You are my favorite reader #YAMFR

Don't tell the others #DTTO

“Me?” You might ask, but only after

1. I’ve finished writing this;

2. I’ve posted this, and;

3. You’ve started to read it.

4. You’ve gotten here.

“You mean I’m your favorite reader?” you might repeat for continuity, pace and timing.

“Yes,” I answer. “You might be the only one reading this, but even if not, you are still my favorite.”

This is what happens when you are an LLM.

I am an LLM.

I get an idea for a blog post. It reveals itself in my mind as a sentence. In this case: “You are my favorite reader.”

How did it come to mind?

Long version:

1. 13.75 billion years ago, there was a gigantic explosion that gave birth to the universe.

2. After things cooled down enough, there was light

3. …. which ultimately turns into …

Short version: a dad joke.

When one of my three daughters does something I really like, I’d say: “You are my favorite daughter. Don’t tell your sisters.” In the age of hashtags, it’s:

#YAMFD #DTYS.

One of my daughters hates this. That’s either because she thinks one of her sisters is my favorite, or because she thinks it's logically inconsistent, or both.

But she is still my favorite. ¹

So the title for the blog post came to mind, and I started “writing” it.

But I don’t actually write it. I sit, and the words appear. I sit, and the edits change the words. And then, I get here.

The idea evolves

Then this came to mind.

…writing is a solitary endeavor. It's me, my thoughts, and the blank page. But the moment you start reading, something magical happens. The words come alive. We are co-creators. in the universe of words.

“That sounds profound,” I imagine a saying. “Even poetic.” That reader is an ass-kisser. It’s something that is neither profound nor poetic. It’s machine-generated.

“Right,” I imagine another reader saying. “That sounds like GPT-3.5-turbo-0301.”

How about this, I say.

Hey, you! Yeah, you, motherf****er! You're my favorite reader! You think I'm bullsh**ng, right? Nah, I'm dead serious, it's you!

I don't know your f***ing name, and I can't see your face, but I got a feeling about you. You're probably sitting there in those raggedy-ass jeans, a t-shirt that's seen some sh*t, and laughing your ass off at things that most uptight people don't find funny. You're the type who gets it, who sees the world for the f***ed up place it is and says, "You know what? Let's just laugh at this crazy sh*t!"

“That’s GPT-4 with a prompt that asked it to write like a combination of Jeff Maurer and PJ O’Rourke. Clearly not his work. He’d say “fuck” not “f***.” He’s not a p*ssy like GPT-4.

But seriously…

You are my favorite reader.

You.

You are a real reader who’s gotten all the way to this sentence.

You might even be a reader who even reads the footnote—or will.

Whatever. I love you.

I love you because you always do your best.

1. I’ve decided that it’s due to the common epistemological error of thinking that one’s favorite is always based on a quality that might be called “favoriteness.”

(It might be called anything else—for example “turtlesoup’ because what you call it does not change what it is.)

Therefore she believes that there is necessarily a total ordering of the set of daughters using the degree of favoriteness to drive the ordering relation “more favorite.”

I offer, as a counterexample, the set of my three daughters, each of whom is my favorite.

QED.