That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?

> Summarize a technique for type erasure as is done in C++. Assume that your audience is familiar with all of C++'s features, but not with the technique of type erasure. The briefer the summary, the better, but don't omit any essential pieces or use vague language.

ChatGPT Plus generated a lot of text and code. Then I said:

> Now please summarize using only a few sentences.

and it replied:

> Type erasure wraps any concrete type `T` in a uniform container that stores a `void*` to the object plus a pointer to a type-specific static table of function pointers (the “vtable”). Each `T` provides its own table implementing required operations (destroy, copy/move, and any interface methods), and the container dispatches all behavior through that table. This lets unrelated types share a runtime interface without a common base class, with lifetime and semantics fully defined by the per-type table.

Not perfect, but pretty good.

It’s like a children or a puppy. People get impressed and go “how cute” at anything it does.

I see designers and PMs vibe coding shit that they would complain for days if it was delivered by a developer. I see C-Levels delivering reports that would make them eviscerate some intern.

Could you publish under AGPLv3, so any AI users with recognizable patterns from your code can get in trouble?

Same here.

I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet.

I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies.

I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry.

All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon.

I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products.

Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?

    The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

    Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

    The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

> It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today.

You are seeing the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire a bit too rosy. Compare and contrast https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

I can't image such people are living meaningful lives in any capacity. They're up there with consumers that think the only purpose in life is to cheerlead for a corporation and buy their wares.

--

[0] - Any self-stabilizing system that operates much slower than us - such as ecosystems or climate - is, from our perspective, static.

I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.

When I do have expertise, I use them because I am able to check.

Their rational is coming off more professional

Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get).

LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote.

LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC.

Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.

We operate within our own time and energy budgets, man. I might never get to that literature. My peaceful times in life where I could chill and choose what to do are over and I don't expect them to ever come back. Though who knows.

And to be clear, maybe some things were genuinely lost when we switched to the written word. But I have to believe it was a net gain.

Time will tell if that's true here as well.

I think that's got more to do with schools just literally not teaching students to read in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing

https://academic.oup.com/book/41217/chapter-abstract/3506879...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

Maybe they are training for that tone now, either deliberately or accidentally. But my belief that they weren't initially comes from the fact that it's a new tone that I doubt anyone designed with deliberation. It bears strong resemblance to "corporate bland", but it is also clearly distinct from it in that we could all tell those two apart very easily.