It's the mediocrity of the situation that gives me hope.

At risk of circling back on points already made… it’s the same mediocrity that isn’t giving me hope, because the mediocrity is not determined by our sense of taste but by the information set processed to create the model. If LLMs are mostly stochastically picking something in the middle of what they know/have seen, that means the middle is defined by the model’s inputs (& training & heuristics) and, crucially, not by our judgement of what the model outputs. In other words, the middle of what range does it produce? It used to be that Midjourney could produce at best a mediocre, deep fried jpeg of, say, Will Smith - one that was recognizable but not much more. 4o can clearly produce a mediocre Miyazaki. There is a mark of progress in that jump - the median of blurry jpegs is objectively worse than the median Miyazaki frame. Similarly, the models have evolved from mediocre code noob to mediocre CS grad to mediocre junior engineer. Without ever doing anything else than seeking the middle of the road, there has been steps of progress towards smaller, more professional, better niches to produce mediocrity in.

Now it’s no replacement for Miyazaki. And I’m pretty sure younger me would’ve realized quickly that there is no ghost in the shell. But if I would’ve chosen to accept that lower quality, that mediocrity, I might at least have someone to talk to about my day or my feelings.

A lot (most?) frustrations surrounding AI now comes from other people choosing to ignore or accept the mediocrity because they get something out of it. The other day I got a document to review from my procurement specialist. After a while I realized he’d given me a largely AI generated document. At that point I’d already spent a good half hour rewriting the text. I felt…betrayed and a bit surprised. Isn’t this your job you’re not doing? but also How did I not notice sooner?

In the meeting to discuss I confronted him with “dude if you’re handing me slop you should tell me”. He said he prefers doing it this way because it means he needs only two or three revisions instead of five+ to get to v1.0 of the procurement document. So he got something out of it (speed) and we’d be rewriting it anyway. If he’d been upfront about it I think I’d been on board, because the truth is that I now regularly use the same workflow: getting the AI to write the shitty first draft so I can get to v1 in 3 hours instead of in 6.

Yeah, I played Farmville for a bit because I’m not actually a gamer. It was fun for a few weeks! Then I got bored. But at no point was I thinking “boy if only I’d be playing a better game right now” because mediocrity is often just passable enough to not second-guess what you’re doing. And I think that’s why I’m worried. I feel like you and I have a pretty good grasp of the technology and its edges to assess when to use it, when to doubt it, and when to absolutely not touch it with a ten foot pole. What about the rest though.

Maybe another analogy here is that of ultra processed foods - they too give you what you want (tastes and textures) but not what you need (a varied and healthy diet). Now I might walk through a Kroger’s thinking about how bad most of these products are, how uninteresting they taste, but most people will still load their cart full of it, won’t they? The mediocrity is not the saving grace there, and it feels like it won’t either with AI.

It is for some unexplainable reason 80+F here and I have an estate to myself.

My parents, whose day job it now is to look after said 150,000 sqft estate for a rich entrepreneur & family who live in Ibiza most of the time, are gone for a few days so I’m taking care of the dogs and working remote. It’s not what I’d describe as lavish, but the cabal of robot lawnmowers, the fully Ubiquiti network and being able to cast music to “Pond - Beachside” and “Bamboo Forest/Sauna” is amusing.

There’s also a school holiday this week (and last week too in a lot of places). The weather plus half the office being empty makes me feel like it’s the middle of summer already.

I remember reading that previous dose of hatorade in February. Personally I thought it was too lone-man-crying-in-desert to share here. Not that I disagree with his facts, just that I wasn't sure what to make of it. There is a blindness to his hatorade which is making me suspicious.

Still, if he ends up being right about OpenAI's terrible position, does that inevitably mean they're screwed? Are they for sure on a one way ticket to becoming the next Lehman? The next Elizabeth Holmes? Or are they simply running in the red like Musk has done many times before, banking on OpenAI to coast on delusions for long enough to figure out how to lock people into their tool ecosystem as they seem to be doing?

(sidenote: I tried to create an Elizabeth Holmes-Forbes-cover with Saltman's face but the GPUs are melting again over at OpenAI and it refused to do so due to internal errors and made up a BS reason for why. that bout sums it up...)

