This is an interesting distinction. I can't stand AI writing but have no problem with AI coding.
I think the key difference is that code is a tool used for a given purpose. It can be slop, or structured better or worse, but at the end of the day it exists to be executed, and its execution is either correct or not. Additionally, good code that does a given thing can only be expressed so many reasonable ways, probably. So LLM-generated code can be perfectly fine.
By contrast, human writing is about exchanging thoughts. Often those thoughts are about infinitely complicated and poorly understood systems, like other people, or emotions, or politics, so it's not a matter of exactly encoding something but attempting to describe it imperfectly. All the tiny little details encoded in how someone writes something can work to this end and are also a product of the writer's thought patterns and overall personality; this all conveys useful information to the reader. In other words, there is a much greater degree of fine detail that affects the quality of writing than of code, and LLMs suck at those fine details for most subjects that are interesting. On top of that, they don't have original thoughts.
That's only one side of the article's point though. The other, more consequential part is:
>Like most writers, I find writing an almost-essential tool for thinking. Often it's only by writing something down, that I can really get my thoughts on a topic into coherence. ... . As more people delegate writing to LLMs they will also delegate thinking and comprehension to LLMs.
There's an analogy with LLM coding that is so screamingly obvious I'm embarrassed to point it out (changing "writer" for "programmer").
I'm curious to know if the author, given who he is, thought of it (he had to, its just too obvious) and what he thinks of it.
I use the free-tier Oracle server, but: Nextcloud. Minecraft server. I will probably move my Joplin and Wallabag hosting there soon, currently paying for both. I tried running a Valheim server there, but ran into bugs emulating it with FEX, unfortunately.
Yeah, getting all your sensitive stuff off your phone onto a secure cloud service seems like the obvious approach here right? They can still escalate what they try to coerce you to do, but they don't have physical access to your data just by taking your phone, and you can also leave the phone with them and only lose the device if needed. In my likely scenario - innocent traveler, they aren't looking for anything specific, but I still don't want them to look through my files and photos just because I happen to travel internationally - that seems like it puts it out of reach (and out of obvious view) for now.
To what extent is it organic demand rather than manufactured demand? Clearly there's some demand for AI use but a lot of it has been shoved down people's throats with usage quotas, pushing it into every webpage and application, etc. To me it seems like there is a large degree of central dictate to use it pushed, at some level, by the perceived need to invest in it faster than China.
That's certainly an opinion... Quite a lot of condemnation for no real argument. I personally think surplus value and socially necessary labor time are quite straightforward, intuitive concepts. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit on Henry George's wikipedia page: "Upon Marx's death, George admitted he has not read any of his works, which were untranslated into English at the time,"
For anyone interested in reading more from Marx's side, Wage Labour And Capital by Marx is a pamphlet meant for mass distribution and not a difficult read. I've heard A People's Guide To Capitalism recommended as a high quality modernized version of the same ideas.
This observation is exactly the Marxist prediction of how capitalism gradually transforms society from early capitalism, which nearly fit the Econ 101 assumptions of many small producers and consumers and such, into something that operates economically more like communism by being centrally planned, but with the severe drawbacks of a minority ruling class and being run undemocratically on the basis of private profit not usefulness to people. This is an interesting book on the subject of how far we have come in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Which is what the European Socialists have been calling "Late Capitalism" since I think the 60's about the period from the 30's onwards.
The problem is it's not easy to have an actual debate on this since to some folks questioning whether capitalism or this form of capitalism is serving societies needs rapidly gets you lumped in with the "communists".
At some point though it becomes impossible to hide that the Emperor does in fact have all the clothes and everyone else is naked by comparison.
Capitalism has long since embedded itself as a cult of money, which is why it makes debates around it so difficult because people believe they are the Golden Child simply disenfranchised by people refusing to let Capitalism grace them. It's evolved from the 'temporarily embarrassed billionaire' part to just outright worship of billionaires though.
Unfortunately I think by the time people recognize the emperor having no clothes it'll be too late and we'll all suffer for it.
How could two people die from it in Germany with modern medicine? Is malaria randomly fatal despite treatment, or did they not understand what the infection was or not seek treatment or something?
