"Naturally gifted writer" is not a thing. The way to get better at writing is to write a lot.
Developing a voice comes naturally as you go through the pain of being a terrible writer to eventually being mediocre. Accepting the LLM's words is actively harmful to that process because it lets you skip over the part where you read over what you wrote and rewrite until it doesn't suck as much.
"Naturally gifted writer" is a thing. Yes like any skill there is a learning curve, but some folks can climb that curve incredibly fast while others will struggle even with a lifetime of practice.
Clearly I am not a gifted writer as my original comment failed to convey this very well. And now I am pondering, maybe next time I should put my comment in an LLM to review it first. This meta lesson is playing out over and over everywhere by anyone writing anything.
I am in no way saying LLM writing in general is good, but ignoring the reality of what is happening is silly. For good or bad the not great writers not only will, but are doing things like voice rambling into an LLM as a starting point and editing it from there.
Testing the "obvious", "duh" things is incredibly valuable science. It provides a more solid foundation on which to build because it reduces the assumption space.
As someone on the spectrum/neurodivergent myself, no, it does not excuse his behavior whatsoever (or the lack of action by MIT).
Stallman predicting that a technical capability could be abused and then somebody eventually abusing it is not Cassandra syndrome, it's just threat modeling run amuck. It gets old after a while (I should know, I remember classic Slashdot lol). The actual question is whether his proposed cure(s) were worth the cost, and that has very much not been "proven right" (if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO)
> if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO
As someone who also remembers classic Slashdot, it's staggering how many of the things Stallman was writing about back then came true. Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control. I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
> Software is centralized and subscription based, and largely not under the consumer's control.
Is it really though? I'll grant that you might have a point with iOS/Android and things like banking apps (no problem with the apps existing, it's when there's no web-based alternative is where the real issue lies). But there's more (F)OSS code out in the wild then there's ever been, more (F)OSS alternatives to most major software, Steam runs on Linux, major companies like Google and Nintendo putting licensing notices where you can read them). Not to mention the rise of open source hardware, the whole makersphere, etc.
> I fail to see how LLMs make any of these situations better, care to elaborate?
By driving the cost of software to zero. I've had great success over the past year or so constructing a whole range of system software, the original "no driver for this printer" complaint Stallman had would be solved with an evening of Claude/Codex/etc usage now (and to prove my point, we just had someone crank out a Linux GPU driver for M4 Apple Silicon using LLMs)
It's still a fringe movement even now, at least the turbo fanatic, FSF disciple kind. It was normal companies like Google adopting Linux that drove adoption, not something Stallman did.
Don’t throw other people under the bus to justify what a wretched person he is. Being autistic doesn’t make you defend pedophilia or any of the other unpleasantness he’s implicated in.
I can write "EA-3167" and "pedophilia" in an article 100 times. Congratulations! You're now associated with pedophilia. That's a classic smear campaign.
Unless someone can cite something Stallman specifically said or did which implicates him, I'm passing on this as part of a smear campaign. I will not accept:
- An article reporting on an article reporting on a misquote of Stallman
- Subtext you read into something he wrote (his flaw is he doesn't get subtext to what he writes)
There's infinite communications from him. He has no filter. Go on. Find something. If you can't, accept you're wrong. The alternative is that I'll accept you're being malicious.
> “In 2006, Stallman published a controversial comment about the intention of pedophiles in The Netherlands to form a political party[1]. He wrote, I am skeptical of the claim that voluntary pedophilia harms children. People today don't think that a prepubertal human being—a child—is capable of understanding all the implications of sexual activity (in some cases this may be so even after puberty). So in widespread social opinion, the concept of “voluntary” does not apply.
In the same article, Stallman writes, [...] stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. This is not totally improper, it encompasses the immense diversity of beliefs about age of consent and morality across cultures.
