Posted by faza 4 hours ago
To those saying it’s the work of an LLM: if it is I don’t care. It’s good.
It hit me when I woke up and I made a (human) haiku (well, sorta) about it:
"We already had Klingon and Elvish. Now we have LLMish."
You’ve condensed down a lot of concepts I learned through research and trial-and-error over my career as a SWE.
Thank you for sharing Faza. Please continue putting in the effort and sharing these essays!
If I may ask, what stack do you use for the inline interactive elements and would you choose anything different after having done it this way?
I actually like this post. It looks good, the explanations are clear, and the AI-generated animation widget actually helps me understand things. What's the problem exactly? Is using AI for visualization considered a bad practice?
As someone who spends their own time developing open-educational resources (OER), I was extremely limited in what I could do pre-AI. Now, AI has supercharged my ability to elevate my work in ways I could have never done before, particularly in visualizations, interactive widgets, and even images (often SVG for me), all of which are necessary components to the resources I've been developing online since 2020 (COVID-era).
Given that my programming abilities are very limited as well as my time, AI has allowed me to develop the missing pieces to much of what I was creating. When used properly (as an expert in a field using AI as a tool), the end product can be completely transformed and elevated in ways that could never have been. I am so thankful that AI came along just at the right time for me to do the things I could have never accomplished before.
Some people just assume that anything "AI" has touched is automatically "slop" because ... AI! Probably at least partly due to how much actual "AI slop" is out there produced by people "holding the tool wrong". When used judiciously and properly, some of these language models can really be a useful tool and help create some quality stuff, but they're no substitute for a knowledgable human using the tool correctly to achieve the desired result (which is why so many people who misuse it to do all their thinking and work for them (without doing any of their part) inevitably produce the typical "slop" result).
Honestly, I think formalism is strange. People also exaggerate and spread false information. Even famous programmers on Hacker News sometimes give incorrect programming advice. In the end, there's always some amount of misinformation in any source. You read it while cross-checking with your own knowledge. Saying that all of it is useless is just an emotional response.
Is 'rational' really about insulting others? Reason seems pretty cheap these days. Then I'll just be an emotional person
I got about half way through, then I had 2 more kids. Then AI happened, and I started questioning the whether there was too much slop out there to bother writing a book.
I’ll still probably finish it when the new baby is a little older.