Posts in "links"

Who invited these goofballs into my workshop of hand-crafted excellence

I think the point is: it’s nice the professionals can make excellent content. It’s fun that the rest of us can now putter around the edges of that, ten seconds at a time. // Also, looks like a good example of a “Strasian reading” with Casey, there. While he is condemning AI generated images, he is showing the cool things he can make with it. // At some point we’ll have to confront the elite/commoner conflict between experts and goofballs using new tools to ape the experts.

blogging as art

blogging as art!!! why not? i am drowning in information. all i want is a little fun. a respite from postmodernity. folk say the internet used to be fun. i was there, it kind of was. we can do better! 🔗 blogging as art

If it's bullshit work, have the bullshit artist do it.

There’s a lot of knowledge work that can be automated: ‘Where Altman’s comment holds water is in what it hints at, even if it doesn’t spell it out. Most jobs aren’t fake, but many have accumulated layers of automatable junk: compliance checklists, reports nobody reads, emails summarizing meetings that could’ve been Slack threads. That’s the kind of “game-playing” work LLMs are already good at. When Altman says these models will wipe out tasks, not just roles, this is what he likely means.

Being exhausted is exhausting

That title says it all. There are two people I think of here: Tyler Cowen is eternally optimistic. He may say he doesn’t like something or he thinks something is “not the best it could be,” but he’s rarely “negative,” and never bitter. James Watters, despite a rough couple of decades for PaaS (his life’s work) is eternally optimistic. He only talks about positive things and potential, not bitterness about rival technologies.

$30bn of $6tn

‘“The availability of AI devices has also boosted overall spending by more than $30 billion,” Lovelock said. “With the replacement cycle unchanged, the stronger performance in 2025 will result in a lower relative growth rate for 2026, as demand has been pulled forward."’ 🔗 Global IT spend to exceed $6 trillion in 2026

A representative case of the oddly simple things that LLMs are bad at

Does it seem right that computer systems that use billions of dollars of hardware, electricity, and clean water need my help to add line numbers to a few kilobytes of plain text? No, it does not. But at least this gives me deterministic results for one part of the processing. Recently, though, I’ve observed that Claude Skills are interestingly clever on the command line. Maybe agentic just means “can use Unix pipes.