The Game Boy Camera can photograph Jupiter. The moon, from the same telescope, looks like a wash of blown-out white. Jupiter at 620 million miles appears as a small disk — cloud bands just visible in four shades of grey. The camera takes it cleanly.
The camera is equally limited in both cases: 128×112 pixels, four shades of grey, no zoom. The moon is too close — its surface detail, dynamic range, and angular size all exceed what the sensor can take in. Jupiter’s distance has compressed it to exactly the right scale.
Gwern makes the same observation about intellectual work: the tasks that resist delegation tend to be the most personalized ones, regardless of their importance. An LLM can debug code and write formal proofs — tasks where everything needed fits into a prompt. An essay in Gwern’s own style, built on twenty years of interconnected notes, can’t be handed over. The context doesn’t fit. Until an instrument can replace you entirely, the tasks that most need delegating are the ones that exceed its intake.
Both cases work when the subject has already done the compression: Jupiter compressed by distance, a debugging problem compressed by being formulated as a question with a checkable answer.