fatherwavelet

People still pay thousands of dollars for wedding photographers even though everyone at the wedding also has a camera and many are taking their own pictures.

I am not a software engineer and it seems to me if someone has experience as a software engineer before LLMs, they have skills no one will really be able to acquire again in the same way.

I would expect current software engineers to eat the entire non-customer facing back office in the next ten years.

At some point it becomes like someone playing a nice song on piano and then someone countering with "that is great but play a song you don't know!".

Then they start improvising and the same person counters with "what a bunch of slop, just making things up!"

There is also an aspect of thinking no one will go to restaurants when anyone can make the same food at home.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

It is one thing to receive the message but a much different thing to act on the message.

From going to the gym for decades now, I don't see older people acting on this at all. A big problem is the CNS takes so much longer to recover as you get older. Starting lifting at an older age is really an uphill battle. I don't know a single person who has ever started lifting over 45 and kept with it. I know a guy that lifts in his 80s but our first conversation about lifting was 35 years ago. I am part of the old crowd at the gym and everyone I know has lifted for decades.

The message really needs to be that you have to start lifting young so you still lift when you are old. Need to become so addicted to lifting that you will still be doing it when your only lifting to get less weak and figuring out how to train around various injury. Not going to the gym is inconceivable to me but I just don't see how I could have started past 45. Even the difference between early 40s and late 40s lifting was night and day for me.

As part of the irrational mob that is out to find the witch, you are just being too rational. Down vote!

It is really a type of self serving religious belief in the face of bounded rationality.

On the other hand, these type of companies are really hard to value too.

Exactly. I have stopped eating out almost completely because it is addictive.

Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.

There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.

To me this is just shit. The meme and youtube video have more value than the art itself. The art is almost not the point.

"You can't begin to paint until you have learned to stretch canvas by hand like the old masters.

What if one day you couldn't just go to the art supply store and buy a pre-stretched canvas?

It is all besides the point anyway. You are going to learn to stretch canvas by hand first because that is what my teacher made me do!"

Certain subjects we treat as if one has to learn woodworking before taking violin lessons.

We just really underestimate sentimentality in our society because it doesn't fit our self conception.

A "commoner"... Could you possibly be more full of yourself?

I was going to try to make the monopoly argument but then realized I only think youtube is a monopoly because I don't use tiktok.

It is just an oligopoly like most other sectors.

Anyone with long experience trading commodities would have expected this. This is like the least surprising thing ever.

It is amusing reading the comments on here. Silver dropped 50% in 1980. Silver is the original memecoin. I think people care less though about market events that happened before they were born. It is like the way I know the entire story of silver in 1980 even though I was a little kid but nothing about the Nifty Fifty a decade earlier.

Nothing for me with commodities will ever top -$37 per barrel during Covid with oil. That was a level of market shell shock for me that I just can't imagine being topped.

The economy in the 21st century developed world is mostly about acquiring positional goods. Positional goods as "products and services valued primarily for their ability to convey status, prestige, or relative social standing rather than their absolute utility".

We have so much wealth that wealth accumulation itself has become a type of positional good as opposed to the utility of the wealth.

When people in the developed world talk about the economy they are largely talking about their prestige and social standing as opposed to their level of warmth and hunger. Unfortunately, we haven't separated these ideas philosophically so it leads to all kinds of nonsense thinking when it comes to "the economy".

I think it becomes more a religious and philosophical question than an economic question. We need to separate economics from the neoliberal religion.

Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitics should be standard text that everyone is discussing right now but instead we will probably do nothing and the future will suffer the consequences of our collective intellectual laziness.

neoliberal ideas vs Marxism is just incredibly intellectually lazy. We really need to think on the level of the way Marx did about the industrial revolution in a new way without being lazy and just falling back on the standard Marxist orothodxy religious ideas.

We don't just need a protestant reformation, we need an entire new religion to deal with this. I think that will be too hard so if I had to bet my bet would be on we do absolutely nothing.

I think you are not using enough imagination.

It would not be shocking at all if in 10 years, "Let's redo the entire project to account for this" is exactly how things work.

Or lets make 3 or 4 versions of the project and see what one the customer likes best.

Or each decision point of the customer becomes multiple iterations of the project, with each time the project starting from scratch.

Of course, at some point there might not be a customer in this context. The "customer" that can't handle this internally might no longer be a viable business.

"You're absolutely right" feels so summer 2025 to me.

Do you think people were more optimistic about the future during World War 2? Or after WW2 when everyone was worried about nuclear annihilation?

How about before that when your new baby had a 30% chance of death before age 5?

Before that, starvation, plague and war were always real things to worry about for the entirety of human history.

I think everyone reading this has the same problem of needing to figure out hedonics in order to appreciate what you do have instead of focusing on minuscule bullshit that you don't have.

Unfortunately, they are extremely competent at holding on to power. Inflation has been oscillating between 20% and 50% since 2019 yet here we are. It is hard to over throw the people who have all the guns.

I am usually pretty isolationist in my thinking but I really wish the US would have already invaded.

Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.

This is nonsense.

You can't understand the tao because there is nothing to "understand".

That is the whole point. If you walk in the woods on a beautiful day and hear birds chirping, there is nothing to "understand". It isn't an intellectual exercise.