As for laws, in the United States the criteria for determining age of consent and related issues differ across jurisdictions, some of them have raised the age of consent as recently as 2017 and 2019. Furthermore, the United States seems to have a double standard when it comes to these laws, since marriage of a child with an adult—even much older—is allowed under certain circumstances; we believe that this seriously disregards children's wellbeing in favor of some other “convenience.” Lastly, it may be surprising to some that age of consent in the US is 16 in 34 States”
Then the actual “defense of Stallman” bit is that he changed his mind or at least said he did… thirteen years later:
Whatever the reasoning that led Stallman to write those statements, the fact is that later he changed his mind:
> “14 September 2019 (Sex between an adult and a child is wrong)
Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.”
Note the date and remember this VERY late “change of heart” coincidentally took place one month after Epstein died and became the current sensation he remains.
That’s from an attempt defend him, and ironically the site is full of documentation of the hideous things he says and believes.
The so-called "article" is a one-line comment on a post in what looks like a 2006-era Twitter-style feed. I think one would see a similar amount of crazy from virtually anyone posting this much, without a filter.
Read it.
Do you believe Stallman is a pedophile on the basis of this comment?
I do not.
I've seen similar comments in academic texts, in the context of cultures where this happened and was acceptable (e.g. Greek pederasty in ancient Athens). From what I know of Stallman's communication style, I read this comment in a similar, if much less informed, light. He's making an incorrect but academic point, poorly.
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
THE EXACT SAME QUOTE on the page you linked. I get it. Do yourself a favor and stop making excuses for him, you can still support the points he makes about FOSS without defending the rest or the man himself. His problem isn't communication style it's the content of what he says that's a problem.
I also never said "Stallman is a pedophile" I said he supports pedophilia. That comment alone, never mind the others, is more than enough to make that claim. Have a lovely weekend.
Let's say your GPU uses a constant 300W. It takes approximately 1.16 Wh to heat a liter of water 1 degree celsius under 100% efficiency. This setup won't be 100% efficient, so let's round up to 1.5 Wh per liter per degree (roughly 80% efficient). A typical domestic water heater in the US 40-50 gallons, so roughly 160 liters.
Let's say your incoming water temperature is 18C and you want it preheated to 50C, which is 32C degree differential, which means you'll need 32 * 1.5 * 160 = 7680 Wh, or 25 hours straight to heat the buffer tank from scratch.
You'll need to purchase a small water-to-water heat exchanger ($50), two pumps ($100 each), a power supply for said pumps, hose and/or copper pipe and fittings, and various other sundries, plus the cost of a buffer tank ($600ish), so figure all in roughly $1000, plus the cost of electricity to run the pumps.
At $0.22/kWh you're saving roughly $450 a year with this setup in foregone water heating, but because it's not 100% efficient you're spending $500 in electricity to run your GPU 24/7/365, and that's the maximum you can possibly save with the above assumptions. Scale up for more GPUs and down accordingly for less usage as you see fit.
Alternatively, use air as the heat conductor by placing the GPU laden machine in the same space as a hybrid heat pump water heater.
Just recycle an old water heater as the tank? I think your cost estimate is way overblown but it would certainly eat up a lot of time and effort to DIY. Regardless there's a much bigger flaw with this plan. Water tanks need to be kept above or below certain temperatures. The "preheated" range being described here is distinctly unsafe due to various microorganisms IIUC.
It looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me.
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
The first few Discworld books explore this a little bit too. I think pterry dropped the concept after that, I don't really remember it later in the series.
The sunrise flows like a golden river onto the landscape. If I remember correctly.
Also one of my favorites is discworld scientist experimenting with ftl communication through succession by “modulating” a king above a pit of sharks an measuring his son at the other end of the world for “kingness”
> A worker reads the tail of the log, performs exactly one step—either inference or tool execution—appends the result, and forgets everything. It holds zero session state between turns.
My current understanding of an agent session is that the entire session (modulo compaction, reordering tools, etc) is sent to the stateless inference engine every time inference happens. The quoted section doesn't seem workable unless "read the tail of the log" actually means "read the entire session log".
There are ways to make that work but workers being completely stateless makes it hard.
First, the worker has to read the entire session log only if the next action is inference.
You are right that my writing is misleading. To clarify that, I mean the worker only needs the tail of the log to decide what to do next: inference or execute tools.
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