The release of 4.5 was the sign on the wall, for sure. It was the largest model training they could have possible done, the most horsepower put into that part of the equation and out came nothing. Nothing new, nothing significantly better, just a ginormous model that is supposedly eye-wateringly expensive to run. OpenAI tried their absolute best to cover it up with a big "...anyways" sign but it's a grand failure whatever way you look at it.

My money is not on OpenAI, just to be clear. But I would also not be surprised if it takes a while for them to deflate. I personally believe 2025 is the year they will (start to) get pwned by Google, if they aren't already:

HYPOTHESIS: AI Boosterism is the consequence of despairing males looking for Teddy Ruxpin to replace their need for human contact

Can we add the Unethical Zurichians to your observations, just for the hell of it? If I remember correctly, their (now removed) early abstract claimed that by consent-free scraping of users' Reddit accounts, they could like 3x their ability to convince users of different viewpoints.

Let's draw a quick old-man-yells-at-cloud parallel. Millenials like me got phones in early high school, smartphones in late high school/early college. We got addicted to them but know what it felt like without 'em so we just feel bad about our own discipline. Zoomers got hit hard by both smartphones and social media in formative years. They got addicted to them, vaguely know better but their attention span and social skills got so rekt they're locked in and depressed. Gen Alpha grew up with smartphones and like 40% of 2-year olds now have an iPad. It is like fish in water. I see mostly Millenials now pushing for smartphone-free upbringing.

I think there's a same parallel now with AI (boosterism), but one generation down. Zoomers know the Before Times and they dislike it but they do use it. Alpha is gonna get hit hardest, is my fear, with high school cheats at the ready but without any kind of checks and balances in place from schools as those are still being figured out.

Socially, I think we need to move real fast to figure out guardrails or norms or anything before we get a perpetual Her situation for any mildly loner kid. I am a bit scared at what access to a friendly, conversational, supportive AI would've done to a younger, much lonelier version of myself. My Ruxpin was spending a lot of time on forums, but those had moderators and some mores...LLMs have none. With memory improvements, with the Unethical Zurichians showing that a personalized AI is very good at manipulating people, there is a real risk of LLMs seriously shaping people's social skills. I mean, Character.AI already has like 250M users? And that's just fringe horny users specifically seeking it out.

Maybe I should reread Reclaiming Conversation,

I learned from his videos that it’s uncommon for US dishwashers to have automatic salt and rinse aid dispensers. I don’t know it it’s the be all & end all, but those two dispensers + never using pods + useful baskets and guides mean I have never had an issue with my Siemens that wasn’t because I loaded it wrong.

I don’t have a lengthy response, but I do want to thank you for enlightening me.

Gold seems to do pretty good right now…but man, even if yields are not soaring to the Trussian levels, it is still surprising how quickly the US’ position on the global stage seems to be deteriorating.

There's this idea that if AI can help the 79% skillful make it to 81% competence, the 99th percentile shall be out of business. Now - I'm out of business for writing because it doesn't pay well enough for me to bother. LLMs sure as shit aren't going to fix that.

A quick preamble: maybe I shouldn't have started this conversation as a response to the argument that writing is doomed that usualgerman is making, because that end conclusion is not one I intended to support.

It's the last 20% that gets you there. in everything. And AI has consistently not even begun to cross that 20% in all the years we've been yammering about LLMs.

I think this is where I went wrong: I don't know the shape of the there well enough when it comes to writing, so I made the cardinal sin of extrapolating. My assumption was that since LLMs have jumped from Markov chained nonsense to getting to 90+% in some forms of writing (StackOverflow, low-quality reporting, some technical writing) in record time, that fiction writing would not be that much harder.

But that's like saying lane-guided driving on a sunny day on the highway is only two steps removed from fully driverless autonomous driving, an assumption I hate since it's in a domain where I do have some idea of the shape of the last percentages. People have been telling me Tesla's autopilot has been improving rapidly for forever, particularly the past year. I (/we?) have for years been shouting back that the last X% is the hardest with self-driving cars, and that it too is not a given just like it's not a given a large enough quantity of monkeys will produce Shakespeare.

