The piano piece is nice. You might enjoy Lubomyr Melnyk.
I think its a good approach to discover and build upon what feels good. There are plenty of pianists that can play a catalogue of songs, or improvise "flawlessly", but rareness or uniqueness are great qualities for art to have.
I'm not sure how well the same applies to work, though, where fulfilling implicit or explicit standards plays more of a role. A developed "taste" plays a role in doing e.g. a good sysadmin job, but if you're creating something unique here, any successor is likely to have a bad time, no matter how beautiful this creation seemed at the time.
I do agree with the idea that passion can be a big driver in both worlds, it just seems to me that in work there's more to gain if it is harnessed to some degree.
Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.
I mean, it only takes a few paragraphs of filler text, hyperbole, "catchy" juxtapositions, and loose logical threads to raise suspicions.
But yeah, I would also like these two minutes of my life back.
Well, as someone who has also generated some text with LLMs, at least I learned that it's still possible to generate truly excruciating stuff with the "right" model and prompt.
As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.
Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.
I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1].
This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.
But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.
I'm not a native speaker, but to me that quote doesn't necessarily imply an inability of OP to get up the curve. Maybe they just mean that the curve can look flat at the start?
Then again, LLMs are well-suited to translate stuff, a relatively grunt work kind of task, so porting libs to your ecosystem of choice is a lot more feasible now.
Perhaps there is a future where individuals can translate large numbers of libraries, and instead of manually porting future improvements of the original versions to the copies, just rerun the translation as needed.
Yup, I recently started doing more development in Nim. I love the language, but the user community is (currently) small, which means the ecosystem of libraries available isn't as big. But LLMs are a massive equalizer here and has made it a lot easier for me to get things done with Nim.
It's not hard to do this as a human, at least if that human is trained in gathering and transforming written information.
What makes a huge difference here is the ease and speed. I recently did a similar analysis of my HN posts. I have hundreds of posts, and it took like 30 seconds with high quality results. Achieving this quality level would have taken me hours, and I have some relevant experience.
This certainly opens up some new possibilities - good ones like self-understanding, potentially ambiguous ones in areas such as HR, and clearly dystopian ones ...
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