Zeb Larson
@zeblarson@hcommons.social
Hello! Where to begin? I'm a former #historian who got a PhD in 2019, studying the history of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. In 2020, I completely switched gears and became a software engineer, but still moonlight as a freelance #writer. I write too much about #food. My taste in #music is all over the map, I'm always looking for new projects and work, and I spend too much time playing #videogames.
hcommons.social
An obstacle in convincing people that LLMs writing history or any nonfiction is a bad thing is that there’s a widespread misperception that history is just a collection of facts on a page. This predates bots; I remember suffering through some techbro telling me historians were obsolete in 2011. But the transition to treating everything as “content” has taken away the idea that there’s intent or argumentation behind it. It’s all become value-neutral, which is yet another reason we’re seeing the collapse of critical thinking skills.