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Comment by kdazzle

14 hours ago

> the bottleneck is no longer engineering, it’s ____

90% of blog articles created in the last two years are probably dead on arrival

Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial relationship.

There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.

  • Your comment immediately made me think about the extreme opposite: a Davy Force-like, Infochammel-style livestream of a never-ending AI generated Ted Talk, offering delectable morsels of tech startup wisdom, but is ultimately zero calorie.

  • As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted to write something and re-write something in a convincing manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their corpus is completed text rather than text in action.

    • I don't know if this idea is generally useful.

      Most of what makes writing a medium worth engaging with is how its presentation is causally insulated from its creation. Well, that is true of other media: film has a whole history of production that you, the viewer, don't witness - being its main difference from theater. But with writing said production cost is trivial, and so is editing: the author doesn't need to commit to a sentence like a director must commit to a shot. This is integral to the identity of the medium, and is what allows writing to be what speech is to cinema: considerably more polished, high-budget, and well-edited conversation with an assumed reader.

      When you take that away, or make the writer conscious of how their each edit is being surveilled, you do lose that ability to freely revise your thoughts, degrading it back into a form of lightly edited monologue. Whether it is a good or bad thing is irrelevant, but it does result in a much different kind of writing. All the while, the collected writing history itself offers very low SNR: it does contain certain some divergent possibilities, but so does orders more meaningless mistakes, attention lapses, and runaway sentences - all that writing is defined by omitting.

      But assuming most writers use the keyboard just as some use the cursor to follow their gaze, it does at least impart a cognitive fingerprint, useful for light authenticity detection (unless the author is just rewriting a finished thought they plagiarized from memory) but also profiling.

      I wrote this, not AI: https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs

  • In 2020, I wrote a book and livestreamed the writing of it. Felt more raw and real at the time but I guess is probably more human vs ai these days.

    Not sure how to make that a platform, as when i wrote i explicitly put everything directly into a book unedited, whereas for many people, the editing is probably at least half if not more of the time they spend writing.

    Or we could just bring back Google Wave :-)

    jimkleiber.com/project-35 if you’re curious.

Is that the original phrasing? Now it's:

> The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It’s moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution.