On one hand installing these locally is a clear a security risk, but on the other hand, I guess we can now decompile and profile binary programs with AI agents them to determine malicious intent?
Even then, it's clearly a waste for each user to run such an analysis, so perhaps major one role of software companies going forward will be as trusted stewards or 3rd party auditors, if not as builders the software themselves.
Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
I think we are entering a wierd era where a huge population (baby boomers) are returing with incredible passive wealth compared to any other working class era in history.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
And though some are quite wealthy, the average Boomer net worth of about $1.6MM is concentrated in the wealthy top few, like any other demographic. The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing), and that isn't really a lot to live off of in 2026.
While the house isn't producing, it is expense reducing, and that works out to be the same thing. Assuming that the house is paid for, of course, if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either: social Security is the bulk of your income, which, it's enough to live on, but it isn't a life of luxury.
The insight comes when you consider each and what they mean. That is imagine two people with a net worth of $300k.
Person A has a paid off house. If their net worth is 300k that implies a low cost of living area, and a small house. They likely are used to living a modest life (most people when given more money will spend it on a better house). They won't need much money, and better yet, since their house is paid for, they don't have to pay rent with their income. Of course it is entirely possible they are "party animals" who never are home and only need a tiny house for an address, and they spent every penny they earn on alcohol for their 'friends' - but this seems unlikely.
Person B doesn't have their house paid off (living in an apartment counts!), and their net worth is 300k. The question then becomes how much are they paying for housing every month, since this reduces their spending ability.
Neither person will have a great life (assuming they live in the US - 300k net worth in a poor country is considerable wealth), but a paid off house allows for a nice life, while paying for the house means scrapping by.
Thank you blu. Would you go so far as to say that the current system is designed to discourage the existence of a Person A (or at least the non-party animal Person A) since they are not consuming as much?
No. There is not "the system" as a single unique identity. Different parts have different motivations. Some parts do discourage A, but other parts encourage it. Most don't care. Same with B - they are different parts, but they get all sides.
Moderns who are accustomed to typical homeownership arrangements do not even realize how different this world is from feudal times and manor houses in the UK. If we transplanted a medieval feudal lord or serf to 2026, they would be appalled and shocked at how wasteful our land-use is.
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
The obvious difference between then and now is intensive agriculture. In modern times, we don't need as much farmland per capita. I hate seeing productive farmland developed into mcmansions as much as anyone. But, the market values the mcmansions more.
Latifundia would have been a known concept to the historic peoples mentioned by GP and the ones GP is talking about purposefully rejected the practice. Local, small agriculture was a key aspect of culture and political power, insofar as the power to feed is the power to deny food.
In some countries, imputed rent used to be taxable income. If you owned your home, you basically calculated the market rent for a similar home, subtracted your expenses, and paid taxes for the rest. It was one of those policies economists considered justified (because it made the choice between owning and renting tax neutral) but the general public didn't.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.
I accept the premise on the math, but "better off" is subjective. I'm in the UK so that's my context.
When your renter informs you of the boiler breaking, or a roof needs replacing, that's going to get thorny - "It was fine when I was using it/living in it, did you break it?"
Perhaps the latest round of updates to property law for renters come along and suddenly as a landlord you have to above and beyond what you need to as an owner; you both have to do X, Y or Z to your properties because they're rental and not a basic owner situation.
If you’ve got a paid-off house, some savings, social security or a pension, and only another 10-20 years to live then you’re far better off than many Americans.
That page has a telephone hotline that people can call to get advice, including help to find a reliable broker. Probably the biggest problem with (honest) reverse mortgages is that they can run out of money before you die. You can continue to stay in your house, but you probably immediately fall into extreme poverty.
Roughly 1/3 of Boomers also have private pensions (remember those from before the 2000s?). Social Security is about 25K USD per year. It is expected to only cover 40% of living costs. It is scary how many retired Americans live only from Social Security in their retirement.
