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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   32855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I always keep an eye out for your takes. You need to be more on the ball so that I can count on you appearing out of a dim closet every time the whole AI thing shows up here.

I see no particular reason that a copilot for writing couldn't exist, but as far as I can tell it doesn't (unless you count something janky like loom).

I'm a cheap bastard, so I enjoy Google's generosity with AI Studio. Their interface is good, or at the least more powerful/ friendly for power-users than the typical chatbot app. I can fork conversations, regenerate responses easily and so on. It doesn't hurt that Gemini 2.5 is great, the only other LLM I've used that I like so much is Grok 3.

I can see better tooling, and I'd love it. Maybe one day I'll be less lazy and vibe code something, but I don't want to pay API fees. Free is free, and pretty good.

And then instead of leveraging that we for whatever reason decided that the way we want to use these things is to train them to imitate professionals in a chat room who are writing with a completely different process (having access to tools which they use before responding, editing their writing before hitting "send", etc).

Gemini 2.5 reasons before outputting anything. This is annoying for short answers, but good on net. I'm a nosy individual and read its thoughts, and they usually include editing and consistency passes.

The stricter and stronger your Prune filter, the higher quality content you stand to produce. But one common bug is related to this: if the quality of your Babble is much lower than that of your Prune, you may end up with nothing to say. Everything you can imagine saying or writing sounds cringey or content-free. Ten minutes after the conversation moves on from that topic, your Babble generator finally returns that witty comeback you were looking for. You'll probably spend your entire evening waiting for an opportunity to force it back in.

I'm always glad that my babble usually comes out with minimal need for pruning. Some people can't just write on the fly, they need to plot things out, summarize and outline. Sounds like a cursed way to live.

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