The statement should be: never use AI to draft text that is to be presented as your own authorial voice.

Never, never, do that!

I draft all my own text that anyone will ever read as “that’s James Bach talking to me.” I want no one to be able to credibly question that.

But of course, writing is more than merely drafting the text. As I draft, I write about ideas that other people or AI may have helped me come to.

Scrambled intentionality is nearly impossible to productively analyze.

When you randomly choose a picture to show me, I cannot glean any intent from being shown that specific picture, but I can glean some intent from the set of pictures you could have shown me, and in the relationships among the elements of the given picture you did show. Any randomness cuts out some intention.

When a picture is derived from huge model, any intention is mulched up to a degree that analyzing the picture for meaning is pointless.

This is a post about someone marketing their personal values: asserting their importance, suggesting we should all share them, and suggesting that certain alternative values should be rudely suppressed.

It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.

I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.

This comes across as pedantic purity testing. It's also ironic and hypocritical because you're not being nice.

Productivity is not the most important thing to me— because it’s too easy to get the wrong things done.

It’s not really about productivity. Consider productivity an unintended benefit of the medication.

Extreme ADHD is a constantly shifting quest for volatile stimulation. This results in poor diet (extreme sugar cravings all the time), short term memory loss, failure to achieve basic tasks, obsessive behaviors, poor social framing, and more. For these extreme cases medication provides clarity that allows for more rational control of basic cognitive decisions.

My son is on such medication and he swears by it.

I suffer from ADHD, probably-- enough that I wrote a book about how I couldn't abide school and can't force my brain to think about arbitrary things. I developed ways of dealing with it. I don't want to take any drugs for it, because I like being me and it is part of me.

I’m surprised that someone who claims that formal education is so important would make such a clumsy, unsupported argument.

A big problem with the notion that a university degree is necessary for success— apart from the obvious counterexamples that are all around you— is that university education is such a small percentage of your career as a learner. Another problem is that a degree can be acquired without doing much actual work. Another problem is that degrees are poorly aligned with the needs of industry.

Having been in the industry 43 years, I also have experience. I wouldn’t tell anyone to “stay in school.” I would tell them to relentlessly study their craft and achieve excellence in it. That’s why, in my field of testing, instead of quoting textbooks, the textbooks quote ME.

You just did.

Boooom! Headshot!

More like developers are now testers and nobody is doing QA.

Interesting that the phrase “words do mean things” is ambiguous: it either means “words actually have meaning” or “words can hurt peoples’ feelings.”

I’m impressed with how vapid a post can be and still find success on Hacker News.

They got rid of test managers. Then testers. The industry said everyone should be responsible for testing— which means no one is.

Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.