If you get a chance, do some homework on an accounting “Magic Trick” that all the Big Boyz are using to flatter profits and obfuscate the sheer amount of capital being torched.
It’s called “Construction in Progress” (CiP). If you are unaware of it and what it does, you will be completely floored when you read about it….
If you or I thought it up and used it, we’d be jailed for fraud.
The challenge is that either your natural writing style happens to resemble generic AI output, or AI is doing much of the writing / editing.
That isn’t meant as a personal dig. It’s a broader problem with technologies that make production cheaper and faster. volume explodes, but quality (or maybe uniqueness) tends to implode.
I had an interesting back and forth recently with a publisher who wanted to run a story I’d written about visiting some of the deep sea lighthouses off the west of Scotland.
Their edit was technically very polished, but I thought it killed the voice. Everything had been regularised into roughly 20–25 word sentences, adjectives had multiplied, and every so often came the familiar three b
eat staccato construction.
Short.
Punchy.
Important.
Nothing was obviously wrong with it, but hat was the problem.
Id compare it to someone who is slightly too handsome or too beautiful. You admire the symmetry, but after a while there’s a nagging sense that something isn’t quite right.
In my opinion, its the blemishes that make me want to read more. AI often improves the prose technically while making it less convincing.
That, for me, is the danger of AI-assisted writing. The problem isn’t that it writes badly. It’s that increasingly it writes recognisably well.
In the end, those with the best ideas, and a writing style that genuinely chimes with their readers, will command a premium.
I do tend to let AI write for me. Not everything, such as this reply. But articles where I don't have all the facts or access to the information as it might have.
I give it the ideas. It connects the dots. And then I ask it to create something cogent for me. I then put the article thru the ringer with other AI's as judges of content, fallibility and truth.
Manual proofreading is never off the table.
However, the speed at which an article can get created is without parallel.
I suspect you may be correct about the originality aspect of the written word. That might not be something as simple to do for AI. It certainly can be mimicked. I have confessed in the past to using the writing style of different celebrities to juice up my replies. But an original style?
Great question. Is not everyone's style a bit of someone else's who has preceded them?
I give SUNO up as an example. You may or may not have come across it in your digital travels. It is a music generator. Born around the same time as ChatGPT, it has created millions of songs since its inception. I say has created, only in the sense that it still required the prompts from individuals to start the process. And then the curation process begins. Not to mention the lawsuits that the music industry has brought against them for copyright infringement.
Are they original styles? Or simply copies, however subtle of previously known styles?
What is a an original style? Didn't the Beatles listen to other artists and create their own from there? Hasn't every musician on the planet done the same? Every author?
AI will benefit writers, as long as they use it for what it is - a tool. Not the be all and end all of their craft.
One area it will excel - medical and scientific papers. I think both you and I would be hard pressed to be able to distinguish the difference between a human generated paper and one squeezed out of a digital transmogrifier.
For day to day, back and forth?
I too would rather hear from other humans. And not necessarily their proxies.
:)
PS. I still haven't found out how to create an EM dash manually using my keyboard (obviously, I haven't even bothered to ask).
Ive not found a keyboard shortcut for tge em dash, but my delete key is wearing out from removing them! (A good example that perfect grammar should be kept for technical documents).
I agree with almost everything you say. Good to discuss as, at this time, the questions are almost more interesting than the answers!
My process (which is for fun and not monetisation):
1. Dump my thoughts into a new chat in a ChatGPT project that I continually add to as style guide and recurring themes (like making things easier usually leads to more quantity / lower quality).
2. Get a first draft from the bot
3. Fill in gaps, reorder
4. Rewrite "manually"
5. Get Grok to review telling it ChatGPT doesnt like me being blunt about politics 😎
Add to Brian Calvin’s post exposing the faux valuation of CIP: the magical doubling of life expectancy of Ai chips from 3 to 6 years on depreciation schedules of the data center owners; and removal of the 5% retention requirement from issuers of private credit. Combined with the risk of demand shortfall for Ai computing, the elements are present for a bubble deflation that make 2008 look tame.
The Inquisition is here, and it's here to stay. (Mel Brooks) AI may bust as an an investment, but AI, as the poor, will always be with us. Best always. PM
We know from history that the earth has gone through many temperature cycles, nothing new.
