No, the "action" part is the distinction. Their world model is conditioned on robot actions for example, which gives you two things the video gen alone can't: predict the future frames that follow a given action (change the action, get a different future from the same starting frame), and run it in reverse to infer the actions behind observed frames or output the actions needed to hit a goal (the output is motor commands abd not video frames).
Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections
???
Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?
If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.
As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.
Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!
I also don't understand this. After having written something I never felt a need to have it reformulated by anything. What would even be the prompt for that?
Maybe "You are an expert editor. Polish this article for X demographic. Make no mistales."?
But jokes aside, I too prefer genuine human writing. Writing is complex enough that you can see a distinct style even if it's rough. LLMs tend to polish the roughness so much that everything reads like magazine ads.
I think it's easy for native speakers to say. But as English is not my mother tongue, I find it safer to run it through a checker and nowadays, LLMs. So maybe no need to be so harsh about it
I understand that motive. On the other hand, LLM smell makes the text untrustworthy. I have detected it as well, and I immediately started to wonder about whether I am reading a reasonable expert analysis or just an AI hallucination. I still don't know.
I recommend prompting the LLM to mostly fix glaring grammatical and stylistic mistakes, not to rewrite the entire thing into a LinkedIn post style text.
Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.
I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.
It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.
It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
The staccato style is often effective for emphasis, but the paragraphing is wrong on this article. It should've been:
> The headlines say yes.
> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.
> The headline is wrong.
> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.
> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”
There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.
> the interspersed animated/interactive models often don't seem strongly connected to the text
It's indeed the part I struggled with most. The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow. But you're right that I didn't do enough to stitch each properly into the prose around it. It reads a bit too adjacent to the text.
For what it's worth, an earlier draft was nearly twice the length and even included a small missile-interception game as the introduction. I think cutting it was the right call though.
Thanks for the notes! I'll keep this in mind for the next post.
> The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow.
I don't know who the target audience is but if you talk about hitting supersonic missiles and kill chains, I don't think you need an interactive example to show that you can't hit a target that's faster than you if it has a head start.
"So can you stop a hypersonic? Sometimes, the wrong ones. Probably not the right ones, yet. The one defense working against the right ones today is a politician’s restraint, not a kill chain.
The worst one is still in its silo. And we are running out of interceptors against the second-worst ones."
It sounds like ChatGPT talking to me.
It's weird reading articles written by AI or helped by AI because it's a lot of words but no overarching narrative. It's almost like an expanded and fluffed up outline. It's very exhausting to read and I lose interest partway through. AI written text has a low "ROI".
AI code is similar. The individual parts are OK but even after reading the entire codebase it's hard to understand how it all fits together or what the over arching structure is.
(BTW, I don't mind what you're doing at all -- as long as you're honest and upfront about it. I love how you're exploring this way of working. I also love the widgets you embedded. It's cute but doesn't add a ton to understanding of the ideas in the article but it's the type of thing AI can really enable for writers.)
"Below it you are doing high-school physics. Above it you are running a small particle accelerator with a missile attached." is where I clocked out.
(Also "honest" assessments; the word "honest" has gone the way of "delve".)
Use LLMs to proofread and critique structure. Don't take a single word they generate and put it in your copy, not even simple vocabulary suggestions. The more work you put into a piece, the more important this rule is.
> ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections
This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?
He met the goal of conveying a lot of information. If he's only judged on what he said, and not how he said it, he did great. If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.
> If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.
I'm sure that in your head this is a witty rejoinder, but it really is quite a wild thing to say: that you place no value on the individual variations in how different human writers express themselves. It follows that you really don't care about voice on YouTube either, except in the most basic mechanical sense: you would be happy watching videos written by AI and narrated by the same monotone text-to-speech narrator, video after video, efficiently delivering that densely packed information you crave.
This is actually a thing, isn't it? Like those "shorts"
with the AI narration and matching subtitles flashing by in the middle of the screen. I guess you must love those---somebody does, probably a lot of people, or they wouldn't exist.