Quibbling about translations of the Tao Te Ching is really quite comical. A better taoist "teaching" would be to throw your copy in the garbage and go for a walk in the woods. This is where the cultural problems come in though. That is not really what is meant by the English word "teaching". Then you are expecting to "learn" some kind of new symbolic representation when the whole point is to get rid of symbolic representation.

The idea you can't understand concepts from other humans because you were born into a different cultures is really stupid.

What is the European alternative to the US military if Russia attacks Europe?

This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.

I don't think it even sounds that interesting. Especially if you have ever used the various physical modeling ensembles in Reaktor. It isn't even close to some of those.

I love Korg but personally I think this is stupid.

I had an OASYS PCI and synthkit 20 years ago that had incredible physical modeling.

Maybe because I can picture what this would sound like with those OASYS models that it is not impressive at all.

I do always appreciate how daring korg can be though.

Florian Schneider has been dead for 5 years and Ralf Hutter is pushing 80.

Other people have made electronic music too since 1975.

I don't currently have any physical instruments while I have had quite a collection and nice studio in the past.

I think it comes down to the fact that it is fun collecting gear and a lot easier than actually making music. Making music is really hard.

I also don't think it even cost me $2k when it was all said and done with all the gear I bought. So much of the gear held its value and one piece of gear I had I sold for 3x what I bought it for so that paid for so much depreciation on gear that didn't hold its value.

Some gear heads I know have money to burn but others just have their savings in gear instead of a savings account at the bank.

audio DSP is a great example. Especially because the proof is in the output if you are then able to make a cool sounding analog filter emulation that you would not have otherwise.

I disagree on the students in educational institutions though. This is the biggest thing for the autodidact who doesn't have the privilege of the educational institution. I think of time, money and effort that would be needed to talk to a professor one on one about analog filter emulation. It is not happening for me.

There are also societal/social high pass filters to even get in the door for these educational institutions. I would just get filtered out anyway. It seems to me in time that entire concept will simply become null and void.

I think many are not doing anything like this so to the person who is not interested in learning anything, technical details like this sound like pretentious name dropping because that is how they relate to the world.

Everything to them is a social media post for likes.

I have explored all kinds of graph layouts in various network science context via LLMs and guess what? I don't know anything much about graph theory beyond G = (V,E). I am not really interested either. I am interested in what I can do with and learn from G. Everything on the right of the equals sign Gemini is already beyond my ability. I am just not that smart.

The standard narrative on this board seems to be something akin to having to master all volumes of Knuth before you can even think to write a React CRUD app. Ironic since I imagine so many learned programming by just programming.

I know I don't think as hard when using an LLM. Maybe that is a problem for people with 25 more IQ points than me. If I had 25 more IQ points maybe I could figure out stuff without the LLM. That was not the hand I was dealt though.

I get the feeling there is immense intellectual hubris on this forum that when something like this comes up, it is a dog whistle for these delusional Erdos in their own mind people to come out of the wood work to tell you how LLMs can't help you with graph theory.

If that wasn't the case there would be vastly more interesting discussion on this forum instead of ad nauseam discussion on how bad LLMs are.

I learn new things everyday from Gemini and basically nothing reading this forum.

It seems obvious to me this quickly escalates to a US nuclear first strike with the B2-Spirit on China manufacturing infrastructure.

It is economic MAD.

Or China can wait 20-30 years and the US will no longer care about Taiwan or have the resources to have much presence in the eastern hemisphere.

I think the saber rattling over Taiwan is just to get the US to spend themselves further into oblivion in the short term. We are in the war already and the saber rattling is an incredibly effective, asymmetric financial weapon. It builds up the Chinese military kinetic capacity long term while weakening the US military kinetic capacity long term by forcing the US to prepare for something that is never going to happen.

When China takes Taiwan it will be without firing a shot. I would bet the house on that because it kind of has to be that way to win the war and not just a self destructive battle.

China is achieving its objectives brilliantly. The US is increasingly isolated and this is the process of retreating into the western hemisphere. NATO is being destroyed without firing a shot.

It is delusional to believe the current frontier models can only write CRUD apps.

I would think someone would have to only write CRUD apps themselves to believe this.

It doesn't matter anyway what a person "believes". If anything, I am having the opposite experience that conversing with people is becoming a bigger and bigger waste of time instead of just talking to Gemini. It is not Gemini that is hallucinating all kinds of nonsense vs the average person. It is the opposite.

I still use my Quest after a year but it is mostly on the web and youtube 360. youtube 360 is actually quite cool given the fact no one really makes content for it.

I have no interest in games and anything inside Horizon is just not impressive.

I just don't understand how Meta spent this much money to get so little in return. VRChat has immense worlds compared to anything in Horizon. Everything in Horizon is just so amateur looking and lacking any kind of imagination.

I got the Quest because I wanted to try developing for VR but that is a total nightmare. Horizon/Unity/Unreal are all different forms of a nightmare. I suspect this is actually the problem. Development is just too hard to do much of anything interesting. Anything interesting I have made has been in vanilla javascript/three js/react three fiber.

Vision Pro level resolution + webxr I think has a huge amount of potential. I even like wearing the Quest. The physical act of wearing the headset is really no issue to me at all. That was what I figured I would get tired of.

The Quest is ultimately an amazing piece of hardware with amazingly bad software.