semanticjudo

I recently bought a new car for the first time in 16 years. I had all the same concerns - my Acura MDX solved them all. It’s not perfect (has opaque shade for panoramic roof) but the number of physical buttons (dozens) is glorious. And the door handles are great.

The author has implied a false dichotomy: positioning the article as “it does 10x or it does nothing” (my paraphrasing) is disingenuous and hyperbolic. My experience is that on several tasks professional devs, including myself, can get to an answer much faster than pre-LLM. For example, I’ve never had to use SQL frequently enough to become an expert. Prior to LLMs, creating queries beyond the basic would take an hour of Googling and keyboard head banging (or find an expert to help who is invariably doing their own job). Now, the same thing takes 6 minutes. Arguably 10x faster for this task. But since I don’t do this often nor have 40 other examples like this, I’d never claim it makes me 10x more productive. But I DO run into 5 or 6 of this and similar examples a week and several others of smaller magnitude. And that has a meaningful impact on my productivity. I could go on to describe in what ways I can see this productivity improvement but the primary point is that it is not all or nothing. An LLM might make me 20% more productive across my week and that is still a big deal when compared with just not having it.

I try to capture this sentiment all the time in conversations here in America - we are privileged simply to say, “I feel unsafe” and have it taken seriously when vast swaths of the world would simply reply, “you and everyone else, why are you stating the obvious”

The western world’s calibration on what it means to feel unsafe is so far out of whack that it’s often hard to take seriously.

Reminds me of the narcissism of small differences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen...

Few people will care because only a few are capable of caring and the world keeps on turning.

I’ve led the software development at a design agency to build project and client collaboration tools in a web app over the last seven years. The company founders never set out to intentionally run a design agency with custom built software in house and from the outside looking in, building “project management” from scratch would sound like a terrible idea. Yet we’ve been profitable in every year and grown +30% more than half those years and were acquired last year with decent equity payouts. The acquiring company (300m+ rev / year) is now expanding the engineering team to build SW for their adjacent market.

Myself, my boss (former CEO) and current CEO strongly believe in the power and potential of in house engineering, in particular for spaces that “sound on paper” like solved problems. The efficiency and productivity gains from building exactly what you need is hard to quantify but has been proven in our business as indispensable and, we believe, a significant competitive advantage.

Of course, as others have mentioned, you need the right person to make this happen in your business. I would look for someone with proven startup and product development experience that you could ultimately see managing a small team. None of this is cheap but the ROI long term is likely justified given the issues you’ve outlined.

yes, when the odds of winning are in my favor...

But I assume you know that so you must be asking, "Is there a situation where somebody can accurately understand the expected outcomes of any particular bet where the odds are against them winning and still come to the conclusion that taking the bet is rational?"

And one answer comes immediately to mind although I'm sure there are several: when I'm willing to lose for the entertainment value of having the chance to win and knowing that short term variance means I may in fact win.

There always has been and always will be a “tax” on those who cannot or will not apply math to their financial decisions. Of course the degree to which we provide opportunities to collect this tax is a societal decision and we’ve almost certainly increased the opportunities for tax collectors in the last ten to fifteen years quite dramatically. And of course, de facto the under educated folks, who also are likely to be poor, will tend to be taxed at a disproportionate rate. Yet another wealth transfer. I wonder what societal attitudes led us down this road?

> Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game).

Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?

I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.

If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.

Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.

Did you bother reading it?

“Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.”

Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.

Read widely, absorb judiciously, adopt frugally

There is one measure of a government that has never failed: are people trying to get in or are people trying to get out?

California's government - federal electives, state and many local have been making decisions and putting in place policies that we are now seeing the consequences of.

The pandemic didn't create the problem - it poured gas on the fire. The elected officials of the last 30-40 years created the problem. The housing shortage is 100% a government created problem. The homeless "problem" is 100% a government created problem.

We don't have to solve these problems - we can continue on as we are which is likely because it is the path of least resistance (accountability is hard for people and governments). But let's be honest about why things are the way they are.

you weren't supposed to notice the similarity to, "standing around outside during your lunch hour".

Sounds like a legitimately good application for block chain - both parties can have access to the immutable transaction history. Similar to how Walmart applied block chain to inventory delivery disputes.

