I too crave my car when I am running around a track on the 5th lap.
In your comparison, I think you're getting tired because you need to reason through syntax writing which you have not done in a while, its more akin to going to gym than it is to "withdrawl". Having to reason through syntax for writing is going to be a muscle memory thing which AI will reduce, but its not really the most valuable skill of programming. Reading, comprehension, ownership, and your internal mental model of programming tasks are without a doubt the most important aspect of our work.
I really enjoyed this article, I didn't bridge the idea of an ATM and mobile banking.
I think the idea raised about "Automated Firms" is a bit off in the picture painted in that linked article. I think the David Oks intention is to paint a picture of a fully automated company, but the linked article gives this impression:
> Future AI firms won’t be constrained by what's scarce or abundant in human skill distributions – they can optimize for whatever abilities are most valuable. Want Jeff Dean-level engineering talent? Cool: once you’ve got one, the marginal copy costs pennies. Need a thousand world-class researchers? Just spin them up. The limiting factor isn't finding or training rare talent – it's just compute.
In that above paragraph the author is saying to the reader that a human will be able to spin up and get these armies of intelligent workers, but at the end of the day their output is given to a human who presumably needs to take ownership of the result. Intelligent workers make bad choices or bad bets, but those AI machines cannot "own" an outcome. The responsibility must fall on a person.
To this end, I think the fully autonomous firm is kind of a fallacy. There needs to be someone who can be sued if anything goes wrong. You're not suing the AI.
That is why a fully automated firm would be a paradigm shift. Instead of requiring someone to be responsible and to QA things, you just let AI systems be responsible internally, and the company responsible as a whole for legal concerns.
This idea of an automated firm relies on the premise that AI will become more capable and reliable than people.
In this regard, the company cannot be created where there is not a single person tied to it, at least legally, even shell corporations have a person on the record as being responsible. So there needs to be some human that is apart of it, and in any "normal" organization if there is a person tied to the outcome of the company they presumably care about it and if the AI 99.99% of the time does good work, but still can make mistakes, a person will still be checking off on all its work. Which leads to a system of people reviewing and signing off on work, not exactly a fully autonomous firm.
Also, employing “infinite intelligence” by splitting it into “workers” and organizing them into firms cannot be farther than a paradigm change.
It’s strictly an attempt to shoehorn the new tech into an existing paradigm, just because right now the system prompt makes an “agent” behave differently than the one with a different prompt.
Yeah, I think if there is some sort of super intelligence, the idea would be that it would make the system of computers and computation irrelevant entirely. Now that would be novel.
Because your physical ID isn't scanned every time you access your bank account, and your bank (hopefully) doesn't check with some central database the government controls before issuing you an account. With a digital ID controlled by your government, that is required for accessing your account on the other hand...
We're not talking about just governments, we're talking about the private sector having to verify a digital identity tied to your biometrics before allowing you to participate in commerce. This is a whole different ball game than having to present a physical ID before being granted access to government services.
The latter is quite normal and the former is extremely dystopian.
What about when obtaining a SIM card or internet access? What about when purchasing a bus or train or plane ticket? Do you think you should have to identify yourself with a digital ID to withdraw your own money from your own bank account? Your average citizen isn't on a sanction list or a politically exposed persons list. In a national digital ID system they will be on a list regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong, and the government can easily block their access if they don't like what they've been doing. Governments should not have this kind of control over the lives of ordinary citizens.
Not to mention the fact that NGOs like the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation are funding this. It's proof that it's more than just nation states that want to implement these digital ID systems. Why should the world bank or Bill Gates have any influence on who can and cannot withdraw their own money?
Get someone you know to try it, and then see why they would or wouldn't tell their friends about your product. Interview the users you already have and ask what they like and dont like about the product.
For getting new users, traditional outbound motions like cold email, and cold calling work. But only if you know the problem youre trying to solve really well.
Yes, I keep sharing with my friends and friends of friends, and they have been my loyal customers ever since.
All the feedback and new iterations are based on their feedback and new users. But the growth of the users is still very slow, and I am trying to see if I can do something that can accelerate the growth process
I would add these motions only really make sense in a few cases:
1. its apart of an enterprise sales motion, eg you want to get ~1000$ per user per month out of it.
2. Its apart of some well subscribed newsletter, this looks more like an ad than a cold email.
If your business is trying an outbound sales motion, then these methods might work. If you're going down a Product lead growth motion because of the nature of the problem/product/customer, then I would try getting some influencers who your prospective users like to use your product.
I know a lot less about PLG motions, so take that with a grain of salt. Feel free to email me directly if you want feedback or anything. Email is in my profile.
I think the sentiment here is about management's tie of bonuses to near-term stock performance. Maybe not about the market itself, I agree with your view on investors want long term gains over short term fluctuations mostly.
Ugh - yes. I’m seriously close to writing a chrome extension just to warn me or block pages that have that phrase…it’s irrational because there are so many legitimate uses, but they are dead to me.
I don't know man, I feel emboldened to keep using emdash exactly because I want to protest against people equating emdash with "AI reply" even though there are very legitimate uses for emdash.
Another common tell nowadays is the apostrophe type (’ vs ').
I don't know personally how to even type ’ on my keyboard. According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.
