I am sure everyone in the Kanzleramt who prepared this meeting, the people who bought a golden frame, made sure it's not too expensive given the recent rise in gold prices and Germany's laws limiting the value of gifts on levels below a luxury Airbus 350, who coached Merz how to be just the right kind of manly, are now very happy about the outcome of the meeting.

It's good to know that what the chancellor of Germany, one of the most important allies of the United States, discussed with the president of the US of A, one of Germany's most important allies, during the first ever meeting between both heads of state is at the top of the US president's mind right now.

@interfluidity I was talking with friends why some meds aren’t available here in Taiwan and they told me that’s because Taiwan has its own processes and certificates instead of copying what the US or EU is doing. So the question is who lacks the resources and just follows the FDA‘s guidelines? And then there’s R&D, production, and economy of scale, of course.

@interfluidity The big fallacy of course is to personalize everything and talk about Biden the way you talk about Trump, because all you know is a king. It’s a bit weird because he is also supposed to be too old to do anything. And that introduces the second wave of narrative weirdness where it seems that in the end 20 year old female graduates in American literature are who destroy everything because they otherwise threaten to cancel everything that is good.

@interfluidity It‘s a weird mirror world, similar to other areas (censorship, blatant incompetence): Trump and his sycophants do it in plain daylight so you know it’s happening. But it can’t be your team, right, you are on The Good Side. So the other side must be really worse! That’s why „woke“ must brainwash good Americans and take Wy all jobs with invading immigrants. Meritocracy is dead and it couldn’t have been your side who killed it…

@glyph I restrict myself to RSS readers and buffer on mobile. It’s much more focused and means I’m missing the broader debates. It also means I hardly post any more. But I don’t feel I have much to say atm anyway.

One of those "back when I was a kid" musings: It's quite remarkable how much teenagers these days are marketed to. When I was that age in the 90s, the only places you saw any ads made for you was when buying one of those slightly cringe (print!) magazines or watching TV. Maybe some fashion posters? But I don't remember any, so maybe they too were directed to parents?

@missmythreyi What's nice about adolescence is that it sticks to the genre code in a way but still adds so much depths and details. The solution in independent films often seems to be to get away from certain genre boxes altogether, but when you mix genres for example it's harder to see what's actually missing from each.

30min into the E1 of Adolescence (Netflix). A young boy is brought into custody, suspected for murder. Kind kid, smart, good family, lot's of uncertainty. The series takes it time. Everyone is kind when they take his details.

Reminds me what an accomplishment the rule of law is. It allows you to stay human, even with a could-be-monster, to separate justice from revenge, maybe even punishment in the rawest sense, to overcome the Lacardian game of looking for scapegoats.

https://mastodon.world/@missmythreyi/114172216154128046

@missmythreyi Thanks for sharing it, made me to check it and really enjoy it. Atmospheric very dense and so rich with details. There is so much in this process that you really wonder why you haven't seen it before, you wonder how many other screenwriters really bothered to do their research...

(I mean, yeah, their prose can be decent, too. And it's a great tool for editing.)

So: If you are "against AI" and have been for a while, give it a try. There are principled reasons against it, but it is a powerful tool. Both can be true, and you don't have to sacrifice it totally to make a point. Same as with every tech.

And: It's still important or maybe more important to know a lot. I feel for those kids who might never learn to write. Much of writing is thinking, and it's not the writing that LLMs are good at, but as a prothesis for better thinking.

All this requires that I have a strong intuition about where I do and where I do not want to go, though. It's this that allows to ask the right questions, raise the right analogies, steer it into the right direction. Whenever I ask for something directly, the quality feels to fall off a cliff.

Examples and color are another great example. My mental model of LLMs a year ago was that they were more boring and bland, but many of the examples and cross-references now feel genuinely "creative." This often takes the form of certain schools, genres, perspectives, etc. Again, it's a starting point for more research, and most useful if I already have some knowledge to work with, but it's stuff I might have overlooked otherwise.

My thinking is very very non-linear and it truly shines there. I can throw five ideas at the wall, there come some more associations, half-baked claims, examples, and I can focus on the best among them and continue with them. It's how I love to think and write myself, but feels many times faster and smoother.

It sometimes feels like "breaking it in." There is a certain pull towards local maxima that I often don't find interesting. The last summary of the LLM after a back and forth, for example, often feels more bland than my model of where I want to take it. Again, it's about the way, not the outcome.

I don't find it useful to write actual sentences. I hardly keep a sentence. Even when the goal is to draft a single sentence (vs. narrative, structure, paragraphs, arguments, ...), I still always used my own ones, not out of pride, but as I lacked something. And yet, the result after the discussion was much better than my initial try.

I learn more and more about how recent LLMs are a fascinating sparring partner for writing. It's an interesting experience, so interesting that I cannot fully verbalize it yet. 1/

@FeliciaDavin Here is a list, https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/wiki/index/