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Last week I came down with a fever and decided to run some experiments on whether the new GPT could generate long-form fiction. Around the same time, I saw a HN comment about how technology gains have lead SWEs to work at higher levels of abstraction—and I thought “huh, why not writers?”

Anyway so I was locked indoors for a week and a half and I spent it coding an answer that question.

Most of the magic sauce here is just in making it feel really snappy and good to edit—making it easy for the human to collaborate with the objectively faster LLM. The underlying prompt engineering is cool, but it’s the feeling that you can do more than just shoot a prompt at ChatGPT and hope for a good result, or start writing and hope for a good autocomplete.

Definitely gave me some ideas for future LLM experiences I want to try out, let me know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38385884

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Sunday you could still have reversed this and treated it as a blip. Now it's Tuesday—there's not really an option anymore that doesn't cause some kind of lasting damage.

This is kind of like the leadership of the executive branch switching parties. You're not going to say "why would the staff immediately quit?" Especially since this is corporate America, and sama can have another "country" next week.

It's still on the early side but it's finally at the point where I would happily use it for my original project, so I figured I'd post it. It's also—almost by accident—fully remote compatible (permissioning system included!), so you can host it on a box and then connect a program to it remotely.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37407429

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.

The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?

Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.

We're going to see both improvements in application, and parallel improvements in the underlying model.

Who cares if it's AGI if someone figures out how to turn it into a competent tax accountant?

It's truly a remarkable place but often feels like a rocket ship pulling itself apart at the seams—a lot of exceptional velocity and a ton of social problems that just no one can seem to get a grip on.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35830663

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I appreciate this as an anti-inequality measure, but it feels like in California low/med income buyers are being outpriced by a lot more than 20% of a down payment.

"We can fit 18 million groups into 14 million units of housing, as long as we pay 20% of the cost" feels like a really last ditch housing policy.

You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.

If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism.

I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth!

If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc.

If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.

We just kind of walked straight past the Turing test and nobody cares.