A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more
When you choose whom to follow on Twitter, you’re choosing what types of mindsets and aesthetics to expose yourself to on a regular basis. You’re choosing what types of conversations to have. You’re choosing to be reminded regularly of certain things, and not of others. This is a kind of Programmable attention.
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more