Let me deconstruct it for you.
His words: He would probably make a good residential plumber. would probably make a good residential plumber probably make a good residential plumber. make a good residential plumber. a good residential plumber. good residential plumber.
And since you’re so intent on deconstructing:
> He would probably make a good residential plumber.
Him making a good residential plumber≠average residential plumber is good.
Correct and incorrect are at least possibly quantifiable and do not intrinsically involve subjectivity.
In other words, my being incorrect is something others can help me to understand and rectify. My being "wrong" is a position which can yield second order harm.
I experienced maybe a minute of being "whelmed" or +1 out of 10 over baseline because I liked reading someone else that uses this approach. For someone who thinks nothing like me, I would imagine it feeling very similar to "draw the rest of the owl."
I don't think everyone needs to think the same way. And if we did want everyone to think a certain way, well, the author's style would not convince many.
The draw the rest of the owl meme is not meant to be insightful at all. This makes it sound like you're trying to tear the author down.
You are comparing them on the basis of doing all the work in the last step, which is a valid way of looking at it but the author already assumed that he has the necessary skills to complete the task and he should slow down before doing the work.
Your post as is kind of misses the point of both the post and the meme without further context.
Looking at this thread, it mostly just lead me to think about how things can be super insightful for one person, and totally meaningless to the next.
Or because the author has enough authority that they are granted a presumption of insightfulness by default, even (or perhaps especially) when the concrete insight that's allegedly being communicated remains unclear.
I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.
I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.
Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.
And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.
Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.
Higher level thinking has fewer constraints on being wrong than lower level subconscious thinking. Low level stuff tends to have some repetitive and evolutionary basis. Higher level thought tends to be more one off, less evidence based, and more exploratory until we get to the point of being an expert around particular concepts.
A huge amount of human thinking is being a parrot and repeating statements without a deeper understanding. For example when I say 1+1=2 I'm not thinking about it. If I say 638483+949948= calculation is necessary.
So in this, your voice has always been one of a somewhat faulty narrator, LLMs just may be further degrading the quality of the narration.
You can never tell his degree of confidence in his answer. For low-level things he is pretty good but for critical high-level things it is more ambiguous.
You work around this by checking Bob’s work. Having formal verification steps to check what he says.
Now let’s say you meet Bob’s twin brother Bill. Who talks and sounds just like Bob. He makes fairly grand high-level statements that you can neither test nor verify.
How much do you intuitively distrust him?
Nothing more human than to label, simplify and categorize, even in the absence of higher quality information.
I've wondered this for a long time now: how does one differentiate between your voice getting "filed smooth to match LLMs" or your brain getting "filed smooth to match LLMs"?
After all, if we accept (as the token providers want us to) that evidence of language use as we see in LLMs is evidence of intelligence, then surely the reverse is true - evidence of machine-only language use is evidence of machine-only intelligence.
IOW, it's the LLM talking through you, not you talking through it.
I'm reminded of <insert-someone-in-your-life-that-generates-friction-here>
"Often wrong, never in doubt"
I see this happening at work, too. All communication and collaboration between engineers has broken down. Juniors don't have questions anymore. Seniors don't discuss architecture anymore. Everyone is just off in their own world of feature work with the only interaction coming at merge time. Really depressing what has happened to our trade.
What are they doing all day with that, I wonder?
LLMs are still a very new technology in relation to human timeliness. There is a whole lot of exploration to be done.
If the CPUs life was an hour, the GPU AI accelerator would have been around 5 minutes and is around 5x larger in total compute.
It should not be underestimated in any way the scale of what is occurring.
I personally have a lot of anger and frustration with many people in the ai hypesphere that are just mindlessly frolicking around without a care in the world, happy to speak into the megaphone offered by masses that are in a rat-race to avoid some AI dystopian hellscape that keep getting painted by these thought leaders... and then going "oopsies... I am just human guys... y so mad?!"
The worst part is that the product, the actual output, often feels underwhelming and at odds with the narrative around it. Action matters more than the narrative. Show these principles in your work and in how you engage with the community, rather than through shallow thought-leadership mumbo jumbo.
Another thing I find skin-crawling is bragging disguised as humility and sincerity. Come on!! Expecting people to buy into that performance is, in itself, a kind of insult to their intelligence.
Finishing your goals does not "make you right". Life is not a binary where you are either wrong, or right. Thinking that you ever become "right" or that you ever achieve 100% confidence that you have arrived at a "solution" is arrogance of the highest order.
Life is about getting better. Every person, every product, starts at a beginning. A beginning is not "wrong", it is early. We try, individually and collectively, to improve ourselves and that which we are responsible for. The decision to ship is not whether we have made something "right" but about whether we have made it better. We ship, knowing we will ship another improvement after this one.
> 2. Gather missing information... 6. Achieve the goal
Sometimes in life, you need to ship first in order to gather missing information later. You cannot do that if everything has to be "right" before you ship it.
> I love being wrong
This is not the essay of someone who loves being wrong. This is the essay of someone who loves becoming right. But the deeper truth is that you will always be "wrong" - unfinished, lacking knowledge, under-developed, incomplete. Do not love being wrong - love improvement.
I prefer being right, but to each their own.