One of my favorite LLM use-cases is alternate history extrapolation. Since there’s no formal ‘right’ to a counterfactual, then it can’t be ‘wrong’, and it pretty much always clies me into other events of relevance that are hinge points on my history bead of interest.
"After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr. 172, MVUEH and it also quickly suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX ..."
I’m interested in what Astra’s test for german-language plaintext looks like. No doubt bog standard among cryptanalysts, but not intuitive for the rest of us. Otherwise it’s difficult to determine a goal state that ‘done’ looks like
Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
Science was presented in a just-so way in our youth. It still is ( #Scicomms ), but back then, whether reading Junior Scholastic or the margin captions of a high school science textbook handed down ex cathedra, there was no communication pathway to pose vexing questions in a publicly visible way as we do now.
We don't even know if Miller or Urey themselves would have (or did) frame their results that way. The honest framing is 'hey this is one way to form amino acids, and maybe that pathway is reflective of the origin of life, but that supposition remains conjecture on our part.'
This was good. I think I want to see a boilerplate on all future substacks I read that says "I read sockpuppet's advice." (bonus points for "here's a hash of my visit log")
The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
God no. This has pretty much all of the slop elements save for jizz drops. Paint brush strokes, icon -> caption -> text, ai divisors... pretty much zero effort, compared to OP's posters.
I wasn't aware of it until AI came around, but apparently there's a cult around how much effort you put into your event posters. Didn't know advertising was something people felt folks should be putting tons of effort into.
The OP article is surprisingly candid about their critique - not that the AI-generated style they've identified is bad, but that it is so common. Therein apparently lies one frailty of our human condition - if everyone can do it, it becomes out of fashion at best, or even stigmatized at worse. I feel there's a place where that's a rational instinct, but under an extensive backdrop where the instinct is irrational - aka, 'art'.
If someone needed an explanation for 'why can't we have nice things', I think OP's article articulates it very well.
surprised the word RAG hasn’t come ho in this thread (except for a likely-LLM-generated-and-therefore-downvoted comment).
>with settings, tools, and context
call me crazy, but I think that this kind of suite, which training-uber-alles people generally dismiss as trivially replicable ‘wrapper’ is actually the differentiating factor for LLM adoption today and moreso into the future.
I’m not dismissing the near-all-out impact of training, but from a competitive busines or industry-structure lens, we’re looking at the three or four big players competing their utmost ultimately, if unintentionally, to turn foundation model access into commodity.
To the capabilities-maximalist minded (typical among engineers - my former life so I’m familiar don’t lack guilt in committing that) folks who will say “Oh the foundation model megacorps will just build out any wrapper whenever one of their third party wrapper plays demonstrates enough adoption, my rejoinder:
Apple did not rebuild an Uber-like app and cut Uber out.
We’ll see how this OpenAI legal services industry wrapper plays out, but I suspect
1) the third party legal wrapper plays will run to other foundation models not doing a legal wrapper, and
2) 3rd party wrappers will do a better job of it since it’s their all-out focus, unlike OpenAI’s whose priorities are necessarily more generalist.
Yes, we all remember the breakout startup failure-arguing quote “Google has entered your space.” That worked for several high profile applications. I believe more of those bets died on the vine than broke-out succeeded however, we only remember the biggest ones that persisted.
If legal services AI turns into one of the Mail or Maps-scale applications of the AI industry, while that would be a fair strategic action counter to the thesis I’ve laid out, the thesis itself would still tolerate it. It’s a question of short-fat tail vs mid-to-long-tail application scope & attractiveness. For example, I think it’s clear that coding is one of these short-fat-tail applications, and the low-no code plays are absolutely having their lunch eaten to acqui-hire ‘death’. I just doubt that the same will persistently transpire facing all professional service wrapper plays.
Agreed. We've basically phased-out the phrase "RAG" for "harness" even though a lot of the discussion is still the data integration rather than agent behaviour (sometimes an MCP or some kind of graph). The argument boils down to "will big company win everything" and the thermodynamics of it tend towards no.
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