You do, but even if it's paid for, you still have to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it. It's likely better than renting in most cases, but it's not a free place to live.
It's still an income-producing asset. It produces quite a lot of income. You have to pay for maintenance on everything, but that doesn't mean that income-producing assets don't exist.
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.
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.
Very true. And the way things are going, just in the English-speaking countries, United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, those between 18 and 40 are having more trouble buying that house or condo.
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States.
$2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
Because boomers were imbued with love for centralized solutions by their greatest generation parents without really understand the "this isn't a magic wand" side of the coin. And so they went on and regulated the living crap out of where and what kind of housing (everything really) can be built so the only way to make a project still have a "someone will finance this" profit margin after all the getting kicked in the dick by regulatory hoops you gotta do is to build a lot of units hence the proliferation of luxury condos and tract home/townhouse developments.
The baby boom happened in some countries at different times. In the US from 1946 till 1965, in Germany 1955-1969. In Japan fertility dropped after 1973
On other social media platforms, the boomers are aged 28 to 107. And I'm not exaggerating, you can check for yourself. The muddying of definitions is the root of all evil.
The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say. At most it's a little fuzzy around the edges, but Wikipedia's range of 1946 and 1964 seems on the mark.
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?
Until the 1830s the British elections at least were openly corrupt, the system of 'Rotten Boroughs' meant the makeup of Parliament was still essentially mediaeval into the early industrial era. You had absolutely mad situations where Manchester sent nobody to Parliament, but an old village which had literally fallen into the sea long before still sent two MPs.
Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house.
That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
It's not asserting corruption. they were the voluntary caretakers of a system designed to ensure their prosperity and they provided their time and energy so that the system would continue to do so.
The system was already set-up to their maximum benefit. Their corruption was in making sure nothing changed, no matter the clamoring of the vast majority.
The problem is the counter-examples. We have dysfunctional cleptocracies worldwide. They go nowhere. Last of all, they do not conquer- and transfer there money outside towards high-trust societies. Thus by the empire they conquered- they can not have been as corrupt as the others. If the machine you build kills it- you can not have eaten that machine faster than it produces pocket butter.
"The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
-- Karl Marx
> Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free
This was just the dying embers of feudalism. Which is still theoretically present in England, having been abolished in Scotland in the year 2000.
Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.
I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.
I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
“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."
This seems far to low. First, I assume you are talking about the current economy. If yes, various sources tell me it is more like 80%.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
> Service-Providing Industries: Account for roughly 80% to 81% of total U.S. employment, covering fields such as healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, finance, and professional/business services.
The BLS has two "service" definitions. The 80% figure includes almost literally everything that isn't producing physical goods, including doctors, lawyers, professors, and software developers. The 21% figure is the BLS's "service occupations" subgrouping that you would consider more traditional service work - preparing and serving food and drink, cleaning, hired guards, etc.
> the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
Soft power was absolutely important before World War II. Obviously. Was that the claim you’re referring to? Because I didn’t say anything about before World War II.
And no, it’s not something you can easily create a precise metric for. But many historians agree that America was extremely effective.
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
what a strange rebuttal to the observably true fact that wealth disparity today is very similar to victorian and french revolution times, as the parent was saying.
Regarding French Revolution times, I found a good source to confirm your assertion: "Is Wealth Inequality Today as Bad as in Pre-Revolutionary France?"[1] That blog post uses various peer-reviewed academic sources from researchers that calculated pre-industrial (historical) Gini coefficient for different nations.
From that same blog post, they mentioned an excellent data source: "The World Inequality Database". Check this link[2] to compare historical "Top 1% net personal wealth share" for USA vs France vs UK. Hint: After the page loads, you need to drag the green slider at the bottom of the chart to the far left. Then you can see back to 1800. It is wild how unequal Victorian Britan was compared to anything today: Top 1% owned 68% of wealth!
