Greg Detre

@pvh.ca I thought you might appreciate this, if you hadn't already seen it.

Things are in a pretty buggy state (importing HTML import should work, but PDF is broken), and there are also problems with heading/table of contents, and probably lots of other areas.

I just started a new gig, but I'll try to get it into a working state over Christmas :~

I had forgotten to flip the GitHub 'public' switch on the repository - now fixed!

github.com/spideryarn/r...

Thanks for the heads-up @martin.kleppmann.com!

Ink & Switch London: Building new tools for Science · Luma Ink & Switch's mission is to help computers become better tools for thought. We believe that the promise of computers as "intelligence amplifiers" or "bicycles…

Last week's Ink & Switch London event was a delight - a room full of nerdy, warm people all interested in tools for thought for science.

luma.com/71g0lhgo?tk=...

It was the first time I showed spideryarn.com to anyone - thank you for all the ideas and suggestions!

absolute highlight of the week was the @inkandswitch.com meetup and talking to @wolkenmachine.bsky.social about his work on programmable ink, and catching a wild @expede.wtf and @pvh.ca too!

That team remains brilliant, radical, and decent in equal measures.

A diet for lazy people. It's based on intermittent fasting, but raised to the next level.

I call it intermittent-intermittent fasting.

Every so often you skip a meal.

The motto of the Alien Intelligence Association:

"You don't get a second chance to make a First Contact."

Might the opposite be true?

There's an old saying I remember from grad school: "Sometimes a year in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."

I thought of it earlier as I tapped my fingers in irritation, waiting many minutes for something that would have only taken me a few hours to do manually myself.

In practice, it's a spectrum.

LinkedIn feels more and more like a game being played against a ranking algorithm, where the consumer is often an AI-commenter :~

How much to use AI for solo creative work?

My current policy:

Human readers deserve human writers.

On the other hand, it's fine to let AI write code, because only the compiler will see that. (Though if you work in a team, maybe they deserve human coding)

www.gregdetre.com/blog/human-r...

If you were to present these stimuli in a more disfluent way, does that help the LLMs avoid the mistake?

cf Alter et al (2007) pages.stern.nyu.edu/~aalter/intu...

Love!

14 years after Alan Turing's death, an unpublished manuscript emerged where he suggested the idea of a "disordered" computer that anticipated the rise of connectionism cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Alan...

An hour of AI-assisted programming might involve: exploring, hitting dead ends, reverting, shipping. Each feels significant & separate.

Our sense of time is heavily influenced by the number of distinct events we experience. So that productive hour might feel longer than a day of traditional coding.

Classic programming has a 'variable reinforcement' quality - maybe this time when I hit 'compile', it'll work! Like slot machines, this unpredictable reward creates robust addictive behaviours.

But we get less of a dopamine hit watching the AI get the reward.

When we watch the AI fail and iterate, we notice every mistake.

Baumeister et al., 1990: we use a 'perpetrator' narrative for our own mistakes (seeing them as isolated, comprehensible incidents) but a 'victim' narrative for the AI's failures (arbitrary, incomprehensible, with lasting implications).

There's something odd and new about the subjective experience of AI-assisted programming. Can we understand it in terms of well-known psychological effects and illusions?

www.gregdetre.com/blog/psychol...

A field guide to AI-first development Detailed techniques and prompts for AI-first coding, for experienced developers to build medium-sized production-ready codebases, providing lots of architecture-level product guidance but without writ...

Want to know how to build a well-architected 60,000-line project from scratch in 6 weeks, without writing a single line of code by hand?

www.makingdatamistakes.com/ai-first-dev...

How can the UK become a leader in AI-driven scientific research?

New report by the Tony Blair Institute outlines policy recommendations across 5 key areas

institute.global/insights/tec...

W/ co-authors @lyan82.bsky.social @guywj.bsky.social @ersatzben.bsky.social @gregdetre.bsky.social

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