Robin Sloan: Language models are a fundamentally manic technology
The “ideal” setting for a brain (or an economy?) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, sometimes revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t sometimes relax the standards by which they light up.
Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”