We also know the big AI balloon is going to pop as every boom has. As I have NO SKIN in the game I'll sit bag and watch that old yellow relic appreciate, thankyou very much!
I suppose the worse thing about the whole mess, is the Big Tuna already set up the failure to be deposited into mom and dad’s pension and annuities. Seems like the writing was already on the wall,
Henry ford did not more than double his wages out of altruism. Olds. Chevrolet Tucker et al were all poaching his employees, engineers right down to the guys who cut the wooden floorboards out of the particular, wooden delivery crates as specified in contracts to be used as internal parts of the Model T. This altruism myth, is just that. He did it to keep competitors down.
Quit complaining about the heat it's summer! You can afford some beautiful women standing above you while you eat those lovely, high mountain grapes.
Please update us on the old caretaker and the gypsy wagon. You've got some time to purchase them in air conditioning.
Regarding Dusty's future, it really depends on what he wants in life. Yet how would he know without exploring a variety of life experiences including work, education, travel and social situations. Who knows where life leads you. It all depends on what a person wants and the kind of life he wishes to live. If he has an independent streak and an entrepreneurial bent it may lead him eventually to be self employed in one form or another. It depends on one's goals and aspirations. For me, it was all about achieving financial independence by running my own business in a field I enjoyed that enabled me to have control over my time and lifestyle.
Of course, self employment is not a fit for everyone and as a matter of fact its not a fit for most. Just as being an employee and being under the direction of a boss or an organization was not a fit for me.
Bill makes some interesting references to music of the 60's & 70's. Wonder if he is a rock fan or maybe an old hippie. Anyway, like that there are people that apparently appreciated (?) those times. Or he has a really good research algorithm. He is an excellent writer.
"And that stops congress from spending more than we have in gold..." Come on Patrick, a smart guy like you knows there are no limits on Congress' ability to make money out of thin air, gold or no gold. Maybe if we had a world wide gold standard Congress might take pause.
There were multiple forces at play when Nixon removed the convertibility of the US dollar to gold in 1971. The biggest? Countries were cashing their US dollars and demanding gold for them. Charles De Gaulle of France, was among the first.
The jig, started by Roosevelt in 1933, was up. Gold that had been pegged at US $35/ounce, was unsustainable, mostly due to America's printing of money not in accordance with how much actual gold they were holding.
Lucas, Rand Paul was at Fort Knox recently; he claims he saw the gold, amounting to roughly half of our national reserves, and all is well, says he. Best always. PM
Hi Paul. Seeing gold, is not the same as auditing and testing the gold. To make sure it is gold. See my article, linked above, as to why the two are very different.
Fair point, Patrick. But I don't believe Rand Paul was allowed to drill into randomly selected gold bars and have the samples independently assayed to make sure, for example, that a bar wasn't tungsten underneath a gold exterior.
That kind of testing has been part of previous Treasury audits. But Rand Paul's few-hour visit wasn't an audit. He looked at gold.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands of other bars sitting behind the ones he could see.
Seeing a room full of gold is certainly evidence that there is gold in Fort Knox. It is not evidence that all 147,341,858 fine troy ounces claimed by the Treasury were sitting there, in the claimed purity, unencumbered and accounted for, on the afternoon he visited.
Hi Bill,
If you get a chance, do some homework on an accounting “Magic Trick” that all the Big Boyz are using to flatter profits and obfuscate the sheer amount of capital being torched.
It’s called “Construction in Progress” (CiP). If you are unaware of it and what it does, you will be completely floored when you read about it….
If you or I thought it up and used it, we’d be jailed for fraud.
Keep up the Amazing Work. And Thank You
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest - Winston Churchill.
100% correct!
Jim
I couldn’t agree with you more on the investment front.
AI looks very ready to meet its pin.
But this caught my eye:
“Behind them all is the hunch that if we were to reduce the cost of knowledge...”
Yesterday I published an article called When Curiosity Becomes Cheap.
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/when-curiosity-becomes-cheap
And oddly enough, I think both of us may be right.
AI may be ruinously expensive to build while becoming astonishingly cheap to use.
