I spent the last three weeks in Seoul, partly visiting family I hadn’t seen in years and partly taking a vacation from my usual work in my usual city in my usual context of life. While I haven’t been able to work much at all, I spent my subway rides and waiting-in-line times reading the Singularity Sky series of novels by Charles Stross.| thesephist.com
I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and perhaps even the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.| thesephist.com
In the last post, I shared some possible ideas for how humans may interact in the future with large language models. It focused on specific examples of both good and bad interface ideas. In this post, I want to continue that exploration, but from first principles, asking ourselves the question, “what properties should good human-AI interfaces have?”| thesephist.com
A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents.| thesephist.com
When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it’s some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I’m lucky, an answer pops into my head a few ...| thesephist.com
