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wrote:

A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/…/2026-09-03-i-think-…rag-with-grep.html I'm still going to do an explore agent.

continued:

Here's a follow up from last night: n0tls.com/…/2026-09-05-fine-tuning-…tiny-retriever.html This has been a great way for me to learn in this space. Learning with AI has been such a fun time for me.

wrote:

Ahoy denizens of textlog. Like the concept.

wrote:

I notice that language models are much better at programming than at writing. This is largely because, in programming, they have a closed feedback loop that allows them to find errors. Writing is much more complicated because the feedback is much more diffuse and delayed over time. In fact, it is often not well-defined.

continued:

What is the function that determines whether a poem is good? This means that models do not know how to think; they lack judgment. If they do not know how to think, it means that we humans are still essential. In fact, even when programming, you have to stay right on top of them. My conviction is that this will not change.

continued:

They will become increasingly useful, but they will never be able to replace the human who defines objectives and evaluates the quality of the work. All these news stories claiming that AI is going to kill us all are stupid. Humans will always be able to turn off the machine.

…

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