The Weekender 05/19/23
Training algorithms on terrible content LOLs: Context Collapse #211
The 4-year-old is home sick, I'm answering work emails while he watches cartoons, I try to keep training him to make funny TikToks, it's not happening. But he will get to sit on my lap and join some Zoom calls, which will make it 110% worth it.
Kids and puppies video call Friday - Let's go!
Greetings from these United States and on to the links.
What I’m Thinking About Right Now:
Reed Albergotti @ Semafor on AI’s existential risk for Google Search:
on (LOL) how to be an intellectual:Search is still Google’s game to lose.
The more radical way of looking at Google’s search conundrum — and one that would probably get the company in trouble with Wall Street — is whether it’s open to cannibalizing its business, and the ad dollars that go with it, by building a search engine reimagined from the ground up.
Protecting the search ad business model, but allowing competitors to build better consumer experiences, is not a winning strategy in the long term.
There are a lot of academics and journalists who do good work as parts of institutions. Those people can let their writing speak for itself. A Harvard professor or a New York Times author doesn’t necessarily need to have a personal connection with the audience. But you on your Substack can’t just sit there and do intellectually interesting work and think that’ll be enough. People want to read interesting things, but they also want to be part of a crowd observing a spectacle. In a world where attention is scarce, you need both the talent and the showmanship to break through. Educated Americans read Ross Douthat or David Brooks articles in part because large numbers of other people read them, making doing so a social event. For you to create that on your own requires you to build a reputation, and for that you need to be interesting.
If you look at almost any individual writer who has succeeded on their own, they are to a large extent known for their quirks.
Peter Nixey on the risk ChatGPT holds to collective knowledge and… training future AI models:
on What is n+1 for?:I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.
Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.
A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.
StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.
It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.
But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.
What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?
When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private.
Journals like n+1, the type that’s long on press if low on readership, play a key role in the media ecosystem, one related to the question who of enjoys promotion and advancement within that ecosystem. I’ve been talking about professional media for at least 15 years, with people in professional media, and I’ve never met anyone who believes that the people who succeed are reliably the ones who are most talented - everyone knows success in the industry is all bound up with popularity and privilege and connections.
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What I’m Loving:
Fishing in downtown Chicago is epic.
Jesse Michaels and Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy’s new band, Doom Regulator.
If you see any of these things in your office, you’re getting laid off in six months.
That’s it for this week. NOW DO AWESOME STUFF.