jmfldn

An excellent point around data retention and training data. It's not like you can scrub out bits of the neural network weights. I guess such a product would have to factor this in.

Indeed it would. But then the source training data would be bad to lose too. That already exists. I understand it would be a higher level of damage to lose the model of course, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and these could be managed via a very security-hardened product.

Perhaps such products are in the works, but I would love a private company LLM that slurps all messages, docs, meetings, and becomes an oracle that can be relied upon. Perhaps it could even infer tacit knowledge even when it's not explicit in any docs, since it could abstract principles and concepts from the maze of data.

Chatgpt soon probably!

Written in Scala I believe which makes me love it even more (Scala fan here!).

+1 for Processing. Amazing tool to iterate quickly on these sorts of ideas.

If you're interested in this piece, and interesting music writing generally, check out this book by Paul Morley...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_and_Music:_A_History_of_...

"Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City is a 2003 book charting the history of popular music, by the music journalist and cultural commentator Paul Morley. Its style takes the form of a robotic Kylie Minogue traveling, with Morley, in a "cyber-car" toward a city of "sound and ideas". The starting points for this history of popular music are Morley's favourite pieces at the time of writing, Kylie Minogue's electro-pop song "Can't Get You Out of My Head" and Alvin Lucier's experimental "I am sitting in a room" "

Quite an original book as you can probably tell just from the description!

Sure it will yep. I'm pretty confident it won't be though.

I am half-Argentine and a student of history. Both things tell me it will be a disaster.

For what it's worth, I'm utterly opposed to the corrupt useless Peronists. Their centre right rivals are pretty awful too. Argentina was lead to the abyss by decades of political failure and corruption. Now, in desperation, they've rolled the dice and summoned a catastrophe.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I understand Argentinians are utterly fed up and willing to roll the dice. This will be even worse...

Sad times.

Interesting point. Perhaps you're right. I hope so, as someone who otherwise believes in the FOSS ideal.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-powerful tech being in the hands of the few or indeed of everyone.

By the way, I'm not sure how easy it will be to stop bad actors since barriers to entry are exponentially lower to developing a malicious AI tool than, say, developing a nuke.

Yes! Going to order my copy soon. Great to see these classic tools evolving and hopefully winning new fans from up to date resources like this.

I think you have a point. The thing is, I'm weirdly OK with labouring away at the coalface. It's hard work, it's more toil and drudgery than people admit, but I'd rather that than finding the white collar 'cheat codes' that allow me to skive off.

It helps to work on a product that you're into, or believe in, if you're lucky enough to find such a thing. I think one of the secrets is to become a product-centric engineer, and focus more energy on understanding the domain and what the business needs.

Julia Evans is amazing. So likeable, such a great teacher, so much enthusiasm and love for her subject and so much wisdom. An example to us all.

Zen IS Buddhism, it's not influenced by it. It's one of the most important schools within Mahayana Buddhism. It has Daoist influences via Chan from which it originated. It absolutely is categorically not Daoism though. It is Buddhism with a somewhat Daoist sensibility.

Zen evolved from Chinese Chan Buddhism which was influenced by Daoism. Zen is not Daoism though, it is Buddhism. Therefore, to study Daoist texts as a beginner I don't think Zen Buddhism is going to help. It's just going to muddy concepts whatever overlap there may be.

It's written in a set of Tao Te Ching-style aphorisms for humorous effect. That's the connection I guess!

Fine, well let's leave it there. I can see it's pointless trying to convince you.

Depressingly for me, I once admired him, so I'm familiar with his output. I went off him a good few years ago as I felt he was becoming incoherent even then. I then watched a few of his recent videos in horror. The shift was quite extreme and I wonder what happened. This article sums it up perfectly. There are many good examples right there and I've (unfortunately) watched a few of the videos alluded to. Graham Hancock, the great reset. Seriously?!

You can disagree with me if you want, but I've assessed his recent output, and to me it's a confusing mess of half truths, baseless conspiracies mixed in with the odd insight. He's not a good thinker. He's all over the place.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/10/russel...

As I said, if you need to ask why his recent videos are unsound and you've watched them all, then I'm not sure what more I can say. It's going to be hard to have a fruitful discussion and your tone underlines that for me.

If it makes you feel better to think I don't know what I'm talking about then I can live with that.

If you have to ask I don't know what to say. Look at anything from literally the last few years. It's basically Info Wars / Alex Jones.

Sure, it just a theory. I had thought several times in recent months how odd his transformation had been though, and this is one possible cause of it.

