I haven't liked much tv sci-fi other than TNG and DS9. In recent times, The Expanse was a huge standout for me. It's also full of characters trying to effectively handle extremely difficult situations, and striving to be good people within their context.
It's very different from TNG in most ways, but it does share the emphasis on retaining humanity, dignity, and ethics within ambiguity and hardship. Very interesting to think about them side-by-side.
He was also a good example for us budding nerds. His intellectualism was not arrogant or apologetic - so it showed us authenticity and self-respect. His intellectualism also did not give him license to dismiss effective communication, leadership, compassion, or humility. So he showed us how to avoid our worst tendencies.
Great thought. I think Sisko is Picard in a much more difficult, fallen, and true to life world. The utopia is receding, the man of principal faces trauma and angry traumatized people, terrible decisions to make under pressure. He’s a sadder character in a piece of culture with less room for optimism. I quite like him, and think he was a harbinger.
Emotional maturity too. People knew how to be part of a team, resolve differences, when to stand on principle, how to live with disappointment, and own their mistakes. Compelling indeed.
Agentic coding has slowly but surely allowed me to enhance many aspects of my life, big and small, with self-made software and automation. These systems are just for myself and my loved ones.
I left the mess of Android years ago in favor of iOS. The restrictive distribution system always irked me but never affected me personally. Now though, having to jump hoops and resort to PWAs for many different things I want to do with my devices, iOS truly feels maliciously crippled. I’m in the market for exactly this kind of tablet, if only they’d let me run my own code in peace maybe I’d buy it.
But you’d never be able to get the timing to work such that the conversational timing stays this good. And if you degrade that, you’ve kinda defeated the point.
Most recent voice-related tech is using voice as an interface or interaction mode. It’s a means to an and, and the end is the value provided by the reasoning system on the other side of the voice.
This model is clearly not so smart. So the voice is the whole point, there’s not much value beyond it, at least on its own.
What that adds up to is, impersonation. That’s what this is for, impersonating humans.
I’m sure it can go both ways. For young me, I always found the outcome itself and sense of accomplishment to be sufficient motivation to persevere. Perseverance itself was the trait I ended up fostering.
Well said. I’ve often noticed how I have a huge tolerance for frustration and ability to persist compared to many people around me, and this is how I acquired these traits. They’ve turned out to be hugely useful, also beyond just coding. It’ll be a shame for our profession to lose them.
People are more neurotic now because of ubiquitous gamification and scoring. Health and aging and looks are scored, alcohol will cost you. Appearing controlled and on brand is a game, alcohol throws the game off. We’ve chosen a dry panopticon.
I really struggle with the contrast between what seems to me to be a formidable and ground-breaking technology, and the deep unseriousness of the leadership of the leading companies developing that technology. If the behavior was coming from, say, uber - I’d be less surprised.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.
I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious.
I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
I also get good mileage out of Terra when I need a diligent workhorse. That's a good way to describe it. We should start using character archetypes when we describe models, it'll do more good than the dubious numbers and cherry-picked quotes. Maybe RPG character-type cliches? Myers Briggs?
I've been working with agents all year, but 5.6 Sol was some sort of sweet spot for me. Something about how it communicated verbally and its engineering instincts just clicked for me, and I was able to somehow predict it and jam with it. Like a colleague you click with. It's the first model I've gotten attached to. I'm concerned that whatever model supercedes it, while technically better, just won't feel quite as natural to work with. And this makes me feel very professionally vulnerable to the labs. I miss the days when my crucial tooling came from companies as reliable and predictable as, say, Jetbrains.
The purges haven’t reached too deep into the rank and file yet, which is why the walls are still standing. But they’ve hit the top of the pyramid hard, which is why nothing makes sense.
There’s a wonderful Ted Chiang short story called “Anxiety is The Dizziness Of Freedom” that explores how people become enmeshed and addicted to alternate versions of how their life could have gone. It’s reminiscent of what you’re describing.
Because elderly people who never had a connection to tech or sci-fi will have no feel for, and therefore no resistance to the kind of trickery that seems fun but is ultimately corrosive. Cheerfully meddling with the artifacts of memory at that life stage is corrosive.
And I know this is petty but the CC cli/harness just grates. It’s overcomplicated, performatively cutesy, and buggy. It’s in my way. The codex harness gives me what I need and gets out of the way.
There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.
Hit the nail on the head. These bureaucratic obstacles are also a manifestation of a culture. A culture that will, in a subconscious and subtle manner, sneer bristle and balk at you, who dared to start a company. What’s wrong with you and who do you think you are, comes the message. Why isn’t what we all do good enough for you, comes the demand.