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Some things just take time

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201–210 of 295 posts

Re: Some things just take time

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, metaphors. Abstract concepts are not moving objects. You don't actually need to "turn it around" or "sail past it". You can break the laws of physics (because they don't apply). You can teleport around. Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time.

Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time. Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean here. What do we win by being faster at producing the wrong things?

You learn more quickly that you are producing the wrong thing.

Re: Some things just take time

#203
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut in a nursery, lol. And forget about 20k. If you find someone willing to sell their tree you're looking at at least 10x that for the logistics of moving a 20 ton root system.

You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut anywhere lol, they were wiped out almost entirely.

You'll find it if you look hard enough. Whether the owner will let you dig up their entire yard is another matter.

Re: Some things just take time

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly. In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude…

10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move. The AI just becomes a power tool — useless if you don't know what you're building, unstoppable if you do

Are you being cute impersonating an LLM, or are you an LLM posting?

Re: Some things just take time

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out? It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward. I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

> I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development. When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back. Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.

At some point hearing "you're holding it wrong" and "here's a metaphor for why you're dumb" in response to real shortcomings with AI, and the manic hype behind it, becomes repetitive and feels like there really aren't good arguments or evidence against those shortcomings and hype.

Re: Some things just take time

#207
The point about all the extra efficiency just making us more stressed and busy resonates deeply with me. It also stood out to me in the recent episode of the No Priors podcast with Andrej Karpathy. It's that feeling of falling behind is you're not using all available compute.

Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.

Re: Some things just take time

#208
post #19

> I’m also increasingly skeptical of anyone who sells me something that supposedly saves my time. Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity. What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better. Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family an…

> Unfortunately, that's not this world.

At one point, it was this world[1]:

> Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was "simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago."

> The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]

> The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Re: Some things just take time

#209
post #207

The point about all the extra efficiency just making us more stressed and busy resonates deeply with me. It also stood out to me in the recent episode of the No Priors podcast with Andrej Karpathy. It's that feeling of falling behind is you're not using all available compute. Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.

> Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.

It really is but it's come at the cost of actually being useful. It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is confusing since they're encouraging people to join. I'm just not sure anybody's going to know what.

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