Posts

Posted on

Review: An Update on LLM Satire

I gave Claude (3.7 Sonnet) the same prompt I provided ChatGPT two years ago: Write a short article in the satirical style of The Onion, titled “Optimistic AI Just Happy to Be Here”.

I also went back to ChatGPT to see how it has improved.

Claude’s attempt.
ChatGPT’s attempt.

This test encapsulates why I’ve stuck with Claude as the LLM I choose to pay for a few months at a time. It has an uncanny sense of style that ChatGPT entirely fails to capture. I found Claude’s article entirely believable and legitimately funny. It addresses my complaints from two years ago—it attributes quotes to individuals rather than nameless people with a title, and doesn’t hit us over the head with any of the jokes. It plays it straight, shares the story, and makes us laugh.

ChatGPT has slightly refined itself but still suffers from being too on the nose with its humor. SunnyBot-9000 is obviously an optimistic robot. That’s a case of nominative determinism if I’ve ever seen it. Compare that to Claude’s creation of IRIS-7, where the running gag is that nobody understands how this bot’s mien came to be. ChatGPT also leans heavily into LLMs’ potential inaccuracies, making it feel like it was written two years ago. Hallucinations still occur, I’m sure, but it’s not what it was upon release. Claude focuses on the tasks’ relative drudgery, which I find more compelling. The happy idiot of ChatGPT’s creation could be refined, but on a first pass, it’s rather dull.

Interestingly, they both used the same rough setup about deleting/resetting the LLM, which it then took in stride. While the punchlines were different, they both landed.

I talked about the characteristic ending of articles from The Onion in my post two years ago, and ChatGPT failed spectacularly yet again. It at least puts the sentiment in a direct quote from the bot, similar to Claude, but hoo-boy, is it objectively not a funny ending. It has the trappings of something that could be funny, but there’s no flair or subversion of expectations. It keeps pounding the same nail of “Live, Laugh, Love” with no unique edge.

ChatGPT has certainly improved compared to two years ago, but it’s impressive what Claude was able to churn out. Heck, Claude even got the rough formatting of “CAPITALIZED CITY NAME—” that begins every Onion article. ChatGPT couldn’t be bothered.

Posted on

Two Interchangeable Mushy Veggie Lunches

As this post is going up, and ideally not while I’m writing it, I recently had three wisdom teeth removed. It’s mushtown for my meals, and that reminded me of two nearly identical lunches I started making in the last couple of months. They differ only in their spices.

My website isn’t a recipe blog, so let’s start with the important information.

Continue reading “Two Interchangeable Mushy Veggie Lunches”
Posted on

Two Good Essays

These are two essays by a couple of “guys on the Internet” whose work I enjoy. John Gruber created Markdown and now works in the Apple/tech media space. Merlin Mann used to be Merlin Mann, one of the first modern productivity gurus. Now, he’s essentially a comedic personality. Both are tremendous writers, and these two essays are supremely affecting and have unique styles that show the authors flexing their muscles.

Cranking by Merlin Mann, posted April 22, 2011. (About parenting and priorities.)

How It Went by John Gruber, posted November 8, 2024. (About the election, kind of.)

Posted on

Art As a Whole

Erin got a record player for Christmas, so I also have access to one. We each picked out albums from our parents to bring back to Connecticut and stopped into a local record shop last month. Her dad’s copy of Elton John’s Honky Cat was hilariously warped—it sounded like the left and right speakers were playing a quarter-beat different from each other. At the shop, she found a copy of an original press of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that the shop proprietor had forgotten about. It had a slight scratch, so he priced it at five dollars.

Vinyl is terrible, except for all the ways that it’s great. Most of those ways amount to coming full circle in an attention-starved economy where billionaires who thought Snow Crash had some pretty good ideas for the future are fighting for each second of our lives, fully aware that we’re near to bursting yet desperate for the next second to be the best second we’ve experienced that day. Beyond that, it’s about the vibe and process.

All this to say, putting a vinyl record on a turntable is an intentional act. Those records contain albums that are entire pieces of art, comprising individual songs that are each a bit of art but none of which capture the complete work. Experiencing art as a whole, accepting it as it’s provided, is powerful and often requires patience and an open mind. That becomes more important as the temporality of the art increases.

Continue reading “Art As a Whole”
Posted on

I Wrote My Representative

Dear Representative DeLauro,

I’ve never written to my representatives. I’ve voted in elections, chatted idly with friends at times, but otherwise admit to not being terribly participatory in the political process.

I’m writing now because I am deeply concerned about recent policy decisions—or attempts at policy decisions—from the Trump administration that affect my friends and millions of Americans’ well-being. The rapid pace and nature of these changes threaten the democratic principles I believe we all value.

As a new constituent of yours, I urge you to oppose the attempts of the Republican party to consolidate power under Trump; please continue to support robust congressional oversight and to vocally oppose any attempts to circumvent constitutional checks and balances. There is no compromise to be found in this situation full of blatantly unlawful actions.

I can’t begin to imagine what working in D.C. is like right now, so you have my sympathy and my support. Work to remind everyone that everyone there was elected by people, not by money. It’s easy to feel powerless right now, but engaging with my representatives and sharing my support feels crucial for preserving our democracy.

Thank you for the work you do. I moved to Connecticut late last summer from San Francisco, and I grew up in Minnesota, so I’m pleased to live in another state that is working to make progress in the world and not succumb to baser instincts.

All the best,

Mark Richard

Posted on

Taskmaster is Wonderful

Erin and I have been binging Taskmaster on YouTube. It’s an absolutely delightful show full of British humour1[sic] and absurd feats of… wit? Orthogonal thought? The show has remained precisely itself for years, yet each series is fresh; tasks are never repeated, and the new crop of contestants creates a different dynamic.

The brain behind the show, Alex Horne, has managed to craft hundreds of unique challenges. Of course, there are recurring task types—Do the most “adjective” thing with this object is one of my favorites—but the combination of Alex’s inventive approach and the comedians actually performing the tasks ensures that you can always expect the unexpected.

Most impressive is that Taskmaster has held true to its vaguely arbitrary scoring system overseen by the Taskmaster, Greg Davies. There’s a balance between speed-based and entirely subjective tasks, giving Greg wide latitude to adjust points as he sees fit. The fictional context of the show is that Greg is assigning these tasks and shall lay equal parts judgment and reward according to his whims. He maintains that character perfectly, getting angry and flustered and disappointed and gleeful and charmed all as appropriate. It isn’t mean-spirited in the least, but there are still incredible insults that are uniquely British.

It’s available on YouTube in the United States. Give it a whirl.

  • 1
    [sic]
Posted on

Department of Education AI Toolkit

The Department of Education1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe. released a toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable, AI Integration last October. I finally made the time to read it and love what I found. As with most things in education, if it’s sensible in that context, it is worth considering in every context.

Continue reading “Department of Education AI Toolkit”
  • 1
    Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe.
Posted on

Self-Satirizing Nonsense and The Department of Education

From a recent Chalkbeat article by Erica Meltzer and Marta W. Aldrich:

Former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has been named to serve as deputy education secretary in the incoming Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump announced the pick in a post on Truth Social Friday evening. […] He also misstated her name as Peggy Schwinn, rather than Penny.

We again enter a period of time where The Onion has its work cut out for itself. The next paragraph of this article is also pitch-perfect in its matter-of-fact approach to reporting on how ridiculous everything is.

Schwinn […] would bring extensive education experience to the role, in contrast with Trump’s education secretary pick, World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon.

Sometimes laughing is the only antidote to the crying.