For me, another question costs almost nothing. Another branch. Another paper. Another connection.
Not because knowledge itself suddenly became cheap.
Because the cost of moving through, assembling, interrogating and connecting the knowledge humanity has already accumulated has collapsed.
Somebody else is spending a fortune to make my curiosity cheap.
The investors may still get killed.
The technology may still change everything.
The challenge is that either your natural writing style happens to resemble generic AI output, or AI is doing much of the writing / editing.
That isn’t meant as a personal dig. It’s a broader problem with technologies that make production cheaper and faster. volume explodes, but quality (or maybe uniqueness) tends to implode.
I had an interesting back and forth recently with a publisher who wanted to run a story I’d written about visiting some of the deep sea lighthouses off the west of Scotland.
Their edit was technically very polished, but I thought it killed the voice. Everything had been regularised into roughly 20–25 word sentences, adjectives had multiplied, and every so often came the familiar three b
eat staccato construction.
Short.
Punchy.
Important.
Nothing was obviously wrong with it, but hat was the problem.
Id compare it to someone who is slightly too handsome or too beautiful. You admire the symmetry, but after a while there’s a nagging sense that something isn’t quite right.
In my opinion, its the blemishes that make me want to read more. AI often improves the prose technically while making it less convincing.
That, for me, is the danger of AI-assisted writing. The problem isn’t that it writes badly. It’s that increasingly it writes recognisably well.
In the end, those with the best ideas, and a writing style that genuinely chimes with their readers, will command a premium.
I do tend to let AI write for me. Not everything, such as this reply. But articles where I don't have all the facts or access to the information as it might have.
I give it the ideas. It connects the dots. And then I ask it to create something cogent for me. I then put the article thru the ringer with other AI's as judges of content, fallibility and truth.
Manual proofreading is never off the table.
However, the speed at which an article can get created is without parallel.
I suspect you may be correct about the originality aspect of the written word. That might not be something as simple to do for AI. It certainly can be mimicked. I have confessed in the past to using the writing style of different celebrities to juice up my replies. But an original style?
Great question. Is not everyone's style a bit of someone else's who has preceded them?
I give SUNO up as an example. You may or may not have come across it in your digital travels. It is a music generator. Born around the same time as ChatGPT, it has created millions of songs since its inception. I say has created, only in the sense that it still required the prompts from individuals to start the process. And then the curation process begins. Not to mention the lawsuits that the music industry has brought against them for copyright infringement.
Are they original styles? Or simply copies, however subtle of previously known styles?
What is a an original style? Didn't the Beatles listen to other artists and create their own from there? Hasn't every musician on the planet done the same? Every author?
AI will benefit writers, as long as they use it for what it is - a tool. Not the be all and end all of their craft.
One area it will excel - medical and scientific papers. I think both you and I would be hard pressed to be able to distinguish the difference between a human generated paper and one squeezed out of a digital transmogrifier.
For day to day, back and forth?
I too would rather hear from other humans. And not necessarily their proxies.
:)
PS. I still haven't found out how to create an EM dash manually using my keyboard (obviously, I haven't even bothered to ask).
You?
Ive not found a keyboard shortcut for tge em dash, but my delete key is wearing out from removing them! (A good example that perfect grammar should be kept for technical documents).
I agree with almost everything you say. Good to discuss as, at this time, the questions are almost more interesting than the answers!
My process (which is for fun and not monetisation):
1. Dump my thoughts into a new chat in a ChatGPT project that I continually add to as style guide and recurring themes (like making things easier usually leads to more quantity / lower quality).
2. Get a first draft from the bot
3. Fill in gaps, reorder
4. Rewrite "manually"
5. Get Grok to review telling it ChatGPT doesnt like me being blunt about politics 😎
#4 I don't do. Not for long form articles, anyways. Takes too long.
My #4 is Read the article and critique and edit.
But the questions keep coming. You and Patrick below, triggered another article.
And thanks to this forum, and life in general, there will always be more questions than answers.
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/before-de-gaulle-the-gold-was-already
Add to Brian Calvin’s post exposing the faux valuation of CIP: the magical doubling of life expectancy of Ai chips from 3 to 6 years on depreciation schedules of the data center owners; and removal of the 5% retention requirement from issuers of private credit. Combined with the risk of demand shortfall for Ai computing, the elements are present for a bubble deflation that make 2008 look tame.
