I wonder why doesn’t the Internet Archive require logging-in prior to accessing the Wayback Machine. It would probably help them distinguish humans from bots, at a very little cost to humans.
> If its the difference between the information being available at all
That's the point. The solution should avoid information not being available. Requiring login will incentivize bots to create spam accounts and move the battle to a new frontier, hurting real people in the process.
I can walk into a library, pull a book from a shelf, sit down, and read it front to back. No library card needed. Only need one to take a book home. Completely different scenario.
Only because there's no way for bots to exploit the system since it's in the physical world.
If thousands of robots suddenly showed up at your local library and started hogging all the books so nobody else could use the library, you can be sure a library card would be required to even enter.
You clearly do not live in an area with a large homeless population. Many libraries are effectively under-resourced homeless shelters. Yet, no requirement to have a library card to get in. Information is still open to the public.
1. I have never been to a library that has banned any class of people. Let alone specifically homeless people.
2. I don't know the laws of your jurisdiction, but banning a whole group of people from a public place would, by definition, not make it a public place.
3. The overwhelming majority of librarians view libraries as a service for everyone, including the homeless[0].
One of the things that stood out in your article was the high amount of negations or contrasts. This is one of the worst hallmarks of AI writing, because humans tend to write in a more straightforward way, without as many caveats.
My two cents: you should avoid using AI to “polish” what you wrote. At most, instruct it to correct grammar mistakes only, instead of rephrasing your words, changing your arguments, turning paragraphs into bullet lists, “improving” sentences to make them more idiomatic… Nowadays, many technical readers would rather read the occasional non-idiomatic prose than put up with the soulless writing style of AI.
This tracks with what OpenAI has been saying about Astra: that it tends to do things in a certain way and it’s up to you to prompt it to change its style.
> Will be interesting to see if inference chips are here to stay
To me, the efficiency gains of inference chips are so significant that they are certainly here to stay — barring a revolution of sorts that leads to a world devoid of AI as we know it.
I add commands that constantly fall into this rabbit hole to AGENTS.md alongside an instruction for the agent to request escalation immediately instead of failing first then retrying out of the sandbox. It’s a hack, but it works.
What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs?
I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.
I have a directory of stuff I've written over the years, fiction to tech writing to emails, and then asked claude to generate a style guide based on that corpus. It's surprisingly good. Not perfect, but it definitely extracted a lot of my tone and patterns, and when generating documents for sharing I just prompt with "please rephrase in my voice using the style guide at ~/path"
Use examples and learn about writing. If you're not a good writer, or at least have a passing interest, I'm not sure why anyone would expect it to nail their style any more than you would expect it to architect software in something you're not familiar with.
Give it some paragraphs of writing you like, authors, writers, whatever. Also don't expect to one shot long papers. Have it write out a table of contents and write it in small chunks.
Typical things I'll say is avoid purple prose, avoid common cliches and tropes, "show don't tell", avoid wild metaphors and similes, etc. But it all depends on what you like. Look at things you do like and try to think about what it is about that writing that is different than a middle schooler or an AI writing it. Theres no formula for it.
I noticed the same thing. In the app, normal “Chat” threads are only available via a “Checking recent chats” window, while projects, GPTs, library… are completely absent.
The web version of ChatGPT is confusing too. Now it has separate “Chat” and “Work” tabs (what about a Codex tab?), and it shifts the burden on the user to know when to use one or the other. Note that using the “Work” tab means using Codex usage limits [^1], but that’s hidden away in the settings.
Also, apparently “GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.6 Luna are not selectable in standard ChatGPT conversations” [^2] — so if you want to use these models, you must go to the Work tab or download the app.
I don’t understand why there is so much fragmentation in what was supposed to be a unified app. The way that it is now, it’s far from intuitive.
I’m interested in knowing how each of GPT 5.6’s variants fare in non-English writing/translation tasks.
GPT 5.5 has a tendency to write English calques and non-idiomatic prose in other languages. Although that can be somewhat tamed with detailed instructions and a corpus of confusing terms, the model’s output often reads like a literal translation rather than native prose. Since I notice these issues most clearly in languages I know well, it makes me reluctant to trust the model’s output in languages in which I’m less proficient.
Ironically, ChatGPT began as a simple text-generation tool, but much of its offerings and benchmarks now focus on coding and agentic workflows, while leaving behind what made it notable in the first place.
I wonder why they haven’t simply continued to rebrand Codex as a general-purpose tool. ChatGPT Work is a convoluted name and continues the trend of having separate brands for separate things, what runs counter to OpenAI’s purported goal of unifying every workflow into a single “superapp”.
Worse still: what happens when your workflow involves both coding and general knowledge work? Are you expected to switch apps, or switch settings? To me, it sounds very confusing and inefficient, and not at all what I was expecting.
because every non-programmer hears “codex” and thinks that it’s for coding only - seems like a large hurdle to adoption. claude has been successful with cowork branding which makes sense.
Isn't Microsoft heavily invested? As one should know, Microsoft are experts at confusing and contrived naming with no connection to reality: Windows Home, Windows Home Premium, Windows Professional, Business, Premium, Small Business etc. Now it is Copilot: Copilot, Copilot Plus, Copilot 365, pretty and Copilot Copilot too, I guess. And ofc Microsoft points, the currency for Xbox. And yeah, anything is Xbox too.
I think they're grappling with the fact that their positioning needs to be as the operating system but they don't have a leg in currently and destabilising the existing OS players is a monumental task. So they're stuck with the super app direction that just doesn't make sense for how the future of AI UX is envisioned.
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