Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look.
I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly.
Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.
Someone has already mentioned Matthew Butterick's fonts and his online "book" Practical Typography [1]—absolutely fantastic material there.
Some concrete suggestions from me:
- Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font.
- Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo.
- Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability.
Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional.
FWIW, I too found it harder to read without capitalization. Came here, read through comments, saw this comment, thought "Oh I didn't see a toggle, did they just add it literally while I was reading?". Went back to the site and realized the toggle was the "orthography mode: based|cringe" bit, which I would have never realized would do that.
> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
I'll play!
My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%.
The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone.
A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something.
Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen.
If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours.
If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot.
A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size.
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[1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes.
[2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one.
[3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S...
Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.
What is the logic behind transforming `FreeBSD RCEs` to `freebsd RCEs`?
If what you're trying to communicate is that, like Sam Altman, you're too cool the press the shift key, then why write some initialisms in upper case? After all, there is a style of acronyms that are always written in lower case: Latin ones ("i.e.", "e.g.")
The biggest improvement to readability is to capitalize the beginning of sentences. There’s no need for a toggle. Don’t default to making your writing unreadable, please.
They do…? Well, “auto” mode has been default in Claude Code for a couple months now. It’s effectively “safer yolo:” tool calls are inspected by a separate classification system (another smaller LLM, I believe) to approve or deny. And you can always layer on additional sandboxing mechanisms to limit the blast radius deterministically.
> They do…? Well, “auto” mode has been default in Claude Code for a couple months now
They have never shipped "yolo" mode by default. Auto mode is not yolo mode. They trained a task specific model just for ensuring the llm didn't accidentally delete every file from your computer.
That is the point I was making, that auto mode is itself a guardrail on top of the model (and not a perfect one.) auto mode seems to cover merely actions the model could take that are clearly bad, like wiping your disk, using an overly privileged context to complete the task, etc.
I recently tasked a GPT model in Codex with implementing part of a new architecture I'm working on. I gave it a very detailed spec and the code it produced looked pretty reasonable and passed my tests. It even did exceptionally well in my evals, so I excitedly declared victory to a few friends. The next day after more careful review I found that the architecture implementation was totally correct, but the model had slipped a one line change to the observation encoding of the RL environment I was prototyping against. The encoding change made the learning problem essentially trivial; the architecture itself, I later realized, had a major flaw that was revealed by returning to the natural encoding.
This is the type of reward hack that is hard to paper over with easy guardrails like auto mode and even harder to specify out. It's also the type of thing a reasonable human wouldn't do unless they were intentionally trying to deceive you.
Doesn't really even need to look like it. If you can verify rewards, RLVR will optimize really really well. If you can't... it's a struggle. There are probably fewer fields where you can verify rewards than one might hope.
> There are probably fewer fields where you can verify rewards than one might hope.
2 tasks I've done today that I believe robots are nowhere near being able to do: Cleaning my wardrobe and draining bad fuel out of my generator. As in generic use cases.
Hard to verify that your wardrobe is clean. Also hard to verify that the bad fuel is out without physical sensors. Many, many tasks are quite difficult to verify beyond "you know it when you see it". That doesn't work so well for training a model.
I can see current limitations, but how do you expect capabilities to change in the next few years? A repeat of the gain that happened in the last two years feels like it would be significant, even if it took a little more than two years this time around.
I'm getting this from Gemini: "Pro is in high demand right now Another model was used for this response. This didn't count toward your limit."
Note that I don't pay for Gemini though. So maybe that's why.
"The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand. This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale."
Never for a moment thought my Subaru would be sending me to die for Israel. How could a patriotic Israeli write deranged dreck like this knowing full well the PR catastrophe the state is experiencing in the United States? It's so beyond the pale that you might even read it as parody.
> I remember this approach was ridiculed by the west when Russia used it few years back to staff the army...
And how has that worked out for Russia? They're still stuck in a stalemate and have an enormous number of casualties to show for it. The current hot war in Ukraine started in February 2022, so 3.5 years on despite offering money to fill billets they cannot win the war.
There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about how desperate people don't necessarily make good, professional and effective soldiers, and the corollary to that: poor, unprofessional, ineffective soldiers don't win you wars.
I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
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