University of Oxford a bunch of WOKE tards
The Inquisition is here, and it's here to stay. (Mel Brooks) AI may bust as an an investment, but AI, as the poor, will always be with us. Best always. PM
We know from history that the earth has gone through many temperature cycles, nothing new.
We also know the big AI balloon is going to pop as every boom has. As I have NO SKIN in the game I'll sit bag and watch that old yellow relic appreciate, thankyou very much!
Jim Marshall
I suppose the worse thing about the whole mess, is the Big Tuna already set up the failure to be deposited into mom and dad’s pension and annuities. Seems like the writing was already on the wall,
Henry ford did not more than double his wages out of altruism. Olds. Chevrolet Tucker et al were all poaching his employees, engineers right down to the guys who cut the wooden floorboards out of the particular, wooden delivery crates as specified in contracts to be used as internal parts of the Model T. This altruism myth, is just that. He did it to keep competitors down.
Quit complaining about the heat it's summer! You can afford some beautiful women standing above you while you eat those lovely, high mountain grapes.
Please update us on the old caretaker and the gypsy wagon. You've got some time to purchase them in air conditioning.
Take care.😁
Regarding Dusty's future, it really depends on what he wants in life. Yet how would he know without exploring a variety of life experiences including work, education, travel and social situations. Who knows where life leads you. It all depends on what a person wants and the kind of life he wishes to live. If he has an independent streak and an entrepreneurial bent it may lead him eventually to be self employed in one form or another. It depends on one's goals and aspirations. For me, it was all about achieving financial independence by running my own business in a field I enjoyed that enabled me to have control over my time and lifestyle.
Of course, self employment is not a fit for everyone and as a matter of fact its not a fit for most. Just as being an employee and being under the direction of a boss or an organization was not a fit for me.
Bill makes some interesting references to music of the 60's & 70's. Wonder if he is a rock fan or maybe an old hippie. Anyway, like that there are people that apparently appreciated (?) those times. Or he has a really good research algorithm. He is an excellent writer.
"And that stops congress from spending more than we have in gold..." Come on Patrick, a smart guy like you knows there are no limits on Congress' ability to make money out of thin air, gold or no gold. Maybe if we had a world wide gold standard Congress might take pause.
There were multiple forces at play when Nixon removed the convertibility of the US dollar to gold in 1971. The biggest? Countries were cashing their US dollars and demanding gold for them. Charles De Gaulle of France, was among the first.
The jig, started by Roosevelt in 1933, was up. Gold that had been pegged at US $35/ounce, was unsustainable, mostly due to America's printing of money not in accordance with how much actual gold they were holding.
Someone noticed. And called their bluff.
Wrote about it here:
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/the-government-says-its-worth-10
You spurred me onto another article. Charles De Gaulle wasn't the first one to convert USD into gold in 1965. He was almost the last one.
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/before-de-gaulle-the-gold-was-already
Fort Knox audit would be awesome. If it ever happens.
Wrote about that too.
Including the last time a person with a camera was allowed to take pictures inside Fort Knox. For the whole world to see - 1974.
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/nobody-has-actually-looked-not-really
Lucas, Rand Paul was at Fort Knox recently; he claims he saw the gold, amounting to roughly half of our national reserves, and all is well, says he. Best always. PM
Hi Paul. Seeing gold, is not the same as auditing and testing the gold. To make sure it is gold. See my article, linked above, as to why the two are very different.
Fair point, Patrick. But I don't believe Rand Paul was allowed to drill into randomly selected gold bars and have the samples independently assayed to make sure, for example, that a bar wasn't tungsten underneath a gold exterior.
That kind of testing has been part of previous Treasury audits. But Rand Paul's few-hour visit wasn't an audit. He looked at gold.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands of other bars sitting behind the ones he could see.
Seeing a room full of gold is certainly evidence that there is gold in Fort Knox. It is not evidence that all 147,341,858 fine troy ounces claimed by the Treasury were sitting there, in the claimed purity, unencumbered and accounted for, on the afternoon he visited.