Please talk to a doctor if you're curious about this instead of following this advice. Megadosing vitamins and supplements comes with risks not addressed by the author.
After reading it, I'm still left asking why browsers can't do this for the user on mobile as well. User preferences should be respected by default and not require an opt-in step from the webmaster of all parties.
I tried using a bunch of zoom on my most frequented sites and they mostly worked just fine. At my day job everything is tested to work at 200% zoom as a baseline.
I really don't think we should bend over backwards to cater to accessibility offenders such as LinkedIn.
Most any site should work with zoom. This is about the scale of the text separate from the level of the zoom. The latter breaks a lot of sites because many common layouts assume the layout space for the text will always grow along with the text, as seen in zoom.
I don't see how the Jevons paradox would apply here. Code being cheaper and faster to produce obviously causes the demand for apps such as this one to grow. That's just supply and demand.
An example of where I think the paradox would apply might be one where LLMs made software engineers more efficient yet the demand for SWEs would grow.
I can only speak for $MY_JOB, but I'm pretty sure everyone was on Atom before VSC "got good". Atom had a good plugin ecosystem; what really drove the change was Atom's horrible performance issues whereas VSC was snappy and responsive.
What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.
> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people: backend developers, frontend developers, marketers, leaders, and more. I can lean on those experiences, fall back on how they did things, and implement their methods with AI.
Will that really work? You interacted with the end product, but you don't have the experience and learned lessons that those people had. Are you sure this isn't the LLM reinforcing false confidence? Is the AI providing you with the real thing or a cheap imitation and how can you tell?
You're probably right about the latter point, but I do wonder how hard it'd be to mask the default "marketing copywriter" tone of the LLM by asking it to assume some other tone in your prompt.
As you said, reading this stuff is taxing. What's more, this is a daily occurrence by now. If there's a silver lining, it's that the LLM smells are so obvious at the moment; I can close the tab as soon as I notice one.
> do wonder how hard it'd be to mask the default "marketing copywriter" tone of the LLM by asking it to assume some other tone in your prompt.
Fairly easy, in my wife's experience. She repeatedly got accused of using chatgpt in her original writing (she's not a native english speaker, and was taught to use many of the same idioms that LLMs use) until she started actually using chatgpt with about two pages of instructions for tone to "humanize" her writing. The irony is staggering.
It’s pretty easy. I’ve written a fairly detailed guide to help Claude write in my tone of voice. It also coaxes it to avoid the obvious AI tells such as ‘It’s not X it’s Y’ sentences, American English and overuse of emojis and em dashes.
It’s really useful for taking my first drafts and cleaning them up ready for a final polish.
https://ember.dev ’s deeper pages (not the blog, but the “resumelike” project pages) was written by claude with guidance and a substantial corpus of my own writing and i still couldn’t squash out all the GPTisms in the generation passes. probably net waste of time, for me, for writing.
It’s definitely partially solved by extensive custom prompting, as evidenced by sibling comments. But that’s a lot of effort for normal users and not a panacea either. I’d rather AI companies introduce noise/randomness themselves to solve this at scale.
The problem isn’t the surface tics—em dashes, short exclamatory sentences, lists of three, “Not X: Y!”.
Those are symptoms of the deep, statistically-built tissue of LLM “understanding” of “how to write a technical blog post”.
If you randomize the surface choices you’re effectively running into the same problem Data did on Star Trek: The Next Generation when he tried to get the computer to give him a novel Sherlock Holmes mystery on the holodeck. The computer created a nonsense mishmash of characters, scenes, and plot points from stories in its data bank.
Good writing uses a common box of metaphorical & rhetorical tools in novel ways to communicate novel ideas. By design, LLMs are trying to avoid true (unpredictable) novelty! Thus they’ll inevitably use these tools to do the reverse of what an author should be attempting.
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.
That's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks.
If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.
Also "my product will kill you and everyone you care about" is not as great a marketing strategy as you seem to imply, and Big Tech CEOs are not talking about risks anymore. They currently say things like "we'll all be so rich that we won't need to work and we will have to find meaning without jobs"
What makes it a scare tactic? There are other areas in which extinction is a serious concern and people don't behave as though it's all that scary or important. It's just a banal fact. And for all of the extinction threats, AI included, it's very easy to find plenty of deep dive commentary if you care.
There's arguably more dread and quiet constrained horror in With Folded Hands ... (1947)
Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life.
No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.
This hardly disproves the point: no one is taking this topic seriously. They're just making up a hostile scenario from science fiction and declaring that's what'll happen.
Lesswrong looks like a forum full of terminally online neckbeards who discovered philosophy 48 hours ago, you can dismiss most of what you read there don't worry
If only they had discovered philosophy. Instead they NIH their own philosophy, falling into the same ditches real philosophers climbed out of centuries ago.
At slow, manageable tempos, you can afford to use motions that don't scale to fast tempos. If you only ever play "what you can manage" with meticulous, tiny BPM increments, you'll never have to take the leap of faith and most likely will hit a wall, never getting past like 120-130 BPM 16ths comfortably. Don't ask how I know this.
What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled. IIRC, this is what Shawn Lane advocated as well.
I recommend checking out Troy Grady's (Cracking The Code) videos on YouTube if you're interested in guitar speed picking. Troy's content has cleared up many myths with an evidence-based approach and helped me get past the invisible wall. He recently uploaded a video pertaining to this very topic[0].
> What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled.
This is actually pretty close to what Stetina says. I just probably didn’t do a good job expressing it.
You’re oscillating above and below the comfort zone and that iteration like you say affords insights from both sides, and eventually the threshold grows.
Depends on the instrument. For wind instruments, the motions basically don’t change, and your focus is on synchronizing your mouth with your hands. Tonguing technique is different at high speed but you would typically practice with the same technique at low speed when learning a fast piece.
But the motions do change, at very slow tempos you can move basically one finger at a time, at faster tempos you have simultaneously overlapping motions.
On a trumpet? A clarinet? No, the motions don't simultaneously overlap. The fingering mechanics are slightly different at speed, but you would still start slow while using the higher speed mechanics and tonguing technique, not jump into high speed practice first.
No one is saying not to practice slow first. This advice is specifically for intermediate or advanced students who are putting a focus on developing speed specifically. Practice slow first, increase tempo slowly next, but when you hit a plateau, you need to add some repetitions that are well outside your comfort zone. You need to feel what it feels like to play fast, then clean it up.
It seems like this is a far more time efficient methodology to build speed on guitar, I do not know why it wouldn’t apply to other instruments like trumpet.
reply