If LLMs are "just" statistical models, humans are "just" a bunch of neurons squirting chemicals back and forth. There's no pixie dust in our brains that makes us special.

LLMs are not conscious: They have no analogues for feelings or senses and no construct of selfhood. But if a statistical model had those things—if it did all the mundane, physical bookkeeping our brains do to produce "real" emotions and motivations—then there's no reason it couldn't be as conscious as we are.

LLMs can't begin to have functional emotions unless they're (for instance) explicitly seeking out or avoiding situations based on the emotions those situations would produce in them. Has a chatbot ever responded to one of your requests with, "no, doing that would make me sad"?

Neither of these is "better" or "more precise"; in fact, LLMs will generally choose randomly between these candidates based on temperature, and SynthID should not distort the output of an LLM any more than the default temperature settings do already.

I agree that those are not the same sentences, but if the difference matters to you, you shouldn't be using an LLM. This difference exists at the level of what sounds better and is more evocative; to an LLM, nothing sounds like or evokes anything. They simply do not write good prose.

It's also easy to get too used to dashes and start sticking them in places where they don't belong. If you're using a coordinate conjunction like "and" or "but," a dash is awkward and redundant. "A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter," can more easily be "a complete thought, and it shifts" or "a complete thought — it shifts."

Dashes take up a lot of space. Like exclamation points, they draw the eye. Does the eye really need to be drawn to "a complete thought; it shifts"? If you let them, dashes will replace all your other punctuation marks, and your writing will become a soup of horizontal lines. Dashes are a sometimes food.

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash.

is noticeably weird-looking. Even a spaced en-dash looks a bit small; a spaced hyphen is just odd. But if you type it like this:

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time—proper dashes, though, not hyphens.

it becomes much more conventional and legible. If you're going to use hyphens, it's better to admit the typewriter convention and use two, like so:

> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time -- I just use the standard keyboard hyphen, but twice.

> hotdogs are shit in my opinion

Then by all means, substitute the street food of your preference. Unless you disdain street food in general, which would be irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food :)

Maybe! A garage can be cleaned very thoroughly, especially if you renovate with that in mind. I wouldn't bet on it, though. A good doctor probably could operate out of a garage, but they wouldn't. And a good restaurateur would take time to think about their menu.

These signals select for people with domain knowledge and experience. Status has nothing to do with it. Even the cheapest street food will be evaluated against its competition based on external signals, and so better, more experienced vendors will tend to know how to present themselves well.

All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?

Look at this poster template. You could make it yourself in 10 minutes, with PowerPoint or any of a million other drag & drop poster-makers. https://s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails.venngage.com/template/1b...

People may think, "oh, it's a bit simple. I guess they're a small business," but so what? If we rule out the option of hiring an actual designer, it's gonna be that or "ew, look at that shitty AI poster."

https://jacobnelson.ca/2022/01/17/the-beauty-of-no-name/

If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.

An ugly AI-generated menu shows a naive disregard for the actual experience of your customers. This attitude will bleed into the food quality.

> Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.

Then throw something together in MS Word. That's free. It's not bad for something to be low-effort; it just needs to be commensurately simple.

Oh it's so simple you'll kick yourself. If you save the macro to the q register, just paste from the q register and it'll print out the corresponding inputs. Copy the inputs into the w register and now you have that macro saved in a second place.

Some people probably do save macros in their vimrc this way, but I use it to correct typos I made when recording the macro. BIG help.

Multi-cursors can be nice, but a sufficiently powerful implementation of that looks like helix or kakoune, and those are at least as complex as vim, if not more.

When you're good at vim, it is invisible. Once you're good at writing macros, you can do stuff which is impossible with Sublime-style multi cursors.

I assume those are situations where the author would have "just written a quick script," but vim macros are an interactive scripting language specifically designed to tersely express text transformations. Your script is never going to be quicker than that.

I'm not saying this as a vim partisan or anything. You could easily argue that vim over-optimizes and saves little time in the grand scheme—that's a fair critique. But it's strange to insist that complex tools are complex only for the sake of complexity. It's a weirdly conspiracist mindset.

https://www.reddit.com/r/knots/comments/12vsuk1/how_to_tie_a...

You only really need one bend. I suggest the zeppelin bend, but they're all pretty similar. Hitches can benefit from a bit more variety, but a round-turn with two half-hitches will serve you well in most situations, along with its more secure variant, the anchor hitch. There's a trade-off between how secure a knot is and how easy it is to untie, which is why the less-secure variant is useful.

The best loop is the angler's loop, which will even hold in bungee cord. The alpine butterfly is also good to know because you can tie it "in the bight" (without access to either end of the rope), which is very handy.

Bindings are (I think) the most commonly-used family of knots for most people. Lashing a load into a truck so it won't move, tying a bag shut, and even tying shoes are all situations for bindings. For large loads, I'd suggest a trucker's hitch, which is good for (e.g.) tightly strapping a load into a truck bed, hence the name. For smaller situations, like cinching a bag shut, try the jam hitch—an underappreciated favourite of mine. It works like a zip tie, tightening around an object and not loosening. (Make sure the knot itself is tied tightly before you zip it. After you zip it, you can tie the ends together for extra security.)

Zeppelin bend: https://www.animatedknots.com/zeppelin-bend-knot

Anchor hitch: https://www.animatedknots.com/anchor-hitch-knot; round turn & two half-hitches: https://www.animatedknots.com/round-turn-two-half-hitches-kn...

Angler's loop (sometimes called "perfection loop"): https://www.animatedknots.com/perfection-loop-knot; alpine butterfly: https://www.animatedknots.com/alpine-butterfly-loop-knot.

Trucker's hitch (feat. alpine butterfly): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o3BcaoPXK5Q; jam hitch (aka "rolling hitch zip tie" or "reverse midshipman's hitch"): https://www.reddit.com/r/knots/comments/12vsuk1/how_to_tie_a.... (Though these have "hitch" in the name, I'd argue they're better described as bindings, because they preserve tension.)

If nothing else, learn the round turn & two half hitches, the alpine butterfly, and the trucker's hitch. Some combination of these will serve you well in most situations.

One final tip, while I'm talking about knots. You may be tying your shoelaces wrong: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm.

> They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards.

Whole language learning is a perfect example of this: The fifth word on the Wikipedia page for whole language is "discredited." [1] It's been linked to systemic regressions in literacy among children. Clever kids with lots of support can succeed despite whole language methods, but in general, whole language is significantly worse than phonics. I'm glad it worked for your kids — hands-on attention from a parent is an excellent way to learn :) — but in the classroom, it is empirically much worse than the alternatives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

> The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

It is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless, and I'm skeptical that there's some special trick we can pull to make the majority of kids passionate about fourth grade math class. A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division, and I think it's better to make learning a smooth and efficient experience than to jangle enrichment opportunities in front of their faces like cat toys. Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?" No! Just tell me what's going to be on the test and let me do the work!

At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.

I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.