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Punch yourself in the face with reality
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#22I have found that it gets some of the "cruft" out of the work, freeing me to do more work. Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before. One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while,…
Yeah I have found that AI in general has a procrastination nullifying effect.
Before dealing with anything that might put me off. I can just ask the agent to do it for me. And then, do something else, take that break, but regardless in a few minutes I will have something to jump on instead of the same blank terminal with the same blinking cursor judging me. It really makes taking the first step, much easier and then the ball just gets rolling.
I see what his point is to be honest though, it's easy to say just one more week of polish, just 5 more features, etc.
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. In the 90's it was outsourcing is going to move all software jobs to India. Turns out that did happen, but also not. Still, manufacturing jobs have actually left the USA.
I think there is something parasitic in both legacy media and actually even worse in new media - where it finds the most toxic, negative idea that can latch on to the minds of the masses and runs away with it. Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better"…
Maybe things are going bad suddenly in the near future. For instance, the projected weather cycle later this year is four times as powerful as a Super El Niño. The US is one week away from running out of gasoline (was 4 weeks away, 3 weeks ago). Are these not things that should be reported?
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#24"Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are opposites.
Not really. You can be honest about something working and others can disagree with your assessment.
In this context "working" means selling. If you're selling the product that means that others are on board.
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a nice quote. But what about the notion that we’re always believing in something, and sometimes those beliefs tune closer to something objective but if we keep tuning past that into something else, then that reality becomes hard to conceive of and really does seem like it’s gone away.
When you break a leg you can’t start believing it is all good. It doesn’t go away. As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough. Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.
You can't become a pro footballer just by wishing your leg wasn't broken, but you can pay close attention to the difference between pain and suffering, and acknowledge the pain without accepting any unnecessary suffering.
Pain is part of reality. Suffering comes from wishing reality was different to how it is.
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#26>Figure out why you were put on this earth. Who is responsible for this mess? ;)
Nobody. We're just here. Mentally healthy human adults have ways to avoid thinking about the terrifying reality of infinite potential being restricted by a finite lifespan of decay, but not everyone is mentally healthy all the time.
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#27> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not. Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning. Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning. On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning;…
I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity.
It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.
But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.
This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.
For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.
When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.
It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is something parasitic in both legacy media and actually even worse in new media - where it finds the most toxic, negative idea that can latch on to the minds of the masses and runs away with it. Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better"…
Maybe things are going bad suddenly in the near future. For instance, the projected weather cycle later this year is four times as powerful as a Super El Niño. The US is one week away from running out of gasoline (was 4 weeks away, 3 weeks ago). Are these not things that should be reported?
I don’t think it’s about what should or shouldn’t be reported. It’s about your relationship to those things. If you wake up on July 21 and there are no headlines saying “The US has run out of gasoline, no driving!”, will you breathe a sigh of relief and be happy things weren’t that bad after all? Or will you browse the headlines for other scary things that might happen in the near future?
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#29I feel bruised
Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality
#30I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).
The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.