I suspect some word processors default to one or the other, but it's becoming all too common in places like Reddit and emails.
If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.
I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.
Word (you know, the most popular word processor out there) will do that substitution. And on macOS & iOS, it's baked into the standard text input widgets so it'll do that basically everywhere that is a rich text editor.
> According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.
Browsers do a form of normalization in search. It's really useful, since it means "resume" will match résumé, unless of course you disable it (in Firefox, this is the "Match Diacritics" checkbox). (Also: itʼs, it's; if you want to see it in action on those two words.)
I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.
Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.
Is there a chance you could ask Ryan if he had an LLM write/rewrite large parts of this blog post? I don't mind at all if he did or didn't in itself, it's a good and informative post, but I strongly assumed the same while reading the article and if it's truly not LLM writing then it would serve as a super useful indicator about how often I'm wrongly making that assumption.
> Over the past year, we’ve seen a shift in what Deno Deploy customers are building: platforms where users generate code with LLMs and that code runs immediately without review
This isn't a canonical use of a colon (and the dependent clause isn't even grammatical)!
> This isn’t the traditional “run untrusted plugins” problem. It’s deeper: LLM-generated code, calling external APIs with real credentials, without human review.
Another colon-offset dependent paired with the classic, "This isn't X. It's Y," that we've all grown to recognize.
> Sandboxing the compute isn’t enough. You need to control network egress and protect secrets from exfiltration.
More of the latter—this sort of thing was quite rare outside of a specific rhetorical goal of getting your reader excited about what's to come. LLMs (mis)use it everywhere.
> Deno Sandbox provides both. And when the code is ready, you can deploy it directly to Deno Deploy without rebuilding.
Good writers vary sentence length, but it's also a rhetorical strategy that LLMs use indiscriminately with no dramatic goal or tension to relieve.
'And' at the beginning of sentences is another LLM-tell.
Yeah, I feel like this is really the smoking gun. Because it's not actually deeper? An LLM running untrusted code is not some additional level of security violation above a plugin running untrusted code. I feel like the most annoying part of "It's not X, it's Y" is that agents often say "It's not X, it's (slightly rephrased X)", lol, but it takes like 30 seconds to work that out.
Can it be that after reading so many LLM texts we will just subconciously follow the style, because that's what we are used to?
No idea how this works for native English speakers, but I know that I lack my own writing style and it is just a pseudo-llm mix of Reddit/irc/technical documentation, as those were the places where I learned written English
Yes, I think you're right—I have a hard time imagining how we avoid such an outcome. If it matters to you, my suggestion is to read as widely as you're able to. That way you can at least recognize which constructions are more/less associated with an LLM.
When I was first working toward this, I found the LA Review of Books and the London Review of Books to be helpful examples of longform, erudite writing. (edit - also recommend the old standards of The New Yorker and The Atlantic; I just wanted to highlight options with free articles).
I also recommend reading George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language.
Given that a lot of us actively try to avoid this style, and immediately disregard text that uses it as not worth reading (a very useful heuristic given the vast amount of LLM-generated garbage), I don't think that would make us more prone to write in this manner. In fact I've actively caught myself editing text I've written to avoid certain LLMisms.
It's unfortunate that, given the entire corpus of human writing, LLMs have seemingly been fine-tuned to reproduce terrible ad copy from old editions of National Geographic.
(Yes, I split the infinitive there, but I hate that rule.)
As someone that has a habit of maybe overusing em dashes to my detriment, often times, and just something that I try to be mindful of in general. This whole thing of assuming that it's AI generated now is a huge blow. It feels like a personal attack.
"—" has always seemed like an particularly weak/unreliable signal to me, if it makes you feel any better. Triply so in any content one would expect smart quotes or formatted lists, but even in general.
RIP anyone who had a penchant for "not just x, but y" though. It's not even a go-to wording for me and I feel the need to rewrite it any time I type it out of fear it'll sound like LLMs.
It’s about more than the emdash. The LLM writing falls into very specific repeated patterns that become extremely obvious tells. The first few paragraphs of this blog post could be used in a textbook as it exhibits most of them at once.
We I 787 I 879-0215 I I I ui 87⁸⁸78⁸877777777 I 77 I⁸7 I 87888887788 I 7788 I I 8 I 8 I 788 I 7⁷88 I 8⁸I 7788 I 787888877788888787 7pm I 87 I⁸77 I ui 77887 I 87787 I 7777888787788787887787877777⁷777⁷879-0215 7777 I 7pm⁷I⁷879-0215 777⁷IIRC 7 7pm 87787777877 I I I⁷⁷7 ui ui 7⁷879-0215 I IIRC 77 ui 777 I 77777 I7777 ui I 7877777778 I7 I 77887 I 87⁷8777⁸8⁷⁷⁸⁸7⁸⁸⁸87⁸⁸⁸⁸8⁷87⁸⁸87888⁷878⁷878887⁸⁸⁸88⁸878888888888888888888887878778788888888787788888888888888888888888888887 ui is 888888888887 7
One of the things I find interesting as well, is that among many of my friends outside the western world, they typically see: "knowing how something is made" as a western cultural thing. Many of them adopt a "why do you care how it's made, you are a not a manufacturer" type of response. Which i find very interesting.
They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
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