Comment by kcoul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kcoul | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone else found a similarity between how you feel at the end of a long AI coding session, and getting off of a long haul flight? I think the reasons are similar.

On the flight, it's not exactly like you directly feel the wind going through your hair as you travel 1000km/hr, but your body still knows that you did. You feel the lag immediately, not really due to a time zone difference but due to how unnatural it is to move so far in so short a time.

I feel the same way after a highly productive AI coding session. I used to anecdotally mention to others that I liked to maintain and use older machines because it felt nice to get little breaks here and there while the machine took longer to open a browser/app, return search results, render a file, etc. This is the opposite of that. Everything is happening so fast, your mind is taxed differently than if you are responsible for typing everything yourself... no matter how fast you could type code.

That said, I don't think it's entirely my increased cognitive load that makes me feel drained after a session, it's as though you can somehow feel the token burn, the water/electricity use, just as you somehow felt the wind shear on the airplane you were just in for many hours.

>but due to how unnatural it is to move so far in so short a time.

Your body literally can't tell whether it's traveling at 500mph or still. After all, the earth is rotating around the sun at 70,000 mph. Of course, there might be plenty of other reasons why crossing continents in a metal tube might be exhausting (eg. jet lag, uncomfortable seats, noise/vibration), but pesudoscientific reasons like "unnatural it is to move so far" is certainly not one of them.

I love how the "pseudoscientific" word gets busted out anytime an understudied area of research is presented. Keep in mind that the state of science in 1000 years from now will prove all sorts of things that hyper-rationalists might scoff at today.

I'd say this is a bit akin to whether people can feel the weather in their bones - biometeorology. The only difference is that the airplane creates a temporary, highly artificial "weather" environment. But I think it's important to include the physical interactions between that environment and the one outside of it, and not only account for interior conditions like air pressure, etc.

We'll probably learn a lot more about this if we ever make it far enough as a civilization to have a shot at long distance space travel, i.e. to Mars.

>I love how the "pseudoscientific" word gets busted out anytime an understudied area of research is presented. Keep in mind that the state of science in 1000 years from now will prove all sorts of things that hyper-rationalists might scoff at today.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown"

>The only difference is that the airplane creates a temporary, highly artificial "weather" environment. But I think it's important to include the physical interactions between that environment and the one outside of it, and not only account for interior conditions like air pressure, etc.

In other words, even you don't think it's "due to how unnatural it is to move so far in so short a time", and instead think it's something to do with the cabin conditions?

Wow. Your comments come across as rude and underdeveloped. I’d posit that if our planet was to significantly change is rotation speed that we would all sense it. That we are accustomed to a predictable constant is not the same as that we wouldn’t feel it if it changed.

We have no ability to sense speed, only acceleration.

>I’d posit that if our planet was to significantly change is rotation speed that we would all sense it.

Can you feel the fact that in the sun's reference frame, your rotation speed around the sun is constantly changing? For about half the day, the earth is rotating in the same direction as the earth's orbit around the sun, adding to the speed, whereas for the other half of the day, the earth is rotating opposite the direction of the orbit, subtracting from the speed.

Maybe a system running a local model is not so bad. The tokens per second will allow for that break?

Also, at what point does AI take over for all the thinking and white board planning?

AI should be a rubber duckie one can use to posit and assist when hit a brick wall. But if using it for all code generation, planning and troubleshooting then one is not in control; they’re just prompt drones…

This gets into how advanced the prompt engineering actually is. I anticipate discussion around what "state-of-the-art" prompts look like, since, as the OpenClaw founder suggested, Prompt Requests may well replace Pull Requests when a set of small tweaks to the prompt may yield vastly improved output.

This of course needs to be coupled with actually staying accountable for what the entirety of the codebase looks like. I imagine many people are unwilling to slow down enough to actually do that accounting/review, and the architecture might gradually shift towards entropy.

>not really due to a time zone difference but due to how unnatural it is to move so far in so short a time.

I'm fairly certain it's the loudness and constant cabin vibration; not temporal mechanics.

Except airplanes have lower oxygen pressure. So it is physically much more demanding. Coding on the plane is harder than coding on the ground.

So it feels just like in college where we had to learn these languages, syntaxes, semantics, before the term ends, and cram and exhaust ourselves before the test.

Cognitive researchers argue late teens to early 20s is the zeitgeist that is the hardest to shake.

That seems to explain the obsession with Reagan era economics and politics of the >50 crowd

Millennials have been in "learn new abstraction" mode for a couple decades regardless such output doesn't really move science forward. Is just learning a new state storage and state mutation syntax

End of the day its labeling some math with some biz edge case

I like the idea of such not being in the code at all. Taking anti-oop to the extreme; code need just be geometric functions to draw on the screen be it text shapes or video game entities

Then we can label on the presentation layer the human context

Then programming can go away.

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