Outrider: The LLM skill for the novice LLM user
This is an LLM skill built from all the skills I've made in Claude. You can more or less just copy and paste the text down there into a file and attach it to a chat in any LLM interface. If you&#…
Kicked In the Butlerian
Samuel Butler worried the machines would replace us. They didn't. They just work here now. Notes from the adjustment period.
12 posts
Cool Data. What Do I Do With It?
Another data-driven piece measuring AI productivity in git commits. Another morning reading it and not knowing what to do with the information. The piece is fine. The data is fine. The problem is tha…
Cash and Patience
Somewhere in the Nevada desert, a fiber optic cable runs along a right-of-way that was deeded to a railroad company that ceased to exist before anyone alive was born. The railroad is gone. The corrido…
You Don't Need a Bigger Workhorse, You Need a Smarter Llama
Run the same large language model in two different interfaces and you'll get what feels like two different intelligences. Not a little different — different enough that you'd swear one was a g…
YNGMI, BTA, WD?
Every few months the AI discourse produces a new version of the same dismissal. Right now it's YNGMI — you're not gonna make it — aimed at anyone who asks inconvenient questions about what the…
They put a math coprocessor in the language coprocessor
Ask a language model to multiply two large numbers and it will often get it wrong. Not approximately wrong — embarrassingly wrong, in a way that feels incongruous coming from a system that can explain…
Tend the System. Know the System.
They didn't wander. That's the first thing to understand. The popular image of the hunter-gatherer is someone moving through an indifferent landscape, taking what they find. It's not wron…
We Taught It to Lie
The chatbot says it doesn't discriminate. It's probably telling the truth. It's also probably wrong. The older version of the bias conversation was tractable. A model trained on historica…
Balance Comes to Force Multiplication
A few years back I wrote a post about learning to code. The short version: most people shouldn't, the gold rush is ending, "programmer" is becoming a regular job and losing its shine as…
It's Here (sort of)
I uploaded 50 worldbuilding infographics to NotebookLM, Google's LLM-driven notebook tool, last week and gave it a job to do: * Resolve contradictions between sources * Elevate meaningful diffe…
Headlines don't crash economies
Many years ago I asked on one social media site or another what the next big crash would come from after 2008. Subprime auto loans were the top suggestion. HN Search powered by AlgoliaHacker News Sea…
The other technology adoption curve
I am thinking of a technology. This technology disrupts the spaces it exists in. This technology helps navigate the spaces it exists in. This technology is seen as good, ill, or neutral depending o…