reg_dunlop

Ha. I love Karamazov. To me, it boils down to a love affair/triangle and case of mistaken identity and ultimate justice. But in true Russian lit fashion, you must pass through the absurd with a detour through morality and human nature.

edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.

tried it and got this:

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We live in an ecosystem where we (engineers/developers) can promote ourselves and display our skills/acumen/values/professionalism/responsibility in an unequivocal way. Regardless of your experience level.

I bootstrapped myself from poverty to Staff software engineer, past the age of 45.

Is that privileged? Or sheer will and force of effort?

I am not unique. I am an example.

It's possible to work for an employer, and not have to compromise your values and or professional integrity.

The attitude suggested by your response suggests you haven't lived that reality yet.

Either way, I'd rather be rejected by an employer for speaking my truth, than lie to be somewhere I'd rather not be.

Intelligence, which I assume to be a synonym for "smart" requires the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge from experience.

These models do not have any experience. They're not sentient. And are in no way capable of being "smart", let alone becoming "smarter".

When I hear about engineers who are bored with coding, I have to imagine it's because the task of "programming logical work flows" has become rote to them.

Instead of refining their approach, or challenging their current knowledge base for discovery of inefficiencies or baseless assumptions, they'd rather hit an "easy" button.

I understand the desire to NOT do work. I understand the desire to spend quality time and free time with family. And I understand the idea that familiarity breeds contempt.

What I don't understand is the willingness to replace a deterministic language/framework/approach with a probabilistic slop machine.

1. A fuzz tester rubygem

2. An app that receives forwarded text messages from my iPhone and then outputs the text message onto a dedicated television connected via a raspberry Pi to display a cold-war era style GUI teletype sort of interface. It actually looks really stinkin cool

Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to the medium elevating to loftier aims?

Is this history repeating itself?

The idea that content creators could be considered artists is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially.

What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization and consumption via "influencers" has altered any individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...

It would be interesting...

My intention for using that specific language was less with the implied language of introvert/extrovert, and was more intended to point out how simply going to an office is not enough to qualify as "socialization". Compulsory attendance in exchange for financial gain isn't a great example of voluntary socialization....

Part of the study specifies remote workers living alone. So it appears the focus of the study excludes those fortunate enough to have family or housemates.

But I do agree that the claim being made is the false dichotomy you point out

Then adjust the specs with the scope and feedback.

I fail to see the argument you're making...

Features aren't made in a vacuum. If specs are made/written....with the information available now...then it's better than not writing specs.

Writing specs with incomplete information is better than not writing specs with incomplete information.

All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.

At the same time, a person working in an office has the illusion of social activity.

Just because a person works in an office doesn't mean they're more well adjusted socially, or more active.

Just because a person works remotely doesn't mean they're a recluse.

Life requires effort and being engaged. Though as a remote worker myself, I do appreciate the tendency to not make an effort. However, when I do make an effort, the effort is easier and the reward greater than social activities that'd be available during an office job.

But that repurposing/removal is exactly what's avoided if you follow through with the SEF framework he outlines.

I have to push back on the idea that token costs balloon when using TDD within the context of a strong framework such as Jason has laid out here.

If the feature is repurposed/removed/refactored....I'd argue the specification wasn't well thought out prior to burning into tokens.

We're so eager to do a lot of the wrong things quickly, when it may serve us better to do a more precise thing slowly.

I'm surprised this isn't receiving more attention.

I realize supply chain attacks are all the rage now-a-days, but this is the first time I've seen this ecosystem come under attack.

Looking forward to the additional context that is (hopefully) forth-coming.

I really like the anonymous angle. Suspending the unspoken reality of bias and profiling by employers, the point of job postings is to fill a skill void, I think. The idea of embellishing the recommendations seems like it would require some sort of validation of the recommendation giver...so yeah, eventually there needs to be some verifiabilty.

Well I guess we have a possible reason why LI is still relevant.

This suggest then that the relevance of any solution would need to appease the employers... yet here we are trying to build/design something for employees first.

My first answer was disingenuous, so here's another interpretation.

I didn't see a definition in the article, however I was reading Edgar Payne's Compostion of Outdoor Painting after reading your comment, and I was surprised to find the book talked about problem finding.

"Art is the art of disguising art". This means artists have to make a representation of a material object while obscuring all the rules and principles required to make the representation.

The problem is: how to make art without making it blatantly obvious it was an effort to make?

It's tough to generate revenue that isn't through ads.

That said, if the users could organize into special interest groups and create a walled-garden with default no ads, and then gate-keep advertisers to a permitted white-list.

I dunno, I'm just spit-ballin

It's odd, yeah?

We have the ability to vibe these things over a weekend, yet getting to the critical mass/tipping point of adoption is something else.

Whatever happened to: if you build it, they will come?

No.

