The Nuanced Writer

“That’s the part that stuck with me” There are too many sentences now that have ascended so rapidly to cliched stereotype that it makes one’s brain twitch when read. The choppy blocks passing as sentences in LLM generated writing seem plausible only if one mixes all the genres of writing together.

In hindsight, the idea of NFTs wasn’t silly, it’s that they were targeted at a market of people who doesn’t understand why easily copied objects are worth owning the original of. NFTs never reached the point of having the necessary legal structure around them either.

Too many people don’t know what liberal arts are or what actually falls within their scope. Also, maybe people confuse liberal arts with humanities? Although even then, it doesn’t seem like enough people know the scope of the humanities either.

Feels as good a time as any to remind you that *distributed* and *decentralized* are not the same thing. They are orthogonal actually, existing within different domains. It’s a lot like how serializability and lineaeizability are not the same thing and also orthogonal.

It’s going to be real funny if this class of models that we’ve called “generative models” actually wind up being so much more useful as interpretation engines that we effectively stop using them for generation. That would also be 100% aligned with how naming in this industry goes.

As much as I dislike LLM generated writing, I think I hate it more when it winds up as the script for a YouTube video. LLM writing sounds worse when read aloud.

“Here’s the part nobody tells you” has been cliched so hard we should probably eradicate it from language for a good long while. It’s shoved in so many LLM responses that its effectiveness has been reduced to basically nothing and it’s just noise now.

We should really just move past the quippy phrase era of communication. LLMs are gonna ruin it anyway and they weren’t nearly as useful as they seemed in the surface. Turns out a phrase is worth a thousand images, and it’s just as difficult to understand the nuance.

People who like to predict the future seem to forget just how good humans are at pattern matching. When people predicted LLMs taking over writing, there wasn’t enough of it for people to pattern match on it. Now there’s plenty we people do not like it.

I love etymology, because what do you mean that cliche and stereotype are deeply related? More than that, the figurative senses come from the ability to print some repeatedly, without change. In this way, LLMs are very much cliche machines. They’ll take any novel phrase and stamp it into monotony.

It’s unfortunate that documentation produced by LLMs is obnoxious to read because I would love if we could offload a lot of the documentation work in the world to LLMs. But we can’t. Because reading LLM generated writing is fatiguing, which is the opposite of what you want your docs to be.

People really love blaming complex problems on singular words or terms. And yet the actual simple term that underlies everything is never the one mentioned. It’s understandable: people want to blame something that doesn’t make it their own fault.

Too many people are predicting that writing code by hand is gone forever. We haven’t had agents long enough to actually know if any of this will stick. In a year we might all be back to mostly writing code by hand with the role of agents completely shifted. We’re bad at predicting the future.

A useful technique in critical analysis is to ask from which perspective a piece of writing is authored. Too often we assume an objective or neutral perspective, but that doesn’t actually exist. Everything has a subjective perspective, and that must be understood so we can calibrate our analysis.

Part of me wonders if, historically, the things that people scream about are the things we should actually fear? I get the feeling that the case is that the things worth being fearful of haven’t been the things that people have actually screamed about.

The extreme focus in micro-correctness by agents is one of those problems I’m still figuring out how to tackle. This isn’t much different from human engineers, who can often get lost looking at individual trees instead of the whole forest. I assume solving the problem with require similar effort.

Apparently we are fearmaxxing now.

Claude is being insufferably stupid today. Multiple sessions doing random stuff, making things up to do, and spewing nonsense even when they’ve already read code that directly contradicts what they say. These aren’t even old sessions, they’re fresh ones! Today is a day I do not like LLMs or agents.

If you say “let’s not reinvent the wheel” you should feel bad for saying something that’s both hallow (a cliche) and profoundly stupid (we’ve reinvented the wheel countless times). Be more precise with your criticisms. Stop being boring and bland.

Every time I think I’ve finally finished this latest redesign round, there’s another small thing that’s not quite right. But we’re so close to being able to ship and I’m super excited.

I’m going to be extremely annoyed if I go to an Apple Store and wind up liking this phone.

Spending $3,200 on a phone seems sort of insane. Although it being ~$130 per month makes that number feel less ridiculous. But still, that’s a lot of money.

I seriously think people need to add more nuance to their definitions of “worst”. Or perhaps just open a couple more history books. Not like the long ago history, just to like the 80s and 90s.

We seem to make the same mistake of believing the marketing hype of AI labs instead of just sitting down and figuring out what these models are good at and what they aren’t. Our imaginations outrun reality in precisely the wrong ways. Unfortunately, we also lack imagination in the right ways.

There are things about frontend design that I didn’t understand previously and now I’m rapidly learning. For example, I didn’t quite understand why Storybook was a useful thing, but now that I’m building design systems it makes a ton of sense why you’d want to use it.

There is truly no shortcut through the sucky figure-out-how-to-use-new-tools growing pains that communities and industries go through. I really want to skip to the point where agents and LLMs don’t constantly oscillate between “super useful” and “dumber than raw sand” every few hours.