Humans Among the LLMs

The rise of LLM AIs has brought up some truly interesting questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be creative?

And lucky for you, I’ve got the answers right here.

Robots Robot

What is creativity?

It is not the creation of ideas ex nihilo. Creativity is the slicing and dicing and remixing of existing ideas to make new ones. The best artists borrow and steal.

Something I gleaned from Doug Wilson’s Wordsmithy is that the generation of new tools and the death of old workflows should not be the cause of an excess of sorrow.

The New Tool

Many lament the loss of beautiful handwriting and yearn for the days when one would write a substantive letter in one go. But, the skill of nailing your first draft in a letter has been replaced with the twin skills of drafting and editing. This is not necessarily bad. Different tools call for different workflows, and AI as a writing tool means the multiplication of this effect. Drafting is now lightning quick. You can draft a blog post or chapter in mere seconds. Chances are the draft will be quite bad. Hence the editing.

One of my favorite things about tech is uncovering the little historical moments that connect the dots to where we are today.

And one of those key moments is Siri’s flash of brilliance and sudden decline.

Apple dropped Siri (in 2011—14 years ago), and it was groundbreaking. You could talk to your phone and get real, conversational answers. You thought you were living in the future.

If you can reach back in your memory, you might recall the kind of answers Siri used to give. In retrospect, some of them were wild. You could ask it questions like, Is Jesus Lord? and it would give you an actual answer.

Learning Is Not A Crime

The big picture: When a human reads something and learns from it, nobody accuses them of copyright infringement.

So why does the equation change just because a computer is doing the learning?

It doesn’t. Learning isn’t infringement; it’s what we do. In the copyright world, this category is called “fair use”.

But this one time….

Let’s tackle a common pushback:

“But I found this AI that can reproduce a copyrighted work or excerpt, word for word!”

A useful yet rarely repeated insight: software engineering is construction work with better lighting and fewer splinters. AI has only made this analogy sharper—and it’s why software engineering isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many robots we throw at it.

If you’ve ever swung a hammer on a job site, you might think at first glance, A robot could do this. Nail goes here, board goes there, repeat.

But spend five minutes actually building something, and you’ll see why that’s nonsense. Even the “standard” stuff—like slapping together a house, one of the ten million built this decade—never stays standard. The foundation’s off by an inch. The client wants a weird skylight. The last subcontractor botched the plumbing. Your boss is incompetent (he gives you incorrect prompts), but good ol’ Jim’s been here 20 years and knows where the bodies are buried. Robots don’t handle that mess. Creativity does. Humans do.

Jevon’s Paradox is my all-time favorite paradox (doesn’t everybody have one?), one of those concepts that reshapes how you think about the nuts and bolts of the world.

Named after 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons, the paradox observes that making a resource more efficient leads to more, not less, consumption of that resource.

The driving example is energy. Suppose power plants become twice as efficient, burning half the fuel to produce the same amount of energy. The naive assumption would be that society would use half as much fuel. But in practice, as energy becomes cheaper and more accessible, new use cases emerge. Instead of using less fuel, we use more: heating entire homes, producing more in our factories, and inventing entirely new markets.

The first and most basic thing to understand about LLMs is that they are statistical models of language. That’s it.

Some people see their incredibly impressive output and say, Statistics? It’s more than just statistics!

But it really is just statistics.

And that’s why you can start using it and stop hiding under your bed.

LLMs Learn Language Similarly to Humans

When humans are born, they know no specific words. They acquire language simply by listening to how others use it.

After 6 years hacking cloud infrastructure at Oracle, I’ve packed up and joined the startup life.

I’m partnering with Joe, creator of Smart Pricing Table, an insanely helpful proposal-writing platform for agencies (or anyone).

What makes Smart Pricing Table worth this investment?

1. The product is actually helpful, and truly loved by its users.
2. Joe is the perfect founder for this product, with years of actual agency experience.

There are a lot of “proposal software” products out there… and they’re mostly glorified word processors + signature software.

TLDR

Use --immediate-mode* **, e.g.

tcpdump --immediate-mode -w out.pcap

And then use Ctrl+C to stop tcpdump whenever you feel like it, without fear of data loss.

* --packet_buffered should do the trick but is not present in older versions of tcpdump; see below.

** But if you’re just printing to the console (that is, not using -w to save to a file), then the non-lossy behavior will be enabled by default, so no need to use these options.