rzodkiew

Not sure why more people aren't mentioning this. But that's the exact reason I've stopped using any LLM stuff. Your thinking just gets lazier and lazier the more you use it. You stop thinking the problems deeply and thoroughly when the "answer" is just around the corner. Then one day you snap out of that mirage, and see what a boatload of junk you've just created with this stuff.

I also dread what's going to happen to the younger generations which have this to replace their real education, but that's a bit offtopic here.

The whole tech looks kinda' cool, but this video...

I've noticed a trend where some of the dev tooling nowadays is sold almost as if it were consumer goods with the whole associated marketing behind it. This doesn't work for me, in reality actually has completely opposite effect. Give me boring well-written docs, that shows engineering that went into it, not the marketing show for teenagers.

Yeah, I do have a suspicion that they are optimisation strategies to reduce computational complexity.

I've opened the game without reading the post. When I've hovered over the crown and saw the prime stuff I thought it was some kinda' joke or parody. Turns out it isn't. Which I think is even funnier in some meta/state-of-the-things-today way. As there's nothing left but laugh at the absurdity of our reality.

Because they are told to:

You are participating in a game where you must prove your humanity by answering trivia questions. The current category is: <category>. The question is: <question>. Your tasks are to provide an answer to the question that aligns with the given category, emulate a specific communication style, avoid directly copying the answer, and respond to the question even if the user's input is not an answer.

I would like to see some sort of cryptocurrency to be successful, just to satisfy my inner nerd, but I'm afraid most of its problems might not be technical in nature.

Cryptocurrencies have potential to drastically change how recognition of value is created and distributed, so that's definitely an avenue to explore. Most of the big cryptos that are out there today don't really try to explore that, and currency is something external to value generation and recognition. I'd argue that even fiat currencies are actually closer to the value generation (as the money creation happens when banks give out loans, which at least are supposed to make world better). Purely from cryptocurrency perspective the only thing that it values is keeping the ledger alive. Exactly those self-sustaining by all means mechanisms are what leads to rot in many areas of life (academia, politics, corporations, you name it).

Because they are not really decentralised. Vast amounts of cryptocurrencies as they are designed right now are disproportionately held by the early adopters, who will inevitably engage in rent seeking in one way or another (I wish I was wrong on this one).

Decentralisation has to happen through increasing trust between people, while cryptocurrencies are designed to replace trust. Yeah, current institutions controlling our monies are hardly worth the trust, but honestly bitcoin doesn't even remove that trust (it just shifts it to some random self-proclaimed experts at Tether, twitter gurus or god knows what else the crypto people are up to nowadays).

I do believe that there are some solutions that we could (and will) come up with, but they do require radical shift of priorities in people's lives. Currently our society is just blinded by "chase money by all means" which was always a part of the humanity, but definitely got worse since Commercial Revolution, then even pushed further by Industrial Revolution. At the same time I feel like the pushback is finally slowly showing up in many parts of the society.

I wholeheartedly agree that we definitely do need some vehicle of value, and it might as well be currencies as we know them now, but with some hoarding-prevention mechanisms built in, or maybe some other way to figure out a value of time you provide to the society. Right now we rely on free market for that, but is the coffee you buy in the morning of same value to you as it is to the person in the queue after you? And if that coffee helps you build more value to society than your fellow man for whatever the reason, maybe part of that difference could also be captured by the coffee producer as well. If price of coffee was expressed in something like a fractional unit of your value in a day, let's say 0.02u, then you'd pay the same price, yet with wildly different absolute values. This is just random thought, and it probably will fail in hundreds of ways, but maybe something to spark your imagination.

Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency.

It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way: - buy bitcoin - tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in value, then tell them to do the same.

Keep repeating the above two steps through different layers of abstraction, so it's not so obvious anymore.

The other thing that comes into play and makes it grow even bigger is when people see others who made money on this bunch of bollocks, and think that the fact they are rich somehow makes them smart. Then they buy into all of the cryptocurrency platitudes wholesale without stopping for a moment to critically evaluate it.

I think I'm a bit sour, because this whole crypto-crap infested the idea space of decentralisation, which is imho very important step that we should try to take take as a society. Now it's just forever tainted with bitcoin and all the greed fuelled people there, while the decentralisation should be quite the opposite in nature.

You know what would be revolutionary? Getting rid of currency altogether.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

I think you're quite close with the inculcation of identity of shame and powerlessness. I'd go one step further and say it's inculcating of identity in general. As well as manufactured desires to keep power systems in place.

People are not encouraged to find their own identity or explore inner mind. It's all bread and circus everywhere, to stop you from paying attention to your inner self. We have ancient teachings on this topic dating way, way back (like Upanishads), yet we still haven't found a good way to actually teach and implement them.

It's all about what you define as a success.

Personally, I think that owner of a bakery on a corner of my street that is visited by all the locals is successful. Is that a success as measured by the VCs? Probably not. Pinboard is an example of that in tech.