The example I have given to multiple people over the years is "yea I'll see it drive through a bicycle-busy Amsterdam street before I'm impressed". This came across my feeds the other day:

I instantly recognized these streets, the one at the 90 second mark is one I walked on just last week. I know exactly how attentive you need to be to drive a large car through there. So I'll admit I had to do a bit of soul-searching. There are goalposts I can move (it's a sunny day again, it's driving like a snail, there are just as many recent videos of FSD mode going kamikaze as there are of them doing something impressive, etc etc)... but it did make me re-evaluate: how good is good enough, exactly? How precise can I define what qualities we should be willing to give up, if it gives us something else in return? We can be a millimeter from the asymptote, definitionally unable to pass it, and that might be good enough.

I watched a video the other day (on YouTube) that discussed the drop in quality, specifically in conventions, that YouTube represents when compared to traditional media. The lack of professionals directly results in jumpcuts, in people holding the mic, in people speaking like they're reading text aloud in 5th grade. The dilettantes never used the conventions that traditional media had forged over decades because they don't know they exist. They're in the Dunning-Kruger zone like many more will now because of LLMs.

And yet - we are now used to jumpcuts, we are okay with people holding the mic in frame. We for sure lowered our standards, it is by inspection obviously worse. What YouTube has going for it is that it appeals in a different/novel way. Your examples…do not. (Other than being adorably wrong like Sunspring.) I'd argue that YT appeals mostly through serving niche interests to a degree traditional media will never be able to. I will gladly give up qualities like audio mixing, lighting, image quality if that means I can watch something in my niches that I otherwise would not be able to ever see.

What I was uncertain about, which is why I called it a cautious "some people under some circumstances", is whether there is an ability of LLM-produced piece of writing to offer the same "niche at scale" benefit that YouTube added to casual couch TV watching. The writing itself can be really bad, can have standards as low as the earths core, but if it scratches an itch there will be some people who will not mind suffering through that.

My expectation with fiction writing was that we’ll see the same thing happening that I’m noticing with coding: on the one hand, dilettantes trying to get “there” and failing, getting somewhere that they might find impressive but the rest of the world does not. And on the other hand the pros fast-tracking their process in some way with LLMs, automating the first draft which would be shit anyway and rewriting from there. They’ll still be writing, perhaps a bit faster than before. The former will be happy enough with how far they’ve come, content with their work and/or not knowing better, that they’d rather have their lower quality something than not having that thing at all, just like I’m content with my vibecoded webapp because it does 12 transit queries for me at once. The code sucks & the process is janky as fuck but Gullit it works, it gets the job done, even if standards couldn’t be lower.

But fiction writing doesn’t exist just to spout duck snakes at you; people get something out of it (symbolism, meaning, the human nature, …) that has to be more than a classifier can handle. That’s your point, right? Which I missed because I am not aware of what the last 20% is made of.

Or am I still missing something here?

I'll concede I don't know much, but hey I am technically a thrice-published article writer, so I'm not entirely unfamiliar.

The execution IS the writing. The taking of the idea and turning it into entertainment IS the craft.

That's not entirely the argument I'm trying to disprove. Maybe I should have defined what "it" in "it could work" is better. An attempt to break "it" down in its consituent parts:

1) It is possible as an individual to write 5,000 words of mediocrity not just with your own elbow grease but now with "Siri, write me a story" as well.

2) It is possible to improve written stories in a way you want as often as you want. "Siri, take that writing advice I heard Brandon Sanderson talk about and apply it to this paragraph." Aka the aforementioned vibewriting.

3) With LLM memory becoming larger and larger it is becoming increasingly more viable to manage consistency across larger pieces of text. "Siri, foreshadow this event in the previous 200 pages in 5 different places."

4) By chopping up tasks to multiple layers of agents, it is becoming increasingly more viable to cover all bases of writing by delegating tasks to specific agentic tools, from the abstract ("Siri, to what degree does this text convey this idea I have?") to the specific ("Siri, go through every sentence of the entire manuscript and ensure apostrophes are set correctly.")

5) The above can lead to a text which is good enough that it can be hard to distinguish by readers as being AI written. Hell, it could even be enjoyable to read!

Now - is that art? Is the next Star Trek in there? Not without serious human intervention, I'd say. Is it an offense to the art of writing that should abhor most if not every writer? For suure. Does that mean it's incapable of producing fiction that people will want to read/buy it? I'd wager no. But it depends on the process.

