monkeynotes

In many countries the police address complaints of illegal streaming from copyright holders reporting individual IP addresses accessing torrents they are sitting on. Why on earth would the UK have a policy that the Police's time could be spent actively detecting that activity. Like how is that ever a priority?

I am glad I left the UK long ago. When I go back I see cameras literally everywhere. Going on the motorway is insane, indeed any given road is peppered with speed cameras, but the motorway has taken it to the max.

It's well known that an individual can be tracked pretty much across the country on various CCTV. While this is great for crime detection it does have a social morale cost that is not considered as they quietly descend unimpeded into 1984.

Anyone see the debacle of the piano player being gaslit by a police officer dealing with Chinese people complaining he was filming them in public?

Some websites did do this. But adding actual text that can be indexed by Ask Jeeves doesn't work with this solution.

Macromedia had this crazy system where you could slice your art up in Fireworks, and then ask it to generate the HTML and Javascript, then you could fine-tune it in Dreamweaver.

It was a mess.

I'd be happy if we didn't have to inline all the CSS.

Surely stock price is directly linked to demand from airlines, and airlines are successful because of customer confidence, convenience, and price. If an airline bails on Boeing because customers refuse to fly Boeing fleets, then damage control/stock price is an abstraction of passenger's requirements.

Is there a reason to isolate this QA culture to just the Max production line? I'm concerned about anything they have produced recently.

I didn't mind flying on a 737 Max once they figured out the MCAS stuff, but now I see it's an institutional problem I don't know if I could accept a ticket on a Boeing aircraft manufactured in the past ~10 years.

Maybe all of those variations are ways to demonstrate mastery, like asymmetry of all the holes might demonstrate a certain skill.

I don't have an opinion of the overall hypothesis.

I understand the vulnerability of the slide up thing, but I guess what I didn't explain properly is why doesn't it open by swinging inside instead of upwards? I don't know if I've ever seen a passenger door that slides up, but I haven't flown on all aircraft types.

I don't understand why the plug doesn't use pressure as a failsafe. You have high pressure one side, low the other side, and just like normal airline doors the interior pressure makes it impossible to open the door.

> If the only programming you do is generic commercial work

Congrats you've found an edge case.

I've spent my whole life working in "commercial" settings, I've learned everything doing that, and it's all programming. I really don't know which places you work at where a software engineer doesn't do programming. That's the whole job, 8hrs a day.

Fuck going home and slugging another 4hrs software, unless you have the energy in which case good for you, you can fast track.

I wonder if a plane flight, and a parachute drop into unfamiliar territory is stressful at all.

Lower 48 has vast deserts, mountain ranges, large national parks. There is loads of inaccessible wilderness in the lower 48, especially when compared to Germany.

All of what you just said is an exact modern version of the same shortcuts. Net difference is probably minimal whether you had a crap book or watched a pile of YT in short order or short cut through someone else's project, or SO.

Comprehension takes time. Thinking for yourself, making smart architectural decisions, working in an ambiguous stack, and so on.

The nature of the shortcut for experience is the same. Experience crushes anything you learned elsewhere. My best engineers are senior engineers with a fuck load of experience for a reason.

> At 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week - 10,000 hours of practice will take 250 full weeks to achieve. That’s about 5 years of nearly non-stop programming.

Isn't this basically a software job? Like, get a junior role and work your way up over 5 years doing 40 hrs a week.

Aren't most successful engineers already very smart when they start out? Being very smart seems to be a prerequisite for all successful engineers.

> Has anyone here done one of those 0 to 1 bootcamps with success?

My tech lead did this.

Yes, but a textbook has fixed knowledge that cannot be queried and discussed. That's why you need the doctor to interpret and apply.

An LLM is the doctor in your pocket. It's yours to use, and whether it is in your head (like a doctor who had to take exams to prove they really had it in their head), or in your pocket makes no difference in your ability to achieve a task.

"Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

Well, if I can acquire knowledge from the LLM, and apply it using the LLM's instructions, I now have achieved intelligence without doing an exam.

Problem is, I can lose my LLM. A doctor could lose their mental faculties though.

Whether the doctor's data for making informed decisions is in their head, or in the computer at their desk is immaterial. Where you fetch your knowledge from, either from wet-ware, or hardware doesn't have any net difference in the real world.

The skill today is the application of that knowledge. If an LLM can provide the data context, and the application advice and you perform what it says, congrats you now have a doctor's brain on tap for your own personal usage. The doctor has it in their head, you have it in a device. The net differences are immaterial IMO.

