This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone

When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in “lexical space” and generating the text that would occupy the location between them

they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic. The Web certainly contains explanations of carrying the “1,” but GPT-3 isn’t able to incorporate those explanations. GPT-3’s statistical analysis of examples of arithmetic enables it to produce a superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that.

In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression

Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.

Can large language models help humans with the creation of original writing? To answer that, we need to be specific about what we mean by that question. There is a genre of art known as Xerox art, or photocopy art, in which artists use the distinctive properties of photocopiers as creative tools. Something along those lines is surely possible with the photocopier that is ChatGPT, so, in that sense, the answer is yes

If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read.

Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas.

Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

The stories we are launching with draw on themes that have long been part of the Dirt ethos: nostalgia for a smaller internet, the ephemerality of “vibes” and how they manifest on different networks, the infinite ways intellectual property can be adapted across platforms, visually-driven online subcultures, the collapse of “high” and “low” culture, and the imperfect politics of the emerging metaverse.

Not all design work is done in code, prototyping tools, or sketches. Likewise, not all engineering work is done in code or technical diagrams. Natural language, text, and conversations should be some of your primary mediums for creative work.

one of the most important sub-skills for writing and conversation as a design medium is learning how to create great analogies. Douglas Hofstadter thinks that analogies are actually the core of cognition, which I buy.

the web has some amazing advantages for launching new projects, which include (but aren’t limited to): Super fast distribution and updates Cross platform Huge tooling ecosystems Enormous, worldwide community If you’re into games, awesome! If you’re into mobile or native development, that’s cool too. There are lots of platform-specific toolkits and environments to make those. There’s also a lot of effort in creating cross platform tools and community-driven projects for both domains (like Unity and Flutter). They all have their advantages, but to me, nothing beats the portability and speed of launching new websites and using web tech to get ideas out the door.

using web tech for 80-90% of my projects has a lot of skill transfer effects. Since I’m using similar tools for lots of different projects, I can still refine my core skillset no matter what I’m making. If I’m making a drawing tool concept, a game, or a text editor— I’ll can still probably build all three with React. Of course there are specific libraries or APIs I might need to learn to make each kind of project, but there’s enough in common between all the projects that I can focus on the new content instead of yakshaving and deliberating over unnecessary details.

There are also market pressures that imply focusing on web will have long term payoff, like the rise of wasm, new browsers, and collaborative apps becoming the norm.

America arguably lacks a folklore proper, in the old-world sense of a body of narratives that explore the philosophical themes of the everyday life of commoners with significant mythological license

Unlike traditional folklore, American industrial folklore is a realist, literal tradition, with the presumption of factuality, and a preference for first-person telling of recent or contemporary events over retellings and handed-down lore

the cowboy western went straight from epic to commercial theater without spending any time simmering as a folklore.

The American hero of folklore, then, is a grifter who tells the tale of his own redemption. Only, he (it is nearly always a he) is a grifter with a heart of gold who might pull little cons to get ahead, but stays true-hearted and noble where it actually matters.

What made me love the wretched thing was its tender and intimate portrayals of friendship, how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys for those who are shut off from the traditions of marriage and family.

I think all writing — and criticism is very much included in this — is a form of autobiography, and I thought that I wanted to lean into it a little bit, and talk about what these shows meant to me.

blogging is an engine for cultivating agency

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . . And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

I started writing because I was jobless and needed to turn my life around. I was an over-saturated news consumer with nothing to show for it.

Desperate for a solution, I started writing online. At the time, I was nameless and stuck on the sidelines because I didn’t have the gumption to share my ideas. I experienced a cocktail of searing emotions — envy, inspiration, fear, curiosity, rage, hope, hopelessness, excitement, and self-loathing. But with each article, things got a little better. For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment, such as a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program and a podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably the world’s most famous scientist.

becoming an online writer has shown me that I can succeed by bringing out more of myself

Good thinking doesn’t happen by passive osmosis of other people’s good thinking. You have to actually write essays and journals to debug yourself and your ideas. And then, crucially, act (a) on this thinking.

Consider a university professor teaching a course. Does she say anything original? Do you think she should cancel her course because somebody else discovered the things she wants to teach? Or does she have to cancel her course simply because there is a similar course at some other university? Or consider yourself. Do you avoid having conversations with your friends when you think you have nothing original to say? Do you share things with them? Do you give advice? Do you help to understand things?

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

He wants honest reviews of novels; instead he gets hype and a dizzying, outrageous, stultifying profusion of adjectives. He wants serious literary criticism of novels; instead he gets withering assessments of the era in which said novels are written, which, by endlessly discussing the same five novels, only confirm his fears that literature has reached the unsustainably small gene-pool era of its long, slow slide to extinction. The contemporary reviewer is unhappy too: she works too hard, and still everything she does is wrong and insufficiently compensated. Her careful reviews end up reading like stenography, and when she swings for the fences her actual readers — unlike the trigger-happy tweeters — complain that she has swung too far.