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tete

3,387 karma · joined May 16, 2011

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tete··on Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings
No they are not. Stop comparing LLMs with brains. Even way before LLMs and the AI craze people realized that ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) are a bad bane and bad abstraction. At this point they are at best "inspired by", but partly also based on misunderstandings.

Basically every new learning about how neurons and the brain works is increasing the distance between how neurons and "artificial neurons" work. There are so many ways in which they are different that I have to stop myself from giving examples, so basically google for it (or use an LLM if you must). The whole memory and computation part, the fact that there are many different types of neurons doing different things, the fact that so much stuff isn't still understood.

And it's not like ANNs are per se changed or adapted to come any closer. A brain or neuron simulation is something very distinct from an artificial neuron.

Yes, it's good enough to emulate something learning, it's probably even an excellent choice to build an AGI and despite LLMs being far from it I think that ANNs will be the right choice, simply because they are a simple basic piece, but they are still not what a biological neuron is. It's simply a different thing.

Also just to be clear: That doesn't mean to say that an artificial biological neuron cannot be made or that we will not be using that or anything like that or that neurons are somehow magical and cannot possibly be replicated or anything like that.

It's just LLMs, ANNs and biological neurons, brains etc. are widely different. Just like a stick figure, a doll or a (current day) robot, an NPC, a chatbot, etc. might be a usable "abstraction" of a human, but is very dissimilar nevertheless. Making artificial and biological neurons equivalent is like pretending your phone has feelings and a bad day, maybe needs to rest, because some app malfunctions. Maybe letting it sit for a while will make things work again, but it's not because it overcame its bad day.

tete··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
Really great channel! I love the "down to earth" history format it provides.

I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.

Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".

Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.

Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".

Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.

Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.

Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.

Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.

tete··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
I think that's because there is differences in comparison. When an HDD reached 5 (or X) years it's much more likely to live to 10 (or y) years than one that died at 2 (or Z) years already. ;)

There is both the mathematical truth to it, but also the physical/chemical one. If something eg. deformed or had a slight manufacturing mistake the wear will be quicker. If everything works perfectly and eg. there are little vibrations (can be everything from earthquake to noise) then HDDs also tend to live longer and run faster. Of course the shipping process also can take its toll and vary greatly.

I think in the world of computers it's all to easy to forget that things largely aren't binary and "logically perfect". Even with advancements in manufacturing and materials drives are physical things in the real world influenced by many things inside and outside of the manufacturer's and user's control.

tete··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
> That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).

That's not exactly what this means. This is like life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy at current age. (which is the thing where people act like "only kings got old" in the past, when while there is some truth to it also doesn't mean "you would be dead by 30" when you already reached adulthood. The biggest difference we got regarding life expectancy at birth by far was doctors and nurses cleaning their hands, followed by things like vaccines for childhood diseases)

Manufacturing errors are likely to hit early. So replacing a drive means you might replace a perfectly healthy drive with one that will eat your data.

Just use SMART and you have a way better insight of how well your drive does than any such advice.

And also you likely won't run your drives in the same conditions as Backblaze, so things might vary in both directions.

There is shipping, storage, running conditions, series, manufacturing, and many variables. So you have a way better understanding of your drive than what Backblaze can provide if you just look at your drive's SMART data and run a self test.

tete··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
There is another option. Going to the source of information (eg. the official project site or code), trying stuff yourself.
tete··on CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3
Holy moly people feel entitled about joining a volunteer run (even things like health and security) organization.
tete··on How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us?
The same way that the world was gonna end before AI.

By some dumb human doing something dumb on a large scale.

The only new part is "... because the AI said so."

tete··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon

Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people.

Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.

tete··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
> I've found sorta the opposite - in any area, it can just do everything for you, or it can be an incredible teacher.

Please don't. I've had all of Codex, Claude and Gemini convincingly tell me absolutely wrong stuff, pointing it out with easily verifiable example they come up with more and more weird reasons.

Things don't become correct simply because most sources are again - easily and logically verifiable - wrong. This already was a plague when people "just googled" stuff and effectively returned with the most SEO optimized answer. Now we have very convincingly written instances all over the place.

