I did not say it was unfit and I don't see how discussing writing styles and the influence of LLMs on it is off topic on a thread about the effects of LLMs on cognition.
I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.
The 3500 BCE date for horse ridding is speculative and poorly supported by evidence. I thought the language in the bit I pasted made that clear. "Horse being driven" means attached to chariots, not ridden.
Unless you want to date the industrial revolution to 30 BCE when Vitruvius described the aeolipile, we can talk about the evidence of these technologies impact in society. For chariots that would be 1700 BCE and horseback riding well into iron age ~1000 BCE.
"However, the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven. Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry."
Long discussion in History Exchange about dating the cave paintings mentioned in the wikipedia article above:
> Reminds me of Plato's concern about reading and writing dulling your mind. (I think he had his sock puppet Socrates express the concern. But I could be wrong.)
Nope.
Read the dialogue (Phaedrus). It's about rhetoric and writing down political discourses. Writing had existed for millennia. And the bit about writing being detrimental is from a mythical Egyptian king talking to a god, just a throwaway story used in the dialogue to make a tiny point.
In fact the conclusion of that bit of the dialogue is that merely having access to text may give an illusion of understanding. Quite relevant and on point I'd say.
Maybe, much like we invented gyms to exercise after civilization made most physical labor redundant (at least in developed countries), we will see a rise of 'creative writing gyms' of some sort in the future.
Same story for me. What has really helped is trying to make initiating useful and desirable tasks easier and seeking distractions harder. Bit by bit, cultivating that mindset changes things for the better over time.
The trap is usually "I've figured it out and this new system will solve my life" only to be burned out days or weeks later because this only addresses the symptoms and not that cause.
Cultivating a more friendly environment has been a great help for me. That and taking notes.
If the solution to all problems with attaching gpu farms to our workflows is to attach more gpu farms to our workflows, I can't see how this isn't just an elaborate scam.
So much of what people hyping AI write in this forums boils down to "this vendor will keep making this tool better forever and management will let me keep the productivity gains".
Experience shows otherwise. Urging me to embrace a new way of building software that is predicated on benevolent vendors and management seems hostile to me.
I really don't get it. I've tested some agents and they can generate boilerplate. It looks quite impressive if you look at the logs, actually seems like an autonomous intelligent agent.
But I can run commands on my local linux box that generate boilerplate in seconds. Why do I need to subscribe to access gpu farms for that? Then the agent gets stuck at some simple bug and goes back and forth saying "yes, I figured out and solved it now" and it keeps changing between two broken states.
The rabid prose, the Fly.io post deriding detractors... To me it seems same hype as usual. Lots of words about it, the first few steps look super impressive, then it gets stuck banging against a wall. If almost all that is said is prognostication and preaching, and we haven't seen teams and organizations racing ahead on top of this new engine of growth... maybe it can't actually carry loads outside of the demo track?
It can be useful. Does it merit 100 billion dollar outlays and datacenter-cum-nuclear-powerplant projects? I hardly think so.
Storytelling is the skill you're looking for. Visual aids and recording/editing are incidental.
What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell.
It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return).
You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a clear understanding of what's at stake, the price to be paid, the confrontation and the return to a new, better normal.
Physics: if you increase energy flow into a closed system its entropy will rise
Tech company: we made you a tool that allows you to increase energy flows into your closed systems AND decrease their entropy!
Software engineers: thank you for increasing the demand for manual entropy management and getting our pay to new heights while proclaiming our demise as a class.
> Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus.
He did not. You should read the dialogue.
> I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above.
This is the biggest problem with LLMs in my view. They are great at confirmation bias.
In Phaedrus 257c–279c Plato portrays Socrates discussing rhetoric and the merits of writing speeches not writing in general.
"Socrates:
Then that is clear to all, that writing speeches is not in itself a disgrace.
Phaedrus:
How can it be?
Socrates:
But the disgrace, I fancy, consists in speaking or writing not well, but disgracefully and badly.
Phaedrus:
Evidently."
I mean, writing had existed for 3 millennia by the point this dialogue was written.
I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.