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Today in "GPT-3 ramblings or marketing spiel": > "We are honoring the cellulose and lignin of the trees by rearticulating them into assets for present and futu

Today in "GPT-3 ramblings or marketing spiel": > "We are honoring the cellulose and lignin of the trees by rearticulating them into assets for present and future generations. By allowing millions of trees to remain in place in their forests, Forust is launching a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere.” hmmkay hmmkay, so you're making money off wood waste, that's cool...

xoa 6y ago
FWIW, I've met McDonough, and a friend did a bunch of work with him. He's an interesting person and has done some genuinely interesting projects. And not in terms of big fancy ultra expensive ones, he's been on the "sustainability" theme for a very long time, it's genuine. But he's always spoke like that, no doubt reinforced by trying to speak in ways that would convince movers and shakers to give a shit. Bunch of us got a huge laugh when we saw this, someone thought "gee that looks like something he'd be interested in" then lo and behold, there it was, and same flowery funny language as always. Anyway, just a random anecdote that that kind of language long predated GPT-3. It learned from somewhere :).
sas41 6y ago
It really is cool, but what I don't understand is why do we need all this techno-babble-esque wording around the idea of "3D printed wood", just call it that. I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the true concept of things. We re-use wood-waste to 3D print objects. So simple, to the point and just as cool.
- torgian 6y ago
  Investors, plain and simple. Many investors don’t know tech, or have a limited knowledge about it, so pitching things in terms and phrases that impress them works.
  - refactor_master 6y ago
    Really? I’d have thought investors were busy people, asking questions like “so what does it actually do”? Like, for example, my management rarely cares about the brilliance of my code. They want to know what it accomplishes —- before they’re off to a different meeting.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      What is it? "a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere" What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to remain in place in their forests". How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and lignin into assets for present and future generations." It's a pretty coherent description of the technology, aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of the technology itself
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Evaluating pitch decks semi-regularly, I certainly want to grab founders and shake them while yelling "what does it actually do?" fairly regularly. A lot of founders clearly think they need to try to bamboozle investors with pointlessly vague and buzzword laden language. But part of that is because they get told it works and/or experience themselves that trying to explain the actual technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases. I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders about a company that we actually ended up investing in where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually understood the subject and wanted to understand if they did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch deck. Sometimes in conversations like that you can hear the relief when they realise they can actually speak normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to know to excited about being able to expand on details instantly. Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises the bullshit isn't working.
- melomal 6y ago
  I would honestly hazard a guess that there's no marketing person on the team yet. If the founder is in charge of the content of the site, which could very well be the case, they are more likely to use technical terms because it's natural to them. Plus, it's the more boujee option.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Because people who don’t know anything are moved by technobabble and underwhelmed by reality.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- carapace 6y ago
  > The idea of circular flow for materials and energy is not new, appearing as early as 1966 in the book by Kenneth E. Boulding, who explains that we should be in a "cyclical" system of production. For its part, the term "circular economy" appeared for the first time in 1988 in "The Economics of Natural Resources". ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy#History_and_aims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy#History_and_a...
carapace 6y ago
Kind of a tangent, but I've noticed a recent tendency to compare people's writing to GPT-3 output as a way of saying something like "I didn't understand that" or "I found the style hard to follow". I gotta say, I find it rude. It's one short step away from calling someone a name, eh? "You sound like a inanimate algorithm imitating a human." Mean. Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh? In this case, sure, the language is flowery, but the underlying meaning is clear, and the subject is, arguably, important. (So, not to put too fine a point on it, in this case, saying it sounds like GPT-3 kinda makes you sound, um, less sophisticated than you might be going for?)
- perpetualpatzer 6y ago
  >Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh? Yes, in the "information as irreducible data" sense. No in the "information as non-obvious truths about the world" sense. A message's unpredictability seems independent, or possibly anti-correlated with its truthiness (as the recipient may already have the true information, or be able to predict it from other knowledge). The rudeness is an interesting point. It is rude, or would be a at a party. At the same time, if the goal of internet forums is to exchange information (as in truths), honest efforts to distill information from noise could be accepted as good faith effort at public service in the way that identifying shill reviews is. It will be interesting to see how internet culture evolves as the ubiquity and awareness of widespread GPT-3 noise grow (or if forums are just doomed).
  - carapace 6y ago
    Honestly, I was just trying to point out without being rude myself that, if something someone says here on HN seems difficult to understand, it might be because one is just too stupid, not that the poster is a robot. In any event, the point about the unpredictability of a message comes from Shannon's Information Theory. Although, see also Robert Anton Wilson's writing about W. Burroughs' "cut ups". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

