Acceptance doesn’t mean that you no longer get sad or you no longer are angry that they’re gone. It just means that you accept the fact that the loss has happened and that you’re able to move forward with resolve. You can convert a lot of that grief into real commitment to live your life in a way that honors their memory and hopefully continues to make them proud.

Source: Grief in the AI Age

This is a powerful way to look at how AI is affecting the professionals of today, especially the ones in the front lines both evaluating it and leveraging it.

I also think acceptance allows one to see what’s possible. What’s possible includes things that you yourself wouldn’t do anymore leaving room for things that you had not considered before.

I want to provide another perspective: nama / rupa. In Buddhism, and Hinduism, there’s a concept of vishuddhi - cleansing your mind. The interpretation that I subscribe to is that of seeing things for what they are: material and imagining things for what they are: this adds the filter of our own mind / ego filled with its learnings and biases.

The biases are an outcome of the events and the lack of resolution of them in our mind. Ever felt anxious and that anxiety spiraling into more anxiety as our mind creatives a series of negative outcomes, each a result of the previous?

That’s a perfect example of klishta. It’s the klishta that attaches mental attributes to a material event / thing. To me, acceptance is the removal of klishta, where you see the event / world for what it is.

Personally, I have a new grief - the death of individuality and voice.

I love reading. I love reading to see how other people’s mind works and how they form connections and then describe them. I am delighted by individual word choices. I am enlightened by their unique metaphors. I am thrilled by new sentence constructions. These and many other aspects of writing allow me a glimpse into the mind of the other person.

LLMs erase this individuality. While sentence construction suffers the most, word choices are increasingly falling victim to this as well. I’ve tried playing around with LLM generated / aided work. I think if the message is the only part that’s deemed important, then I think LLMs are fine.

They help most people develop the Toyota Camry of writing. If your goal was to get from place A -> place B (communicate X), the Camry is a fine, safe, stable car that will make that happen. However, to appeal to the most amount of people, it’s also fully devoid of character, just like LLM writing.

I don’t mean to suggest that it cannot be effective. It can even generate sustainable engagement. However, it erases the voice of the author. It is bland.

These poetics in language are picked up by the model from human practice of the linguistic form, and it learns true meaning of true things in the world in the shape of the structural vibes, and those go beyond spelling, grammar and syntax. What we have as a result is a machine that “lacks the subjective intent of a cognitive agent” which nevertheless “does encode meaning and valid semantic representations”. Is that sort of meaning weak, compared to our rich understanding of the world? Likely, yes, sure, but it’s not false.

Source: Intelligence Minus Cognition - by René Walter

Like the author in this post suggests, my grief is from the increased loss of poeticism of language in the spirit of efficiency. What I mourn is when people that I love reading use it to write more or consistently. Heck, I’ve tried it myself - and I decided it absolutely kills the vibe. It’s ironic that the tool for vibe coding kills the vibe in writing.

Wait, I just realized that for people that appreciate great code, it might be similar too given the Gell-Mann amnesia of LLMs. Except this isn’t about accuracy, but the appreciation of the art. And I am nowhere close to being a professional writer.

I don’t know if this condition will remain static. I hope not (klishta) and I certainly wish that it will allow for even more interesting writing. However, in my own case, I am now convinced more than ever that I like penning my own thoughts - no matter how imperfect they might be. No matter how how inefficient they might be in communicating. Not as a way to not improve, but as a way to remain true to myself. Today I feel like I realized how much my own voice matters to me.

p.s. if you are interested in the debate of what’s intelligence (like me), I highly suggest you read this one