Brokers (what the author calls "middlemen") have existed for ages and served all sorts of purposes in all sorts of economic activities. They serve a specific and valuable function in the economy.

The author muddles the point by bringing this into the equation. The core, valid issue raised is monopoly power. Which will naturally be the end goal of any enterprise. It is governments job to bring reasonable power to bear to prevent monopolies. Ours is failing to do this due to crony capitalism - all of the benefits both sides of the political aisle reap by maintaining the status quo.

Saving to copy/paste on every [X workstyle] is best thread…

We’ll done. I read the autocorrelation post when it came out a couple weeks back and it didn’t sit right with me. But I didn’t have the motivation to figure out why. Your explanation resonates perfectly with my initial (snap) intuition and I thank you for taking the time to write it out and post!

This kind of shit the CDC has pulled is so frustrating. I just want good information to make decisions on but do not have time to fact check everything everyone says or keep up with the latest research even monthly. I thought the CDC would be an impartial source who at worst would skew questionable calls in a defensible way but the pure propaganda and junk science examples provided here clearly show that is not the case.

Because all my passwords in the vault are strong and unique. Because my master password is a massive pass phrase not subject to the vagaries of limits on passwords many sites have and I literally keep it locked in a vault. So it is exponentially better than any alternative I have found [edit] for the cost and effort.

Depends on a few factors like what task, innate ability, etc. Which is not a non-answer - it is THE answer: in my experience, some things are easier on one than the other and vice versa.

FWIW, here's my definition of a "hard" drug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29028924

it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.

But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.

I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.

A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.

When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.

By just about any measure alcohol is a "harder" drug than marijuana but certainly more broadly acceptable.

The problem they're going to have is not whether or not Amazon leaves Seattle. It is that existing or new corporations that may fall into this tax category will not move to Seattle because of it.

Learning how to be truly empathetic to another person was transformational for me. Studying meditation, mindfulness and generally seeking to truly understand other humans with an open heart and mind has been a long, ongoing journey but well worth the effort to date.

It appears to me that work environment is a personal preference based on an array of personality traits and motivations mostly opaque to most people until they've had a chance to try a few out. Further, it seems that the preferences fall into a few categories that are broadly represented in the population. Each has objective pros and cons but for any individual, the cons are easily outweighed by our preferences and motivations.

Once you realize this, articles regarding "X environment has Y good and Z bad" stop providing any value. What I want to read about is how to effectively manage a company to allow my employees to 1) discover the environment they prefer 2) be in that environment and 3) maintain a high performing team across those environments. Given considerations around maintaining culture, communication challenges and "informal, de-facto decision makers" forming up where people to choose to work closely together, #3 is a challenge I haven't seen a good answer to. (e.g. office or co-working employees naturally have a networking advantage and can quickly form an "in group" that makes decisions while, at best, unconsciously leaving remote workers out)

I argue from position 1 that we should be looking for the next breakthrough, CO2-emission-free power source. I'm extremely grateful that some people are. Wind and solar are highly inefficient, expensive and difficult to scale[1] and are very unlikely to be an effective solution long-term. Nuclear power sources have great potential among technologies we have access to today and while there are real, technical drawbacks (setup cost, security, waste) there are ongoing, significant research projects in each area[2]. Beyond nuclear, the seeming holy-grail would be to find a CO2-emission-free power source that is 10-100x more effective at the same or lower cost. And why can't we? Our ability to imagine what is possible in the future has been shown time and again to be very limited, in general.

Arguing position 1 amounts to taking an interest in and investing in efforts that will allow the world to progress along its current trajectory without CO2-emitting power sources.

"... why are you surprised to be forced to defend their wrongheadedness?" - I'm not... I just avoid having conversations with folks that would jump to this conclusion without hearing my point of view.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08... [2]http://energy.mit.edu/news/mit-releases-interdisciplinary-st...

Yah, I realized this too a while back when I was doing the "what problem do I have?" exercise... "well, clearly I have a problem finding an idea." :)

I had some ideas on how to go about this but I think the major blocker to scale is the "functional fixedness" bias. At least that is where I got stuck.