i personally prompt to produce a baseline then re-prompt to tweak then re-re-prompt to re-order, then re-re-re-prompt to expand certain parts, then re-re-re-reprompt to properly cross reference internally , then re-re-re-re-reprompt to proof read and add missing references . so there is no single prompt that produced the document and if i were to start from scratch the path would likely be different.
The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most.
In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.
prompt: if a family has four boys, would a bayesian conclude that their next child would most likely be a boy?
fable taught me about the beta binomial and large observational studies that came down on both sides of the question about whether per family births are truly binomial. it also told me about countries like the uk and uae that are inching towards national genetic registries that might answer such questions definitively in time. as well as the efforts in Cyprus in this 80s to reduce beta thalassemia through voluntary testing of couples pre marriage.
i’m personally deriving a huge amount of value from the custom materials fable is assembling for me. for example i asked it to write a focused expository math paper on reed solomon to accompany an implementation module that it wrote for me. it’s remarkably useful to steer it to create graphs and diagrams of exactly how you like the material presented. or the bibliography researched and cross-linked with the body or the order you want your questions addressed.
it also researched vision correcting displays for me and i can finally put that idea to bed - i was never really going to pick up an optometry textbook tbh. plus it was able to pull together a bunch of geometric and physical context about light and the eye plugging exactly my personal knowledge gaps.
in general i suspect these materials might not be that interesting to others because they are so custom to my learning style and personal needs and preferences.
these are usually not one shot documents but rather many prompts deep before i get something I’m willing to sit down and read or study. but dramatically quicker than assembling it myself from primary sources. i wouldn’t say it matches master expositors but then they’re not available to write on any topic i happen to need right now.
plus I’ll just have a live voice discussion with the system when i go for a walk and there are still things bothering me on a topic. it takes a little patience but if i’m in the mood it’s amazing.
i generally find that it can help track down specific references if i suspect hallucinations. but especially on factual topics my experience so far has been extremely encouraging.
Good point. Same with me. Despite it being very tiresome, all the back and forth that I do with it really deepens my understanding of the topic. I have been on Opus so far, let me try Fable and see if it gets better. I haven’t tried voice either. Next time I go for a walk I’ll try that!
breaking some of these systems that humanity has been banging on for decades would be an elegant proof that the llms have outsampled us decisively. one word at a time, which is how we write too.
You know how non-coders basically build crazy business apps in Excel? LLMs, even if they don't get any better, seem at least 10x more useful than Excel. Why do you say it's for a narrow audience?
i meant people who enjoy the idea of software even if they don’t necessarily need or enjoy the resulting software itself. it’s possible that some of the spreadsheet hacking has a similar flavor but lacks the natural language hook.
i use it primarily to enforce my personal conventions that are not super commonly followed in the wild. structure of comments at the top of .h , structure of bibliography in .tex, etc etc things that i would otherwise have to repeat periodically.
