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What a weird title.

Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.

Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.

Do we just want parchment?

No. We want paper.

A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”

Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.

Don’t worry, the 100x boosted harness wrote it

Love this idea

Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed.

But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.

Wow so technology doing tasks for people has an effect of diminishing their skill at those tasks. Truly unprecedented.

This is how regulation will look someday.

Yep, exiftool is great for CLI use, but in a production pipeline a library is the way to go over shelling out.

Hm, so it’s almost like the corporation is not an ideal format for long-lived values driven institutions?

These are lovely

I had received four very different bids for a home repair project. Just wildly different itemization breakdowns, costs, timelines, scopes, even formats. Opus helped me turn it into an apples-apples comparison, filled in missing areas with reasonable inferences based on the other bids, provided a nice pdf I printed to review with my partner, even offered suggested key questions for follow up calls. It really clarified the advantages of one of the bids.

I use it professionally all the time and could cite technical scenarios where it’s become almost indispensable, but saving me time and money and reducing stress on this mundane stuff… now imagine applying to people’s stressors: job searches, health, big purchases, debt… there’s an opportunity to actually make people’s lives better. After 30 years of hype cycles, I should be wary of techno-optimism. But here I am feeling cautiously optimistic anyway.

Yeah I feel like I’ve learned a lot from superpowers. It’s such a thoughtfully developed skillset.

The software generalist described in this post has domain expertise as well. In software.

If you’re a great generalist software engineer today, you aren’t jumping to some random domain to escape AI. Software is your domain. You’re sticking with it as it expands and transforms.

I think a lot of us aren’t rational about it. I tend to feel excited about changes for which productivity is a side effect, even if it’s not my motivation. It’s hard to say no to extending my capabilities and insulating myself from the more boring repetitive tasks.

If your job was 80-90% shoveling and one day you were offered use of an excavator, wouldn’t you find that exciting even while realizing the shoveling part of your career is probably dead?

My thinking tends to be that our standard work week is an equilibrium among a few different forces. We’re motivated by social norms, capital markets, and biological needs and wants. In places like the U.S. the market forces have been powerful enough to really shift social norms. In tandem they’re probably slowly altering our biology too.

Computer fun is inversely proportional to number of investors.

Or in other words: I made an extension to dumb down my professional network and unexpectedly found real human feelings

I’ve been playing with nanoclaw since it came out, which has similar use cases to openclaw. I initially set it up to monitor various news sources for me about specific theses I’ve had. I had it grooming its growing knowledge base, trying to make connections. It would check in with me about certain goals I had.

My current take is that these projects are alluring for a kind of personal productivity or workflow tinkering. They are integration hubs centered around an LLM. Automation can be fun, like running model trains or setting up home assistant. And you can learn the shape of the technologies by tinkering. But I’m doubtful they have improved productivity in real world cases.

Maybe I’m using it wrong and I need to be spending a ton of tokens with a dark factory pattern and a fleet of claws creating new religions? Then I’ll see the benefits?

I read this and feel happier for it. Keep it up OP! I like imagining a world where more people are curious, kind, and open to connecting.

I think there’s also perhaps an organizational explanation.

A reasonable TUI can be built without any design or frontend people even looped in.

Collaboration and coordination tend to slow down processes and flatten outputs.

Is this an investment that disease and genetics researchers believe will be valuable?

Or is this primarily tax deductible funds flowing back into the AI industrial complex?

(Honest question! If it’s a truly promising path that’s great)

Thank you, Zed team, for creating Zed. It’s clearly a labor of love, and I really want Zed to work for me. It seems like a quality project, it’s fast, and the base editor is easy to use.

I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.

Yes I’ve noticed this as well! Now whenever I get a question of this format, I just relax the constraint.

Yeah writing out code by hand made me slow down and think more.

One thing I recall is that the grading policy made it very clear that minor syntax issues were inconsequential in handwritten answers. And more advanced classes only wanted pseudocode. Which are exactly the right priorities.

I’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well.

The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those machines had the standard dev toolchains provisioned that weren’t easy (at the time) to do on a dorm room Mac or windows computer.

I really think a lot of the ways we can reduce reliance on AI for thinking is to just set up systems where it’s not an inviting or rewarding option.

I want to defend my hometown a bit: most people who live in and around SF have nothing to do with any of this crap. SF is a diverse city of many ages, nationalities, and values. It is not a “high school,” not a tech scene, not a glib bunch of online assholes.

Evolution itself has some skeptics among the religious right.

Yes the publish-distribute delay pattern looks like a reasonable design.

But you’re not a “free-rider” if you intentionally let others leap before you. You’re just being cautious, which is rational behavior and should be baked into assumptions about how any ecosystem actually works.

My iPhone 13 can’t run most of these models. A decent local LLM is one of the few reasons I can imagine actually upgrading earlier than typically necessary.

This is ridiculous and I’m into it.