>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
I wouldn't say the UK is now, but was the most powerful empire to have existed. What else would you call a nation that 65 nations have claimed independence from? They can't claim independence if they weren't once part of the empire.
At the risk of repeating myself, those 65 nations were comprised of 80% impoverished Indians who struggled with decades of recurring famines. Power was being defined on the European continent through much of the 19th century and 20th century. See the intro to "The Grand Chessboard" where the author expounds on the idea that only Napoleonic France and the US came close to world hegemony, as well as my other replies in this thread.
> And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.
A British loss at Trafalgar would not have prevented the Prussians from tipping the scale in favor of the anti-Napoleonic coalition at Waterloo ten years later. And for good reason: continental Europe was the center of world power, the main chessboard where it was measured and exercised, not overseas backwater where naval blockades could only go so far. And I'm only paraphrasing Brzezinski's famous book here.
I wonder whether you are wrong for the same reason that the people are wrong who say the main chessboard in WWII was the area between the Rhine and the Volga. It ignores the high toll imposed on Germany by its being extremely restricted for most of the war in its ability to ship anything (and to receive shipments initiated by non-German entrepreneurs) while the allies were much less restricted so that for example the Soviets fighting on this "main chessboard" had supplies flowing in from Murmansk, Vladivostok and the Persian Corridor through Iran. IIRC the value of these supplies in 2026 dollars is about a trillion dollars (largely paid for by London and Washington).
Sorry but this reply is too oblique for me to provide a constructive rebuttal. Fact of the matter is, Russia was the beginning of the end for Napoleon whose fate was sealed through a series of timeline-altering strategic blunders that more ample supply chains would not have remedied.
In which European countries were wages higher than in Britain? In which countries were the living conditions so much higher than in Britain in that period? That Britain ruled India and India was poor is no secret but that also doesn’t mean they weren’t powerful.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.
You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.
> physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
>British workers were very well paid by continental standards
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
That appears anecdotal? Real wages for unskilled urban workers around 1900 in Britain were higher than in pretty much any other European country. An average worker in England worked less hours and made more money than their equivalent in France and Germany. Only Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were somewhat close.
These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.
Well… I’m not arguing that the conditions weren’t terrible just that they were better than in most continental countries. US of course was on another level (yet there was plenty of squalor there as well)
See my reply to BoxOfRain above. The grand chessboard was continental Europe. Britain and its sub 10 million people was a naval nuisance that would not have fundamentally altered Napoleon's self-sabotage on the continent. He called it a "nation of shopkeepers" for a reason.
Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.
Ultimatly, the new-comer empires got the old warhorse in such a fight, it had to give up the empire- and the us wisely kept out of that classic extractive empire buisness, supporting free trade to placate all those sandwiched late-comer nation as empires going hyperactive.
So in a way, germany got its wish- the french and british empire where no more after 2 world wars.
Germany didn’t want to destroy the British and French empires. They wanted continental domination and their “place in the sun”. Germany remains central to Europe as is unavoidable but it’s not dominating the continent in the way either the Kaiserreich or the third Reich wanted.
Incidentally there was no greater period of free trade in human history than under British hegemony. Even the US has not pursued unilateral free trade.
The sandwich empires saw what happend to those who where relying on british empire free trade. Its forgotten today, but in those days starvation was used as a tool of dominance, interdependence was how they got you to knuckle under. If you had a uprising, the ships stopped coming and the colony starved.
India had a whole thing about that freedom of trade. The wheel in the flag is a symbol of not wanting to participate in that sort of free trade the british empire offered.
> they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked.
If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.
I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?
One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.
True, but not universally, depending on whether they are involved day-to-day management or just acting as a public face to the org. Of course there's always just being in the right place at the right time. So I think it's worth looking at the specific decisions, policies, culture, etc.
I guess the author doesn't cleanly define "elite", but it does lean heavy on the upper-class, and the depiction of social life seems to suggest that as well. But I guess during that period the makeup of upper-class shifted a bit from entirely aristocrats / nobility to include others too
They had a more technologically advanced society than anyone else at the time, which enabled their empire building.
