's also the fact that reading poetry is so different from reading regular prose, and it can take some getting used to. It took me several re-readings before poems that I now love first started to "click."

For me, it all started with discovering Nabokov's novels last summer -- his writing sparked an appreciation of prose and imagery that I never experienced before, despite being a lifetime reader. I read that he loved Keats, so I picked a few of Keats's best-known poems and read them over and over, until I internalized them and eventually came to love them. As I've explored other poets, I find that the more I read, the more I become sensitive to. But still, I'd say that 80% of the poetry I encounter (especially modern stuff) leaves me feeling stupid and insensitive, at least after the first couple readings. Better than the 99% a year ago, though!

EDIT: I went through something similar with classical music a couple years ago. Despite being a musician and music lover, I could just never get into it. I immersed myself in it for a few months and began to see/feel the beauty in it. I think it's just a very different way of approaching music compared to modern genres and structures, kind of like how poetry is fundamentally different from the novels most of us grow up reading.

Why did this get flagged as a dupe? This particular article hasn't been linked yet, and it seems to have more substance and analysis than the other two posts today.

Sorry, didn't mean to drag you back into the discussion! I posted my question because I was concerned that maybe a moderator deleted it. I guess I was being a little paranoid!

There was a comment about the political influence and aspirations of certain big names in tech, but it has suddenly disappeared. It contained some criticism of Paul Graham and Sam Altman, but seemed totally reasonable to me -- can anyone say why it was deleted?

So what are we calling this one, Y2K38?

I've heard people talk about the risk to cars, but what other kinds of embedded systems will still be in use after 20 years? Maybe certain industrial machines?

Also noticed that and was disappointed. What else goes into the rankings apart from points & time?

Edit: Now page 6: http://imgur.com/3CAfOnT. (Look at the points/times of the stories above and below it...)

I think that's actually bootload's point? A policy of measured, non-violent responses to perceived aggression -- like China's response here -- is a good way to avoid being tricked into war. (Compared to North Vietnam's response to our encroachment in the Gulf of Tonkin, which many suspect was an attempt to goad them into war.)

Come on, that's so disingenuous. "Punishment," as the word is most commonly used (and defined), implies a harm is being inflicted due to some fault or bad act by the punished.

You can say it's "unfair," or "undeserved," or like you say below, that it "discourages people from making a financially prudent decision". But no one wants to "punish" you -- that would be absurd.

Because working for a living, while still a game of chance, gives me much better odds of coming out ahead, with minimal risk of losing everything in an instant. Plus I get some choice in how the game is played and have the ability to use my personal talents to tilt the odds further in my favor.

"But if you continue and success in the 12th, it is no luck. In fact if you never succeed your behavior will be called and obsessive compulsive and pathologic."

You say that if you eventually succeed after many failures, it's not luck. But then you also acknowledge all of the people who never succeed despite their dogged persistence. How do you reconcile those two statements?

Why do you say it's analogous to "requiring us to constantly record all of our vocal communications"? Don't they just want to make it possible for police to record electronic communications, the same way police can already record vocal communications with a warrant and sufficient resources?

Just a heads-up, I signed up for the mailing list a few weeks ago and didn't receive the notice. I suppose there could be some kind of filter on my end blocking it, but just wanted you to be aware! Tried a different email address yesterday and didn't get a confirmation email, so not sure if it worked.

"...and also unlock the intuitive sense that comes from mastery."

To me, unlocking that aesthetic intuition is the essence of creativity. The other component -- which I recognize most people lack -- is an open-mindedness and willingness to experiment and find art in unexpected places. But even if you have that, you still need the mastery, at least in most disciplines.

If you create lots of sculpture, you'll encounter lots of "problems." And if you persevere, you'll discover lots of "solutions" -- whether they are intended results or happy accidents. Mastery in the arts is simply accumulating a sufficiently large library of problems/solutions, and encountering them often enough that they become mental muscle memory, so that you begin to see potential high-level solutions in the world around you. I believe the art we find most "creative" is, counterintuitively, the art that is discovered or stumbled upon by masters who have developed the skill to spot, excavate, and refine it. (Like Michelangelo seeing his sculpture "emerge" from the marble -- I don't think it was the mystical process it's often made out to be, but rather him recognizing the maximum potential of each quirk of the marble, and intuitively seeing how those potentials might combine into an image.) Contrast that with an artist's attempt to make something "from the ground up," based solely on the application of learned principles. The result may be beautiful or masterful, but probably won't have that true creative spark.

Great art often makes people think "I never would of thought to do that," which to me is kind of tragic, because they may get discouraged from pursuing art, without realizing that the artist never "thought to do that," either. The artist just had the open-mindedness to look around, the developed intuition to spot it, and the technical skill to build it out.

Isn't that still a "unit"? (Your desk is 1.7 "desk widths" long?)

I wouldn't begrudge an employer for negotiating my salary and not paying me what they think I'm "worth," but I also wouldn't feel guilty about doing the least amount of work necessary to fly under the radar at the job and not get fired. (Not a direct response to your comment, I know -- it just made me think of how annoyed I get when the former is considered "just business" while its equivalent on the employee's end is usually regarded as "mooching" or a moral failing.)