disqard

Thank you for sharing, and thank you for your candor!

If there was one strategy that had the best bang/buck impact on your own productivity during that intense time, what would that be (if you're willing to share)? Thanks in advance!

You are actually right.

I'm fairly gregarious, and find it fairly easy to approach strangers (if I have to). Yes, a lot of human contact can be had for fairly cheap.

However, I'm also aware that this is far from "normal" -- the average person is not this way (at least, not today). How/why things have come to be this way, I cannot pinpoint, but our lives have gotten progressively busier to the point where many of us choose convenience over "richness/fullness of experience".

However, my point is still valid, in that if you are an average person today, the prevailing social gestalt in America is "mind your own business, and don't talk to (or approach) people in the street".

Yes, weird folks like me, who are willing to be more vulnerable (what if the person you just said "Good morning!" to cusses you out?) will be able to get human contact for cheap, but high-quality Human contact is definitely waning.

P.S. Also agree with you that GenAI (and other modern technologies) are providing a frictionless existence, while also removing the richness and meaning that comes with the friction. It's the "soma" from Huxley's "Brave New World".

Human contact is indeed a luxury good now.

They used to say:

"buy cheap, buy twice"

Now it'll be something like:

"interact cheap, interact with AI"

"Any sufficiently large organization's stated mission is unrecognizably different from its actual mission".

(with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke)

Lots of future unicorn CEOs on here?

I mean "temporarily embarrassed billionaires".

I think this is a continuum:

I let candidates use X during coding interviews.

I've personally seen this evolve over the past 20 years

Whiteboard --> Text editor --> IDE --> ...?

Maybe "AI Coding Assistant" is next.

I'm rooting for this to happen at scale.

It'll be an object lesson in short-termism.

(and provide some job security, perhaps)

Well, the tax rate for people making (say) more than 2 million / year could just be 50%, and then increase by 10% for every 0 added.

$20 million -> 60%

$200 million -> 70%

$2 billion -> 80%

I think that would bring things under control without resorting to extrajudicial means. But apparently, that's completely impossible to achieve in the US, so here we are...

Sanguine means "optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation".

Did you mean to write a different word, or are you saying "if a family member dying of cancer had their treatment delayed, I'd feel more positive"?

Thank you for articulating this.

...but who will be left holding the (body)bag?

Thank You For Making And Sharing!

I've been there, and it's definitely worth it -- if anyone is in the Seattle area, go check it out asap!

If you haven't already, you should check out Daniel Dennett's "From Bacteria to Bach and Back". I think you'll be susceptible to "catching" a lot of the ideas in there :)

..because it reinforces what Wall St. wants to hear.

Wow! This really captures several key facets of what's going on. Thank you for making time to write all of that.

P.S. Your JPB quote from 1992 reminded me of Stuart Brand in 1985:

> "Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."

I didn't see Andy Farnell's "Digital Self-Defense" mentioned, but I think it's relevant here -- analogous to how one should be cognizant of personal safety when navigating a city (or even while crossing a busy intersection).

https://www.solent.ac.uk/blogs/media-technology-blogs/digita...

I think you're both right, though in different ways.

GP is correct that life today "beats" that from the 90s -- as far as convenience/friction is concerned.

OTOH, just like how "sitting is the new smoking", a 100% frictionless life is not better in every way. It atrophies several important faculties like the ability to deal with boredom (or people who aren't exactly your type), focus for long periods of time on work, etc.

Viewed from this perspective (and as a parent myself), I agree that 2024 does not beat 1994.

Indeed, and after that shit turns cold, it'll be the "heat death" of the Information Universe that we called the Internet.

Transposed to a very different time and place, the "bravado" here really reminded me of the "repeated dives in a carbon-fiber sub to crushing depths" -- with such setups, it's just a matter of when, not if.

I'm not so sure about that.

It looks like they were copying out the contents of an online test/exam, and the "listen" could've been a recording that's played back (to make the test accessible to deaf/HoH folks).

The student might've included that button/link text when selecting, before doing their copy+pasta.

I don't believe any fancy "attack" happened here.

You're right!

IME, LinkedIn suffers from a different problem: on there, "everything is awesome", and the toxic positivity embedded in its DNA always snuffs out any authentic rancor.

So yes, it's free of bad behavior -- but it's also free of "normal" conversations. It's just full of "thought leaders", "visionaries", and "visionary thought leaders".

Thank You For Making And Sharing :)

Thank you for sharing that!

Is that also the "F*** Around" phase?

IMO, the "Find Out" is at least 1-2 years away.

I'm a paying customer of Kagi.

Kagi itself runs on top of Google. It's certainly worth paying for (IMO), but let's not kid ourselves -- it is *not* a competitor (as in, can replace Google). Without Google, there is no Kagi.

In TFA, "EdTech" refers to things like grade-school subjects: e.g. learning to do fractions. In this respect, replacing human teachers with software/apps is what's being debated. The consequence of this replacement is a sharp drop in face-to-face engagement, and the substitution thereof with 1:1 screen time.

You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.

Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality?

I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).

You should Google "marc prensky digital natives". You'll see this hype is over two decades old now.

> Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV. > They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. > They've been networked most or all of their lives. > They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.

There's a lot more cheerful predictions:

> My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. > After all, it's an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.

I think the core fact that learning is fundamentally about curiosity and motivation, not "engagement", was (and continues to be) glossed over, or intentionally ignored by a lot of tech-pushers.

I assure you that Imposter Syndrome is a daily reality even for Senior Engineers at Google.