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Continental philosophers do frequently write complete nonsense (often intentionally), but this isn't hard to follow.

> Althusserian theory

though I think using this term is rather un-feminist because of the part where he killed his wife, but basically continental philosophers will forgive you for anything as long as you're a French communist.


Halte, tu serres ! as another well-known French communist used to call him.

IME they're usually the first thing you see when you get to the comments, so the really long essays are possibly a way to bore people into not getting to the comment section.

They use automated graders now. It's more likely the communication style was rewarded by overly strict grading rubrics.

(ie "honest caveats" wording comes from a reward for being honest about drawbacks instead of covering them up)

Note Opus 5.5 is much less likely to do it.


AI writing style comes from post-training, which is entirely under the control of the labs. It's not copying it from any public sources.

I didn't say it's copying anything. It's learning styles - all of them - in pre-training. Post-training is just about giving it the right defaults.

Doesn't change my point anyway - even if post-training, labs naturally want the LLM to come off as smart (well, except for Grok). Post-training is where they "untrained" em-dashes and such, due to complaints of users.


I'd heard an interesting theory that in training on customer chats there's a lot of interactions like this:

Agent: _wall of text_

User: yeah sounds great, do it

Which has the predictable outcome of biasing towards wall of text responses.


Vibe coding hasn't existed for years, has it?

believe it or not, it has.

Exploiting people and resources is a terrible way to be extremely profitable; it's very inefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

This is why economics is called "the dismal science"; slaveowners got mad that economists told them having slaves was inefficient and decided the economists were bores.


“I never thought I would be so rich as to be able to own a car, but I did become rich — so rich that in the end I could give up working if I liked. That was a great surprise to me.

But at the same time, it was the irony of life that while I could afford a car, I could not afford a maid."

- Agatha Christie


It's imputed income because you don't have to pay rent.

This is the most European thing I’ve read all week. Income is inflow of money, while rent is an expense. The avoidance of expense should not be considered income for tax purposes: it would discourage frugality.

If you applied that principle consistently, it would be much worse to tax income, since that discourages production.

No, that's just a measurement methodology. It's income because it's a valuable product that you receive.

Consider a farm that grows wheat on 15 acres of fields. Are those fields an income-producing asset? If so, your house is also an income-producing asset.


Pangram is reliable.

It would be easy for them to use AI for ideas and then write the article themselves though.


Turns out if you’re good at technical writing you’re classified at 100% AI

That would be unlikely unless you're a single pass transformer model.

Pangram is at least on some text very unreliable. From the story a while back about the mother at the ball game: when she wrote a medium or substack essay about it, various people in that thread (including myself) used pangram on the essay, and came back all over the place. 100% (both ways!), 20-something, 60-something, etc. It was eye-opening about how to take claims that something is AI-written or human-written.


Pangram is tuned to err on the side of human written if not sure. AI written is much stronger signal than human written.

That's not consistent with Charlie Finch' findings.

Nope, they're all universally terrible

> Get Crank to start Time Machine backups immediately when I connect my HDD and notify me when the backup is done.

Is that not how it works out of the box?


Not really. macOS may wait for idle time, may prioritize internal disk and the backup will go extremely slow on an HDD, there's no notification whatsoever.

It's a very specific thing for me really, I connect the HDD specifically for doing backups as fast as possible then I want to disconnect and store it back so I can keep using my laptop. I don't have a desk anymore where I can keep these things connected all the time.


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