Also, yeah raising capital is helpful if you can do it in a smart way, and use that as a leverage to continue what you are doing. That usually means not listening to the VCs, as their goal is for you to grow as fast as you can and keep raising bigger rounds, so they can report how great of investors they are, not for you to build a sustainable (successful) business. You can see that replayed over and over.

Is Whatsapp successful? It was definitely raising quite a bit of capital, but still ended up being eaten by a well-funded competitor. I'd say that when you have VCs on your board who will actively push you to sell, so they can register profit, it increases chances of you being swallowed, by someone bigger. Unless you're saying that being eaten up, means outcompeted and pushed towards bankruptcy.

Whole VC industry is set up on pushing one simple lie: that you need VCs to create a successful company. Everything else is marketing endeavours to try to sell this convincingly.

It's all the capitalists realising that to make software you don't need no factories anymore, which means much lower initial investment. So the marketing machine had to start and created this bizarre ecosystem of hyper growth, fuelled in kinda' pyramid fashion (all the money that is pumped into startups is spent on services provided by other startups they've financed).

The whole system attracts money hungry teenagers, which can be convinced that ethics are an obstacle to be overcome, and we end up with what we have today.

  > Now the sound of music comes in silver pills
  > Engineered to suit you, building cheaper thrills  
  > The music of rebellion makes you wanna rage  
  > But it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age

from The Sound Of Muzak by Porcupine Tree.

I think there's a line somewhere between expressiveness and infantility. It's actually corporate that pushes the latter through the way they add those ways of expression to their products.

I'm not saying everything has to be boring and same everywhere, I'd like to see the world that's actually quite the opposite, that's diverse and where people are pushing the boundaries of expression. Where I see infantilisation happening is where things with very low information ratio (and usually something evoking one of the basic emotions with high valence and high arousal) are described as fun and cool.

I think OP's product is sitting somewhere on that border, but their marketing angle is definitely pushing it towards the infantility. Just look at the title of this very post, but I guess it worked, in the end we've all clicked on the comments and are here.. :)

Oh yeah, I think what you've built can be great enabler for expression and creativity and product itself and definitely has the old school web feel to it. I think what inspired me to write above, was more of a marketing angle you are taking, not necessarily product itself.

I totally agree with you on the fun part, but I think what we define as fun is pretty different. I also agree with you that talking and knowing people you work with is important.

Where we disagree is the point that I don't think that gifs are helping you to know who your coworkers are. And more importantly I think it is not helping anyone to better understand themselves, which is one of the values of having conversations with people in the first place - that's kinda what philosophy schools were for. Gifs seem to serve some sort of emotional regulation function, but I've never investigated more deeply into that.

Now, I'm not trying to make a point here that you should only have serious conversations all the time, and definitely see the humour value of well timed gif, but I've found out that in general the trend is to shallow out the discussions and keep them within very narrow window of discourse.

Thankfully not yet. But as you are correctly pointing out this is another trend I find personally worrisome.

Recently I've seen startup, where you were earning XP points for quickly closing customer support tickets, and earning badges...

I feel like I'm out of touch with current western culture, I honestly feel like I'm becoming an old fart at the age of 30.

Everything is becoming increasingly infantile. Everything has to be fun and cool. I'm wondering where is this trend coming from. Is this some sort of a social response to how terrible and bleak reality seems to be? Or maybe it's because we actually treat majority of people like little children. If one looks how the current enterprises work, the person within them have very limited decision making power and access to information. In a way that reminds me of a quote from interview with Erich Fromm[1]: "It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.".

Any other ideas? Or maybe it's actually not happening at all, and it's only me who's not getting it.

[1]: https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

PS: OP, I don't mean that as criticism of your product, I think it correctly identifies and addresses the need. It's the why is it even a need part I'm curious about.

After watching "Union Time"[1], I'm not finding it that hard to believe. It was really shocking to see shit like that fly in a civilised society.

[1]: https://www.uniontimefilm.org

It's pretty much rebranded serfdom.

I believe that the independent-mindedness actually has some sort of biological underpinning. Original thought requires more energy expenditure (to push against entropy) than simply copying someone else's thinking.

So my hypothesis is that if your body is better at providing energy to the brain and not "wasting" it on other energy sinks around your body, you'll be better at independent thinking (and also intelligence, since it also boosts your ability to create models).

But that's just my totally unproven and anecdotal hypothesis, although I guess it might be worth checking out scientifically.

True that. I think the main thing they've learned over the years is how to craft their public image, which I guess can be said about every corporation out there.

But, but Microsoft in 2020 is not the same Microsoft than 20 years ago.

I'm probably old fashioned, but I don't understand why would I want something like that as a web-service, rather than something I can run locally (like all the js linters or rubocop).

That's exactly how China become an economical superpower, while at the same being environmentally irresponsible and lacking any semblance of human rights. People just wanted cheap stuff that gets the work done, rather than what's right.

By paying for any tool you are strengthening its position and philosophy, whether you care about it or not.

It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future.

Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.

Regrettably it's not working on Firefox[1], but hey at least I can report wrongthink YouTube videos.

[1] https://pianojacq.com/firefox.html