His decent into outrage-bait, alt-right friendly nonsense struck me as abrupt. One minute his channel was reasonable enough, the next it was totally nuts.

Part of me wonders whether this was calculated once he knew that a major expose was circling. I have zero evidence for this, but you can see the logic. Court a following that is sceptical of everything, and that will see an investigation by the 'mainstream media' as obvious evidence of some deep state conspiracy. You now have an army of cheerleaders, and an alternative renevue source, ready to wage war with.

Previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539

Honestly, what you're describing would be common to almost any software engineer I know at least. The entire world of computer science, programming and software is VAST. You're only going to know about a tiny bit of it. A physicist doesn't know all of physics in depth, a doctor only has a surface level understanding of most things, and deeper knowledge of a few. Our field is the same. You're going to get to know your little niche, and bits and pieces of others.

As for tooling, if Windows and Visual Studio work then great. Vim is just a tool.

That's a bit over the top. It's just people having a conversation and sharing their experiences. Quite interesting to see that it's not that uncommon.

Is there selection bias here, with those reporting ill effects having a particular thinking style and interests? Sure, could be part of it. As you allude to, it's a complex topic, people will have these experiences for a variety of reasons and unpicking the various causes is probably very hard.

It's quite common I've gradually come to realise. Even within my friendship group, two people had these experiences.

I found this quote in "Notes On A Nervous planet" by the wonderful Matt Haig a few years ago. It was the first time I felt "seen" and like someone else could articulate this weird feeling I sometimes had...

"People who have never had a period of living with anxiety and panic don’t understand that the realness of you is an actual feeling that you can lose. People take it for granted. You don’t get up in the morning and think, as you spread peanut butter onto your toast, ‘Ah, good, my sense of self is still intact, and the world is still real, I can now get on with my day.’ It’s just there. Until it isn’t. Until you are in the cereal aisle, feeling inexplicable terror. When trying to express what a panic attack feels like it’s easy to talk about the obvious symptoms: the racing thoughts, the palpitations, the tightness of the chest, the breathlessness, the nausea, the tingling sensations inside your skull or your arms and legs. But there is another more complicated symptom I used to get. One which I have come to realise is at the heart of what my panic attacks have always been about. It is the one called, tellingly, derealisation. Within a feeling of derealisation, I still knew I was me. I just didn’t feel I was me. It is a feeling of disintegration. Like a sand sculpture crumbling away. And there is a paradox about this sensation. Because it feels like both an extreme intensity of self and a nothingness of self. A feeling of no return, as if you have suddenly lost something that you didn’t know you had to look after, and that the thing you had to look after was you."

Yes absolutely. The insight for me is that the perception itself is totally unreal. One minute I felt one way, now I feel another. Well, which is real? Since I can perceive reality in two ways then they can't both be real. Maybe neither are, but the panic perception is underpinned by all this adrenaline and stress, so it's a much more artificial or contingent state. You never experience this when you're relaxed and in a state of homeostasis. It's just a warped perception, your mind plays tricks when you're tired and certainly when it's anxious.

I'm not sure if I've had these exact experiences, but something related perhaps, albeit milder. When I was in my early twenties I consumed a lot of cannabis in the form of hash cakes one night and it triggered a panic attack. What was scary about the panic attack was this feeling of the world around me feeling dreamlike, or like I was in a dream I couldn't wake up from. It was like there's normally this safe ground we all walk on, and we don't know its even there, and that implicit feeling we all carry with us can drift away. It wasn't psychosis, I think it was just a by-product of anxiety, which in itself is a very mind altering experience. If you've ever had a panic attack or experienced severe anxiety states you'll know what I mean. It's effectively a bad trip, your perception is altered by the cortisol and adrenaline coursing through your brain and the resulting mental exhaustion and depressed emotions that can arise alongside it.

I was predisposed to anxiety already, and I think this experience led me into developing mild to moderate panic disorder which was driven by fear of experiencing this state again. So it become a vicious circle. A fear of fear which, ironically, became a trigger for the feared thing. I believe it was made worse by my highly philosophical brain, and a deep immersion in existential philosophies. In particular Buddhism. So I was already used to a worldview which was challenging existentially let's say. Looking back, I was probably too young at the time, and maybe too anxious, to be immersed in all this naval gazing given my mental health.

Decades later I'm OK, but I have residual panic feelings surfacing sometimes. The difference now is that I don't identify with them, I just see them as fleeting feelings producing a distorted sense of reality. The secret with anxiety, for me at least, is to not care if you feel anxious and to let it pass.