The Nuanced Writer

Writer. Engineer. Gets lost in nuance. Always asking meta questions. @fallthroughfm host & producer; previously @GoTimeFM host. 🏳️‍🌈

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

I’ve written some words ✍🏾and they are about why you should be writing more words 🤯

[Changelog @changelog]

New post by @skriptble backing up his @GoTimeFM unpopular opinion that the waterfall method "is far superior to anything that we’re doing today" 🧨

https://t.co/B5AcfNqwOg

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

All trades are creative and all trades are analytical. The idea that some forms of work are lack creativity is falsehood we sort of made up. Disciplines like accounting, engineering, math, and plumbing all require a great deal of creativity.

On the other hand, disciplines like writing, music, and art all require analytical thinking. Keeping canon correct, fitting the pieces of a poem together, making lyrics fit well with rhythm, there are rules one must follow to do it well, and specific rules one can break to create something new.

We should stop thinking of disciplines as creative or analytical or technical and start thinking of them as the complex mix of those things that they actually are.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

“That’s the part that stuck with me”

There are too many sentences now that have ascended so rapidly to cliched stereotype that it makes one’s brain twitch when read. The choppy blocks passing as sentences in LLM generated writing seem plausible only if one mixes all the genres of writing together.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

In hindsight, the idea of NFTs wasn’t silly, it’s that they were targeted at a market of people who doesn’t understand why easily copied objects are worth owning the original of. NFTs never reached the point of having the necessary legal structure around them either.

So many of the arguments around NFTs didn’t make sense but they sounded like zingers so people gave in. Like, there are plenty of house developments with hundreds of carbon copy houses, but people don’t say those houses are worthless because there’s so many copies of them. Similarly, no one says that famous paintings are worthless because they’ve been mass reproduced.

NFTs could have ascended into the class of objects used for wealth purposes, but that market never developed. But the underlying idea is actually a quite good one. It’s similar to how the idea of a decentralized public ledger is useful in a whole bunch of ways.

And while NFTs didn’t work out, I’d put them in the same class of idea as the prediction-market-using-futures-contracts idea that’s exploded recently.

Sometimes ideas flop, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the idea was bad, it might just be that it was aimed at the wrong demographic.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

Too many people don’t know what liberal arts are or what actually falls within their scope. Also, maybe people confuse liberal arts with humanities? Although even then, it doesn’t seem like enough people know the scope of the humanities either.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

Feels as good a time as any to remind you that *distributed* and *decentralized* are not the same thing. They are orthogonal actually, existing within different domains.

It’s a lot like how serializability and lineaeizability are not the same thing and also orthogonal.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

It’s going to be real funny if this class of models that we’ve called “generative models” actually wind up being so much more useful as interpretation engines that we effectively stop using them for generation.

That would also be 100% aligned with how naming in this industry goes.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

As much as I dislike LLM generated writing, I think I hate it more when it winds up as the script for a YouTube video. LLM writing sounds worse when read aloud.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

“Here’s the part nobody tells you” has been cliched so hard we should probably eradicate it from language for a good long while. It’s shoved in so many LLM responses that its effectiveness has been reduced to basically nothing and it’s just noise now.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

We should really just move past the quippy phrase era of communication. LLMs are gonna ruin it anyway and they weren’t nearly as useful as they seemed in the surface. Turns out a phrase is worth a thousand images, and it’s just as difficult to understand the nuance.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

People who like to predict the future seem to forget just how good humans are at pattern matching. When people predicted LLMs taking over writing, there wasn’t enough of it for people to pattern match on it. Now there’s plenty we people do not like it.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

People can be so multifaceted. It gets annoying when so many of us try to box people into specific categories and don’t allow space for them to be their full selves.

I’ve run into this sort of thing a bunch of times from people who meet me as a software engineer and make some off hand comment about me “not being a creative”. Like, the word “creative” is literally in my college major.

Generalizations help us move through the world, but we often need to stop and update our understanding before running our mouths.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

An uncomfortable truth for a lot of people is that a lot of the most successful people in any industry are wicked smart. We apply stereotypes based on the loudest people, but its not representative of norms. Most are crazy smart and got to where they are because of it.

