hyperG

"I think its a fair point to say that most of humanity will probably be dead within 20-30 years. "

Why do I even read this stupid fucking website

Anyone working remote is just talking nonsense on this subject.

I am related to a journeyman electrician and journeyman welder.

They would give it up to work remote in a second.

As someone who has used zero social media in 10 years, this is incredibly trivial.

No one complains about being hopelessly addicted to listening to audio books or doing anki flashcards.

I suspect it isn't just social media but the cultivation of an online presence that is hopelessly addicting to many.

It is kind of like saying how do we get people to stop being addicted to smoking crack pipes. The crack is the problem, not the pipe.

Animals fly by flapping their wings, hence an airplane is not really flying. It can't even land safely in a tree!

I will never work in an office again but I suspect that the good/hard workers, are slightly more productive with work from home and are happier if they want to work remote.

The slackers though are slacking much more with WFH. At least in the office they have to pretend to be productive and that ultimately results in additional productivity.

There has to be scaling laws at work here. I work for a very small company and it is quite obvious who is slacking off remote. In a large company, it is probably much easier for the slackers to hide their lack of productivity.

There is a linear relationship between fat loss and caloric restriction until about 7 or 8% body fat.

The idea that caloric restriction is causing all this muscle loss is one of the dumbest ideas we currently have.

It is simply not true.

Tolerance for ideas one disagrees with has a very short history in space and time. Intolerance in this area seems to be the long run equilibrium and we are simply returning from a far from equilibrium state that could only last so long.

I consume many audiobooks and I usually love an audiobook narrator to the point they are a value add itself or I hate the way they speak and I literally can't read the book. The former is very rare though and the later much more common.

The ability to change voices to one that suites a person's taste is hardly a race to the bottom. It is a HUGE value add.

I am sure lamplighters were not happy about the light bulb either.

c'est la vie.

Breaking the audible monopoly sounds like a nice side effect too.

Protein powder is 90% marketing that is a distortion of reality and research for marketing purposes. None of this matters unless you are only getting your protein from one source.

If you are eating north of .5-7 grams per lb of bodyweight throughout the day you are not going to be short of amino acids when needed even if lifting really hard.

I like a protein shake because it taste good and different but there is absolutely nothing special about any of this. Protein powder has the absolute most bullshit around the product of anything I can even think of.

I listened to the Cursor team on Lex Fridman yesterday. The biggest thing I took away is they have some wild ideas with having agents running in the background that are following what you are creating, trying to find bugs.

I understand what you mean but surely those guys were thinking about this awhile ago now. That part seems obvious listening to them. They are thinking way beyond that.

I am in the same spot as a non-software engineer.

If you are using multiple programming languages though you really can't say you are a non-programmer.

I just got up and running with Julia in like two weeks when I didn't even know what Julia was 3 weeks ago.

On the other hand, I have the digital audio workstation Reaper installed. It is one thing for LLMs to write crud apps and data science scripts but to write a digital audio workstation(something I have 25 years of experience as a user), as a non-software engineer I wouldn't even know how to begin. Even if I could compile the code to play an audio file with a volume knob, the gulf is so huge. I wouldn't be able to add more than a few features before it would become totally unmanageable since I don't know what I am doing.

Much of what makes LLMs so impressive is we have such low expectations of modern software. They have broken the market for demo CRUD apps. Beyond that though I wouldn't trust anything cursor and I make.

Maybe because my salary doesn't depend on any of this that I think this whole framing is science fiction.

A calculator needs direction on what to calculate because the machine doesn't have agency.

We are going to a higher level of abstraction and at that higher level you probably need a different skill set than before. Humans aren't going to get cut out of the loop but you always have to level up your skills.

I think there is just a generation of tech workers that got lazy and thought they were immune to change some how. I didn't even know anyone that had been on the internet when I graduated high school. Someone older and wiser though told me I would have to constantly reinvent myself, always learn new skills and will have several different careers. They were so spot on. Guess what? Nothing has changed.

I suspect many people are simply not that intellectually curious about the world.

It a super power for the intellectually curious while the highly specialized that thought they were done learning can only see the threat to their intellectual moat. They aren't wrong.