I mean, we've talked before about how LLMs are a specific tool which in the hands of creatives will lead to new and better art, even if using said tools feels heinous at first. Why would that be different for fiction writing? No, I don't think the monkeys will produce a good book. But I do think that you can create 80% of the scaffolding of a book in an afternoon and work from there. I believe you can forego writing groups and sharpen your thinking by loading 40 of the best books on writing into 40 LLM agents and have them have a go at your manuscript. I'm noticing that the barrier for myself to write longer form has been significantly lowered, because I know I can use these tools to create a version of my writing that is much better than I'd be able to pull on my own. Hell, I am cautiously optimistic that there will be writers who find new uses for these tools that enhance their writing in ways that we've yet to discover.

You're not wrong to hold to the idea that an LLM by design, by definition churns out something which regresses to the mean. But I do think it matters a great deal what we compare that mean to, I do think it matters in whose hands the tool is whether what it churns out ends up, in the final product, as anything good. We can now make the sausage diffently, at a higher abstraction level, and that has upsides and clear downsides. But it's hard to argue against LLMs being able to produce writing that is useful to some people under some circumstances, no? StackOverflow is dead because why would anyone bother with that when LLMs can produce what I am looking for. AO3 is not dead...yet, but I am not sure it will thrive in the next decade.

Far fewer passengers are coming to the US in the past months.

Considering my first name is considered male only in the area I grew up, I’d be…a bit worried passing customs nowadays.

Not to disagree with you, but I do think that there might be a way where it could work, which is to have a human with a vision/original idea, who uses an LLM to write a book. There are people who are not able or interested in mastering the process of writing, but do have a book idea in them that others might want to read. Whether it will be a book to top the charts is up for debate, but if the "author" has a good enough taste for good writing that might produce something original and good, even though the process by which the text is created itself produces mediocrity. Vibewriting instead of vibecoding, so to speak.

To add to the above (most of which I wasn't aware of, so thanks): start out with TinkerCAD + PrusaSlicers. TinkerCAD is super easy to get started, but does allow for fairly precise building blocks. PrusaSlicer has a bit of a learning curve, but once you know there's almost nothing you need to change other than level of detail (nozzle setting) you should get pretty far on your own.

I learned a bunch of printing wisdom from /r/fixmyprint, one wisdom of which is that given a seemingly simple problem there are always four different solutions proposed cuz overstimating internet users. But the good one is usually in there.

With infrequent use of the printer, there's a good chance the nozzle will clog and your printer will not print a single good layer. There's a few YouTube videos on how to solve that, it looks hard but it's not that hard once you're comfortable opening up your printer head.

Supplies for making a green roof on my garden shed arrived. Can’t wait to see what that will look like in a few months. With the warmer days this past month the garden is growing all sorts of plants in all sorts of places. It’s fun to see where the plants we planted last year will end up spreading to.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this here before, but I have been leaning into my rollercoaster hobby much more the past year or two. As a child I was positively obsessed for years, despite (or because?) the amount of themepark visits in my entire youth can be almost count on one hand. I let the hobby go halfway through my teens, went back to it by getting over my fear for big rides in college, but then it waned again and went away completely during covid. I’m so glad I have now picked it back up again, and I now have more park visits planned this year than my entire youth combined. I even got myself a season pass for my local park! It feels redemptive, like I’m finally doing what eleven year old me has dreamt of. (His biggest dream is to one day go to Cedar Point. That’s not in the works yet, but mostly because of self-restraint…)

The big question for the Dems seems to be whether they can produce a new candidate that won't be another Dukakis. Really, what I don't understand is how low the Dems have to be in the polls and how bad their demographic outlook has to become for them for them to wake up and change course.

My dislike of Tesla has been consistent since reading Ashlee Vance's book, but if you'd told me two years ago that even electric cars can become a MAGA shibboleth I would've been very surprised.

We’ve been dog-and-housesitting for a few days for a good friend who’s away. It’s the kind of dog that excitedly comes running up to you when you come back from getting your phone upstairs for a sec. We did this dogsitting last year too, but this time around he’s noticeably more chill and listens better.

—-

Some ideas just keep coming back, and for me it’s the idea that I should start a (video) podcast about in depth topics my field…there’s like two that exist and both of them suck. But then I’d be Yet Another Guy with a Podcast.

