The Bottleneck Is You
Language models have effectively read every book ever written. You process what they hand back at a fixed fifty bits a second, a number that hasn't moved in your species' history. That fixed rate is the actual chokepoint.
Language models have effectively read every book ever written. You process what they hand back at a fixed fifty bits a second, a number that hasn't moved in your species' history. That fixed rate is the actual chokepoint.
Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.
More GPUs will not wake a language model up. A map cannot feel rain, and a mirror has nothing to lose. Feeling came from bodies that could die.
A skill is a saved set of rules an AI model loads when the topic fits. They take ten minutes to build and end the constant re-explaining.
One prompt turns an unreadable agreement into a list of what you are giving up. It pays off most on the contracts nobody would ever pay a lawyer to look at — which is nearly all of them.
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
AI is a remorseless liar, trained on a mountain of text whose whole purpose was persuasion, not accuracy. No amount of prompting fixes that on its own. You have to stop enabling it.
Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
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