If these were singular instances I wouldn't be so worried, but if you are learning it already is very easy to learn something wrong. This is why back in the days when people still used physical books to learn new things it was a good idea to check first which books are actually recommended. There have been a lot of "experts" that wrote things they clearly misunderstood but worked for all the examples in their books.

To give a common example for both the backend and frontend devs, that isn't about a specific projects. LLMs and Google searches frequently turn out wrong results regarding CORS caching and how it works in relation to domains/hostnames. The circumstances under which Content-Disposition work are another example. I think a lot of wrong statements that LLMs are "convinced" about are due to wrong statements (sometimes in otherwise correct response) of popular Stack Overflow answers.

It's saddening how much wrong "common knowledge" exists in the industry. I have been bitten by a lot of these, but it feels when people don't even actually code and think anymore this will just rise forever.

tete··on OTel isn’t going well
OpenTelemtry is the perfect example of an overengineered mess.

While I usually think that at least having some standard that people agree on I think OpenTelemtry should be dropped.

A lot of the less popular alternatives (just going with Prometheus, Victoriametrics, etc) are de-facto competing smaller standards and a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get.

I think OpenTelemetry turned metrics into a farce. In many situations even self-rolled telemetry works better even with the added stuff. The annoying thing is that OpenTelemtry is that big standard now one kind of has to to add compatibility. So please, if you write software, make sure you don't lock yourself into OTel.

tete··on Incentives are for losers
That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.

I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.

Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.

I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.

And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.

Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.

tete··on Incentives are for losers
Well, this is just silly.

"We can all agree: the incentives are bad."

Seriously?!

If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?

The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.

A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.

Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.

In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.

So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.

If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.

Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").

The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.

And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.

Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.

Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.

tete··on NetBSD 11.0
They for that reason also were very very early in the Xen game both host and guest. Back when it was essentially a research project, why before hardware virtualization was even on the roadmap for Intel.
tete··on NetBSD 11.0
I will focus on the things that people rarely point out. Btw. to be clear, I largely use Linux personally and professionally. So no evangelism here.

First of all: The BSDs are ALL general purpose operating systems, not distributions. I just mention this because there is that general "OpenBSD is for routers" and "NetBSD is for old hardware" nonsense. To give you an example. Various things including 3D graphics acceleration for various devices has been available in OpenBSD and DragonFly a lot earlier than in eg. FreeBSD even though FreeBSD for example has proprietary NVIDIA drivers available unlike the rest. People use all of them on server, as desktops and even on gaming devices. It's even kind of a myth in BSD communities that "this BSD is for X".

Something that people who aren't in the BSD users already and especially ones that do use Linux sometimes misunderstand is that the BSDs are independent of one another. Eg. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are as different as eg. FreeBSD and macOS, which is also a BSD and has A LOT of kernel and user space level code shared with FreeBSD. That's why grep -v says FreeBSD that's why docker uses (or used) xhyve which is FreeBSDs bhyve for macOS, which is why you got kqueue and dtrace, etc.

So in that respect "the BSDs" doesn't really work that well and is "dangerously" oversimplifying things.

All of them have a pretty good security track with strengths and weaknesses compared to each other and Linux. I would say it's overall even. But depending whom you ask the difference may very, because even in the Linux world there are different approaches to security. And as anyone having anything serious to do with security it's not that easy to measure security in first place. OpenBSD has a strong focus and achieves a lot on the C side and people who don't use any BSD at all actually and basically don't know it have critical C code compile on OpenBSD to spot issues affecting their actual target platform.

As for development. All of the BSDs increase in terms of development (only happen to know it cause someone once pointed me at an obviously wrong graph). I got a bit interested in that comparison because something that people like to underestimate is that single individuals are still the ones doing huge chunks of big projects. It's insane. Linux kernel might be one of the very few exceptions because a huge amount of people make hardware essentially for it for a living (SBCs and so on). Even if you look at other "big" projects like Postgres and so on which huge companies absolutely rely on it's a couple of people doing insane amounts of work. You have that in all BSDs.

