Most amazing art isn't really a product of inspiration, but from severe editing (or severe practice, if it's live).
Good writing needs a lot of "post-production" to get the ideas hammered out. Most of it is removing content that isn't central to what the writer wants.
This LLM trend is part of a larger historical pattern that shifts editing away from us having to think things in our brain:
A. At one time, the editing was mental load, since writing was tedious.
B. The typewriter made writing easy, but modifying it required lots of handwritten scrawling, but the mental load was still within reviewing and rewriting the content.
C. By the end of the 20th century, editing and rewriting was a total breeze, but the mental load was still within handwritten note-taking.
D. Once we made a bazillion forms of productivity and note-taking software, the mental load was only in thinking the thought and getting it into a computer. Everything after that was massaging the idea.
E. Now, the regurgitation machine can get you 3/4 of the way to the finish line of your draft without even trying.
But, I'm convinced we lost something on each of these transitions. There is more power in one well-placed sentence assembled over tremendous meditation than 85 paragraphs of slop.
Paul Graham's essay on good writing (https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html) defines "right" written ideas as "developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail".
My opinion is that the absurd complexities of the Over-Information Age make the "right" level of detail the following:
1. Executive summary that children and dumb people can understand.
2. Tightly-defined specifications for everyone who cares or needs to know.
3. Footnotes and background information that you can throw everything and the kitchen sink onto. This includes attempts to persuade, artful descriptions, feelings you had, associations to other things, and that general elegant "waxing on" that everyone gets the fancy for doing sometimes.
I'd say it's a social mechanism more than anything else.
While I haven't used the service myself, I expect the UX steers people to generate video-based content themselves, which is an evolution from the Twitter-era "spontaneously text as many tweets as you want" vibe.
The "human" value of things versus the "computer" value of those same things are vastly different:
1. Text data may be one of the highest forms of human perception, but computers find storing it as trivial beyond enterprise-scale needs. Of course, it becomes important to a computer as soon as it's interpreted as code.
2. Photos are often on the level with text, but the data takes megabytes of information.
3. Video data typically adds a marginal increase in human value, but is typically data-heavy.
4. Interactive software packages with high-falutin' UX, most notably things like games, are the pinnacle of conveying human meaning, but also cost quite a ton of data.
I anticipate the next evolution in 10 years might be the development of shareable game-based experiences, with the deluge of amateurish production values we see in today's videos.
A huge part about whether honesty hurts or helps is the framing that revolves around it.
In this case, it's a matter of social expectations driven by the timing of that honesty:
* If someone is a completely unfiltered person and says the information audaciously and openly, the interviewer may simply see they have nothing to hide.
* On the other hand, if the person looks anxious (which could literally be nothing more than PTSD), then awkwardly blurts out the information, they may be interpreted as having more to hide, making that honesty appear worse than it is. Ironically, that was probably the optics that got my felony in the first place.
It all depends on the framing of the situation. For myself, I frame it as a few of the following, context-depending on how it's asked:
* (on a webform) "not applicable" in writing
* (do you have a felony?) I do, but it has absolutely nothing to do with my role (because it really doesn't).
* (will the background check yield anything we should know?) you'll see something, but it has nothing to do with the job.
If they keep pressing, and seem simply hesitant, I refer them to a webpage that articulates the story for them. It's behind me, I've grown from it to where it doesn't define me, and I'm proud that it's behind me.
If they get weird for the rest of the interview, I simply say "thank you for your time, but I don't believe this will be a good fit, please let me know if you change your mind", and I walk out of there to avoid wasting another minute with their bigotry.
Once I hit the 7-year mark, that background check won't yank any database association to my legal fiction unless they wish to dig. At that point, I can simply say "nothing will show on my background check" and it's completely honest.
The reason this continues to be a problem in the USA is because people aren't confident in what they've come through. The stigma exists because employees fold over and continue letting employers feel they have the right to discriminate over what happened, irrespective of how that person changed from their experience. I see my opposing any condescension as an effort to resist a social structure that creates a second-class citizen.
Genetics play a huge part as well. From birth, we're given a death clock, which goes downward as stressors hit us, then further as we relive that stress.
In other words, everyone would probably live to ~110 in a perfect, stressor-free world.
This may be taboo to discuss here, but the wording could phenomenologically transfer to "the love of commoditization and scalability of meaningful things that give power is the root of all evil".
Enjoying a beautiful sunset is an enhancement of the soul, but enjoying 10^100 identical sunsets has accrued enough diminishing return to be trivial to the soul.
You're forgetting that there's a secondary market for these things, similar to how subsistence farming is largely gone in lieu of the supermarket. Just purchase a share of camel slurry, and you're solid.
Actually, now that I mention it, that seems to be quite a bit like Jesus' problem with the currency conversion specialists in the temple: commoditization of something meaningful can lead to evil.
