Llms on Harlan D. Harris

Nine Things I Learned Building a Scrabble App for My Friends

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I wished it had features like word definitions and better game history. So, starting last year, I built my own web app. I've had half a dozen friends and family members playing with me, each other, and a robot for the last few months, and it's been a lot of fun. I thought I'd share a few things I've learned along the way.

IZE meets AI -- semantic search, smarter labels, and agentic orientation

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the last post in the IZE series. In the previous installment, I looked at two ways to generalize the IZE algorithm itself: preferring consistent facets and searching for trees with better goodness scores. Here I want to ask a different question: what does the AI revolution of the last few years actually change about what could be built here?

I see three distinct opportunities, at different layers of the system.

Defensible Use of AI in Writing (Like This)

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If AI helps me get ideas from my head to the readers' heads faster, that's good. Society thrives when ideas are shared, critiqued, and built on. But authors shouldn't take credit for other peoples' ideas -- they should synthesize others' ideas, including the "blurry JPG of the web" that is LLMs. The question is: what makes AI-assisted writing defensible? When is it helpful to society, and when is it plagiarism? When can you still be considered the author of AI-assisted writing?

Use LLMs for Translation and Fallible Reasoning

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep seeing AI skeptic takes like "AI is useless" or "LLMs are only good at Natural Language Processing", usually because of hallucinations and AI slop. Both are real problems. But that conclusion still misses the point: it misidentifies what LLMs are actually good at.

My take is: LLMs are great at translation (in the broad sense), and they have emergent but fallible reasoning. Knowledge, in the "just tell me what's true" sense, is not their strong suit, despite how convincingly they can sound.

Are LLMs a simple solution? And if so, for what problems?

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, I was reading a post by Venkatash Rao (thousands of words of under-edited brilliance, as usual), and was struck by this note about the complexity of climate solutions:

I tend to take as an article of faith the systems science rule of thumb that the complexity of solutions generally matches the complexity of the problems. If it doesn’t, then you either got lucky, or there are negative externalities you’re ignoring.

LLMs and Theories of Consciousness

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been an immense amount of discussion about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT over the last year, of course. Some of that discussion has been whether they are intelligent, conscious, or on the path to Artificial General Intelligence.

I’m particularly interested in the "consciousness" question, as it was an area of personal interest when I was working as a cognitive scientist, in a prior career. I never did research on the topic, but I read plenty of philosophers of mind and neuroscientists as they tried to pin down what, exactly (or even vaguely), consciousness might be. One of my favorite treatments of the topic is by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, most accessibly covered in his book The Feeling of What Happens. (I recently read a new collection of short essays by him, entitled Feeling & Knowing, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It feels more like footnotes or stray thoughts than a coherent presentation or a novel contribution.)