FreeBSD sees a lot of usage as a base for commercial OSs (video game consoles, Netflix cache servers, etc.). However to be fair while some parts come back to the OS they also have companies that shamelessly take code without giving pretty much anything back (looking at you, Apple). Nobody is angry at that cause that's the terms and people in the BSDs often contribute out of the drive to make a great OS.

Something in my opinion greatly overlooked is that FreeBSD has one of the best package bases of all open source operating systems including all the Linux distributions. This is somehow rarely advertised but you have a huge official, very stable, very up to date, highly configurable "repository". I think this is pretty much unmatched elsewhere. It's like having Arch AUR, but without the security nightmare nor instability. In fact getting a commit bit is on the harder side compared to many Linux distributions. Many official package maintainers cannot commit on their own. This means that the "many eyes" does a lot of work there.

You get binary packages with one of the best binary package managers out there (classic case of being late to the game, but taking all the leanings and doing a great implementation).

You get close to 35k of these "ports" both binary or compiled if you want. If you compile yourself you get a huge amount of flexibility. My go to example for this is pick and choose a Postgres and PostGIS version combination, but there are many other examples from disabling adding docs, to optimizations to a stunning amount of third party nginx patches giving you better than commercial version experience. That coupled with a great flexible automatic build tool called poudriere, which you can use to create repositories of all or parts of these 35k ports and your chosen options for different versions of FreeBSD.

I am not completely sure but the sheer amounted of vetted(!) packages is unseen anywhere else. There is a security database, there is deprecation warnings and since the base OS and package separation (maybe the common differentiator of BSDs compared to Linux) you can match stability with the latest packages (or older version, eg. in Postgres), which is something I really miss in the Linux world even though there is nothing that is because of the OS/kernel it runs. It's simply nobody in the Linux world did put the effort in so far.

While FreeBSD has had a couple of not so great defaults - I think maybe to do with how many long term FreeBSD users any ways have their custom configs and trying to be compatible with upgrades - I think it got better. On the other hand they have and had a lot of projects on that front. jails predated pretty much everything else in the open source world, there was the TrustedBSD project, now there is CherBSD which puts a capabilities system in to hardware, etc.

OpenBSD also has a strength that is overlooked in that for a lot of "set and forget" style applications the base OS is enough. You get a highly secure (custom) HTTP server, a custom acme client, a custom load balancer (relayd), one of the best firewall implementations, etc. out of the box. I love to use it for simple I need something so that one can upload files via SFTP to a HTTP server setups. Just run syspatch and every half year sysupgrade and you are good. OpenSMTPD is also an absolute breeze and also having a Go application running with pledge and unveil (basically a way simpler easy to use seccomp) is great. Also for some reason there is a serious gaming community on OpenBSD making things work without wine (doesn't even work on the OS) in a way that is hard to believe.

Another thing is that a lot of "everyone uses them" tools come out of OpenBSD circles. Eg. tmux, OpenSSH, sudo (even though doas replaces it), OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD femail, etc. Also LibreSSL and sndio which always pop up on Linux in the least expected places (like games) for some reason. They all of that heavy focus on simplicity, but done in a non-academical but very real world scenario. They also do a lot of work in the compiler scene on the security side.

NetBSD and DragonFly also have their often very unexpected strength. Eg. DragonFly supports multiple ways of full file system encryption, including truecrypt compatible one. NetBSD while working on a Dreamcast also has very interesting and it runs in unexpected places like the ISS and somehow there have always been DARPA contributions, while in all BSDs at least subjectively the most to NetBSD. Mostly because there I've also seen quite a few pkgsrc (their non-base-OS packages) contributions. pkgsrc probably is one of NetBSDs biggest impacts being using by lots of other OSs from Minix to illumos. And on that topic, Android has (had?) quite a few NetBSD parts (in place of GNU userspace software) and Microsoft took the network stack from the BSDs and Internix (which was the predocessor to the Linux subsystem from when they wanted to be compatible with Unix datacenters, etc.) was largely a modified OpenBSD system.

Again, not a BSD users, and BSD people being very practical and less of a cult they'll usually tell you to keep using Linux if it works for you. But I think there also are a lot of misinterpretations when you used Linux all your life.

