I'm sorry to hear that. If it's any consolation, people often say I act like an alien pretending to be a human. Maybe it's just the price I pay for being an inquisitive person.

I get where you're coming from, and I agree to some extent, but I do think our tendency to weight criticism more favorably than praise (as if praise is "chaff" and criticism is automatically valuable) can be dangerous. This negativity bias unfortunately led me to adopt less-than-optimal ways of working in my younger years, because I assumed the people offering me criticism knew what they were talking about, when this wasn't always the case.

So while criticism can be valuable, I think it's worth reflecting an equally critical eye back at the person who is offering it, as upon closer inspection they may not be worth listening to at all.

Your article, https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/babys-second-garbage... made me happy. :)

I read this in the voice and cadence of a D&D dungeon master reciting an epic tale,

    The dark mages often braved the underworld themselves and were therefore undaunted by the task. It should not be difficult, they thought, to adapt the machine to do it. Why couldn't it travel the foreign lands? There was no reason. And so it was decided. The machine would be taught how to do it.
    
    The resources available at the garbage collector's disposal were substantial. It had the object census. It had a list of roots which it would search for objects. It would reap all objects it didn't find in those roots.
    
    One of those roots is the lisp stack. As the program churns, values are placed in stasis and stored there so that they may be recovered later when needed. It is when they escape from this stack that they create havoc in dynamic society. But where are they escaping to?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K9mlJMVmEOY

I just read your article, and please don’t listen to the machines!!! It’s a very fun read, and I for one love some personality in an otherwise dry topic.

The thing about keeping your personality in your writing is that you will have to be prepared for it to rub some people the wrong way, even while some people (like me) like it much better: the only writing that no one dislikes is writing that no one likes, either.

Anyway, fight the corporate blandness, have fun in your writing, and keep it out there! That at least is my opinion.

PS if you add RSS I would gladly add your blog to my feed, based on this article.

It's right that they steer toward the center of their distribution. But I would offer a different view on whether that's a step up for half the population.

Writing isn't a distribution on a single dimension that goes from "bad" to "good". It's a lot of dimensions that encompass everything from "funny" to "formal", "precise" or "hysterical". They may be filled with metaphors, or use allegory; they may use math or logic to explain. The allegories could be from science fiction or they could be Biblical or 19th century Victorian novels. None of these are right or wrong, but they are opinionated ways to express an idea.

Writing feels better when it has real texture and character to it. That character is not the monodistribution of "bad" to "good". It's whether it inhabits pockets of out-of-distribution thought in the thousands of dimensions of "thought-space."

An LLM pushing to the center of distribution means it pushes the writing out of inhabiting any of the interesting pockets that create the feeling of texture. The middle of the distribution does not mean it is average quality: it means it's not good at all. The median of the distribution can be far worse than the median writer if you accept that the median writer has out-of-distribution thoughts on at least something, and that it is this which makes their thoughts interesting.

That's why a rough, perhaps not-totally-grammatical article written by someone with interesting thoughts is vastly better than a "correct" LLM revision, even if the human writer isn't a 'good' writer. Their article occupies an opinionated stance on some dimension that matters; it sits in a pocket of interestingness that LLMs seem almost totally unable to inhabit.

The exact middle of the distribution across thousands of dimensions may actually be one of the very worst places of them all.

Haha this is excellent, I believe you’ve just invented a new genre - Garbage Collector fanfiction.

I have no idea how reading this people would jump to the conclusion that you have problems, but I will jump to the conclusion that those people probably like to live in a gray box with blank walls

That was epic and I couldn't stop reading.

I'm floored people told you that you had issues because of that article. I'd ignore them and forget all about it.

That was fantastic. Vaguely reminded me of: https://0x5f37642f.com/