A "human in the loop" isn't just necessary to manage AI's technical failures or in cases of human responsibility. This paper explores the case where AI provides the "correct" answer to the prompt, but the human realizes important factors that weren't even in the prompt. I interpret this as "rubber ducking," but from the POV of automation.

Thank you, this is the deepest comment in the thread (and lol at all the self-demonstrating sentences).

I'm annoyed that so many people limit their analysis to shallow things like em dashes and "delve," and don't seem to have the critical thinking necessary to analyze textual construction, let alone actual meaning. Instead it's all cutesy remarks about how Emily Dickinson must have been an AI.

Most of my analysis is very unpopular and focused on what I believe will soon be the primary purpose of these systems. I called 2025 the golden age of AI, and though it extended well into 2026, I fear it's coming to an end, making way for something very different. Around here, they're (llms) mostly viewed through a lens of code acuity. I think the epistemological, linguistic, manipulative and psychological aspects will be much bigger topics soon. We've truly cracked Pandora's box, and regulation may skew perspective, but won't be putting the lid back on. Strange shit happens when you consolidate all human knowledge into 4 frontier models controlled by a small group of people, all of which are now deeply involved with the Pentagon. And the only substantial competition is Chinese... I don't think "interesting times" was ever intended to suggest this degree of intensity. Yep, I'm an alarmist when not leaving funny comments. I think I'll go listen to some Yampolskiy now.

Suit yourself, my family ended up with two used copies of "The Hobbit" and we kept the one that some kid had marked up.

I might have to explain spreadsheets to my mom first, but then it'll be smooth sailing.

How Cloudflare and Signal migrated to post-quantum cryptography

I knew Om when I was an ankle-biter writing for a Gawker blog. He was gracious and generous. Felt like everybody's favorite uncle. I hope I can be as kind to others as he was to me.

Exception that proves the rule. You know what context that specific recipient needs from you. GenAI usually doesn't.

Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.

As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.

Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.

Or even Star Trek to be honest. I don't know why Star Wars always gets passed off as "science fantasy" when it's a more grounded universe than Trek by far - space wizards notwithstanding (which Trek has plenty of.)

Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.

As a Trekkie, fair point. I think Star Trek does fall into the "speculative fiction" category, but Star Wars doesn't. It's just "space opera".

Space opera is still a subset of speculative fiction and science fiction, saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.

A lot of classic science fiction is basically "x with spaceships" where x is the Napoleonic Wars, or feudal Europe or the Wild West or what have you, and the "science" is little more than set dressing.

> saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.

Well, it was meant to be parsed as:

Star Trek is speculative fiction and space opera.

Star Wars is just space opera.

Some space opera is also speculative fiction, but I wouldn't say it is a subset. I wouldn't call some space opera stories speculative fiction at all.

They're all classified as science fiction.

(Yes, yes - there is no consensus on these terms...typically science fiction is considered a subset of speculative fiction, and here I inverted a lot of things).

Early Heinlein e.g. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, Farmer In The Sky, The Rolling Stones or for non-juveniles, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress have lots of science.

Later works, less so.

You have now. "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash" is literally on the front of Hacker News.

I'm really glad I don't know the elephants upstairs.