In fact the hardest thing on just trying it will probably be it NOT being Linux and also when switching between BSDs. They are simply other approaches to making an operating system. So if you take away one thing from this it's they are general purpose operating systems in their own respect and while they share code so does macOS, which as mentioned is also a BSD.

Use Linux if it works for you, but just for people trying it out: If you wanna actually be able to compare it you really have to use it and get it else you will just be annoyed with it not being Linux. Kind of like when you try a different editor, programming language, etc. Just don't make the mistake thinking BSDs are like distributions. That's a bit like thinking AIX and macOS are just Unix distributions. Even Solaris I think in very old versions was BSD based. ;)

tete··on Kill The Cookie Banner
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law

I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.

tete··on Kill The Cookie Banner
There is Consent-O-Matic.

Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.

Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".

tete··on Kill The Cookie Banner
No, please don't!

It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.

tete··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
It's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.
tete··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
You should be able. Go for it.
tete··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.
tete··on WASI 0.3
I get that. That's not my criticism. My criticism is that you can do say that about many things. With that argument you can essentially encompass everything, which is cool in a way, but also means that the scope is at least bigger than the original - hence what the speaker says.

What I worry about here is that when I think about implementing it the scope will likely grow as well. And while I very much get the wish to encompass things in a standard (I think everyone who ever wrote any kind of specification knows that) a standard doing that extension when the initial goal of being a (commonly used) system interface isn't achieved - at least that's how'd interpret being 0.3 now - then what if that scope extends like that. Will we see full implementations?

To me it seems like maybe it would have made sense to separate that a bit. Something like a WASI based standard. Or something else. The fact that you almost need to change your name like this indicates that you went quite a bit away from the initial goal and doing that before a 1.0 seems like a very early point to get of course for any project. Sure sometimes you find out that you have looked at it from the wrong angle, but honestly this doesn't look like it. This looks a lot more "this is something we can reuse".

tete··on WASI 0.3
Fair enough. Isn't that another topic more tied to WASM compare to what initially claimed to be a "System Interface" and not a language interface or a browser interface?
tete··on WASI 0.3
Even if something lasts due to pure inertia it lasts. And something that lasts is pretty nice if you want a standard to last, or be implemented. The standard usually isn't the thing that you use to proof you can do something better, by being different. Because then everyone will have a harder time adapting it. People implement interfaces they dislike.

Since this is related to Webassembly, Browsers, the Web. The web has a lot of historically baggage, that one might have to work around at times, sometimes more sometimes less. There are good bits and not so good bits and in the end a lot of the time more modern web applications (whether you think they are good or bad) as well as web browsers jump through hoops to do things. For many applications there would be better protocols. But it became the dominant standard, a standard that is actually being used a lot and that is why it has become a success story. It wasn't a hundred times better than everything else. It simply was something that people managed to implement successfully and something where they were willing to deal with shortcomings, because there are great benefits in implementing the same standard as everyone else.

Don't know much about the US constitution, but it seems that it was largely good enough to make people work together that otherwise might have ended up fighting each other. That's what you'd get if everyone had a different idea about what a good constitution is. Maybe things are unclear, and maybe there are uproars because of things, but it doesn't even get to that if people don't agree on a standard or a constitution in first place.

And while over the years I often imagined how great it would be if everyone just used that better standard that has been there for a long time and nobody uses and is completely forgotten, if it ever had any popularity, then everything would be so much better and greater and I wouldn't have to do that senseless thing I am doing now. But if that standard doesn't allow for people to agree with it by implementing it it's essentially worthless (outside of maybe "prior art" consideration).

And like it or not we currently live in a world where designs persist due to pure inertia. But we know that obviously people are willing to implement these which means when a standard comes along that is similar to what already is there then having many people adapting it is realistic. Otherwise it's that super interesting university project that never makes it into anything in the real world.

tete··on WASI 0.3
I think there is a difference between "just copying" and "building upon understood systems and standards".

Also to be fair "just copying" works really really well, especially for standards. The primary goal of standardization is not to invent something new, but to have a target that isn't constantly moving.

