6 items tagged “new-yorker”
2024
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
2023
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (via) James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.
I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:
What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it's a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps.
ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.
2020
How a Cheese Goes Extinct (via) Ruby Tandoh writes for the New Yorker about the culture, history and anthropology of cheesemaking through the lens of the British cheese industry. I learned that two of my favourite British cheeses—Tymsboro and Innes Log, have sadly ceased production. Beautifully written.
2018
The Friendship That Made Google Huge. The New Yorker profiles Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Google’s first and only level 11 Senior Fellows. This is some of the best writing on complex software engineering topics (map-reduce, Tensor Flow and the like) aimed at a general audience that I’ve ever seen. Also a very compelling case study in pair programming.
2009
One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor's advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It's the retail version of the doomsday machine.