Epistemic status: in some sense, I am just complaining, and making light of the extensive effort which goes into designing modern AI. I'm focusing on a sense that something is missing and could be better, which might incidentally come off as calling a broad category of people stupid. Sorry.

The video Badness 0 by Suckerpinch makes a comparison between the approach of Donald Knuth and a fictional villain which he names "Lorem Epson". Knuth created the typesetting tool TeX, which (together with LaTeX, a macro package for TeX) has become a nearly ubiquitous tool for writing academic papers, especially difficult-to-typset mathematical work. TeX, along with Knuth's other work, focuses on identifying good abstractions for thinking about the problem, and delivering perfect solutions at that level of abstraction. In contrast, the Lorem Epson approach focuses on looking good over being good, buzzwords over understanding, etc.

Suckerpinch understandably puts modern LLMs [...]

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(02:24) Truth Machines

(06:02) Where are the Knuths?

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