Simon Willison's Weblog: new-yorker

Quoting Ted Chiang

2024-08-31T22:09:15+00:00

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.

— Ted Chiang

Tags: art, new-yorker, ai, generative-ai, ted-chiang

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

2023-11-14T04:36:56+00:00

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.

I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:

What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.

Via Hacker News

Tags: new-yorker, programming, ai, chatgpt, llms

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

2023-02-09T21:28:37+00:00

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it's a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps.

ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

Tags: new-yorker, ai, gpt-3, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ted-chiang

How a Cheese Goes Extinct

2020-08-02T17:51:34+00:00

How a Cheese Goes Extinct

Ruby Tandoh writes for the New Yorker about the culture, history and anthropology of cheesemaking through the lens of the British cheese industry. I learned that two of my favourite British cheeses—Tymsboro and Innes Log, have sadly ceased production. Beautifully written.

Via @rubytandoh

Tags: cheese, new-yorker

The Friendship That Made Google Huge

2018-12-31T03:56:45+00:00

The Friendship That Made Google Huge

The New Yorker profiles Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Google’s first and only level 11 Senior Fellows. This is some of the best writing on complex software engineering topics (map-reduce, Tensor Flow and the like) aimed at a general audience that I’ve ever seen. Also a very compelling case study in pair programming.

Tags: google, mapreduce, new-yorker, tensorflow

Quoting James Surowiecki

2009-11-09T10:06:08+00:00

One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor's advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It's the retail version of the doomsday machine.

— James Surowiecki

Tags: amazon, james-surowiecki, new-yorker, pricing, walmart