OP’s linked article mentions the importance for them of reading their writing aloud. Humans construct sentences with a (mostly unconscious) sonic influence. How things sound really matters.

My theory is that LLM prose sounds slop-like because the base unit for an LLM is not a single sound.

Thus, perhaps, you get the uncanny, meandering, hollow-feeling outputs, which feel vapid to human readers, without the reader really knowing quite why.

I think this is also part of the reason why LLMs are rewarded for and thus more strongly exhibit their faux-punchy constructions, such as the infamous “it’s not [X], it’s [Y].” The transformer model can, with current tokenization, articulate some features of “good writing”, but not quite all.

I think there are a number of fairly simple SOLNs to this (or ways to test this hypothesis) without making tokenizers purely syllabic across the board, which would probably be a mistake.

Whether prose output quality even matters for models which are not explicitly trained for creative writing is highly debatable, though.

Releasing models openly doesn't mean providing the compute. It's beneficial for relatively GPU-poor Chinese orgs to let users run models themselves - by releasing the models openly - as it means the orgs don't have to provide the compute to run their own models.

Microsoft did not pay with money - it paid (mostly) with Azure cloud computing credits. MSOFT is then able to write this off as a loss against tax.

It is generally far more tax-efficient in the US to write a loss in this way than it is to write a loss for a cash investment.

In this case, I believe the difference was ultimately highly significant. When including MSOFT eventually writing-off the deprecating Azure hardware it had used to buy the OpenAI equity, the result was MSOFT's tax reduction being either close-to or exceeding the actual cash value of MSOFT's investment in OpenAI - IIRC.

These examples represent taxes that the US chooses not to collect - the US could choose to make investments like these less tax-efficient. Instead, by making them extremely tax-efficient, the US subsidises the transaction hugely.

There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.

A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.

If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.

It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.

The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.

I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.

It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.

But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.

This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.

Slight bug report - might just be HN hug-of-death related - on Arc browser, mostly without it as the active tab, I seem to have been stuck over Slough for some time (an ignoble fate).

I believe Arc reduces resources allocated to background tabs, and I don't think it likes being a background tab.

My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):

- Longitude

- Latitude

- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")

- Paths between destinations

- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.

I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.

More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.

I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.

How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.

The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting:

>"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction."

Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all!

I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level.

I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited.

Thanks for sharing this!

It’s a relatively big city geographically, and it’s really nice to be able to do 5 - 10 miles in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and not arrive at a social event in a sweat. The tube is really hot (high 30s!) in the summer and generally quite unpleasant (fleas in the upholstery!). So cruising around in the sun is a really big urban niche for rentals. Those that do lots of miles per day seem more likely to own e-bikes - delivery guys who probably average 50+ miles/day will absolutely feel the difference in their legs, and need to control their tiredness for their safety.

I think the tyres would limit the power output most. Probably quite annoying to have no rear mudguard in anything but the driest conditions. You’d be spraying a lot of crap up at the motor (and probably your back).

Attaching and detaching it looks relatively simple, though - removing it for downhills doesn’t look arduous. You could probably 3d print a clip for the frame.

Given the likely reduced power, and that the spec seems to be saying ‘500w peak, but 250w is sensible’ - probably up to the user’s needs whether the hassle is worth the extra watts per kilo. For those without mobility issues or longterm injuries, it’s usually best to optimise the rider rather than the bike for that.

I feel like off-road climbing would necessitate really wide, sensitive speed variance that this motor is likely not great at supporting. It strikes me that you’d want more direct pedal feedback.

Really fun bike design problem.

I don't think the alchemists suddenly became scientists, or died off to make way. It was a gradual transition.

They didn't quite work out how to transmute lead to gold, but the alchemists and their descendants did eventually discover - and create - substances that are worth more than gold by weight.

Now we have created sand that can teach itself how to talk. We covet and share the optimal incantations to speak into the sand. The best talking sand has ardent supporters, or cultists. Which it is depends on who you ask.

Most people do not understand how to make sand teach itself how to talk to us.

Those that do know the secret methods must feed the sand endless increasingly obscure and esoteric books because the sand has an insatiable appetite for our words. Those people might even break the law to obtain words to feed the sand.

Other people hate the sand. They say the sand eats too much water. That the sand might kill us all. Some sand is so powerful that some consider it a weapon.

Recently, the US government has tried to constrain the sand. They fear the sand in the East. It is getting more powerful by the day.

Camp dramatics aside, I think it's all arguably more than an approximation. Whether a thing is magic or just a magic trick depends mostly on whether or not you're the guy in the top hat, and if you're not, how many times you've seen the show.

Alchemy alone is, in some ways, a mostly solved - or irrelevant - problem. That alone is, I think, startling. LLMs are a weirdly neat continuation of it. Humans get used to magic real quick.

I wonder if you couldn’t distribute heavier parts across a swarm - perhaps separating the sender and receiver(s) - running the wave at an angle (or many angles simultaneously) to the surface.

The sources mention mostly aircraft, rather than drones, and human pilots aren’t as good as drones at flying in extremely tight formations, which might allow (if the tech allows in the first place!) parts to be distributed to work around pesky laws of flight.

1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:

A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?

B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.

2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?

It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.

Your "science made them men" point feels astute, compact, and one that feels familiar, as if I've come across it before in some form, relating to an older context, but I'm not sure where. If it's not an original take, I'd really like to read whoever you read it in. It's very sharp.

More broadly, "getting MKULTRA'd is an epic path toward maturity" is a deeply / darkly funny message.

It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.

Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.

"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.

I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.

That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.

This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.

Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.

Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.

This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.

Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.

It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.

But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.

Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events.

The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly.

Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies.

Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.

If the author's argument had been: "Gabriel Smith specifically is wasting some of his finite life commenting on this post on HN - which is for nerds" then it would at least have been partially accurate, if a little circular.