I feel like I level up on a weekly basis practically.

It wouldn't be shocking to me that in 30 years, your daughter would be tasked with writing a whole book and not just an essay. Part of the learning process is learning to leverage technology. Something I think we do a really bad job at teaching kids.

Of course, leveraging technology to do the exact same thing you would do without the technology is a terrible lesson on many levels.

Seems obvious to me too as someone who sucks at dancing but loves fitness.

Like saying the heart worked harder with people on a treadmill at 4 miles per hour than 3 miles per hour.

I think there is also this bogus implication then that dancing would help you write a better novel or painting a picture than just walking on a treadmill.

Thanks. That is a really great idea.

You are just wrong.

Before the camera, portrait painting was how most painters would make their living and the camera upended that completely.

On the last line, look up hyperrealist painter on a search engine. That is the reverse , an artistic movement in painting inspired by the photograph.

We have already been through this with music.

It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.

Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.

I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.

"Rap isn't even music, they aren't even singing!"

You are just expressing the same, uncreative, ignorant opinion that is always expressed when we come upon a NEW ART FORM.

Temporal graph visualization is quite lacking. It probably depends what one time slice of your network looks like.

If you have 10 to 20 nodes without a ton of edges you could use a fixed circular layout for the nodes on a timeline that just the edges change over time.

More than this and you start getting into hairball territory even without the changes over time. A hairball changing over time is even more useless than a hairball on its own.

The standard force directed layout is really quite useless other than seeing the global structure of the graph. The uselessness is more obvious when you try to change it over time. I suspect the layout is so standard because the visualization looks so cool.

Most data visualization though has this same problem. There is almost this property that the cooler and more beautiful the visualization is, the more useless it is as far as containing any insight about the data itself.

It is because the goalposts were wrong.

We once thought that a computer could not beat a grandmaster in chess or pass the Turing test without some undefined special human property. We were wrong about the computer needing this undefined special human property.

A spreadsheet has been much better at math than the average person for a long time too. A spreadsheet is a very useful human tool. LLMs are a revolutionary useful tool. For some people that doesn't seem to be enough though and they have to try to find or insist the LLM has the undefined special human property.

I am fully remote and have only been in the office once this year.

I really miss the social aspect but that is it. Everything I miss about the office is the opposite of productive.

Even career growth wise, I have much more direct line to the people that matter eyes on chats than I ever would to their ears in the office. Their ears would be drowned in noise like everyone else in the office.

You can't underestimate this being a bot playground/training ground with no particular purpose beyond getting the bot to say realistic/interesting replies.

I have zero interest in bots, but if I did, the hacker news API would be exactly how I would start.

The idea of uploading my passport in order to talk on a social network is quite delusional.

I would say LLMs have told me more interesting things than any human has in the past year and it is not even close.

I suspect at some point, a new structure will be figured out that it doesn't matter if you are talking to a human or LLM. If that doesn't happen, at some point I will probably just stop trying to talk to humans online and just talk to Claude or whatever the strongest model is of the moment.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is an entirely throw away bargaining chip.

"Ok, Ok, we will give up on the anti-automation demands but we aren't budging on the wage increase demands!"

Sapolsky wrote a 500 page rebuttal to this idea in Determined.

It is quite a convincing book and maybe even a dangerous book in a sense.

At my previous company, I was rejected by HR for a job the hiring manager not only told me to apply for but hired me immediately after the interview for.

Reach out for sure. Do anything humanly possible to avoid going through HR.

The problem is I don't even like video calls with real people.

It is the same problem that in most context, the video has no purpose. The only use for video is to put a face to a name/voice.

I hope my company competitors switch to AI video for sales and support. I would absolutely pay for that!

I have never read anything by him that seemed correct.

He really does seem like quite a good contrarian indicator if anything.

It is a great point.

It also might be that the language everyone uses 20 years from now that gives a 50X from today is just being worked on right now or won't come along for another 5 years.

The way people who would have thought that humans could never fly were not completely wrong before the airplane. After the airplane though, we are really talking about two different versions of a "human that can fly".