Also the book is $60 on Kindle and $80 for paperback? Who's the target audience?

That'll always be useful.

What's less useful, and what's changed in my own behavior, is that I no longer read tool specific books. I used to devour books from Manning, O'reilly etc. I haven't read a single one since LLMs took off.

How do any of the quotes and citations used coherently form that argument?

What is this writing style? Why does it feel like it doesn't want me to understand what the heck it's saying?

Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?

What's the criteria for pieces promoted?

Back in 2023 when I compared semantic search to lexical search (tantivy; BM25), I found the search results to be marginally different.

Even if semantic search has slightly more recall, does the problem of context warrant this multi-component, homebrew search engine approach?

By what important measure does it outperform a lexical search engine? Is the engineering time worth it?

Time spent, monetary cost, and uncertainty, are all practical concerns.

An engineering problem where you can ignore time spent, monetary cost, and uncertainty, is a privileged position. A very small number of engineering problems can have an engineering philosophy that makes no mention of these factors.

If you're risking money and time, can you really justify this?

- 'writing code that works in all situations'

- 'commitment to zero technical debt'

- 'design for performance early'

As a whole, this is not just idealist, it's privileged.

I read it twice; twice I got nothing.

It is incoherent. Vaguely attempting to take a swing at ... modularity???

Unfortunately, details take time and time takes money.

For a business's survival, the company's relative positioning in the market, access to sales and marketing channels, financing are much stronger concerns.

This is a designer longing for endless tinkering.

But that's not what the author's analogy would imply.

Still, I think you're saying the author is deducing the creative process as a kind of gradient descent, whereas my reading was the author was trying to abductively explore an analogy.

The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model.

My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.

I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many; it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.

Is it their effect on the total number of available choices?

Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?

The author's main counter-argument: We have control in the development and progress of AI; we shouldn't rule out positive outcomes.

The author's ending argument: We're going to build it anyway, so some of us should try and build it to be good.

The argument in this post was a) not very clear, b) not greatly supported and c) a little unfocused.

Would it persuade someone whose mind is made up that AGI will destroy our world? I think not.

> who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds

You invoked usage that connotes vapid meaning.

I see your argument: How can someone do something if they don't know what to do?

Explicit instruction is useful to a novice; say a toddler or someone new to a domain. But most adults don't spend the day explicitly telling each other how to behave socially.

A case can be made for individuals who display some difficulty learning this vicariously, but considering that should affect <1% of the world population, I think it's reasonable to be suspect of misbehavior.

i.e "you didn't tell me how to be nice, so how could I be nice?" is not a reasonable excuse for most adults.

Like the author, you're constructing a similar straw man argument: selecting a specific use of the word and making that the main point to argue against.

'be more empathetic' is an argument to behave differently with the people around you. Not think differently; behave differently.