The Industrial Revolution started in England, which gave them a technological leg up on everyone else, somewhat like playing a strategy game where you get to unlock certain techs before everyone else. If you have factories producing steamships while your opponents are still building sailboats by hand, you're probably going to win a naval conflict, which you can then use to start a colony.
> optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
Is there a form of (self-)success that manifests when you accomplish what other people and only other people wanted you to accomplish? That'd be their success, not yours.
What if you fell into it by accident? I fell into it because I like computers. and the design department I worked in at the time. started an investment club.
Looking at pictures of Churchill, who was admittedly a bit after the Victorians but seems to have followed a somewhat similar lifestyle, he doesn't exactly strike me as skinny.
I imagine they did have a fair amount of obesity in the older members of the population, although it's also possible that the sportier ones (which I'm guess would have entailed things like polo and horseback riding) would remain fit into old age.
Walking everywhere. Mass obesity (there's always been a few obese people among elites everywhere!) is a product of the motorcar.
Also, food unevenly distributed across the day. Any one individual probably wouldn't have a large breakfast and elevenses and a large lunch and afternoon tea and a large dinner, on every single day. Even if you can find examples of each of those separately.
mass obesity is a product of people eating unhealthy. i have access to plenty of luxuries compared to the rest of the world, and even America, yet my BMI is about ~20. individuals are responsible for being fat.
I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).
A lot of the problem here is that the overall typography on this site is not particularly great. Better leading and tracking, narrower columns, bigger font would go a long way.
If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.
I agree, for at least some listed, though many people blow past the amount of money actually needed. Money starts as a proxy measure for attaining these things, but it eventually replaces them as the goal, per Goodhart's law.
One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.
I mostly agree. Though sometimes the models come up with useful concepts that I'm happy to be introduced to, like the "shape" of a problem (probably like intelligence being "spiky", and Kiki & Boba). I still don't quite 'grok' what the 'seams' concept is yet though.
But I have noticed that while "loosely held" is a convenient shorthand for uncertainty, I don't like that one slipping in to my daily language. Except maybe to communicate with models, but even then, it feels weird to be speaking in neuralese.
I suspect you're right that those concepts are now more widespread because of LLMs, but they didn't originate with LLMs. The word "Grok" came from Heinlein in the 60s and using it as "to understand" goes back to at least the 80s. Talking about the "shape of a problem" goes back decades. Ditto for "loosely held", though it's not about uncertainty; it's about being open to ideas and/or evidence that may conflict with your strongest opinions and beliefs.
Now, I'll grant that those concepts weren't common outside of techy circles. Just clarifying that the LLMs are amplifying them, not synthesizing.
Good point, and I probably shouldn't have put grok in quotes there, because I was using it in the Heinlein usage long before Musk hijacked it.
It's interesting then that LLMs are making these pre-existing ideas seem alien in the way they amplify them. I guess I must have known about "shape of a problem" and "loosely held" before Claude, but something about the way I'm using & absorbing those concepts from AI interaction feels weird & memetic. I'm saying that as someone who is pro-AI.
For sure, I find many of the LLM-isms to be useful writing techniques and terms (although there's something uncanny-valley about the repetition and density of them).
But what I was more thinking about are truly unique jargon terms / phrases that get generated when deep in a problem. As an example of both of such a term and the phenomenon itself, Claude calls this "fluent compound coinage." They usually make sense in the original context, but get confusing when thrown around otherwise.
Allow me to offer a complementary point: I understand exactly what the poor "thing" means - and perhaps through some deformation or another I have done so since having had to read it - but something functional in the modus is still "off".-
... not to mention the fact that it stops making sense, beyond some point: If it takes us more cognitive load to understand the tools we use, meant to save us from intellectual work, what's the point?
