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Punch yourself in the face with reality

adi.bio

71–80 of 139 posts

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#71

"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.

No, they're actually the same thing: making an honest assessment of reality. In the first case you're doing so to prevent self-delusion. In the second you're doing so to prevent others from clouding your judgment.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#72

No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes. What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question. Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stom…

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Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#73
post #30

I 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…

I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title.

Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if the code for the prototype is a mess the "idea" of it should be cleaner. I like to have an LLM make a new spec at that point, and start fresh with it. You can clean up the abstractions and the UX there.

When writing code is cheap figuring out what you want to write is the hard part. It always was, but the barrier of getting the code written and working made that less obvious.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#74
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.

So you build a machine that kills all tigers and now you don't have to worry about belief. The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places. If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic think…

This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

You are overthinking this. Reality exists in a point in time and space, same point where you are. That is the only problem you face.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#75
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>It’s about your relationship to those things. The year 2000 problem is a good example of this. The year 2000 problem was not a problem. Not because it wasn't a problem, but because a shitload of people did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a problem. If we didn't have news saying 'oh no, this is a problem' before Jan 1 2000, would it have been taken so seriously? In February 2021 Texas was so incredibly close to…

Speaking of grids, USA power companies are saying they'll have to start blacking out millions of homes within a year, to have enough power for AI DCs.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference. The first is getting market feedback. The second is just getting opinions.

If I listened to market feedback I would have delivered a faster horse.

That's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. :) If you listened to opinion you'd deliver a faster horse. If you test the market with an idea, you get behavioral feedback.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#77
post #30

I 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…

I find the more structure that the AI can be given to follow the better. I recently tried building a side project with Elixir, Phoenix & LiveView but on the recommendation of somebody I decided to have it use the Ash framework within it.

I've been very pleasantly surprised. The combination of the compiler improvements in Elixir 1.20 and the structural guardrails from Ash seems to have led to very consistent, organized and readable code.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#78
post #75
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s about your relationship to those things. The year 2000 problem is a good example of this. The year 2000 problem was not a problem. Not because it wasn't a problem, but because a shitload of people did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a problem. If we didn't have news saying 'oh no, this is a problem' before Jan 1 2000, would it have been taken so seriously? In February 2021 Texas was so incredibly close to…

Speaking of grids, USA power companies are saying they'll have to start blacking out millions of homes within a year, to have enough power for AI DCs.

Hopefully we're still at the point that millions of pissed off voters are more important than the relatively small number of DCs.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#79
post #63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…

> evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.

Thank goodness it was only one bacteria doing all that evolving!

Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.

/Pedantry crisis averted.

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