Much obliged.

I mean, I’ll applaud any push toward Linux.

I’m reminded of a time I was in a bar in Georgia at a conference. It was in the hotel, and a high-ranking editor for the then-reputable Washington Post bought me a beer. He let me take a sip before launching into how much “immature shit [I] need to get out of [my] system” before being ready to be “Post material.”

Where is any industry going to be in a decade, when no one’s been mentored?

This is four sentences that leads to a 404 source link.

Well, you don’t want to use birdshot with eugenics.

I never got a degree! I got roped into the college paper, and from there, well, I didn’t really care about my studies. Why worry about semantics and semiotics when you can tell 18,000 people what to think?

(yeah, I meandered into news after cutting my teeth in opinion)

Sure. That’s a specific use case and not likely a useful one.

When we start getting into utterances, though, we’re firmly in linguistics. Unless you’ve been passing bad checks.

As a former linguistics major, I find this to be horseshit.

Really, we optimize for the least possible amount of communication necessary. With a spouse, you don’t ask full questions. Early on, you might have to shoot a look, but later on? This is now ingrained. They’re offering the solution before you express the problem.

There is no reason for you to care. I am informing users familiar with my writing and methods that this is now on my radar, but I can’t yet do it justice. I’m being honest about not being ready to perform analysis.

It is 23.43, and I can’t analyze this tonight. Ars has been good for a long while, and I enjoy their reporting. To have to reassess this is disappointing, but I’ve already had to feel this with the NYT and WaPo. Not exactly a huge loss here. But I want to fully investigate what happened ahead of reaching a conclusion.

Rest assured, I will reach a conclusion. I don’t think I’ll like the one I think I’ll find, but that’s journalism for you. I will withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to fully examine what happened here.

I would hazard a guess that you’ve spent less time in a newsroom than I have.

So that I fully understand your argument, it is that other automation proves that what I posted is LLM output? Let’s sit with that for a moment. Your bullshit detector is accurate, but mine is not. This is essentially your thesis.

I’d workshop this for a bit.

What, you saw a couple of em-dashes and reached that conclusion? I would argue – emphatically – that people are using the wrong methods to attempt to unmask LLMs. They’re literally trained on prose written by humans. We still know how to write.

I have thoughts on this, but your mileage will definitely vary.

I met my first wife on OKCupid in 2004. We were something like a 97% match. And, indeed, we shared politics, musical tastes, geeky senses of humour … it felt like the algorithm had done its job. We got married in 2007. We got divorced in 2010.

But before meeting her, there was another one. Just weeks earlier. She shot me down, and I accepted that.

Without realizing I was attempting to connect with the same woman for a second time, I reached out to her new profile. She’s the sort of manic-pixie alt type that has no problems finding guys. And I am decidedly average in looks. She was a 34% match.

And yet … I didn’t wake up in my first wife’s bed last month.

I personally believe in soulmates, but I don’t think the concept is usually construed correctly. It’s not how it’s popularly portrayed; rather, it’s a matter of feeling incomplete without that body against you. I’m not sure my life has been improved by that knowledge.

I have thoughts about this, but I’ll be civil. Let’s just say I was in a budget meeting with Len Downie.

When I took on a job as an editor for a paper in a tourist town, one of the first things I told the publisher was “what is going on with this map? This road doesn’t exist!”

Well, me being me, I decided we needed entirely new maps, and I was going to be the one who did them.

It’s got what plants crave!

It’s not the Voltaires that kill you, it’s the Ampaires.

I personally reduced trade-show receiving times by 75% per item by designing a Microsoft Form for warehouse employees to upload photos of shipping labels, where 10 lines of JS pulled all the relevant info from the sheet being populated by the form. This replaced hand-writing complex triplicate forms, allowed us to send reports before close of business, and the client was thrilled.

My boss absolutely hated the new workflow, as she couldn’t read code and therefore didn’t trust that my system worked, all client satisfaction to the contrary. Absolutely absurd.

And this before LLMs were a thing. “AI” is not doing significant automation that hasn’t already been being done for decades.

Always assume anything you post outside of some messaging apps has hit the public domain and will be used, sold and targeted. This is scarcely a Discord-only problem.