Readit Newsostacke commented on King of Cannibal Island: Will the AI Bubble Burst? lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n... · Posted by u/ostacke
I’ve been using GPT-4o and now 5.2 pretty much daily, mostly for creative and technical work. What helped me get more out of it was to stop thinking of it as a chatbot or knowledge engine, and instead try to model how it actually works on a structural level.
The closest parallel I’ve found is Peter Gärdenfors’ work on conceptual spaces, where meaning isn’t symbolic but geometric. Fedorenko’s research on predictive sequencing in the brain fits too. In both cases, the idea is that language follows a trajectory through a shaped mental space, and that’s basically what GPT is doing. It doesn’t know anything, but it generates plausible paths through a statistical terrain built from our own language use.
So when it “hallucinates”, that’s not a bug so much as a result of the system not being grounded. It’s doing what it was designed to do: complete the next step in a pattern. Sometimes that’s wildly useful. Sometimes it’s nonsense. The trick is knowing which is which.
What’s weird is that once you internalise this, you can work with it as a kind of improvisational system. If you stay in the loop, challenge it, steer it, it feels more like a collaborator than a tool.
That’s how I use it anyway. Not as a source of truth, but as a way of moving through ideas faster.
Interesting concept with conceptual spaces, but how does that affect how you work with LLM:s in practice?
ostacke commented on Things I want to say to my boss ithoughtaboutthatalot.com... · Posted by u/casca
You know, watching Mad Men, it seems to be that work culture hasn't changed since the 50s. The same fake smiles, the same small talk, the same boss's favorite getting the credit. What's really changed since then?
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
I’m sure you’re right, at least to some extent, but let’s not forget that Mad Men is fictional, and from the 21st century, and might not accurately reflect the 1950’s.
ostacke commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
I wonder what the US administration will demand from Netflix for approving this.
ostacke commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value
No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
Adding Warner Bros. catalog will naturally lead to more titles to choose from for Netflix users. The choice of streaming services will be slimmer though. It will be interesting to see how regulators see it.
ostacke commented on Benjamin Franklin's Experiments lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n... · Posted by u/ostacke
> If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you're sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you're probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it'll feel too expensive.
Author in 2025:
> This is why it’s so useful to work on an article for a long time. If you’re reporting on something for six months, even if the really concentrated part, the key visit, is only a week or two of that, you have time for notes to accumulate.
What a difference 10 years of experience makes eh?