Counter-Tech

They want you to return to work, to their simulation of happiness and community, because they’re afraid that if you don’t you might remember that there was a time when you were free.

If you submitted such work as part of an introductory statistics course, the professor would likely ask you to come to his office hours. And yet it became official policy in cities the world over.

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort.

Even a mid-range Macbook can do 10x or 100x more transactions per second on its SSD than a supposedly fast cloud local disk, because cloud providers sell that disk to 10 or 100 people at once while charging you full price. Why would you pay exorbitant fees instead of hosting your mission-critical website on your super fast Macbook?

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copyi... See more

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it

Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.