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New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

newyorker.com

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Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#61

Post by krashidov »

pants2 wrote: post #42
renegade-otter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.

This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...

FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).

In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#63

Post by vanviegen »

I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#66

Post by Toutouxc »

pants2 wrote: post #60
malux85 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)

Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.

How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.

So far I’m not that impressed.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#67

Post by jvanderbot »

ml_basics wrote: post #33

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.

The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#68

Post by orthecreedence »

throwforfeds wrote: post #64

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."

Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#70

Post by mlboss »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #54

I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobb…

I don't think this will ever work. Sleep acts as a compression for our daily life. Brains takes in daily new information and compresses it based on what we already know. The stuff dreams are made off are just a variant of what happens in day life.
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