jvanderbot

Outlive is an excellent book, and one of the excellent discussions in that book is that there is no safe level of certain kinds of cholesterol. The details are fun do read up on.

It's somewhat bombastic, but a really excellent book for overall "next generation" health.

Almost. In a zero-sum world, where "Big" and "Tech" only combine into "evil", any use of a resource by big tech is intolerable. You can't get there from water use statistics, you have to assume zero sum, and you have to assume improper use.

That is the most factually correct and constrained headline and GP comment I've seen in a while. Both are literally true as written, and contain no anecdotal, cautionary, or extrapolated suggestions.

Yes - the question has always been whether that is a good reason for a new, big federal organization to expand its surveillance capabilities, budget, and prosecution powers.

As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.

Yeah what goes unspoken in all these AI discussions is that there's a culture of collaboration that just evaporates when everyone is pushing their own ideas.

There's very little mutual discussion, brainstorming, anything. The slowness inherit in building software before made those discussions almost necessary, now they're post-hoc criticisms (PR "review") rather than fulfilling collaborations.

It's fine from a technical sense, but I do wonder what it does for culture.

I've found, from working with scientists and non-software specialists at NASA, universities, and various industries, that the big wins come from specialists learning to code as the vanguard, then a few engineers taking over for production. I think that's ever more true with AI assistance, and I'm not sure what is left for product-ization. All I know is it's changing fast.

It's always something I've hated, coming from software and working with experts. I always wanted to be the "software guy" who gets to learn the specialist engineering disciplines. It just felt like swimming upstream and the incumbent specialists always wanted to DIY.

Having said that, some subject-matter experts just don't have the stomach for it. They are so separated from software that they have a block to building even with AI. A good s/w-specialist pair is dynamite there.

Sure can. I did similar.

Shoutout to project nomad.

https://www.projectnomad.us/

its got a ton of useful options, preconfigured, integrates pretty easily, and can use any local LLM or data.

I think there's antibodies around disagreeable AI takes, honestly. It's fair enough. We're in this funny don't ask/don't tell stage still, regarding AI use.

Jeez, great place for discussion about new tech then. What precisely went wrong - me expressing enjoyment at finally being able to try new ideas, statements about my actual work hours, or diverging from consensus?

And what does this have to do with psychosis - is that a general catch-all term for using AI too much?

I find it enjoyable to have the energy to think, and less cognitive overload by firing off a suggestion to be checked overnight.

You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.

but it often was socially mandatory!

At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!

Oh but AI has wiped out some of the most tedious work I have to do. I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago if I wanted!

The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.

EDIT: Making the continuation mandatory would be a bad thing, but it's not bad that I can do this now.

I have a strong sense that there's many more CS problems falling than will be released quickly. CS starts to get tangible / actionable pretty quickly.

60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.

That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.

60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.

That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.

This isn't the end.

I've worked remote for the last 6 years, at startups or otherwise.

This is somewhat written for a CEO: "you must bring intensity and instill it on your blank-slate employees". In one case there's the assumption that onsite startups work better, and that assumed-to-be-true mystery is explained as being from on-site being higher intensity.

I somewhat caution against that mindset. I find myself frequently more intense about driving feature timelines and rollouts than my colleagues, even when I'm remote. It's part of the nature of me not my office chair.

My brother in law has hunting dogs. They are not a tool, per se, because they have their own cognitive processes. But they sure are _useful_, trained, reinforced, and even bred for their purpose. They make hunting a lot easier.

My grandfather had horses. They are not a tool, per se, for the same reasons. But they sure were useful for certain jobs, at least until the widespread adoption of ATVs and such. AFAICT, they liked having a horse for the experience of riding the pasture w/ a horse vs an ATV.

I don't see such a distinction. I think domesticating things is a human inclination.

What's funny this time is that we might find the situation reversed, but I digress.

Well, wouldn't it have to become a public good / public utility then? Isn't that what we're all talking about ITT?

Consumer choice, or public good/public utility: Choose one.

A deregulated market should provide choice, if it provides monopoly the gov should step in either by breaking up (forcing choice) or making public (forcing good).

Western perspective:

A bad loser tries to save face. A good winner helps them.

The company we're discussing is being a bad loser.

Hey man, shaving a few petawatts off that time bomb would be great.

Geothermal power -> some % saved for atmospheric carbon extraction makes it a carbon negative endeavor.

Relieve the US energy woes somewhat.

Use the carbon to make methane for his rockets.

And make some diesel fuel too, while he's at it (though he'll have to stock up on soybeans - great for his eventual presidential run)

I'm sorry, I'm going to sound dumb for a second.

I know that you can use LLMs to write ascii numbers that represent a "confidence" as in TFA. This is fraught and strange and hard to trust.

But can't you also use the next token likelihood itself, so long as you rearchitect to use the input classes as the only possible output tokens? Something like stripping away speech and only working with the input labels as vocabulary...

I guess I thought that's what decision-like models were doing to output confidence scoring. (or something like that)

I go back and forth. You can go mad reading the tea leaves.

You actually claimed two very different things.

1) that LLMs can do existing white collar work well once some (possibly significant amount of) work is done to fully plug them in and get specifications settled.

2) That all white collar workers will be replaced by LLMs.

Perhaps a typo, but I don't think (1) implies (2).

You're missing the point - if someone, broadly and irrevocably, is responsible for deciding what is true and repressing things that say otherwise, then that mechanism, even if used truthfully by one party and viciously by another, is itself a bad mechanism by virtue of being so easily abused. The very existence of a "bad others" in your government implies you do not want to give power to government.

That is the whole point. if you add power while you're in office, you better believe that power will be used against you while you're not. It's not about good vs bad, it's about giving power to an organization that itself can be flipped good or bad by one election.

Of course "ours==good, theirs==bad" is a different, dangerous cognitive problem, but institutional power creep is orthogonal and needs to be fought regardless to protect all of us from that power being used against all of us. That is a prerequisite to civil society wherein we're forced to live with people with completely different world views.

Because right now, platforms can and do cave to government pressure, so they're just thin proxy enforcement arms against dissent.

The meta-lesson here is "do unto others as they'll do unto you after next midterms".

Suppression of misinformation during one era is suppression of protests in another era.

You're right that the reality of the current day is what TFA is about - but GP is mentioning that we built this reality.

That wasn't my intent. The intent is that the prevailing pushback that coding is more fun now doesn't apply and need not. That OP has to come to terms with that they want from the new world, even though nobody can say for sure what they world is, other than "currently different"

Well I have a document for you to read on this very question!

Observations:

* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.

* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?

* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.

* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.

* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.

* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.

Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.