But humans still manage to wrangle these, sometimes seemingly effortlessly, through a process which we call by shorthand "taste". This is a largely vibes-based heuristic that combines expertise with life experience and cultural training -- intuition, more or less.

This is likely not possible to automate either -- aspects of it may be automatable for a given expert, in small pieces in narrow subsets of their particular domains of interest, but even those likely will require some manual intervention.

This is in part because it is, to a large degree, a black box, even to the expert deploying it. With some self-awareness and strong language skills we can articulate approximations of the judgements that go into taste. But even those will fall short, as even the most self-aware individual will fail to notice certain judgements and dependencies.

In practice many of these are not even explicitly articulable. Humans are idiosyncratic and messy and dynamic, and the suggestion that we can build a machine that approximates this in a way that pleases our sensibilities and doesn't require supervision is kind of ludicrous, even in light of recent developments.

It's a work of art

One of the points the parent makes, along with the TFA, is that academia -- or more specifically, the "mathematical community"-- is a setting primarily for creating and ingesting mathematical knowledge, and disseminating it to the next generation and to other fields. Humans absorb this material slowly, through lots of discussion and collaboration -- it is necessarily a slow process. Facilitating this is one of the important functions of academia. Your usage of academic as a slur here is a bit silly for this exact reason.

I don't claim it is perfect, and we can argue about pedagogy in elementary courses till the cows come home. That's not really material. But this is one of the only settings in which such knowledge is broadly valued for its own sake, and in which there is a semblance of incentive to help others "know" this stuff as well, be they future generations of mathematicians, science and math educators and communicators, practitioners in other fields, or genuinely curious amateurs.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...

This requires some citation or justification.

Diagnosis is not a criminal conviction in a North American court of law. In particular, reasonable doubt -- particularly among casual, non-clinical, self-deputized jurists who don't generally have any insight into the patient's chart, let alone medical qualification whatsoever -- is not a sufficient justification to withhold diagnosis.

In your post, you are leaning a bit too heavily on vibes to do the heavy lifting in making your points. For example, you claim there exist people with epilepsy who prefer to be labeled as autistic, but you don't say how many people are doing this, why they are doing this in a way that doesn't strawman, nor why this is even topical.

My interpretation is that you are hoping the reader will have specific visceral (vibes based) reactions to these facts and the drama of the spectacle you've described -- e.g. "yikes, some morons are conflating correlation with causation/identification and using that faulty reasoning to claim a diagnosis they don't deserve". Please correct me if I'm misrepresenting what you are trying to communicate, it is not my intention

My suspicion is that this is a tiny number of people to begin with, and not an indictment of autism diagnosis in the way you believe it is. In fact, most of the people you seem to take issue with are self-diagnosing. What specific "methodology, diagnosis, and relevance to every day healthcare" are you taking issue with then?

More than anything, they are buying a position within the ecosystem. Many of us could get a version of an app deployed in short order that implements most core HF functionality, but I am sorry to say that this is very far from the "hard part" of building a business, and this was the case even before coding agents were a thing. It's no small thing to become the first tool pretty much everyone reaches for in a particular niche, and therefore the incumbent in that niche

And there's lots of inertia keeping companies and developers on these incumbents like HF and GitHub -- see also Microsoft's play here dumping billions into a company that is basically peanuts and probably nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft normally would like. But they bought it at a time when they were trying to make Microsoft synonymous with open source, and it was a great play to that end. Likewise Nvidia wants to be synonymous with AI. Even if HF is a loss leader, the positioning is probably worth it

To a lesser degree, Nvidia probably also might like to reinvigorate its flagging cloud compute business and this could be a natural way to do that. At least TechCrunch thinks this, but I, an overconfident layperson, feel that the positioning is where most of the value is for Nvidia, and consolidating that will act as a force multiplier for that + anything else they may want to do with this space

I like the idea of playing with granularity. I'll also suggest: one way to make timestamps available but less of a focus is to add friction. Require an extra click into a post metadata page that loads with a full page refresh. Any friction introduced reduces a feature's usage, and even as little as just adding an extra page refresh tends to be enough to reduce its usage by an order of magnitude or more. If you wanted to be particularly sadistic you could require the user download a pdf with that data lol

It is important to remember that herbs are difficult to study in this setting compared with isolated compounds -- likely because their pharmacological and chemical compositions are sensitive to many factors: hour and season of harvest, form consumed (raw powder, alcohol extract, cold water infusion, fat emulsion, hot water infusion, combustion, pyrolysis, essential oil), part consumed (leaf, root, flower, seed), among staggeringly many others. Anyone with experience consuming cannabis or coffee can probably testify to the above

