t-writescode

Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":

Plants scream when harmed:

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...

Plants release VOCs when harmed:

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...

(OP's main comment has several sources)

Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):

[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/

A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"

I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).

  All humans are human.
  Babies can feel pain.
  Plants feel.
  Animals think.

Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.

I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.

I thought the fishing industry paid … way more than 10k / 3 months. Color me surprised o.O

> In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

What natural resource export is Spain’s economy dependent upon?

Oh yes! I find an argumentative rubber duck to be one of the best uses of AI for myself!

How does someone know what is wrong, ignorant, inappropriate advice without first finding out from you, through communication, what kind of state you’re in and what you’ve already tried.

And if the “listener” / fixer is in a state where they can’t do the work of finding out what kind of help and/or fixing is needed, then maybe *they* need to step back and have a break, too.

In my experience, fixers tend to completely miss the cues of “please stop word-vomitting at me, you’re not helping” and continue offering unsolicited suggestions. And then it’s my job, as the person that was talked at, to make them feel better, *further* exhausting my current state.

The solution to both of our problems is to ask and listen and hear. And then move forward. It’s true, we both exist. (Though I would argue that sometimes “bad advice” is just “advice I already tried, or that doesn’t work, but you don’t know that because you didn’t ask”).

And the solution to both is setting ground rules about what each person in the conversation can give and is expected to give.

If a fixer can’t empathize for a bit, and that’s what the other person needs, they should be allowed to step out of the conversation, too.

Context, as always, is basically everything.

I suppose I’ve found myself lucky when many* people are open to new and even contradictory ideas, one on one**, and when they feel respected and calm.

* but definitely not all

** because there’s no more ego, status nor hierarchy to defend.

Journaling sounded stupid to me, until I tried it; and then the whole “do you really think that?”, “is that true?”, “what about this?” and “why are you lying to a sheet of paper?” started happening and I was like, “oh I get it.”

Come to think of it, that’s a major reason why fully agentic coding doesn’t resonate with me and/or feels like I’m not growing or learning. I’m short-circuiting the “journaling” step where I mentally attack my own thoughts and assumptions.

I’m someone who operates in both modes on the receiving end, so I think I can answer some of this.

I’m going to come at it from a slightly different angle, but I think the spirit will get there.

Sometimes, I’ve been working on troubleshooting my PC for hours already. I’m tired. I’m angry because I’ve spent all that mental capital, etc., so I come to friends to rant a little bit.

And then they start offering solutions. Solutions I’ve definitely already tried. Solutions that don’t work for a multitude of reasons that I’m not expressing because, again, I already spent hours on this. But they keep blasting me with troubleshooting tips and “have you tried this yet?” and “what’s the text say in this folder?”

But I’m already at my wits end, and now they’re wanting me to keep pushing, to do more labor to solve the problem. A problem I don’t want solved. I just want someone to hear my struggle and go “that sucks man, let’s have a beer”.

For me, sometimes it’s “I’m out of spoons”, sometimes it’s “I just want someone to see *my* struggle, too”. Sometimes I want to be validated for my current plight.

And when I’m reached with solutions and/or explaining, at the wrong time, sometimes that can be very invalidating.

In circumstances like this, when I’m on the end where I want to be the fixer or the explainer, I’ll even ask, “do you want fixer me? Or just company?”

You don’t have to lie and say XYZ are bad for that; but you can instead say something like “oh yeah that sucks when you’re already doing all this elsewhere”. Because it does suck. Even if it has a logical reason, it does suck.

Edit: Okay, I want to add a bit more. When someone is stressed or exhausted to a high enough degree, they literally cannot range in new information, no matter how well-meaning. So sometimes the commiseration and/or presence without offering solutions is just one of many steps to help them relax enough that they can even *hear* the new thought or suggestion. As well-meaning as advice or a reality check can be in those situations, until the stress is reduced, it’s literally falling on deaf ears.

… Advertising?

What did you mean, then?

Also, CFCs.

I’m a bit frustrated. AI can do a looot of things; but I think as we continue to muddy the waters between LLMs and more traditional machine learning like Monte Carlo, Genetic Algoriths, Expert Systems and other Statistics magic tricks, we’re too aggressively conflating established and morally neutral activities in ML with the concerns that people have about LLMs and Stable Diffusion.

Though I also imagine that that is the point.

Most prices, like GPUs, are amortized over several years, when doing the calculus. Maybe they're already paid off, maybe they aren't. I would lean toward "aren't".

I suspect the reason is highly personal to their particular situation, but also most likely justified.

You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on.

Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?

Well, they're asking on Hacker News, so they're probably asking the broader collective, not just (presumptuously) themselves.

That does not reduce my sorrow for dealing with the complicated edge cases that need human intervention and don’t want to deal with hours and hours of arguing with an AI to try and get special-cased.

I feel sorry for anyone that has to deal with account transfer due to end of life when working exclusively in LLM hell in your imagined world.

This is grass greener logic.

Try cancelling a flight on British Airways months in advance.

Races to the bottom to … do work exclusively for free and not make any money out of the hopes that they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?

But when you look at brain organoids they quickly find themselves able to play video games as complex as Doom.

To each their own, but I do it every day, nearly. I’m using wifi 6 though, so that might be the difference. 2.4Ghz might not be sufficient. There’s also very likely local faking on the device (Quest 3) that can rotate your vision before the new data arrives.

Either way, it’s pretty alright nowadays, at least in my experience.

Though time in the seat *might* be making it easier for me.

Mostly entertainment. Oftentimes with lots of generalized movement, including head turning, tilting, etc.

I regularly wear a Quest 3 for 4-7 hours at a time. Before that, I used a Focus Vision for the same.

I have a battery pack I put in my pocket for the Quest 3 and I’m generally very happy with it.

The Big Screen Beyond and WiFi-enabled video streaming like for the Quest 3 and upcoming Steam Frame disagree with you.

Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.

So yes, this is done and it can help.

Cutting and/or other randomizing activities makes planning for everyone involved very, very hard.

Congrats, the funding came back that time; but jobs were already cut, people already got deported whose college time depended on it, the professor got axed because the college couldn’t afford it anymore, etc.

Stability is worth its weight in gold in some areas. This isn’t that.

If it runs faster than the windows ones, who cares?

While I strongly agree that heavy LLM usage in industries that actually collect customer data, or make important decisions is INCREDIBLY harmful (with quite a bit of unfortunate regularity), democratizing coding “for all” especially in small, narrow niches, is similar to democratizing art, singing, music, general creating.

As long as it’s “for you” or “small time”, there really isn’t a problem at all.

The only real downside so far to LLMs (ignoring environmental concerns) is when they’re heavily used and left unrestrained to go play with financial data, healthcare data, PII, anything with real consequences when it breaks. If a person is using it to automate their life. If a father is using it to help their kid with accessibility issues speak. If an artist is using it to help them write code so they can make a game. These are all good things.

You might think it’s shovelware; but the creator of those things is now super excited that their vision was made or their niche issue was helped, when no one else would.

Kotlin, Java, Python, C#, Typescript. Anything that has a trustworthy and consistent pointer between code.

Ruby would be the one exception I’ve worked on in my head, and for they language, ctrl+f *usually* (but not always) finds the rest.

Ruby is particularly magical with being able to evaluate methods from dynamic strings into running, production code[0]; but otherwise, languages and capable IDEs, like IntelliJ and Visual Studio just support that. I don’t happen to use VS Code, but I assume it has basic refactor, too.

[0] Devise. https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/lib/devise/co...