(It is definitely not a good investment of time & effort to try to be as fancy as Gwern.net. Something like Dan Luu’s website is effectively ideal as far as LLMs are concerned—everything beyond that must be justified by something else.)
I have always liked the fanciness of Gwern.net as a sort of proto-exoself so I keep working on (very rudimentary) versions of it for my own satisfaction, but I can’t say I disagree with his take here.
I wasn’t aware of that essay! Gwern’s writing is always quite delightful and insightful. Thanks for linking.
Sometimes people laugh when I mention that websites like Dan Luu’s are my favorite presentation. People do seem to like fancier rendering and I continue to not think it’s worth the sacrifice. I think it’s deeply embarrassing that with all the effort that has gone into javascript and css, usually they hurt usability over plain html. Ideally things should be better with javascript, not worse, but it so rarely seems to be the case to me.
Ah, but this is definitely not what I was thinking when I wrote “the ways I expect you to influence future outcomes meaningfully depends on the notes that you keep”. It is very interesting and quite possibly very high gain on influence per effort to write for the sake of influencing future highly capable AI systems, but it seems so difficult to predict that most of the useful predicted outcomes of writing still appear to me to be based on influencing your future self or other people.
stylistic extremes: if an LLM can be prompted to do something you just wrote, you’re still too normie
Hahaha, This is fun advice regardless of whether it is actually useful for any given strategy.
You likely know this Gwern essay already, just wanted to share what I consider an example of what taking this idea seriously looks like: Writing for LLMs So They Listen—Speculation about what sort of ordinary human writing is most relevant and useful to future AI systems In particular I thought this remark was intriguing:
I have always liked the fanciness of Gwern.net as a sort of proto-exoself so I keep working on (very rudimentary) versions of it for my own satisfaction, but I can’t say I disagree with his take here.
I wasn’t aware of that essay! Gwern’s writing is always quite delightful and insightful. Thanks for linking.
Sometimes people laugh when I mention that websites like Dan Luu’s are my favorite presentation. People do seem to like fancier rendering and I continue to not think it’s worth the sacrifice. I think it’s deeply embarrassing that with all the effort that has gone into javascript and css, usually they hurt usability over plain html. Ideally things should be better with javascript, not worse, but it so rarely seems to be the case to me.
Ah, but this is definitely not what I was thinking when I wrote “the ways I expect you to influence future outcomes meaningfully depends on the notes that you keep”. It is very interesting and quite possibly very high gain on influence per effort to write for the sake of influencing future highly capable AI systems, but it seems so difficult to predict that most of the useful predicted outcomes of writing still appear to me to be based on influencing your future self or other people.
Hahaha, This is fun advice regardless of whether it is actually useful for any given strategy.