i really like reading the blog posts fly.io puts out, there’s always something new to learn or dive deeper into. it’s been two months since the last one, and the sprites.dev blog seems to have dried up too.
i just miss the blog posts
The best blog articles are driven by authenticity and not by marketing. It needs time and space to breed, develop, and rise naturally. This means that we shouldn’t expect robotic blog posting if we appreciate real content more than a filler substitute.
@Hypermind Most of your contributions seem genuine, but occasionally you post AI slop. Please don’t; it doesn’t add any value.
Hm… Do LLMs talk a lot about authenticity, though, 
? (I mostly only see their output on cultural kinds of subjects when they come up in Wikipedia disputes, etc.)
I think we should generally give people the benefit of the doubt, unless there are factual errors being hallucinated, or a “the AI says P, so P must be true” assertion, or the like…
Here’s another one:
There’s several tells, in my view; the biggest one here is the jarring effect of a poetic or philosophical ponderance added to a practical thread. It shifts the tone dramatically, and has something of a derailing effect.
Well, “live and let live” is the main thing at this point: I would worry that people, particularly those who are not native English speakers, might otherwise hesitate to post their own (manually written) words now, since they don’t know whether they sound like the forbidden style or not.
Given Fly.io’s rather unconstrained design language, with Haiku login poetry, the bird who’s in a sandbox admiring a tornado, Dr. Teeth the muppet explaining token attenuation with a flowchart, etc., I don’t think it’s out of place to have occasional whisps of the same here in their forum…
That kind of unexpected perspective might actually be what brings the main blog back, after all!
Indeed, subjectively, that second passage that you quoted reminds me less of an intentional time-waster and more of the real-life Dr. Teeths in my neighborhood, the offbeat academic-spinoff small-business owners, in the small college town that I live in. (I can hear them† tuning up their graduation orchestra right now.) They’re an interesting bunch, overall, and neither always right nor always wrong about what they do. Colin Percival isn’t part of that exact group, but the following gives an excellent example of that idealistic but still practical genre:
https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-06-17-crypto-science-not-engineering.html
This is a tough mode of writing, though, like the old saying of “trying to sit on two chairs”. People don’t always nail every attempt.
There should be room for a wide variety of writing styles, flowery, or plain-spoken, or somewhere in between…
†Their university, anyway.
Myself, I’d call that graphic a dream sequence, not a tornado. I like it; it looks peaceful. A meditative and optimistic bird in a sandbox; what’s not to like?
I had not heard of Colin Percival, and you lost me a bit in regards to Dr. Teeth. I needed to search for this apparently learned gnasher, and found that he’s furry, musical, and animatronic. Beyond that, my powers of decoding metaphors fail me today; I assume it’s down to the oppressive heat in the first floor of my tiny house. I could go downstairs for the purposes of rebooting my brain, but then a choc-ice in the freezer would distract me from my mission, and this would be further compounded by a game of Watercolor Sort on my 'phone. My attention span is quite poor these days.
Meanwhile: my reaction to AI text gen is visceral, not a choice. That response may be common, or rare, or somewhere in between; it would, I dare say, be interesting to find out. Indeed, in the next ten years, we probably will: we are on the rollercoaster now, even if we can’t quite recall getting on. My brain is likely to continue to fight the good fight against slop, and the cultural impact of the cocaine-addled techbro, and even the everyday AI user who acquiesces in the war on language, humanness, autonomy, and soul. I acknowledge the possibility I have non-typical brain wiring. The rich always seem to get richer at the expense of everyone else.
We can “tolerate” this, of course, but the paradox of tolerance is available to people who will tolerate everything. I’ve not yet seen the image of the impoverished immigrant being wheeled out to defend the interests of the techbro, though the techbro hates the immigrant with an unsettling fury, and there’s a first time for everything. I hope class analysis trumps identity. In general I like spelling and grammar and effort, but—sod this for a game of soldiers!—maybe I’d rather have a ropey human effort than a polished robotic one.