gh0stcat

Even more reason to stop supporting Amazon, how else will we stop physical retailers and smaller shops from going out of business?

We will reach enlightenment in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

I would love to do this, I just cannot afford it as others have already stated. It's depressing to feel like I spend so much of my life at my day job and yet require it to afford the tiny portion I get left. I wish things were different.

This is an absurd take. We should not bend language around ignorance. There is a beauty to effort. Please take a second to explore this for yourself.

You've perfectly captured my experience as well, I typically only trust it and have good experiences with LLMs when I have enough domain expertise to get to at least a 95% confidence the output is correct. (Specific to my domain of work, I don't always need "perfect"). I also can mostly use it as a first pass for getting the idea of where to begin research, after that I lose confidence that the more detailed and advanced content it is giving me is accurate. There is a gray area though where a domain expert might have a false sense of confidence, and over time experience "Skill Drift", where they lose expertise because they are only ever verifying a lossy compression of information, rather than re-setting their context with real world information. I am mostly concerned with that last bit.

I've gone through stuff like this too. Not sure if it helps, but I believe in you and hope you find strength and peace in your journey. :)

This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.

I actually think I communicated my point incorrectly, I also agree with you, I meant more that at least if you had some guidance as a child and your environment wasn't so antagonistic, you might have a fighting chance, not even that you will definitely succeed. We see it now with food deserts, etc. It's a challenging environment to navigate when you have all of this "freedom". :p

Sure, the culture is the content and human drive behind it, but the technology has made it so that we cannot avoid it and cannot easily practice good hygiene when it comes to social engagement. Or another metaphor, food, imagine if you had candy/sugar laying around everywhere and that was placed in front of whole foods everywhere you looked, such that you technically could choose a better option, but you were always fighting your human instincts to prioritize fast/cheap energy. As an adult, you know that you need to override these base instincts, and have evidence from your childhood where you encountered the structure of choosing healthy options even when you probably wanted something more sugary/fatty. The argument is that kids are not getting the opportunity to develop this healthy digital content diet because their parents either do not have the technical ability nor the actual functional ability to do anything about it.

There's a reason why most teenagers are on tiktok, but believe that they would be better off if it never existed. [1] https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...

Yes because generating "art" that is entirely stealing from the hard work and actual dedication put forth by real artists is anything like the expressionist movement in the 20th century.

As if the ability is not attainable, people want to be put on top of the mountain without any effort.

No one has any morals or soul at this point. It's all garbage in, garbage out.

This actually so amateurish and cliche it's painful. The fact people like this shows that art never had a chance when the masses have no taste. This makes me depressed for artists and the future.

Emphasis on "doing something useful with their lives".

Honestly this, if these people are so smart, I truly believe they can help shift the ratio of spying/nefarious/addictive tech to productive/helpful/truly world changing tech in a positive direction. We need to distribute talented people across more industries to improve the world and technology for everyone.

Typethon will fix everything :p

But yeah I can't stop myself from eye-rolling when I'm using python (which honestly is very useful for a lot of data manip that is one-off for my job) and there's just tiny syntax differences for seemingly no reason, like not instead of !, X if Y else Z, len(x) instead of it being a member... it's all very fast to look up, but easy to miss when you're also working in C++ or Rust.

What's crazy to me is it seems that we as a society have determined that it is far easier and more efficient to throw billions of dollars into a language token generating tool than teach people how to work with computers. It shows that most humans find it so psychologically painful to understand a system of rules and logical problem solving, that they choose to use an LLM, which in many instances is a far less efficient and salient solution.

Another thing I have noticed with automation in general is that the more you use it, the less you understand the thing being automated. I think the reason why a lot of things today are still being manually done is because humans inherently understand that for both short AND long term success with a task, a conceptual understanding of the components of the system, whether that is partially or fully imagined in the case of complex business scenarios, is necessary, even though it lengthens time to complete in the short term. How do you modify or grow a system you do not understand? It feels like you're cutting a branch at a certain length and not allowing it to grow beyond where you've placed the automation. I will be interested to see the outcome of the increased push today for advanced automation in places where the business relies on understanding of the system to make adjacent decisions/further business operations.

Why do people keep parroting this reduction of Socrates' thoughts... I don't think it was just as simple as he thought writing was bad. And we already know that writing isn't everything, anyone who as done any study of a craft can tell you that reading and writing don't teach you the feel of the art form, but can also nonetheless aid in the study. It's not black and white, even though people like to make it out to be.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.

SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?

PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?

SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.

[link](https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...)

Yeah, even though people say they are shipping faster, the software my work pays for is not seemingly getting better at any faster rate.

It’s not actually cheap, just subsidized. Becoming reliant on it now virtually guarantees you will have a tough decision to make later when profitability is actually important.

I’d like to hear an explanation of what mastered skills are useless?

Thank you, it’s unfortunate that the average person doesn’t seem to understand this.

This was huge for me, also taking phosphatidylserine supplements, magnesium, and prioritizing sleep (low caffeine helped with this the most).

I quit my last job because I was so destroyed by anxiety, to the point I had physical issues like shortness of breath, throat tightness, racing thoughts and even some thoughts of not wanting to exist anymore. I quit that job to focus on getting healthy. Now that I am feeling healthier though, this job market is destroying me and I haven’t been able to get a “true” software developer role since. I do software at a meat manufacturer and its very chill. The funny thing is that I have so much mental energy that I can work on stuff I want to. Before I was doing backend software development but wasn’t super passionate about the technology. Now I am learning vulkan, ray tracing, 3d modeling and rigging, among other things. So idk I would love a job in those things, but for now having a less demanding job is better for me than a more demanding job doing something I am not that passionate about.

Maybe I don’t understand the purpose of this fully, what format do models typically generate for animation? I am not familiar with SWF files, and google says its a defunct format.

It’s because they don’t use their products for actual work, have been having this experience with all AI in Microsoft products too, and in general software has a problem where the people making it don’t use their own products.

> I don’t copy-paste it as my own thoughts

Like how engineers claim they are not losing skills because they are using programming tool assistants, I think there is an over-confidence thing at play here, where the user of an AI assistant doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they are also being shaped by it.

You are still being subtly influenced by something, that’s the whole issue at play here. OpenAI has incredible power in influencing the subconscious of so many people, and I think thats the thing to question here. I am not entirely against it, but we need to be honest with ourselves with how malleable our minds are and influenced we are by what we consume.

The AGI piece from Ezra was frustrating, to the extent that after listening to him talk about technology in this podcast, it made me question the quality of his knowledge in domains I know far less about.

Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the present. As someone who graduated with an engineering degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn’t know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not have prompted an LLM to review.