marcuschong

I really enjoyed reading John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine column when I was just getting started in tech. His contrarian style was a nice change from most tech columnists at the time. He had a grumpy but oddly likable personality, and I even enjoyed No Agenda for a while and his occasional TWiT appearances.

That's why I have such mixed feelings about him. Somewhere along the way, being a contrarian seemed to become an end in itself. He became a Trump fan, and the No Agenda agenda increasingly drifted toward questioning well-established facts, from climate science to questioning the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Real Alex Jones shit.

Something I've been wondering about is whether fake news and these alternative realities people live in will eventually have a material impact on their lives.

In my country, where the political divide is huge, I know people who are very successful professionally and financially, yet believe all sorts of things that seem completely detached from reality. For example, I have a cousin who was convinced that if a certain presidential candidate won, the government would confiscate people's savings. Her solution was to convert a large part of her savings into jewelry.

She's highly educated. She also gets a lot of her information about climate change from a fortune teller on Instagram. I know that sounds made up, but it's not.

What's interesting to me is that, despite all this, their lives seem to go on just fine. Maybe they're a bit more anxious than they need to be, but they don't seem materially worse off because of these beliefs.

It makes me wonder whether we're just in an unusual transition period. As it becomes harder to trust what we see online, and as misinformation gets more convincing, will there eventually be a real advantage to consistently relying on reputable sources.

I don't think my 18-month-old had any problems from watching a little Miss Rachel and Baby Einstein here and there. However, the few times my mother showed her cute animal videos on Instagram, it was a completely different story. She became obsessed with the phone and would fuss and scream whenever my mother put it away. It was pretty incredible. We banned it pretty quickly.

It's curious that the person claiming LLMs will soon skip code entirely and go straight to binary is willing to spend $60bn on Cursor.

At 14:52

I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.

Plus, even if you do prefer the American way (and I could see why), it seems fanatic for people to not recognize the clear benefits of the European model.

Me too. I'm an active father, love my daughter and don't regret our choice. But damn I would never opt to go through this again and can't wait until she's a little older. I see parents having orderly lunches in restaurants with their older children and it just seems like the most beautiful and civilized thing in the world.

The whole experience is too much noise and not enough signal to me.

And now it appears every single time I use incognito mode on my browser, somehow. I hate it profoundly.

Plus doing it to a hundred million followers and controlling the medium that delivers his message.

That's a big problem with very specific manifestations. My startup helps customers handle regulatory compliance, also by forwarding complex questions to a pool of consultants.

We've compared now more than a hundred replies to that of GPT Pro, and the quality is roughly the same. Sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better. Always more detailed. Never unacceptable.

But how to convince our customers that we have the right technology and know how to use it appropriately? We're trying, but it's not easy.

Part of that's accountability. In the event of the LLM producing rubbish, as rare as it may be, who is accountable? There is not a person and her reputation attached to it.

That's what I've been struggling with to give it a go. How to make it useful somehow if I can't really give it access to my stuff.

I don't disagree with the premise, but I still can't think of a SaaS that I'm paying for that I can replace. And I have many subscriptions.

You mentioned Google, which makes it interesting that Sundar was at the infamous inauguration photo op, while neither Satya nor Bill was.

I have two questions about that, with the supposition that Cook is being coerced to do that, somehow:

- Isn't Cook supposed to step down from the role in the next few years? If so, wouldn't that facilitate an accelerated exit to not have to put up with this shit? He might as well have chosen someone who's willing to do that, and slowly fade away.

- Why haven't we seen the same level of craziness coming from Satya and Gates? Are Microsoft's offerings and interests so diversified that the government has less power over it?

Update: grammar

Precisely. That's what I took from the experience as well. If that's so hard and I had no idea about it until now, maybe there are other things that I don't know, and some that I will never learn, and I should tread lightly.

I was incapable of the compassion you're talking about until I had a bad shroom trip and felt some horrible, hard-to-describe anxiety the next morning. It was some of the worst hours of my life until my serotonin system rebalanced itself.

I'm not saying it's the same thing as depression or regular anxiety, but it gave me tremendous perspective on how bad these conditions can be and you just don't have the ability to "shake it off" when things are unbalanced.

Maybe that's how my wife feels when she's off the meds. Shit. Now imagine having a douchebag by your side second-guessing your pain. Never again.

Right. A subterranean fortress in NZ is not part of the perks.

It's interesting how people I know wouldn't work for my small startup if I, as the boss, aligned myself with such people, but are happy to work for big tech companies that do that. It's amazing what 100 levels of abstraction and money can make you do.

I'm using GPT Pro and a VS extension that makes it easy to copy code from multiple files at once. I'm architecting the new version of our SaaS and using it to generate everything for me on the backend. It’s a huge help with modeling and coding, though it takes a lot of steering and correction. I think I’ll end up with a better result than if I did it alone, since it knows many patterns and details I’m not aware of (even simple things like RRULE). I’m designing this new project with a simpler, more vertical architecture in the hopes that Codex will be able to create new tables and services easily once the initial structure is ready and well documented.

Edit: typo.

Same here. 10mo old. Funny thing is I have barely revisited the photos and videos, due to lack of time.

The fake death thought is very common. My brother drowned at the beach when he was only 17. We all stood there helpless, unable to find him. His body took some time to return to the shore, and a friend of a friend of the family was the one who identified him.

I was very young, only 7, but my cousin, who was 15 at the time, spent years searching for him, convinced the body had been misidentified. Later, when I grew older, I also went through the phase of thinking, "He was too smart and strong for that. Maybe he ran away somehow."

I've just turned 40, have been married for almost 20 years, and now have a 9-month-old baby. I've spent most of what would otherwise be my free time working, ever since I was 15 and bought into the American idea of entrepreneurship and became obsessed with technology.

Before having the baby, I'd leave the premises maybe twice a week, forced by necessity, mostly for health reasons, and I couldn't care less most of the time about seeing a blue sky or hearing the birds sing.

I've probably never worked the insane hours some entrepreneurs put in, but I've definitely worked far more than most people I know. My wife is the same. We have a great relationship, and I love my daughter, who I'm lucky to spend time with every day since I set my own hours. But if there's one thing I'm always chasing hours to do more, is working, creating. It doesn't even feel like work, as long as it's something I'm building that's mine. Sure, there are grueling tasks I can't avoid, the real eat glass stuff. But even then, I wouldn't trade it.

I've never gotten truly rich, not in the way I once imagined I would. But it's not something that weighs on me, not even the idea that maybe I never will. The real reward has always been doing the things I love to do. Recently my wife has asked me more than once if I could make more money than I do now by working less in a company. Maybe so, and I'd probably work much less with a lighter load if I were in a company job, but the idea of going back to that doesn't excite me. I like the grueling work, I like building something of my own, and I like having my own routine, even if I end up working more this way.

Different strokes, I guess.

EDIT: typo.

Agreed. Even more so because SaaS is generally inexpensive.

I agree with you, though I’m not sure I fully understand your point about game studios. That seems like an area where software could evolve in ways that make perfect sense. For example, dynamic worlds, unique missions, unscripted characters, and so forth.

More comments from another mathematician:

https://x.com/ErnestRyu/status/1958408925864403068?t=QmTqOcx...

Or pay 20 bucks to have access to the old version. I guess the version picker is not available to free users?

I wonder if this update will be pushed to any enterprise customers using it on Azure, and how will Microsoft handle that.

It's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.

Also, a CEO defines which way the company will go and makes questionable decisions like opting to build a Cybertruck. I don't see AIs doing these type of decisions, which are many, for now.