Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Software developers are not okay
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
The story of this blog so far: 'AI', the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
The social contract of writing | jola.dev
About the value of genuine writing in a world being drowned in slop.
The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
On Writing #3
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.
The Evolution of Creativity
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Writing Is Thinking
When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…
Thinking is not only writing
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) raises valid concerns about the loss of cognitive work embedded in scholarly writing. However, universally dismissing AI-assisted drafting mistakenly conflates writing with thinking itself and reinforces existing inequities in who can transform their ideas into polished text. Academic authorship should depend more on the depth and creativity of human intellectual engagement than on the medium through which first drafts are produced.
Opinion | Why Save a Language? (Published 2014)
Hint: It’s not to preserve a different way of seeing the world.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.