Daniel

I would definitely say that GPT-5 is showing improvement in reasoning tasks over previous models, but for now it is still more efficient for me to ask chat to help me write a script to do an analysis than to just ask chat to do the analysis.

The script I can debug once I have a starting point, but if the chatbot’s analysis goes off sideways, there no getting it back on track.

Thesis: An AI system can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which it is conversing in the same sense that its human interlocutors can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which they are conversing.

I would classify the above thesis as the “linguistic pragmatist” framing, with reference to later Wittgenstein and a footnote to the Turing test (“imitation game”) and its parallels to W’s “language games.”

Thesis: An AI system can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which it is conversing in the same sense that its human interlocutors can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which they are conversing.

Against: “If ‘knowing’ is tied to having intentional states, embodied experience, or cultural participation, the thesis fails because AI’s ‘pragmatic knowledge’ is a simulation, not a lived competence.”

Thesis: An AI system can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which it is conversing in the same sense that its human interlocutors can be said to know the pragmatics of a language in which they are conversing.

I asked ChatGPT to discuss this thesis, and it made a few good points:

(1/5) In researching next-gen CMS platforms last year, I was very interested in Payload as a product that was trying to incorporate all of the out-of-the-box capabilities you get with WordPress, but with an attractive UI and a modern TypeScript/React/Next.js stack under the hood.

(4/5) And a big YES to this: "Figma and Payload together can and will solve a problem that’s been bugging me (and probably all of you) for years ... Designers create in Figma, then devs recreate in code, then content teams struggle to maintain it all. It’s inefficient and frustrating."

(1/5) In researching next-gen CMS platforms last year, I was very interested in Payload as a product that was trying to incorporate all of the out-of-the-box capabilities you get with WordPress, but with an attractive UI and a modern TypeScript/React/Next.js stack under the hood.

(2/5) I have seen a number of alternative CMS products come and go over the last few years. While Payload looked impressive, I was concerned that it might be too niche and might not win enough of a following to gain traction in this product space.

The dream of every frontend dev is not to have to think too much about infrastructure. I've been trying out AstroDB + Turso as a database solution for basic content management, and experience has been great so far: astro.build/blog/astro-d...

One concern I've had about choosing any cloud database provider has been vendor lock and the effort required to migrate data to another service if the provider exists the market or becomes too expensive.