If you want to build something new and better do that, and if you are ready to build a standard based of it which is very valid. You can also build them together, and CloudABI which they mention as inspiration in their readme for example did it that way. All valid paths.

But you want to start out simple and something common so that people that make use of the standard have an easy time to implement it. After all having more than one implementation is why you need a standard. Otherwise it's maybe a specification, which again, fair enough.

I can stand behind not copying Unix until the end of time, but "Unix" is a common target that people know how to implement and use. And while not even the authors of Unix claim it's great or even good it is something that people already implement (often enough even when not targeting anything unixy at all) so if your goal is to create a standard that those people can target then abandoning that does seem like a wrong move.

tete··on WASI 0.3
> - "What is a Component (and Why)?" (WasmCon 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAACYA1Mwv4

At 18:00 the speaker states something like "It should not be Systems Interface but Standard Interfaces" which honestly sounds like a different project. As an implementer or even as just a user in general, can it be trusted that tomorrow it isn't something completely different? Seems like an odd standard to follow.

(EDIT and aside: Rereading this it reads more dismissive than I meant it. So if this isn't clear: I want WASI to succeed. I think having a widely used system interface is great, but I think many know standards that suffered from scope creep. And while big successful standards for better or for worse at least have a chance of surviving this, WASI as the 0.3 indicates is in its infancy. So I worry about it turning out bad, leading to people abandoning the idea altogether or the standard losing sight of its initial goal. So while this is criticism the only reason I bother to write it in first place is because I badly want it to succeed. I worry that if WASI tries to do too much at once - and I totally understand wanting to do that - it makes it less likely to be successfully implemented and thereby less likely to succeed as a standard.)

tete··on WASI 0.3
I agree. This is saddening. It seems to often happen in "standard first" scenarios for some reason. I was very happy when CloudABI and POSIX were picked as prior art inspiration.

Now it feels like it moved from "what would we need to get things done and achieve our goals?" to "what could be done and which goals could we achieve?"

Maybe I am missing something, but are the recent changes something that people requested?

tete··on The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
I am curious about how many of these cases are self-diagnosis and how many of them are wrong self-diagnosis.

Highly subjective (which is why I am curious), but I know zero people in real life that have an actual ADHD diagnosis, but two that were pretty much convinced to have ADHD and when trying to establish it for real learned that they actually have a different kind of neurodivergency/mental disease.

I think both of those cases were caused by a pretty large set of ADHD and other things are not as specific as they appear to a non-professional and also some conditions can make you more sensitive to noticing specific "symptoms".

For anyone reading this: Please don't read this as "you don't have it", but also if you think please try to confirm it via a trained professional, because the result could make your life quite a bit better, whether you are diagnosed ADHD or anything else.

tete··on The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Do you have no intention of answering skydhash's initial question? Do you have any examples of what you actually learned?
tete··on The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Out of curiosity: What is your clear meaning and purpose in your life and the related missions?
tete··on The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
That's something that is really really common in other contexts as well. For example lower level languages and especially more verbose languages make one feel a lot more productive. Another example is over-engineered infrastructure and especially cloud infrastructure that somehow make me feel very productive, because you have to think about certain details and things can feel puzzly where just running a service with a service file or init script on a random server might get you just as far and provide a lot less surface for things to go wrong.

I think another set of related effects might when people switch programming languages. There two major things tend to happen. Rewrites of something they now understand way better and having a clean slate. As well as - in case of new programming languages - way less historical bagged, 15 ways of doing the same way, deprecated tools, lots of the "new way" code in dependencies and "old ways".

What I mean with that is that there are a lot of overlooked things going on. And humans in general are really good at mistaking moving a problem somewhere else as not having to deal with that problem. Sometimes that is the case, sometimes even moving things to another apartment or being able to move work to a free coworker is a worthwhile investment even if it adds overhead. But it's also really easy to forget about how you didn't make issues disappear but just moved the issue somewhere else.

I think psychology plays a much bigger role in many of these things than technology does.

These are just examples. I don't argue against any of these things, also because whether they are worthwhile depends a lot on context. However, I do think that LLMs aren't the first example of that happening.

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