> I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
Yes, and instead of sending an letter by post I could send a carrier pigeon. I don't "need" the postal service at all! Why am I shoehorning the postal service in where it doesn't belong?
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
Some tools should be avoided outright, because they're bad tools. You can hammer nails in with a rock, making it a tool, but I wouldn't question the biases of a craftsman who avoided using rocks in their work. I use LLMs for work, but your statement here doesn't hold water at all.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
This is a completely reasonable take from a normal human being. YK some people become journalists because they enjoy the act of research, writing and investigating. And in all honesty, LLMs are still INCREDIBLY bad at communication. They get stuff done, sure, but god, for something named "large language model" all their attempts at human style communication makes me want to turn off the computer for good.
Code review for CRUD apps is largely something you can hand off to a council of sub agents.
Code review for a system whose business logic is not obvious within the codebase? Currently none of the prescribed steps in TFA solve for a peer looking at it with fresh eyes.
I'd run my own email server since the early 2000's - in several forms over time. A VA Linux 2U rack server that I got from work (noisy, overkill), a personal Mac Mini (Frankenstein macport upgrade-resistant), and now a single-node k8s instance with everything neatly managed (an excuse to really dive into k8s from the ground up).
I use dyndns to handle IP changes (incredibly rare with Frontier FIOS, actually).
I use mailhop.org to handle secondary MX records in case my machine is down (as well as mail filtering)
Everything else is postfix, spamassassin, dovecot imap
It's not a trivial system, and it took a while to get everything working how I wanted. It's a terrific learning opportunity, but it's by no means simple to mentally model the process of all that happens inside.
I've got a private github repo where all of this is documented. I intentionally kept everything that's secret out of there. Will turn it public, now that I think about it. Thanks, friend!
Performance, memory efficiency, some security nits (but compared to Leenucks, it's not that bad), bug fix cadence (there's a bug I filed against NeXTStep 2.2 in 1993 that was finally fixed in 2015), support (they keep changing their mind whether the command line tools are supported.)
Yep, this is what I think about when “scaling” is mentioned. Maybe I’m too distributed-compute brained, but throwing CPU at a db isn’t what I was hoping would be the answer.
So the point of distributed compute is to reduce the compute needed? I’ve generally found that distributed compute requires more compute than vertical scaling while getting clobbered by network bandwidth / latency.
Theoretically with 2 to 10x compute required and in practice 100 to 500x
I think for databases horizontal scaling for writes only makes sense once vertical scaling stops working. It comes with high complexity, annoying limitations, and often higher cost.
Horizontal scaling for reads on the other hand is much easier. If you have multiple replicas for high availability, you might as well put them to work. It can also reduce the risk for read heavy tasks interfering with transaction processing. You can even go a step further and replicate to a database that's optimized for analytical tasks.
Horizontal scaling for stateless applications (e.g. web servers or job processors) is often easier and more robust than vertical scaling, with little to no downsides.
The advice I’ve gotten is that you want to move computation to data that is already distributed. The cost of moving large amounts of data usually dwarfs compute costs (usually, not always), and so the performance win comes from distributing the computation and then (depending on the problem) centralizing aggregate results.
Does the Wacom show the actual result of the writing, or do you need to look at the screen? This feels like a bad solution to needing an electronic notepad.
It's a touchpad, of course the result shows up on the laptop screen, and the user doesn't even look at the touchpad anymore, just as digital artists don't now. Honestly not sure why commenters here are acting like it's some huge deal to use a touchpad for note taking and that one has to get an iPad when there really is no need.
The pen. 95% of the way our son does assignments now.
He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
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