Archer6621

This is very true, and it's easy to forget that it often has nothing to do with how good/great the product is, unless it is self-evident and thus self-promoting (which for most non-trivial things is simply not the case).

If you use it often enough, it becomes quite easy to tell. For one, when using it through the chat interface, it always congratulates me on my amazing insight in the first paragraph or at least has a very forthcoming tone. It also has a fetish for numbered lists whenever attempting to make a point, which usually contain 3 items, sometimes 2. It's also quite good at making relatively unhelpful ASCII diagrams on a semi-frequent basis.

That said, I do genuinely enjoy brainstorming with it, and these quirks are not really a hindrance. If anything, the sentiment in the first paragraph is quite useful to quickly get an insight about where I stand with my thoughts, relative to the available knowledge that Gemini has access to.

It's complacency and having consciously or naively relied on security through obscurity for so long. Now that LLMs are a thing, such design flaws are trivial to expose even for the lay person, leading to a pretty massive awakening of how bad it all really was all this time, or what kind of stupid decisions have been made (i.e. the supermarket cooling incident).

I suspect the problem will solve itself though eventually, as the threat level of bad security practices has risen now, so companies have incentive to throw money at the problem for risk management, and LLMs may just as well assist with detecting potential exploits during the design phase. Thinking of it this way, I believe that security will actually improve a lot in the near future.

Depending on where you work, in Europe it can be just as bad. It doesn't matter whether Europe is economically uncompetitive (is it?), if the people themselves think they have to compete and become deprived of time and energy then they will burn out regardless. I see it happening left and right lately.

The only thing here is that there generally is a fairly robust social net ready to catch you if you do, as you mention. But my honest opinion is that this is not a solution, it's a bandaid for the real problem: why do people feel like they have to work themselves into the ground in order to be able to live?

You are right though, many here including myself cannot imagine living in those circumstances in other continents. I think that is another problem in itself, that people are becoming complacent here due to the low risk. That might even be part of the reason why people are so careless with their work-life balance, because they can't really lose it all like in other places, so maybe people stop paying attention to things that are actually important. Just guessing.

That is more or less the crux of what I was pointing out: many of these things are little side-benefits that you get on the way, not as a primary concern. By stripping everything down to the essentials and always taking or accepting the direct path, you will end up missing out on whatever contributions those secondary things (that you otherwise did not think of) would have made to your life. Just missing out on the random social interactions with waiters or personnel doesn't do it on its own. But structurally missing out on little bits of social interactions that were there before in all kinds of places in life, because everything is becoming more convenient and automated (think of how online shopping is dominating), will most certainly affect people eventually.

I agree with your last point though, and you can turn it into a more general statement: some people or companies use automation to do more, and others use it to do less. There's probably a reason for it, among others most likely deprivation. People and companies are getting pushed to 11, and take shortcuts.

I don't know whether you can really call it winning. Who is actually benefiting from the win here? Another small example: something you see now at restaurants are these QR codes being put on the tables, to remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.

There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.

It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?

So I have a hunch about this: I think it makes sense that they become less pleasant as they become more capable, because LLMs inherently do not have feelings, or any faculties/organs that could generate them. The pleasant tone was just an artificially encouraged artifact of the fact that LLMs approximate reasoning probabilistically, with mimicry. Of course, if you mimic things thoroughly enough, with sufficient granularity, you start to approximate the real thing and become robot-like, but maybe then there's also less room for more pleasant disclosure that was the result of less rigid mimicry.

So it almost seems like a situation where you cannot really have your cake and eat it, at least not in the way it currently works.

Agree. Maybe such soft skills will become a lot more important soon, for instance also the ability to translate feelings into useful information, since LLMs cannot feel as humans do.

Personally I've been very hesitant to deep-dive into putting together the perfect AI-workflow, I've been sticking to just using the conversational/chat modality for pretty much everything, usually that gets me as far as I need. It's just really hard to justify spending time on it when it all potentially gets turned upside down next month again.

That's a nice anecdote. The other (sort of parallel) utility it has, is smoothly steering the conversation towards deeper topics that you both find interesting to talk about, in the exploratory sense, finding common grounds etc. You just poke around, until some interesting coincidence pops up. But this is more for conversations that do not have a clearly known point or objective beforehand.

I think the astronomy and telescope comparison is missing some nuance. You don't delegate actual thought to a telescope, the thinking and acting on the observations you make with it is still done by you. With AI that is different; you get the opportunity to delegate a lot of thinking and acting to it (practically all of it if you really wish), at which point it becomes dubious to call yourself the creator or inventor of some idea.