Maybe we should redefine AI as Artificial Interface. I think we’re finding out as we go that the scope of the word “systems” in your sentence can encompass a lot - it’s not just getting a recipe into Notion, it’s also starting to become useful as an interface between my notes and my email, or between a corpus of academic papers and my project outline. I’m tempted to start to record more meetings (or make voice notes after each?) just so I can create the data I need to become useful later.

Extrapolating once gets me to wonder how much more useful OpenAI’s Deep Research would be if it would have access to all academic papers instead of just Google results. “I’ve found 726 relevant papers to your inquiry, do you want to pay $118 for me to access them once?” Reminds me of the people who used to shout “data is the new gold!!1!” years ago. Like, hell, as a government we have decades of letters, research, data, notes and reports all just gathering dust because there only interface on it is tedious, laborious, expensive, or all of the above.

Extrapolating twice is what I’ve seen some tech bros do, where they are dreaming of the day when everything they say and everything they do is quietly monitored just so they create a wealth of data to query or dive into later. There are now people who have two years of (personal) conversations with ChatGPT, which they can use with its memory feature to do [shit like this][https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1guygcv/comment/ly3b4bz/). But somewhere here is a Rubicon I’m not willing to cross.

I’ve been enjoying cooking more lately! Found a Whole Foods-esque home delivery grocer with a spectacular assortment of good quality & organic ingredients. Finally bit the bullet and bought two carbon steel pans to add to my enameled Dutch oven and stainless steel pan. I spent a Saturday afternoon seasoning them and so far, they’ve been great at their job. Mostly I’m glad I can now cook without any nonstick pans.

As per recipes, Rukmini Iyer is fantastic. I’m also still exploring NYT’s recipes so if y’all have veggie/vegan recipes that you love lemme know, as I’m now trying to cook three new meals a week.

I also built an AI bot to copy all recipes (physical or digital) and throw it into a Notion cookbook I’m building. Have also been playing around with tools like Cursor and Wispr. I’m still regularly surprised at its simultaneous stupidity and genius. But I do feel AI slowly creeping into the useful territory.

Have you been able to get the UPF book already from the library? I’m curious whether you think it’s garbage or not, it also has a part about the GRAS loophole being bad (like every industry self-regulation of safety inevitably is).

To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.

The reason I shared this is because to me, it represents a line of thinking I keep seeing more and more on the left: deregulating to enable growth and progress. This is/was in my mind a sternly right-wing idea. Deregulation still is, but I hear calls for reforming regulation more and more from the left, not the right.

As a government bureaucrat myself now, I'm noticing I'm becoming more receptive to the idea that a rainforest of well intentioned regulations can ultimately make it too hard, too expensive, or even impossible to build things or make things work. We have been adding hurdles and my impression is that it wouldn't hurt less than the status quo to have the pendulum swing the other way for a while. I'm not under the illusion that it will reduce grift and corruption. The DOGE bulldozer is arguably the purest distillation of said corruption.

Now I'm also not blind to the advantages that have been made in the past decades through regulatory improvements/additions. I am however keenly aware (slash worried) that we have lost focus away from what gets us to better results and instead have put too much focus on improving the process instead. The price per mile of new rail (from high speed to local tram tracks) varies wildly. It's not just because of corruption, not just because of technical differences, but for a significant part it is the regulatory process that takes an ungodly amount of paperwork to wade through.

An example over here is the Friesenbrücke. A single, rural railway bridge got hit by a cargo ship in 2015, the primary railway corridor between the Netherlands and Germany in that area. After eight years it's demolished. The estimated date of finishing construction is this year, so more than a decade after it was hit. It was first estimated to cost €48M, later €66M; now, the total costs have ballooned to well over €200M. The slowness and expensiveness was because it had to comply with more laws and requirements than a simple replacement. On the one hand, that's great, now you've accidentally made this bridge future-proof. On the other hand, it is now par for the course now that these kinds of projects balloon in time and money. We shrug and go "oh well that's just what infrastructure is these days".

But the more expensive it is to do anything, the less we do of it, there's no way around it. We used to have multiple large rail projects ongoing at any time. December marked the first time the Netherlands has zero new rail being built for a while - everything we do is replacing or removing existing infrastructure. I think the two are related.