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>they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them

such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.

> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem.

As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.

I think this easily could have been me if I didn't have a gnawing hunger to find weird niche books that seem interesting to me and have very few "opinions" about them online. I think it was at 19 that I discovered I just hate reading anything that is saturated with opinions and reviews, even if "complex" "challenging", a "cult favorite", which was my precursor to this (and I did enjoy that phase while it lasted). Sometimes I go to the library and carry a stack of books, read the first page, and put it back if I don't want to go on. Every once in a while, I get a random interest in something that is indeed saturated, and I do read it, but also drop it when I lose interest without guilt. Doing anything because everyone else who is similar to me is doing it never worked for me, don't see a reason why it should work in reading, and finding something good to read can be as simple as going in a rabbit hole of search. For reference, I'd say I completed over a thousand "serious" (non Harry Potter/YA/"easy read") books, including nonfiction, and I'd say there is almost an equal number of books I did not finish.

How I feel when I see a fat person dieting.

You do need to have some combination of money, time, a car, patience, taste, willingness to inspect things in person, and owned housing to care about a piece of furniture that's "not from IKEA". For a normal person who wants their rented apartment to be livable like... now, it is probably the only good choice. People are so quick to talk crap about it when their only decent options outside of it are either "designer furniture" they cannot afford, custom made furniture they don't have the vision for (but also can't afford), or "eclectic pieces" from "thrift stores" that only unemployed hobbyist or people who own their apartments can afford (in terms of time). I really dislike that.

I don't hate either particularly, but I care more about getting any book I want whenever, wherever, than I care about some abstract far away moralizing of something of consequence to me only ambiguously.

weird hill(s) to die on

A craft can be extremely hard while useful output from it is relatively easy to obtain. Case in point, I used to be a very serious baker. I mean, very serious. It started when I was a child. I made sure I understood things at a molecular level, cared about first principles, redid techniques thousands of times, spent hours on the craft in every axis imaginable. And yet people who baked ten times a year sometimes made better cookies than I did. A friend once made a better carrot cake than mine because she didn't waste time trying to figure out how to "bring depth to carrots." and the many ways of modifying textures. She just picked a very good recipe and had the tastebuds to know it's good enough to make for people.

That didn't mean she understood baking better than I did. If something went wrong, I usually knew why and what to do about it. If someone gave me direction and wild requests, I could get us there, meanwhile she could not. If things didn't work out, her solution was more likely to be "find another recipe"... and finally, the part that "validates" the ego of bakers, if you looked at everything we both made, I'm sure mine was better on average.

BUT... if what people actually value is "who made a great carrot cake tonight?", then yes, baking is easy. All she had to do was find a recipe detailed enough for her and apply it without majorly messing up.

I think that's what the "coding was never the hard part" argument is getting at. The fact that programming has difficulty that people spend decades mastering it, or that the best programmers can do things ordinary programmers cannot does not tell you how much of that depth is actually required to produce the software people value. Which is, tbh, very little.

Anyway, I could spread this analogy further but this is long as it is so I will stop here. It just reminded me of when people accused me of "just knowing how to pick a good recipe" as a way of reducing my development efforts, and it made me laugh.

It's bad at anything that still requires constant human judgement. The only reason it can build apps and websites so easily is that human judgement was encoded in that a long time ago in many forms. It's a developed and aged practice.

So you're saying a lead/manager that recognizes good programmers from bad programmers should be paid the most... rubs hands together

Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.

I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.

I believe we should.. step back a bit, and agree on what we mean by "reading books", vs "other things on a screen"; you all mean the tension between reading cumulative attention-intensive material versus discontinuous context-resetting material, right?

It would only be an oversimplification if they had claimed that every book reader understands more than every online reader, regardless of subject matter. They didn't. Plus, in your example, this hypothetical online reader has already acquired the capacities that books are supposed to help develop, and he might be closer to a book writer.

Exactly. Add it to the fact that the world was never particularly "fair" to deep thinkers, because said deep thinkers are often not prioritizing "production". It already rewarded people who could search for and ship a working solution before they understand it perfectly. The person who can only move after fully understanding the problem was at a disadvantage long before LLMs, almost everywhere outside academia.

If things were so good then, how did they lead to Now?

I don't know, the higher my TC gets the easier I find it to reduce my spending. I feel like it inflates in the beginning and then it kinda levels out.

And what's the underlying issue, exactly?

The world might slowly realize that a lot of generative goodness and direction is the result of our limitations and constraints as builders, not necessarily our velocity.

I agree with everything you are saying, especially as someone whose main goal behind going into content is to understand, and have agreed with it for so long, and in my attempt to understand - ever since I was young - what people get from self-help books, I realized something. I do believe this - our - perspective neglects the difference between reading to "get a complex premise", and reading/watching something simple as some sort of lengthy ritual to get you to marinate on the idea and to allow yourself enough time to "change". Those 300 pages have the benefit of making you "stay with the idea" for however long reading 300 pages takes you, and that's what people who are into self-help like. Being persuaded.

That said, a lot of it is really filler.

Can confirm. I had to make an effort NOT to cheat. It's so incredibly easy on exams with MCQs.

Yes, it's from this textbook: https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs147/2022/au/readings/rest...

Yeah, you can't get it out in "one session of conversation", but you definitely can under a different... context.

"Seeing the work reveals what matters. Even if the master were a good teacher, apprenticeship in the context of on-going work is the most effective way to learn. People are not aware of everything they do. Each step of doing a task reminds them of the next step; each action taken reminds them of the last time they had to take such an action and what happened then. Some actions are the result of years of experience and have subtle reasons; other actions are habit and no longer have a good justification. Nobody can talk better about what they do and why they do it than they can while in the middle of doing it."

Exactly, I am quite surprised by this thread. I always thought sokobans were just one of the niches of puzzle games (one that I am not quite a fan of, to be honest... I find it just okay.)

I was not actually defending LLM tools or casinos. Not every system with variable outcomes and ritualized user behavior is meaningfully equivalent to wagering money against probabilistic loss (slots). If the same reasoning were applied to video games or running scientific experiments of any kind, we'd end up labeling most uncertainty-laden interaction as gambling. I just did not find it particular enough.

I think this is more of a statement of human behavior under uncertainty and non-determinism rather than the tools themselves. Perhaps the ease of use brings it closer to the funny analogy you made but I think you will find this in any system where users interact with a partially opaque mechanism that produces different quality outcomes contingent on their input...

I hear you, but it seems quicker to predict whether the agent's solution is correct/sound before running it than to compose and "start" coding yourself. Understanding something that's already there seems like less effort. But I guess it highly depends on what you are doing and its level of complexity and how much you're offloading your authority and judgment.

I prefer waiting till it gets me in trouble. So far, it having access to all my .env secrets seems to work out okay.

Also, this was literally said about the technology of - what OP fantasizes as - "good ole pen and paper writing" at some point by vintage philosophers. Nothing new here.

It seems like what you miss is actually a stable cognitive regime built around long uninterrupted internal simulation of a single problem. This is why people play strategy video games.