> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.
> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.
> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer
Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).
Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.
A few hours ago, on another post, I had someone explain/teach me why another article may be written by LLM and they pointed out the "It's not X, it's Y" thing. Since I read that comment, I instantly picked that up in this post article too.
Yeah that's fair. I might dust off my draft and re-edit myself, I foolishly thought this would lead to a better post, and I guess am not as attuned to the AI smell as others.
Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.
I have the feeling that this article was hurt rather than helped by being written using LLMs. It was really hard to follow, and even though I read it hoping to learn something new, I left feeling more confused than when I started. The feeling while reading was that the prose was trying to hold my hand but had absolutely no empathy for the build up of my understanding over the article. It’s a bit like when, as a child, you’d do homework with your parent and the parent would start saying “don’t you see how it’s obvious that 25/5=5” with no further explanation and a building tone of frustration.
Information theory has been a really fascinating topic to get more acquainted with. Not really related to the crossword, but I highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's video "Compression is Intelligence", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM
While intelligence and compression both may have similar goals (to optimize paths of information), intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.
> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.
> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer
Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).
Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739555
I liked the post, I just don't like Claude writing every article I read, just like I didn't like every website I visited looking like Bootstrap.
While intelligence and compression both may have similar goals (to optimize paths of information), intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.
What does this mean?
Lossy, non-deterministic compression is a thing. Does that meet the "allowing multiple divergent outcomes" criteria?
This might even have been an interesting journey if it had been REMOTELY READABLE.