This is a natural product of how power works on the internet. Barring an algo that downgrades time spent, the people with the most power are proportionally the people who do the least things elsewhere.
I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.
The trouble goes back to a 1910's telegraph bill. The US created a de facto monopoly on each carrier for each zone of land. On a particular parcel of land, there is only 1 carrier for any telecom tech, with those parcels as tradable on a market. M&A has allowed it to become a bit of a duopoly (e.g., Verizon + ATT).
It did make sense at the time of the law: carriers kept clustering around the major metro areas and wouldn't expand to the boonies. Nowadays, that law has outlived its purpose.
The US has something like this already with cellular with MVNOs, driven by the free market.
The TL;DR is that the cost of cell towers is mostly the same irrespective of bandwidth (e.g., hiring a technician to break-fix as parts fail from weather conditions), so carriers figured out they could "rent" their leftover bandwidth.
Most of the "cheap" carriers are simply slinging together MVNOs from all the carriers (e.g., Boost Mobile, MetroPCS). It creates a weird situation where you get plenty of signal on off-peak hours and (often) the middle of nowhere, but at the expense of having no signal in larger metro areas at peak hours.
It's a natural trend cycle: things grow beautifully, they stagnate, their corruption load exceeds their productivity and they start declining, then they collapse in lieu of something new.
There's hope for revitalization, but only if it's caught early-on. I feel Mozilla doesn't have much time.
A cliche that may apply here is "follow the money". If your primary financiers are entities that prefer you to avoid competing with what that financier is producing, you're not looking at the interests of the userbase anymore.
Well, not necessarily everywhere. In the lens of history, new countries with a new constitution don't have that problem. Over time, they create layers of new laws, then cruft when those laws make little sense to enforce, then they can crack down on the letter of that law when enforcement is socially acceptable.
Before I clicked the link, I was scared this was contextually something far scarier:
"After centuries of intellectual property legal disputes with the Catholic church and the Chaucer family estate, the British Library has finally been able to secure a win for public domain content freedom."
A huge part of this is tied to the "conscientiousness" aspect of the Big 5 personality.
For myself, I need 1.5-2 days of off-time, depending what I'm working on. I consider myself a constant grindstone-lover, and most of the people I work around seem to reflect your 3.5 number, but I've seen some people who probably need 5 days off a week.
No shame in any of it, though. Everyone's wired differently. The USA has a unique taboo about "enjoying life", and I blame its post-WWII militarized culture for the most of it.
I've had a hard time penetrating philosophy myself, and found out from PG's essays that he saw much of the same problems as me.
So, I wanted to summarize a little of everything that makes up reality, with the hope that people can feel more "ahh" instead of "huh?" as they read it.
1. ALL information is biased: there's no way to remove that part entirely because human beings make everything news-related.
2. The motivations of the journalists determine what the news reveals or hides[0].
3. To that end, all mainstream journalism (excepting journalists directly funded by listeners) is about as accurate as an advertisement.
4. Consume with a general distrust, assume everyone else is doing the same (since most people are NOT indoctrinated into the mediafest), and go about the rest of your life.
5. If you ever start getting a bad case of anxiety or the shakes, go outside for a walk or strike up a conversation with a complete stranger.
I wrote an essay on the subject[1], but the gist of it is to learn the art of skepticism, on EVERYTHING.
I've been seeing WP's failings more and more, especially as Gutenberg keeps adding kitchen sink features to stay cool and trendy. The static site builder is on my todo list.
The email list was a plugin on WordPress. I had to grieve the loss, but I'm better now from it. Anyone who cares enough can get an RSS reader, which I've realized advances my techno-political values on software freedom.
I'm happy to pay more for web hosting, and that's basically what I did when I migrated. It's not that I'm over-using resources.
I didn't start in web development, and have only adopted paying for on-rails hosting as a reluctant desire to meet my essay-making purposes.
As far as being a "thought leader" in any sense of the word, I'm really not important: just an essay hobbyist with lots of static content. 2-4 of those essays are controversial, but most of them are useful-but-nonconfrontational crap like how to cook well or how to navigate bureaucracy.
In some ways, I represent the ideal shared hosting customer: Very little web exposure, minimal-to-little SEO, paying customer.
My opinion is that it was likely a confluence of factors that piled up at once. It's not uncommon for things to work steadily, until they don't. I'm clinging hard to Hanlon's Razor on this one.
Good writing needs a lot of "post-production" to get the ideas hammered out. Most of it is removing content that isn't central to what the writer wants.
This LLM trend is part of a larger historical pattern that shifts editing away from us having to think things in our brain:
But, I'm convinced we lost something on each of these transitions. There is more power in one well-placed sentence assembled over tremendous meditation than 85 paragraphs of slop.
Paul Graham's essay on good writing (https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html) defines "right" written ideas as "developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail".
My opinion is that the absurd complexities of the Over-Information Age make the "right" level of detail the following:
And, in this attitude, LLMs are only good for #3.