Not to mention that the pharmacologically active compounds in many plants are far from being comprehensively understood, let alone their interactions and dynamics

This isn't to say that every claim about herbs is to be taken seriously. My point here is more that there is no good reason to dismiss the herb itself as a cause yet simply because it's an herb and a fairly mundane one at that. There are easy examples of herbs which have pronounced physiological effects, used for recreation, performance enhancement, as literal poison, to induce labor, to thin the blood -- among others.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19585478/

Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021? Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge? What was the expert concensus on the topic when the author wrote about it? What meaning did this slang have back then?

What technologies were commonplace? He said he needs help with something I'm an expert in -- can I help him, or was it over a decade ago?

What was happening culturally when this was written? What was the weather like? Did this collection of posts with a dour tone get posted during a global pandemic when mostly everyone was self-isolating? Did he write this post about his loved one before or after her death?

I mean hopefully I don't need to sell you on why this information is useful and actually antithetical to addictive, low nuance, engagement-driven social media. We need more media literacy, not less, and de-emphasizing critical details like this seems problematic

I do sympathize with the challenge and know that there aren't really easy answers here, and every possible change is likely to ruffle someone's feathers, but I have a feeling there is another way to achieve what you're after.

If it's worth saying at all then it's likely not actually a parenthetical. If it's not worth saying, then you should cull it. Yours seem to mostly fall in this latter category, in my assessment anyway

Decide what you are trying to communicate and be sure that every word is in service to that message and that message alone. For example, you are discussing the practice of writing. That's why I'm in this thread, as a reader. In the middle of a sentence about finishing your novel, you mention via parenthetical that you're looking for an agent. Maybe the intent here was self-promotion -- you hope an agent or someone who knows one will read this -- fine. But if you can't decide and plan to use a parenthetical instead, know that the reader will be paying a dear cost: the sentence containing the parenthetical will be substantially more painful to read. Subsequent uses will be worse.

By that second paragraph, you blew your parenthetical budget, and yet you went on to deploy three more. Parentheticals need to be vanishingly rare as they are an eyesore. Yes, if you'd like to die on that particular hill, you can use them with stylistic intent. Go for it. But for the reader it will probably grate.

For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.

One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.

I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.

Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper.

Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played

Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?

For instance, I am wondering what exactly you are responding to with this comment, since the game described in the article is not really about teaching the kid to code with AI at all? I mean, what you wrote is interesting, but it isn't really topical

The blog post that I read mentions a single generative AI feature baked into the game that allows the player to create a single item once per day using a text prompt. But it is one single feature with limited uses. The blog post devotes very little ink towards describing it, and it is very clear that the goal of the project is not to use AI to teach coding, but more to provide a constrained, hackable sandbox environment with a deliberately impaired scripting language -- so, lots of "basic building blocks" as you say.

Was there something else in the post that I missed?

Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.

Before calling me dishonest, did you stop to consider that maybe you didn't understand my comment, or that you weren't clear with your meaning?

I genuinely don't think you understood what I wrote.

If I operate a business, you are not necessarily entitled to transact with me how you please. I can implement whatever rules I want so long as I am not outright committing discrimination against a legally protected category and so long as I am upholding other fiduciary obligations.

For all you know, the site operator is opposed to AI agents on moral grounds, or has beef with the developer of the specific LLM interface you are using.

More practically, an e-commerce website often won't make a profit if a purchase is too small. If they find that LLM users are easily bypassing their upselling tactics that usually result in higher basket sizes, then ideally they would adapt their approach to LLMs or implement a minimum order size, but they are also perfectly within their rights to simply ban you.

I am not saying that this is the likely reason -- just that there are reasons, many, and often they aren't very obvious unless you are in their shoes.

Every kind of business does this sort of thing! A software consultant or designer might only take money from healthcare companies, and not talk to anyone offering (apparently, to a naive outsider) equivalent work in a different industry. A restaurant might implement a dress code. A cab driver might insist you not wear strong perfume.

Some rules that externally seem flippant and unreasonable exist for reasons that are entirely sensible, but also entirely nonobvious externally. In any event, I don't agree that your usage is equivalent to a manual session, if it were, the operator wouldn't be able to detect it! Therefore they are within their rights to detect this and disallow it. There are plenty of reasons that they might do this, and unfortunately you probably don't have the information needed to interrogate those in a meaningful way