You can use AI like a telescope, and alleviate your inherent organizational problems or other ailments, which in my opinion is a great use case, as it is empowering. But there will also be plenty of people who are not looking to alleviate any mental/physical quirks they have to do more, but simply want to make a "quick buck" for the least possible effort from the work and thinking of others, without adding much value of their own. Lowering the bar makes things easier for both, the ones who bring value and the ones who merely exploit in some context.

If you have an instance (which is what I assume is implied by "real-life data structure") bounded by a particular size, then you could say that the runtime complexity is constant with respect to that bound. Whether that is a useful statement to make is another discussion entirely. On its own probably not. It can potentially be useful for analyzing the runtime complexity of operations in more complex algorithms that use this data structure up to a certain fixed size, e.g. as a buffer/cache of some sort.

For a lot of people, I think religion provides this basis or promise of harmony with the world, in a simplified way that stipulates what you should or shouldn't do and how things work, and those people find comfort in having these clear "rules"; we want to be able to rely on our understanding of the world, so that we can act within it with confidence, or faith. Ultimately, the "god" that is present in many religions is synonymous with this absolute truth of how the universe works, it's an unattainable standard that we all try to aim for, intuitively and knowledge-wise, or seek wisdom from, and I believe the intention of prayer is to have a way to get closer to it, to tune the self to the god in order to sense and know this absolute truth more clearly. I reckon that conceptually, prayer and meditation are very similar in this sense, but with a focus on different areas of the self.

I don't think it's one or the other. You need to spend some time in the cave to find your bearings and prepare a bit, otherwise you'll be clueless and have skill issues. The mistake is in spending forever doing that - at some point you have exhausted what you can get from the cave, and you need to put it to the test in order to find grounding, and you can do that by going out there and showing what you've been brewing. Finding that balance is a nice thing to pursue in itself, and from what I have seen it seems to be completely different for everyone.

Understandable irony. The way I see it, there are no buckets, only context surrounding the advice and your awareness thereof. If the context is unknown, best to take it with a big chunk of salt... Or spend time familiarizing yourself with the context if you think it's worth the time/effort; working on things that interest you is a nice way of doing that.

But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.

That might explain my naivety here, I've never really gotten into using tablets for anything.

Well, the way I use a device with a monitor is a different kind of UX though. Usually it involves a keyboard and mouse, not a touch screen, and I can do certain things better through that kind of input. For that reason I personally like having different devices that are specific to different use cases, as I can express myself better then through the mechanical intuition that I have built up, instead of shoehorning one generic way to do everything. Phones I mostly use to quickly check things such as news, sometimes to watch videos, and messaging/calling, I don't need a large screen for that because at some point it compromises my ability to hold and operate the phone with one hand. Having a virtual environment that responds to your body/hands of course allows you to emulate all types of things, when it gets to that point I think I agree that having one device is the future.

Bad eye sight is a good one, but I don't think it explains the popularity of large screens fully, are there really so many with bad eye sight to the point that they need a larger screen?

Also fan of the smaller phones. I dug up my Samsung Galaxy Ace from many years ago, and was so surprised at how tiny it was, with a replaceable battery as well!

My hope is that Unihertz ends up making a phone that I like enough, they seem to be pretty much the only ones making smaller phones. Their current offering doesn't really speak to me yet, but they're making quick progress.

The crease makes it look cheap and fragile, like with many of the foldable phones.

I'm curious what people need the huge screens for on phones? Is it mostly for watching videos?

It does not read like a compliment to me. What the person seems to be saying in a rather patronizing and opaque manner is that building a game engine gives you an excuse to avoid building a game, thus framing it as an exercise in avoiding hard work or needing to be creative.

In reality however, many people whom I know who built a game engine did it for a plethora of different additional reasons:

- Learning C++, OpenGL, and other tech

- Similarly, learning a new language

- Learning how a game engine works, by building one, and perhaps a better one afterwards, or for developing skills to work on existing engines

- Just because it is fun and you get a high from it

- Building an environment tailored to how they would like to build a game, e.g. because existing engines don't cut it in that regard. Basically building your own tool(s).

- Building tools for others, so that they can build cool things, because you get satisfaction from that.

- Building a new engine because existing large engines have gone stale for some reason (an attempt at becoming the next big engine that structurally solves the tech debt problems that the status quo ones developed over time)

- Similarly, building an engine that has a new paradigm as first-class citizen, e.g. ECS

- A combination of any of these.

I had a similar mindset in the past, not understanding why anyone would like to build their own engine and not a game, because it happened very often and I was the one who liked to build games. Now I do see that there's more to it than just the product it is supposed to create. I learned that when I got into tool development, and noticing that I got a lot of satisfaction from building tools that other people can use well.

