mirror_neuron

Good points, I’ll take it!

I think the source of our disagreement is in our answers to this question: is the USA many subcultures under a common umbrella (“American culture”), or is it many independent cultures mixed together?

I could be convinced of your position if you can name the common elements that justify the umbrella. It becomes even stronger if those common elements are the rotten ones.

Anecdotally: I married someone from a very different (USA) culture than my own, and their family feels as different from my own as some people that I’ve met from other countries, so that’s partly why I answer that question the way that I do.

The culture you were born into may very well be rotten, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s the culture of “this landmass”. The USA is enormous, and contains a huge number of cultures and subcultures. I grew up here, too, and experienced nothing like what you describe.

Live the rest of your life abroad if you’d like, but don’t do so believing that everyone in the USA is from the same culture.

As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.

Well said. I completely agree.

I think there's a key difference of perspective hidden in your response. You're a business owner; you sell outcomes to your customers. Even if we suppose that skill atrophy is real, it's easy to see how that tradeoff would be worth it to you, and not to someone who is an individual contributor in a corporate environment. For an IC in a corporate environment, the accumulation of portable skills is an important part of what makes the job worthwhile.

For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.

I still work like this, using Aider. What do you mean when you say you “miss” it? (Why not just keep using it?)

I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.

I love this concept. Looks great, I will definitely check it out.

I’m curious to hear more about how you get useful performance out of your local setup. How would you characterize the difference in “intelligence” of local models on your hardware vs. something like chatgpt? I imagine speed is also a factor. Curious to hear about your experiences in as much detail as you’re willing to share!

That was my first reaction, too, but it’s not actually nonsense - it’s a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual conversation.

It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.

Count me among those that didn’t realize how much seed oil is used. But is that bad? I don’t have an axe to grind against cow’s milk, but I do have trouble digesting it (and besides, I like the way oat milk tastes).

Do I need to be worried about the fact that there’s a lot of seed oil in it?

It’s hard (impossible?) to know if we’re talking about the same thing or not, but I experience something like this all the time, without being on the edge of sleep. We might both be wrong, but it’s relatable!

My mother forced me to practice classical string instruments from a very young age, and as a child, I fought her viciously over it.

Because she pushed through my complaints and bore my abuse, I now have deeply embedded musical skills that have changed the trajectory of my life experience for the better.

As an adult, I try to thank her for this whenever I can. I don’t know if I’ll be strong enough to give my own future children this gift.

> Even if you manage to find something that is somewhat relevant to the real world, like green energy research, chances are it might be something highly technical, abstract, and difficult to relate back to the final product.

As someone lucky enough to have found a programming job in an organization that is dedicated to something I believe in, I can confirm this perspective. The big picture mission helps keep me motivated, but my day-to-day is pretty abstracted from that mission.

My advice to OP would be to try to diversify your sources of fulfillment. That may be unsatisfying advice - I know that there was a time in my life that I would have rejected it - but from where I stand now, it is the most reliable path to overall happiness.

It's a matter of the degree of support. Would it be wrong, in your view, for a wealthy tax-paying parent to invest in their own child above and beyond what their taxes provide for society's children?

I agree with your takeaway message, but the timeline isn’t completely arbitrary. From the perspective of humans appreciating things, there’s a difference between something that endures for .01x vs. 10x a person’s expected lifespan.

Unless you mean that you eventually grew out of the view that extroverts “suffer from severe deficit in their mental makeup”, I wouldn’t call your position “balanced” at all. You’ve just swung from one extreme to another.

I don’t know you, but I have a feeling that you’ll eventually come to understand “extroverts” better than this.

That adaptation may not be appropriate for the modern environment.

When exposed to modern/ internet-scale communities, it could be that there are so many false-positive threats to one’s status that the advice to (generally) not worry too much about it is good advice.

Our innate desire for sweets comes to mind.

Are you suggesting that there are people who practice science that do not rely on trust in others in any way to establish their beliefs?

I sympathize with you (the feeling of being threatened by charlatans). I don't think these feelings reflect reality, though. It can feel like your career will be threatened by the existence of this type of person, but unlike them, you have real technical skill to deploy on real problems.

> it also changes the expectations of my friends and family on the occasions that I do try to relate to them about the aspects of work that I like

While it can be grating that charlatans can have this kind of influence on the public's perception, realize that this is really the limit of their influence. They will never displace a person with real knowledge in settings where actually getting things done is the goal. Among your friends and family, it may even present an opportunity to practice your ability to translate your knowledge into something digestible to the layperson. You'll be doing them a service in the process.

You are expanding the scope of the original suggestion to make it seem more extreme. Taxing activities that damage society as a whole (and funneling that money towards mitigating that damage) seems to me like a good solution.

I disagree that this is a slippery slope. The line should be drawn by the people living in the society that draws it. As that society (and the cultural, technological, and environmental context around it) changes, the position of that line might change as well.

Many in the USA would choose a world with more expensive junk food and socialized healthcare than the reverse.

(I'm assuming your questions are rhetorical. Each of them has their own set of trade-offs.)

In a society with socialized healthcare, you would be harming others by making it more expensive to care for you in the future.

In a society where the price of healthcare is set by market forces alone, perhaps you should have unlimited freedom to make bad decisions.

It seems like a lot of people would prefer socialized healthcare over that unlimited freedom.

My (unsubstantiated, off-the-cuff) theory is that empathy/altruism and selfishness are held in equilibrium. Altruistic traits lead to cooperation, which leads to civilization and surplus, which makes selfishness less damaging to society (and thus more adaptive for the individual). Too many selfish individuals damage the trust that leads to that surplus, which keeps the number of the selfish in check.

GP is using “theory of mind” as a technical term with a specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

If you haven’t heard of it, you may be interested in openreview.net

They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.

Neuron count is strongly correlated with body size, and does not necessarily correspond to what we like to call “intelligence”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4244864

I like this. These are good points.

I think it's worth noting that your position is not the same as GP's, however.

One small objection: I assume you lead with "of course" in your first sentence because that value is intuitive to you. It's intuitive to me, too, but I don't have an argument for why it's moral.

Serious question: how is the destruction of animal life for sustenance different from the destruction of plant life?

I'll give you my answer, and hopefully you can share your thoughts (or other answers entirely) to help clarify my thinking.

I conclude that we draw a line between animals and other kinds of life because we are more like animals than other kinds of life. And "likeness with ourselves" seems like an arbitrary way of dividing life.

Extrapolating in the other direction: why don't we practice cannibalism, as other animals do? Perhaps we find cannibalism dangerous and impractical, but also that the typical human carries social instincts that make the behavior distasteful (which in turn leads to taboos in many -- but not all -- of our cultures).

One of my favorite expressions is that "there are no boundaries in nature". That is to say: all dividing lines between categories are invented, regardless of how useful those lines may be. And human constructs change with time and culture. The line between "destroying a someone" and "harvesting a resource" may depend very much on time and place.

I'm not trying to criticize your position, only trying to clarify my own. I would appreciate your thoughts (or links to the thoughts of others).