Here's one interpretation though, for the discourse:

When given a task, some artists focused less on the objective and more on the process of observation. Observation of what, would be a logical next question. And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning. How to select some combination of objects, relative to the constraints of the circumstances for the task, paired with the skills they possess to produce the task at hand.

Given the proper acumen and a relatively subordinate task, I imagine some would tend towards Parkinson's law.

So following this, maybe problem finding could be seen as: how is this beautiful/aesthetically pleasing, or what do I really want to compose to fulfill this demand? What innate qualities do these things have which express some quality? Or maybe: how can I waste an hour of this man's time?

YMMV

I'm curious what is meant by

...recalibrates the Salience Network's threshold for alarm.

Superficial googling reveals superficial information about the SN.

And more specifically, i'm curious what sort of physiological signals could verify recalibration.

Yeah, I think the actual "invention" I originally attributed to the author of the blog post should be attributed to the YouTuber. But if this version of meditation is helpful for the YouTuber and/or the blogger, then fantastic. That's 2 people who are benefiting from it.

I'm reluctant to say more about my own mindfulness practice; I feel the finer points about how or when to meditate are open to interpretation. Anyone can be as superficial or dogmatic as they'd like when it comes to choosing a practice, and how they adhere to it.

The point, for me, isn't strict adherence; It's both simpler and more interesting to let go of the preconceived notions of attempting to achieve something.

One thing I will say: If I believe I can't meditate for 5 minutes, I meditate for 15. This makes me more open and receptive in life when I find myself saying "....I should meditate".

As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation.

And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.

Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.

This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.

Impressive. Thanks for the share.

I was thinking about this recently: The difference between systemic (systematic) learning and opportunistic learning.

AI enables opportunistic learning, or Just-in-time (JIT) learning. It give the impression of infinite knowledge.

Most general concepts are well within the grasp of human understanding.

My curiosity RE the difference between systemic v opportunistic learning was the effect of longer-termed exposure/use to a tool that enables opportunistic learning.

Yeah this is an interesting relationship between interconnected concepts: principles, beliefs and convictions.

I agree with your assertion regarding the degree to which a principle guides behavior. And id probably walk back my original position somewhat, because having a principle and adhering to it absolutely and fanatically is untenable at most and inconvenient at least.

Still, I'd argue there's value in a human engaging in some sort of periodic "principles audit" to take stock of their past behaviors/actions and recalibrate future behavior.

Then again, I'm an optimist....

Hmm, maybe. Though my initial reaction is the response isn't "emotional". An LLM isn't capable of emotion. Sure it's capable of assessing a quantitative score of sentiment to words/phrases...though that's not the same as an actual emotion.

If the tool being used generates fantastical fiction that isn't supported by factual data or verifiable systems, then eventually that falsehood will bubble to the surface; whether that is immediate (parsed through my own bullshit-meter) , the near future (during an agent-session that reveals itself to be a hallucination) or in the long-run (production bug/tech debt).

It's not my job to get an ideal "emotional" response from a machine. It's my job to deliver deterministic results with minimal fuck ups.

Emotion has no place in this exchange. If I don't know something, aren't I expected to admit it? And then do the work to subdue the knowledge to bring it under my domain?

Factual knowledge does not cease to exist because someone's in a bad mood....

Hmm, I'd argue what you call "compartmentalize their principles" is in fact, NOT having principles.

Correct me if I'm wrong: I'm asserting that having a principle is an inalienable belief that actually guides behavior, not selectively applies to behavior.

Though generally: yes, I agree: get off twitter, and I'd go a step further and say..minimize all social media involvement.

Maybe; I've been very content with the results I achieve while responding to interview style pre-planning, refinement of plans and implementation.

If anything, it's been fantastic to have an "interlocutor" that is vastly capable of producing possible solutions without emotional bias, superfluous flourishes, or having to endure personal proclivities or eccentricities.

I extract all emotional context from my prompting and communicate with this tool as though it were an inanimate object which can provide factual information, without any hint of sentience.

It's an insane perspective I'm taking I know....call me crazy. /s

edit: the fact that humans are going out of their way to type or speak some sort of emotional content into their prompting is beyond me. Why would I waste time typing out a pronoun to a large-language model agent? Why would I do the lazy intellectual thing and blur the line between pure factual communication of concepts by expressing emotional content to a machine? What are we doing, folks?

I think what's more sad is someone going out of their way to NOT support the artist.

Art is, among other things, a conversation starter. If someone sees an LLM generated thing hanging in the home or office and strikes up a conversation, it goes something like: "Yeah, i saw it online and I ended up ripping it off"...or the person lies to save face (also sad).

Or, the conversation could be "Yeah, these were purchased directly from the artist...I bought them because....". (a much more interesting conversation)

Both of these evoke an emotional reaction with an interlocutor.