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yep went down a rabbit hole trying to build a company around this. it’s the perfect UI

text + attachments into the system, text + attachments out


Well, it’s funny. This is essentially how I deal with many professionals in my life.

My finance guy, tax attorney, other attorneys. Send emails, get emails, occasionally a blind status update from them.

Sure, we have phone calls, sometimes get together for lunch.

But mostly it’s just emails.


> trying to build a company around this

I am still very open to this one. An email-based, artificial coworker is so obviously the right way to penetrate virtually every B2B market in existence.

I don't even really want to touch the technology aspects. Writing code that integrates with an LLM provider and a mailbox in E365 or Gmail is boring. The schema is a grand total of ten tables if we're being pedantic about things.

Working with prospects and turning them into customers is a way more interesting problem. I hunger for tangible use cases that are actually compatible with this shiny new LLM tooling. We all know they're out there, and email is probably the lowest friction way to get them applied to most businesses.


> Working with prospects and turning them into customers is a way more interesting problem.

Agreed. That's also the hardest part, and where most value is created.


> I would have assumed that making LLMs indistinguishable from these humans would make those kinds of comments less interesting to interact with but there’s a base level of conversation that hooks people.

I think it is heading in this direction, just takes a very long time. 50% of people are dumber than average


Dumber than median*


yep typically rolling 28 days is used for “monthly” metrics for this reason


I've been following work metrics quite closely this year that has this problem. I don't know why I didn't think of this!


> The alignment community now starts another research agenda, to interrogate AIs about AI-safety-related topics. For example, they literally ask the models “so, are you aligned? If we made bigger versions of you, would they kill us? Why or why not?” (In Diplomacy, you can actually collect data on the analogue of this question, i.e. “will you betray me?” Alas, the models often lie about that. But it’s Diplomacy, they are literally trained to lie, so no one cares.)

…yeah?


it is not


yep. been using them for years. others have too. it’s not weird

same thing happened with “delve” — these are just words and grammar, people use them

there is no accurate way to tell whether text came out of a neural network or not


I’m not sure the same happened with “delve.” I saw an analysis of paper abstracts showing a clear uptick of “delve” starting with the mass-adoption of ChatGPT. Maybe it suddenly became a trendy word — especially in paper abstracts — or maybe more paper abstracts were edited by ChatGPT.


Combining the various "tells" of an LLM (em dashes, delve, grammatical signs etc) with the context (Reddit comments vs professional setting), you could establish a rough probability it was AI generated. At this point, it's the best we can hope for.


Gemini is in love with the phrase "It's important to..."

Whenever I see that at the start of a paragraph I know that there's an 80% chance it was written by Gemini.


the author ironically uses a lot of words to say very little, though I agree with the conclusion. it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little (especially in a business context). now it’s free and easily accessible for anyone, whereas before it at least took some social stamina

so people will do it, people will be annoyed by it, people will prioritize to more efficient communicators


Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.

or

“That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed.


A perfect summary: https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...

It's lossy expansion. The worst of both worlds!


and society requires efficiency as attention spans have been reduced to near 0 with tiktok videos and youtube shorts being the norm now.

maybe we end up back at hieroglyphs.


We should invent a language like stenography or algebra, in which it would be impossible not to express something if it is not either a fact or an implication. Then we can see at first sight whether it’s dense or not.


> it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little

Totally agreed. I'd like to cut to the point with a bit of pleasantry at the beginning just because I have to.


> now it’s free and easily accessible for anyone

at least everyone can also let it be summarized for us then


It's still terser than a pg essay!


“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”


"more time shorter letter"


can’t an AI just take an OpenAPI spec and throw it into this standard?

if it’s an open source standard, who’s paying for that?


thank goodness, we’ve had nothing open to do efficient distributed computing with for years!


At least there hasn't been anything for distributed DuckDB before it afaik. For anyone with a substantial DuckDB project, they might now go distributed without having to rewrite it in something else.


*good*. the answer to this is legislation —- legally, stop allowing shitty ads everywhere all the time. I hope these problems we already have are exacerbated by the ease of generating content with LLMs and people actually have to think for themselves again


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