One question that gets asked is "have you traveled to another country?" When the answer is "no", then doctors no longer consider diseases that exist in other countries. So that is why they did not understand the parasitic infection until it was too late.
Some of the early symptoms resemble a bad cold.
The parasite that causes malaria (literally "bad air") can only survive in certain species of mosquitos. Those skeeters don't live in Germany. They used to live in the state I live in, but they were exterminated back in the 1950s & 1960s (thanks DDT!). And people from West Africa were naturally/genetically resistant, which was why slaves from that region were preferred over every other race in the southern US where malaria existed until the 1950s & 1960s. If you have 0 copies of the gene then you usually die (of malaria) before puberty. If you have 2 copies of the gene, then you die from sickle cell anemia (usually by your teen years). If you have 1 copy of that gene (another commenter used the term "heterozygote") then the parasite can't live in some of your red blood cells, so you survive to have children.
Germany never had it, and reported being malaria free in 1964. America, in 1970.
Some good info, but some kind of simplistic. I lived in Nigeria for the second half of my childhood in the 80s and 90s and got malaria several times. People come down with it all the time, and typically treat it, and you can recover without treatment also. Most people die from sickle cell anemia when young, but I know multiple outliers who have lived to middle age, and they might live longer yet.
It's easy to test for malaria, if you actually think to test for malaria. In the 90s, we used to hear wild stories from people we knew who would come down with malaria shortly after returning to the USA and doctors and nurses would freak out not knowing what to do about it, and the medication would be expensive to obtain, so the conventional wisdom was also to remember to take a few pills with you on the plane back to the USA!
It's sad but unsurprising that no one was able to treat these German workers in time. When I was a child, there was already talk of strains developing resistance, and this has gotten worse in the 21st century, and the airport workers caught the most deadly strain:
> It's sad but unsurprising that no one was able to treat these German workers in time.
Literally every pharmacy over here sells treatment against malaria – many have it in stock and even if they don't, they'll be able to get it for you within a few hours. Every major city (certainly every city with an airport where you could catch airport malaria) has a hospital with a department specifically for infectious and tropical diseases, where they'll happily take care of you. GPs ask you if you've been to the equator lately if you go see them with high fever. I'm not sure how a country where malaria is not common at all would be able to do any better?
Also, as I mentioned in another comment, airport staff are instructed to watch out for malaria symptoms precisely because airport malaria is a thing.
Something definitely went wrong here but from afar it surely doesn't look like a healthcare failure to me. Maybe the deceased stayed home, thinking they had caught a cold and would be able to sit it out?
Somehow it still lead to two deaths. Maybe GPs didn’t ask/didn’t know about airport malaria, or airport workers were some subcontractors and never gotten instructed.
"It [the Robert Koch Institute] said laboratory tests to determine the source of the infections were not expected to be available for several weeks. [...] The [Robert Koch] institute said malaria in Germany almost exclusively affects long-haul travellers who were infected in malaria-endemic areas, and that malaria transmitted within a German airport is rare. 'The lack of a travel history can lead to a delayed diagnosis. A delayed diagnosis increases the risk of a severe course of the diseases,' the institute said in its epidemiological bulletin."
Cerebral malaria is fatal with no treatment in many cases. For kids and elderly it’s fatal even with.
Likely this happened because they have no expertise and didn’t know what to do.
Imagine if you showed up in a hospital in the us with a sting from some super intense scorpion that only exists is some obscure part of the world. They’ll try to help, but likely can’t do much.
The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.
edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.
I think the key difference is that code is a tool used for a given purpose. It can be slop, or structured better or worse, but at the end of the day it exists to be executed, and its execution is either correct or not. Additionally, good code that does a given thing can only be expressed so many reasonable ways, probably. So LLM-generated code can be perfectly fine.
By contrast, human writing is about exchanging thoughts. Often those thoughts are about infinitely complicated and poorly understood systems, like other people, or emotions, or politics, so it's not a matter of exactly encoding something but attempting to describe it imperfectly. All the tiny little details encoded in how someone writes something can work to this end and are also a product of the writer's thought patterns and overall personality; this all conveys useful information to the reader. In other words, there is a much greater degree of fine detail that affects the quality of writing than of code, and LLMs suck at those fine details for most subjects that are interesting. On top of that, they don't have original thoughts.
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