While not Common Lisp I've always found it pretty cool that AutoCAD shipped with a Lisp, making the language technically a hugely deployed commercial success.
Were it not for early exposure to Autolisp I would not have appreciated Lisp or Lisp-based systems, like Emacs, the way that I did. I might've ended up whinging that they didn't use a mOdErN language like JavaScript.
Autolisp definitely sent me down the left-paren path.
Put together, it’s likely most people’s friends wouldn’t produce enough content to drive engagement, at least in ‘public’ social media like Facebook.
I remember this phenomenon back when Facebook was less algorithmic — some days there’d just be no new content at all. Especially I’m guessing if you limit adding friends to actually just the people you’d be happy to grab lunch with.
You know it’s really strange when I think about it. I no longer feel motivated to read books mostly, but I could easily spend an hour or two a day reading HN comments and Reddit threads.
Although part of that I’m sure is that as I’m visually impaired, reading physical books is far more tiring than reading off a screen where I can make the text the exact size I want.
Used to be a voracious reader as a kid (though 99% non-fiction).
This is why Hackernews and all other social media are blocked on my phone which I now leave across the room all day long when at home, and at home when I go out a lot of times.
Now, I read the New Yorker which I had a pile of half read issues. There's one at the table where I eat, one in the loo, one on the couch, and when my brain gets tired of staring at the wall... I pick up a copy when I don't want to do anything particularly creative.
Finishing a good New Yorker article, or a book laying by my bed often expands my worldview, my vocabulary, and my understanding of current events. Reading a ton of comments online has never really produced that same experience even in a place like HackerNews which has (IMO) much higher quality comments than many places.
So you can get back into it! And it seems to be like riding a bike, very easy to get back into. And the more I read, the more I'm happy I'm reading.
For me, it's the realization of how much filler (tangents, embellishment, hyperbole, pretentiousness, ego, straight up BS, etc) is in long form content that makes it's really hard to make a commitment to anything new. Once you see it, it's ALL you see. I was rewatching some Feynman lectures this morning, and I couldn't get past it anymore. What I used to find engaging, was a major distraction. And the more I learn about stuff, the quicker I see when it's happening, even subjects I'm not familiar with.
This is a really interesting observation to me because it touches at something that I think is at risk of getting lost as the world leans further and further towards optimisation as a core goal. Get to the point, no deviations, transmit the information to me and on to the next.
I can objectively/rationally, see the appeal but I feel the world is a lesser place for it. There's a lack of something I can't quite articulate, maybe personality (not quite but something like that), that makes for a less fulfilling.
It's sort like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is one of the finest texts humanity has imo. And the best bit for me is, the turtle crossing the road. Yes, there's some symbolism, but its largely a pointless interlude; in the sense that in another version of the universe, there's an editor out there who would have cut that bit, and it wouldn't have affected the story too significantly. Yet something incredible would have been lost.
Symbolism is great, it just have to serve a purpose. Constantly insisting "this idea blows your mind" is not that, especially when it doesn't deliver, or it only "blew my mind" because a key component of the idea was withheld until the end, like a murder mystery.
Pop-sci / self-help I feel is particularly egregious in this regard. Like you could take the entirety of many self-help books and summarise them into a few bullet points.
Though having said that, if the ultimate goal of writing is to transfer one person’s experience of human thought to another, then the filler often makes sense. They’re trying to take you on the same mental journey that they went on. At least that’s the good-faith interpretation.
I think filler is also akin to the difference in experience between listening to an audiobook at 1x speed vs say 3x speed. The slower pace gives your brain time to work.
But I totally agree, once you know a bunch about a subject the filler becomes unnecessary.
1) The problem with teaching is that "filler" often isn't.
Teaching is art and not science in spite of what so many tech folks think. If I'm teaching a hard subject, I don't know a priori what will click with each student. I'm trying to give you multiple tools for you to try to use while working on problems to get you to your next level of understanding. Some of those tools are idiosyncratic to my experience and not in the textbook. Most of my suggestions are going to wind up being useless to a particular student, but I'm hoping that at least one of them connects properly.
For example, the biggest complaint of linear algebra students is "This is boring and doesn't have any use." Well, I can talk about how its used in graphics, but the mathematicians will call that filler. I can talk about solving differential equation systems for the engineers, but the CS students will call that filler. The instructor, of course, thinks all that stuff is filler and would rather get back to teaching the subject, but understands that getting people interested and enthusiastic is a part of the teaching process.
2) The "filler" part of "traditional" media is completely different for each person while "social" media filler is useless to everybody.
This is something that so many people don't seem to grasp. Each individual will fixate on and take something different from a book or lecture. That's good. As long as each part of media resonates and has a purpose with somebody consuming it, it's not "filler".
The problem is that "social" media rewards behaviors that create useless "filler". So, social media is in a war--people get more sensitive to ignoring useless filler; the social media sites ramp more aggressive garbage; people get more sensitive; lather, rinse, repeat.
The problem is that your social media "useless filler" pattern matcher learns to be super aggressive and classifies anything that doesn't immediately engage with you, personally and immediately as garbage. That's fine when doomscrolling; that's not fine when reading a book or listening to a lecture.
That's not to say that there aren't poor lectures or poor quality books. There very definitely are. And you should definitely leave those behind.
However, you need to turn those super aggressive filler filters off when an author or lecturer is genuinely trying to engage you in good faith. If an author or lecturer did the work, is well-prepared, and is making solid points and progress, you need give them the leeway to do their job.
I love that to obtain the Freedom ending you've got to give up agency entirely and obey the narrator; the ending even takes control over the character away from you. Perfect play on ludonarrative dissonance.
that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)
The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.
I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.
The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).
The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)
Thank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.
With the right context both are pretty good actually.
I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.
The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.
When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.
If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.
Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.
I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).
Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.
But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.
When you say assistive technology, what kind of things are you thinking about?
I don't have ADHD myself but I'm heavy into home automation and am just interested in it in general, since I think there's so much potential for smart tech to actually improve the lives of those with ADHD.
Some things that come to mind:
- Washing machine alerts you if you have accidentally done washing and forgotten to take it out.
- Household lights change colour consistently throughout the day to assist with time blindness; house goes into wind-down mode at night automatically at the same time. Music starts automatically when you should be getting up out of bed. Coffee machine starts brewing coffee (if that's your thing).
- Doomscrolling pits like Instagram and Tiktok are disabled except for very specific times of the day.
Also goes without saying -- when you know one person with ADHD.... you know one person with ADHD. What works for any particular person is going to be mostly unique, or at least a unique combination of things.
Essentially, anything that a) puts cues in your environment to help steer you in the right direction and b) requires very little executive function to access.
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