Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka

Blah, blah, LLMs: whatever you think of them, you have to admit they are very productive at emitting discourse.

Novel terms with narrow definitions get fuzzier in meaning as they are more widely adopted.

You’re absolutely right!

A few people have asked me (an old man) how I manage to use LLMs in my life without being driven insane by their horrid new-fangledness, their hallucinations, their wanton sycophancy, the hype, the grift, and the everpresent risk of being lured into psych…

I’m a big fan of explaining difficult and unintuitive concepts through analogy to even more unintuitive ideas — a technique known to the ancients (and my friend Seth, who first explained it to me), as obscurum per obscurius.

Thome Ptacek, with whom I alternate between disagreement and agreement at approximately 50hz, writes about AI, amicably titling his article “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts” (and that’s how you get to #1 on Hacker News, which is where I posted a version

There a class of tasks that drive me to distraction, and that’s when I am obliged to execute them myself, in the full knowledge that a computer could do them better and faster.

I work in an entirely (mostly) remote organization.

I didn’t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I’m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form — I still believe that the question “what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel?”