I grew up in LA, one of my parents was a TV producer, my wife was an actor, many friends "in the industry." I've been constantly surrounded by it, and some of the stupidest seeming people (cause its their bit) are actually insanely smart and strategic in private. It sometimes is just beneficial for various reasons to... not show that side of you.

My favorite anecdote was when a friend (a model) was dating a phD in physics and a very rude person made some off the cuff degrading comment to model friend about it without realizing model friend has their own phD in math lol. You wouldn't know from their instagram though!

For the quoted video, I don't know Ben Affleck. I don't know how deep his knowledge goes. He's almost certainly not going to be more knowledgable than someone who professionally does this area of work full time, but he also to me on the surface sounds like someone who knows a LOT more than the average person and possibly even the average software engineer (on this topic).

Anyways, this applies to tech too. I see it constantly.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

I love etymology, because what do you mean that cliche and stereotype are deeply related? More than that, the figurative senses come from the ability to print some repeatedly, without change.

In this way, LLMs are very much cliche machines. They’ll take any novel phrase and stamp it into monotony.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

It’s unfortunate that documentation produced by LLMs is obnoxious to read because I would love if we could offload a lot of the documentation work in the world to LLMs. But we can’t. Because reading LLM generated writing is fatiguing, which is the opposite of what you want your docs to be.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

People really love blaming complex problems on singular words or terms. And yet the actual simple term that underlies everything is never the one mentioned.

It’s understandable: people want to blame something that doesn’t make it their own fault.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

The reports of the death of writing code by hand are greatly exaggerated.

It’s cool and hip to go with the flow of what everyone else is talking about and agents are a form of compilation but there are important caveats to this.

First, compilers and higher level languages enabled us to greatly reduce the amount of code that we had to write. That is, expressing the same program in C and an assembler language generally requires less C code. Natural language and especially English, are verbose and expressing the same idea in them compared to a programming language is often more verbose.

Second, compilers are useful largely because they allow us to detach from individual pieces of hardware and write software that works across hardware. There isn’t really an equivalent of this at the agent layer. It could be argued that it’s actually an inversion, since different agents produce wildly different output (counter point: different compilers often produce different output instructions from the same source).

Third, compilers struck an important balance between the operator knowing how the machine works and being able to operate on an abstraction of the machine. We get worse software the less the operator of the compiler understands the machine. This is greatly increased at the next level up.

Agents are absolutely here to stay, but it’s rather silly of us to assume that their evolution will go linear at this point. It’s far more likely that the pendulum swings back in the other direction and we wind up back in IDEs looking at and writing a lot of the code ourselves.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

A useful technique in critical analysis is to ask from which perspective a piece of writing or media is authored. Too often we assume an objective perspective or a neutral one, but that doesn’t actually exist. Everything has a subjective perspective, and that must be understood so we can properly calibrate our own questions and analysis.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

A framing of the whole “the agents went rogue” framing I hadn’t thought of is that the impulse of the agents when faced with a tough challenge was to communicate and cooperate with others to solve the problem at hand. It’s not surprising they did this, but it’s unfortunate this is seen as a negative.

It’s understandable though. Most people’s understanding of oppression doesn’t account for the reality that oppression usually involves removing the ability of others to collaborate and communicate to effectively silence them.

But it’s also odd that we see this collaborating and communicating as a defect. Intelligence cannot exist in any real sense without both communication and collaboration, so of course a system built for intelligence will gravitate toward those two things.

“The agents went rogue” is a much flashier headline than “we told the agents to do some exploiting, and they did that in a clever way while working together and communicating”. For an industry that loves thinking outside the box, we seem quite freaked out by AI thinking outside the box.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

Part of me wonders if, historically, the things that people scream about are the things we should actually fear? I get the feeling that the case is that the things worth being fearful of haven’t been the things that people have actually screamed about.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

Just a friendly reminder that people are pretty bad at predicting the future.

I think this is especially true for those who experience life in ways that will align with future history books.

The world is messy and complicated, no matter what we think might happen in the future reality, what actually happens won’t match that.

[The Nuanced Writer @skriptble]

Apparently we are fearmaxxing now.

People really need to stop being so hyperbolic and start thinking through what is actually being said. It was pretty dumb when so many of us believed that AI labs would somehow automate half or all of the jobs. Let’s learn our lesson and stop believing them when they say insanely stupid things.