I've seen plenty of evidence that goes against this. From what I have seen, short women will absolutely prefer a man who is taller than other men, regardless of their own height, so something does not add up. In fact, I've seen it often be the other way around; a man will sometimes prefer a woman who is not a midget compared to himself, purely for practical reasons (unless of course he falls in love).

I will go as far as to say that assortative mating is likely a side-effect of people ending up in the same or similar socioeconomic circles, but that is just me reaching. In reality I would guess that it's a bit of that, and being used to people from a certain "class".

Could be, depends on the woman and what she values. Celebrities are usually in a league of their own. The way you have to see it, is that women look for a certificate of potential for success (and many other things, but this is one of them). Since being tall is generally desirable in society, it acts as such a certificate. It is definitely not the only trait or circumstance that acts as such, but it is pretty much impossible to fake.

The reason why height is so important, is because it serves as a proxy for strength, potential for dominance, and protective capacity. Women feel safe from the world and other men, when they are with a tall man (assuming they also feel safe from him). The circular effect of this is that tall men are seen as a successful archetype from all the attention and resources they get, which inflates their true sexual value. Probably social media and internet has a big hand in this too.

How do you know whether that's not just you growing as a person? A few decades is quite a long time, a lot of personal growth could happen in that time with or without this practice.

Thanks, I indeed meant existential crises, but it didn't hit me while I was writing.

It's a nice post, with a lot of valuable insights. There is one that I disagree with though: "Never abandon the root node".

There are plenty of instances that show that in reality this is not what happens, and in fact this is often a necessary step of reinventing yourself if things really aren't working for you. The mid-life crisis is a famous example of this, or even the quarter-life crisis. In some specific psychological circles this is referred to as "disintegration". Sometimes carefully backtracking is simply not enough, and growth needs this kind large shock to the system.

I believe that this is the case where the "self" needs some more work, as in it is not well-adapted enough to its total environment yet. This can be due to a myriad of reasons, neurodivergence or other neurological problems are often a possible culprit due to an altered cognition, but don't need to be. If someone just doesn't give a crap or doesn't understand the consequences of some kind of behavior (or the lack thereof) in some situation, they will not be inclined to develop a more appropriate behavior for that situation.

You are still not being yourself though, if you have to suppress the tendency to call someone a dipshit idiot. It is arguable whether the "self" in that case needs some work or not, but the idea about "being yourself" is being able to express yourself freely without giving it any conscious thought. Think of the setting where you are with close friends, and let the conversation flow freely. Having to filter yourself is the opposite of that. In reality, you can never truly be yourself in an environment that you do not own without risking dire consequences or opposition (even when you own it, this eventually becomes the case). So I think not being yourself is a good and necessary compromise for harmonious functioning within an organ, and there is no need to soften this by saying that having a filter is different from not being yourself.

The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.

That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.

This is indeed an important angle to consider as well.

I think there is some nuance though, but it's hard to articulate. I think that is because there are some long term effects that are currently invisible, but that can be anticipated. A lot of it is the human factor, and how changes to how people think and act may ripple through the organizations as well.

Things such as skill atrophy which may reduce not only immediate skills, but also adjacent skills that were maybe important for critical thinking and making good decisions. Or the fact that learning to use an LLM is a skill that is not truly grounded in reality and can therefore not translate well to other areas (you're essentially learning skills within the "reality" of the LLM, based on its weights). That is very different from machine code --> tools, where the tools make explicit assumptions that are based on the workings of the machine code (which is analytical in nature), and where you can, if you wish to, jump in to override those assumptions where needed without having to adapt to a mental model that operates in its own reality (i.e. the LLM's "thought process").

There will always be a point where you simply snap under stress, no matter how well you rationally understand the difference between pain and suffering while being at rest, and you will undeniably suffer from the pain when that happens. It's why torture works so well.

Not to say that knowing this difference has no merit, just saying that it has limits to how much it can do. After all, reality can also hit the brain, when it gets flooded by hormones and neurotransmitters that take away your rational thinking.

It's a very interesting phenomenon. It's often said that famous stars become delusional exactly because they are surrounded by yes-men who are too afraid of rocking the boat and of losing their relationship with the star.

But if I have to think of my own experiences here, I would say that overly agreeable people become tiresome pretty quickly. To me their perspective does not offer anything of value without any pushback, as it certainly doesn't help with grounding my own thoughts. Perhaps it's why being too nice makes it difficult to form deeper bonds, and maybe paradoxically it is therefore a good thing that LLMs are overly agreeable.

It probably also depends on one's mindset - those who are interested in growing could be more likely interested in opposing views, while those who perceive that they have already "made it" (e.g. stars) perhaps don't care so much and prefer an agreeable tone.