The doctor is the LLM, lol.

I don't think we can/should do this on today's LLMs, but if we continue advancing in the same way, and as-good-as-human reliability is achieved, the intelligence of a doctor is in your pocket whenever you want it.

And just like you say you know addresses because you have an address book, you'll know medicine because you have it immediately on-tap. Instead of holding all of that in your own memory, instead of having to use your own critical thinking (or lack thereof), just offload it to the LLM in your pocket.

We do this all the time with tools. Who now knows how to cut down a tree but lives in a house made of milled trees? There are so many lost skills that we defer to either other people or machines and yet each individual lives with the benefit of all those skills.

Tools make cognitive bypasses for us to benefit from. When we can make intelligence a tool, I assume we can offload a lot of our intelligence, or at least acquire new intelligence we didn't have before.

WebMD is the same whoever looks at it. An LLM can adapt to your clarification questions and meet you on your comprehension level. So no, it's not as naive as you are insisting.

Whether it's misanthropic or not is moot if it's just a plain fact.

> You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art.

No, I made an assertion that the most talented artists make art.

> And execution definitely forms part of the talent.

Seeing that many, many top, full time, talented artists have technicians that execute, I don't think it's the defining quality of a top artist. Execution can be offloaded, ideas cannot.

> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.

Talented artists have fully formed thoughts. That's their talent.

> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.

Well, I'd suggest your job is at risk. Execution can be automated, ideas not so much. Who is gonna tell the GPT what to do?

> And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art.

Yeah, those people failed to be the top talent in art and did something else. They are still highly talented but not in the realms of top talented artists.

The article literally said "the most talented". The top talent artists are certainly making art, and it is a fact they are driven to do it more than anything else. That's the attitude that makes them "the most talented". I am not romanticising it, it's just how it is.

> It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you.

Exactly. People make choices in what they do, it has nothing to do with talent being taken out of the market, it's always been this way. There have always been more profitable things to do than making art.

> I think it's good to realize when it's stretched too far.

Who is the arbiter of when it's stretched too far? I am working with the data we have to make an empirical expectation. Speculation is fine, but if we are going to make an effort to ground it in reality I feel like prior art is as the best bet we can make.

> Just because you find a similarity with something that happened in the past doesn't mean you can just abandon all critical thought.

I think I am actually applying critical thought. I am challenging a narrative that doesn't seem to have a precedent and looking at examples from the past that were similar unprecedented technological changes. This seems to be a reasonable approach to set reasonable expectations. Of course I could be wrong, but I feel like at least my pitch is based on some historic data.

FYI the book reading this wasn't just an aside in a newspaper, it was a cultural concern shared by many.

https://timeline.com/what-technology-are-we-addicted-to-this...

Seems to me it would initially be a narrowly scoped to the immediate outflow. As the brine dissipates I assume it will be normalized by the rest of the ocean as it's diluted.

However, as with all human endeavours, scaling up will scale up the problem. And we won't pay attention to that until it's a huge issue.

Let's wind this back to the days when people thought reading books was an indulgent waste of time.

The best artists are writing trivial drivel for women to read.

The best minds are finding new ways to sell books.

It's a stupid heuristical argument.

If they are doing advertising then they are art directors, not artists. The most talented artists make art, it's not something they have a choice in. They will suffer poverty to make their art.

Talent isn't in the execution in art, it's in the ideas, and tapestry of the artist's life.

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

This is also not true, because those minds aren't intelligent enough to see the folly of their attention. The best minds see past this and do the work they are driven to do, similar to artists.

Yes, this is the nature of major disruption. I doubt it will be a smooth ride, but I also doubt we will suffer until we are wiped out.

> But this was a correct prediction.

And yet the sky didn't fall.

> Or we'll just poison the "intelligence"

We really don't know how that will pan out. All I have is history to inform me, and even the most radical revolutions have worked out with humans continuing to move forward with increased capacity and better living conditions overall. The new boss is way better than the old.

The paradigm is changed beyond that. Exams are irrelevant if intelligence is freely available to everyone. Anyone who can ask questions can be a doctor, anyone can be an architect. All of those duties are at the fingertips of anyone who cares to ask. So why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge? An exam certifies you know how to do something, well if you can ask questions you can do anything.

> Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists.

No it isn't, unless you are 12 maybe.