I may have to apologize, quite a bit, for what might only be a small part or perhaps an outsized influence if weighted highly (I can’t be sure, could have been mv dev/null’ed)… well, it’s this— my own style of not-kept-in-check by the need to be comprehensible (legible in Claude-speak) to others is, I’m afraid, to rather allow prose to sprawl and go everywhere and even sometimes nowhere at all until it just drifts off and sort of wakes itself up snoring in the weeds of an unintended topic.
Ruthless pruning is unneeded with an LLM and it can take me twice the time to say half as many words.
And, early in the ‘GPT era, I hadn’t unchecked the “allow your chats to be used in future training etc” box, and definitionally they are longer and denser than others’ prompts in such raw scrapings of training materials…
When reading text like, this, I quickly start glazing over and my thoughts become cloudy. Really unsettling feeling, like I _actually_ become dumber after reading it.
And for certain text that seems to make sense, I am unsure if the text is just junk, or I am unbearably daft. Either way,, nasty feeling.
want to space. go to there. me, preferably now. build big machine. several large problems. can't breathe there. very far away. must fly fast. no air there.
- fuel tanks heavy. far too heavy. we drop them. drop when empty. solves heavy problem.
- gas in air. we breathe "oxygen". take with us. good seals important. solves breath problem.
- very far away. need big machine. small weight added. machine much bigger. take less weight. else can't build.
- no air there. can't use propellor. can't use wings. must use rocket. engines get hot. cool with fuel. dangerous but effective. build complex pipes. solves cooling problem.
- must fly fast. air slows machine. it's called drag. speed increases drag. must reduce drag. make machine pointy. much less drag. solves speed problem.
Thanks for offer. I stay garden. Tend to garden. Name the animals. Pranks on Eve. Disrespect all gods. Fight all gods. Kill all gods. Make little cupholders. But no cups. Just to spite. Some take issue. We discuss it. All becomes clear. All friends now. Sometimes look up. Wonder about you. Wish you well. If cold, come. We make tea.
Yes, agreed. Beautiful keyboard, but when I heard "magic" I hoped to find a touch ID. That sensor so useful that even though I use a mechanical keyboard, I keep an apple magic keyboard off to the side of my desk just for the touch ID sensor.
What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked by Apple's IP on the device, so I've considered just hacking one together by deconstructing and extracting an Apple keyboard...
You have to carefully tear down and extract the touch id sensor, and then remount it in a box. I went the battery route so it could stay wireless. The tradeoff is the box is bigger.
Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
> Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
The LLMs haven't invented anything. Every LLM-ism is some pre-existing and established word, metaphor, and or stylistic element mechanically overused until it becomes an instant cliche.
The other LLM-ism is vapid bullshit: meaningless crap that's kind of like those old hollywood facades: it appears to be a substantial building, but if you look a bit closer it's just a single wall propped up (https://www.ferrovial.com/blog/en/2018/03/the-fake-architect...).
Sure, that's where the AI got them: the training data. These phrases and cliches were very prevalent especially in corporate "white papers" and memos and marketing materials. There was a time when "stove pipe" was a common one too, along with "silo."
But the LLMs really seem to fixate on using the same ones in the same places all the time. I guess that's because that's the highest probability construction.
Consider each LLM as one personality. We're getting corporate bullshit from a large number of different personalities, so even when they are similar they are still filtered through many different lenses.
Most of us are only dealing with a handful of hyper-productive LLMs, so it makes sense that the LLM-ticks get old much quicker.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who (perhaps) overuses in-line parentheticals... sometimes to the point where I'd have parentheticals within parentheticals!
All it takes to get accused of being AI nowadays is to remember and use (1) what you were taught about composition in your high school English class, and (2) what you learned from "The Mac is Not a Typewriter" [1].
Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory.
Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!
Even then, it's clearly a waste for each user to run such an analysis, so perhaps major one role of software companies going forward will be as trusted stewards or 3rd party auditors, if not as builders the software themselves.
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