I wonder what it would look if you redid the benchmarks, testing against models that have reasoning effort set to various values. Maybe structured output is only worse if the model isn't allowed to do reasoning first?
For me, that’s kind of the point. It’s similar to how the characters in a novel don’t really exist, and yet you can’t really discuss what happens in a novel without pretending that they do. It doesn’t really make sense to treat the author’s motivations and each character’s motivations as the same.
Similarly, we’re all talking to ghosts now, which aren’t real, and yet there is something there that we can talk about. There are obvious behavioral differences depending on what persona the LLM is generating text for.
I also like the hint of danger in “talking to ghosts.” It’s difficult to see how a rational adult could be in any danger from just talking, but I believe the news reports that some people who get too deep into it get “possessed.”
I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs.
A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.
Anything you do with AI is improved if you're able to traverse the stack. There's no situation where knowing how to code won't put you above peers who don't.
It's like how every job requires math if you make it far enough.
As far as I know, Google respects robots.txt and doesn't obfuscate their crawlers, so you can easily block them if you want. It seems like an important distinction?
Google can afford to respect robots.txt because it has a monopoly on search and nobody would consider actually blocking them in said robots.txt anyway.
SerpApi is scraping Google. The "maliciousness" if the requests is a matter of perspective. Of course Google considers it malicious; that doesn't necessarily make it true.
There's no law that says you have to do that. It used to be a sensible thing to do, in the early internet. In the current internet, obeying robots.txt is a self-handicap and you shouldn't do it.
It's rather odd to use words like "should" when you're advocating for disrespecting other people's wishes. There are sometimes reasons not to cooperate, but it seems like a good default.
The web is now hostile. If you're starting a search engine, everyone else has written a robots.txt that bans you from starting a search engine. You either ignore that, or you abandon your plan to make a search engine.
It’s a meme that will never die, but there’s no proof it ever happened:
> This story doesn’t even show that Target tried to figure out whether the girl was pregnant. It just shows that she received a flyer that contained some maternity items and her weird dad freaked out and wanted to talk to the manager. There’s no way to know whether the flyer arrived as a result of some complex targeting algorithm that correctly deduced that the girl was pregnant because she bought a bunch of lotion, or whether they just happened to be having a sale on diapers that week and sent a flyer about it to all their customers.
I think parent comment was pointing to lack of establishing a causation link. The finding in their abstract is extrapolated by statistical inference. For example smokers tend to drink more etc. The paper does take such factors into account. Personally I wouldn't jump to such a strong conclusion from statistical inference because it closes the door on other factors that might be even stronger when combined together. The paper reflects motivated reasoning more than a discovery outcome. That said, smoking is of course a major health risk, I am just pointing at the research approach.
In the paper they claim it matters for midlife mortality too:
> People who start smoking at age 18 begin to exhibit higher mortality several decades later, with particularly large effects beginning at ages 45–64 (Lawton et al. 2025). A health-capital model allows the mortality rates of older persons to be determined not only by their current smoking behavior but also by smoking in earlier years. In the United States, smoking rates started falling for college graduates earlier than they did for the non-college population.
...
> [...] with rapidly improving treatments and screening for lung cancer (Howladeret al. 2020), the major impact of smoking over the longer-term—particularly for people aged 55–64 arises from other more-common tobacco-related diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); cardiovascular diseases such as strokes, aneurysms, and heart
attacks; diabetes; and other types of cancers (Carter et al. 2015). Perhaps more surprising is that past county-level smoking rates are highly predictive of deaths of despair. This finding, however, is consistent with an emerging literature in biology that points to a causal influence
of smoking on drug addiction [...]
I like "ghosts" as a simple metaphor for what you chat with when you chat with AI. Usually we chat with Casper the Friendly Ghost, but there are a lot of other ghosts that can be conjured up.
Some people are obsessed with chatting with ghosts. It seems like a rational adult couldn't be seriously harmed by chatting with a ghost, but there are news reports showing that some people get possessed.
Also, much of the point of having shareholders is that they take the risk. If something goes wrong, they lose their money first.
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