xoa 6y ago

FWIW, I've met McDonough, and a friend did a bunch of work with him. He's an interesting person and has done some genuinely interesting projects. And not in terms of big fancy ultra expensive ones, he's been on the "sustainability" theme for a very long time, it's genuine. But he's always spoke like that, no doubt reinforced by trying to speak in ways that would convince movers and shakers to give a shit. Bunch of us got a huge laugh when we saw this, someone thought "gee that looks like something he'd be interested in" then lo and behold, there it was, and same flowery funny language as always. Anyway, just a random anecdote that that kind of language long predated GPT-3. It learned from somewhere :).

sas41 6y ago

It really is cool, but what I don't understand is why do we need all this techno-babble-esque wording around the idea of "3D printed wood", just call it that. I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the true concept of things. We re-use wood-waste to 3D print objects. So simple, to the point and just as cool.

torgian 6y ago
Investors, plain and simple. Many investors don’t know tech, or have a limited knowledge about it, so pitching things in terms and phrases that impress them works.
- refactor_master 6y ago
  Really? I’d have thought investors were busy people, asking questions like “so what does it actually do”? Like, for example, my management rarely cares about the brilliance of my code. They want to know what it accomplishes —- before they’re off to a different meeting.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    What is it? "a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere" What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to remain in place in their forests". How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and lignin into assets for present and future generations." It's a pretty coherent description of the technology, aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of the technology itself
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Evaluating pitch decks semi-regularly, I certainly want to grab founders and shake them while yelling "what does it actually do?" fairly regularly. A lot of founders clearly think they need to try to bamboozle investors with pointlessly vague and buzzword laden language. But part of that is because they get told it works and/or experience themselves that trying to explain the actual technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases. I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders about a company that we actually ended up investing in where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually understood the subject and wanted to understand if they did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch deck. Sometimes in conversations like that you can hear the relief when they realise they can actually speak normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to know to excited about being able to expand on details instantly. Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises the bullshit isn't working.
melomal 6y ago
I would honestly hazard a guess that there's no marketing person on the team yet. If the founder is in charge of the content of the site, which could very well be the case, they are more likely to use technical terms because it's natural to them. Plus, it's the more boujee option.
colechristensen 6y ago
Because people who don’t know anything are moved by technobabble and underwhelmed by reality.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

carapace 6y ago
> The idea of circular flow for materials and energy is not new, appearing as early as 1966 in the book by Kenneth E. Boulding, who explains that we should be in a "cyclical" system of production. For its part, the term "circular economy" appeared for the first time in 1988 in "The Economics of Natural Resources". ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy#History_and_aims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy#History_and_a...

carapace 6y ago

Kind of a tangent, but I've noticed a recent tendency to compare people's writing to GPT-3 output as a way of saying something like "I didn't understand that" or "I found the style hard to follow". I gotta say, I find it rude. It's one short step away from calling someone a name, eh? "You sound like a inanimate algorithm imitating a human." Mean. Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh? In this case, sure, the language is flowery, but the underlying meaning is clear, and the subject is, arguably, important. (So, not to put too fine a point on it, in this case, saying it sounds like GPT-3 kinda makes you sound, um, less sophisticated than you might be going for?)

perpetualpatzer 6y ago
>Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh? Yes, in the "information as irreducible data" sense. No in the "information as non-obvious truths about the world" sense. A message's unpredictability seems independent, or possibly anti-correlated with its truthiness (as the recipient may already have the true information, or be able to predict it from other knowledge). The rudeness is an interesting point. It is rude, or would be a at a party. At the same time, if the goal of internet forums is to exchange information (as in truths), honest efforts to distill information from noise could be accepted as good faith effort at public service in the way that identifying shill reviews is. It will be interesting to see how internet culture evolves as the ubiquity and awareness of widespread GPT-3 noise grow (or if forums are just doomed).
- carapace 6y ago
  Honestly, I was just trying to point out without being rude myself that, if something someone says here on HN seems difficult to understand, it might be because one is just too stupid, not that the poster is a robot. In any event, the point about the unpredictability of a message comes from Shannon's Information Theory. Although, see also Robert Anton Wilson's writing about W. Burroughs' "cut ups". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique