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rmwaite

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I make computers do things

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Agree completely about the time thing. Indeed, every time I’ve fallen into the trap of somehow believing I’ve moved “past” the time sink it inevitably has bitten me down the road when something breaks or I learn about some maintenance task I should have been doing but didn’t even know existed.

More than anything, I’ve come to admire those who learn how to do this stuff consistently because it is hard.

What I find fascinating about LLMs is that a lot of their failures seem strikingly similar to the failures that humans struggle with. I’m not sure what this “means” but I think it’s interesting that we can theoretically fix these failures for LLMs but for humans it is much harder. You pretty much need to educate / indoctrinate people for their entire lives and even then it’s messy and unpredictable and prone to failure—just like LLMs.

This matches me experience as well. Some of my earliest rsync experiences were with the Cygwin version and I can remember scratching my head and wondering why people raved about this tool that ran so slowly. Imagine my surprise when I tried it on Linux. Night and day!

In my case, once I set the limit to 0 minutes and refreshed the home tab I don't see Shorts recommendations at all. There is still a Shorts tab at the bottom that tells me I have no remaining time (and allows me to trivially override it, sigh). But otherwise this seems to have cleaned up the "feed" that I see in the app of anything Shorts related (for now, at least).

I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.

I’ve always seen the hubris as an essential component of doing things “you didn’t know you couldn’t do.” A lot of great ideas are discounted as impossible and it takes hubris to fly in the face of that perceived impossibility. I reckon most of the time it doesn’t work out and the pessimism was warranted—but those times it does work out make up for it.

To be honest, if you’re using a tool that stores things as trees and blobs and almost every part of its functionality is influenced by that fact, then you just need to understand trees and blobs. This is like trying to teach someone how to interact with the file system and they are like “whoa whoa whoa, directories? Files? I don’t have time to understand this, I just want to organize my documents.” Actually I take that back, it isn’t /like/ that, it is /exactly/ that.

GenAI Predictions 10 months ago

Exactly. I mean, if you asked people how probable the current LLMs would be (warts and all) 20 years ago I think there would have been a similar cynicism.

“You can’t tell people anything” I read this on a blog article a long time ago and I’m constantly reminded of it. This gives me that same feeling where someone is attempting to give some insight into their POV (precisely /because/ it’s alien to so many) and the responses (well, some of them) miss this point entirely.

My problem with takes like this is it presumes a level of understanding of intelligence in general that we simply do not have. We do not understand consciousness at all, much less consciousness that exhibits human intelligence. How are we to know what the exact conditions are that result in human-like intelligence? You’re assuming that there isn’t some emergent phenomenon that LLMs could very well achieve, but have not yet.

I think kids are smarter than you give them credit for. You’re right that they randomly click around and will do so for hours. But they /will/ do so for hours. And when it finally clicks - that time was not entirely wasted. Kids in my observation essentially brute force everything. Their one resource is time and they will happily use it for as long as they feel.

If you do this often enough you can create a simple commit hook that searches for these markers and will fail to commit if it finds them.

I’ve been using Raindrop and have used the Permanent Copy (offline) feature enough that I wouldn’t consider doing without it. It’s worth every penny if you ask me. And you can host it yourself AFAIK, I just haven’t looked into it much.

The Egg (2009) 1 year ago

every philosopher would call a repugnant conclusion

Just because a conclusion is repugnant doesn't mean it is beyond consideration.