I'm tempted to frame this as a new kind of illiteracy. People whose brains are so addled by the modern media landscape that to get them to pay attention to anything at all you have to resort to tricks like this; god forbid they ever encounter a writer or narrator who speaks differently, sounds differently, thinks differently, frames differently. Nobody should be surprised, I suppose, that the ability to parse different levels of meaning in Content that falls outside the AI cognitive monoculture is a dying skill.
> The wallet was supposed to be the constraint. It turns out, as we will see, that the wallet is the constraint after all.
I can't tell if you made a mistake and meant the wallet isn't the constraint. These short burst sentences are really hard to read. Write "As we'll see, the constraint is x.". There's no need to split that, a single sentence conveys the whole point.
The article is full of similar wording, and that's why it feels choppy to read.
> The rest of this essay is about why that is harder than the press understands. And about a second problem hiding underneath it
I'd describe this as chain of thought writing. It's fine in casual conversation, with the words just tumbling out of our mouths, but it doesn't work in writing or speeches. There are so many ways the two concepts expressed there could be worded, combined or separated. "The press has an unfortunate tendency to use hyperbole and simple descriptions, but even with those stripped away there are deeper misconceptions..."
It's interesting that folks have honed in on AI as the problem. I'm my view the issue is that you haven't decided on your writing style, and as a non native speaker, you're unable to write a simple phrase and get AI to embellish it. Writing simple phrases is surprisingly difficult. Try making everything concise, with no repitition, and then adding style and flowery language afterwards.
Edit: sorry I may have read another person's comment about being a non native speaker. Writing concisely is something we can all work on.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
> I personally can't understand anyone wanting to move to the US anymore except for extreme reasons.
I am German and honestly can't wait to move to the US once I get a suitable H-1B offer. I already spent 8 months in Boston for a research stay, and back then the doomer mentality among natives was wild to me. From an outsider's perspective it’s crazy to watch. Life, and especially the ceiling for what you can achieve, is still 10x higher in the US than anywhere else.
I think people in the US severely underestimate how stagnant it feels in Europe and other continents right now. We are basically just stumbling from one crisis to the next, without any strong leadership (the US two-party system definitely has its advantages here, as you're able to charge fullspeed into one direction instead of not moving at all).
If you actually want to build ambitious things, the friction here is exhausting. And instead of being rewarded for high output you get taxed to death to prop up a system favored towards an aging/declining population. It's essentially a massive boomer tax. Younger workers have zero political leverage to change it because our demographic is just too small to matter at the ballot box.
Sure, the US definitely has its ugly sides, but if you want to work hard and actually capture the upside of what you build, it's still the only game in town. Even if that means jumping through all the hoops the current gov throws in your way.
That isn't why though. Germany has a demographic cliff right now. Same post WWII baby boom as anywhere but for whatever reason, no echo boom in the 80-90s like the US. Also US has absolutely been sponging up central and south american immigrants hand over fist especially the last 40 years, meanwhile europe has been quite a bit less permissive in this aspect.
> if you want to work hard and actually capture the upside of what you build, it's still the only game in town
I think that this is only true to some extent. There are many successful engineers and scientists who work in Europe that earn good money and live well. Especially if you're a researcher, Horizon grants provide really good opportunities to collaborate with people from different countries
> Major breakthroughs in robotics research thanks to ultra scalable simulation software and RL
I was hoping that plumbers, electricians, construction, factory workers still had another 10-20 years before being priced out of the work pool.
I was also hoping we had that much time to use threat of mass protest to keep our politicians aligned.
I genuinely think it's game over for 99% of humanity's interests once the top wealthiest individuals and/or their governments can simply deploy robots en masse.
Hey if developers and office jobs get fucked by AI “promises” then fuck blue collar as well. You need a united population to destroy the interests of the 1%.
Likewise. I have two Mac laptops, three home servers, and a Windows desktop managed by Nix.
The home servers are nixOS, the rest basically have the CLI environment managed with nix-darwin and nixos-wsl, all with one flake (Git repo) containing all the configuration.
Case in point - this morning I’m rebuilding one of the servers onto new hardware, and the longest time spent was getting the flake config onto the server with git clone. Now just watching the rebuild switch command output, after which it’s good to go.
I recently used Typst and their own collab solution for a paper we worked on. While some features are still lacking it was a pretty good experience overall.
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