cladopa
When I was young and poor(but smart, beautiful and tall) I gave some women I was interested on too much time and attention and it looked like they were not interested t all. The women I gave the less attention (that I was not that interested in) usually got deeply in love with me and I had great time with them.
I am European, it is different from living in the US or Asia(I have also lived there). In the US you have way more opportunities professionally but people live isolated from each other. They don't have so many common spaces like in Europe.
Later when I got more money and status the women that ignored me came after me. They only valued my time and attention after it was zero. When I ignored them as I was genuinely busy they got in love as well.
I also made friends around the world easily and probably the best reason is because I already had friends and I did not need new ones.
The best way to make friends and lovers is not to need them at all. You make friends or lover when you don't try to make friends and people just have a great time with you.
So beware about thinking about idealistic ideas about life that have been never tested. There are things about humans that were decided when we were living in tribes.
Japanese people really hate physical contact, or any contact by the way.
I learned OpensCAD manually but it was so painful because you needed to take into account the most minimal and ridiculous thing using code, so I used Freecad in the end that is way more intuitive and fast with graphical tools.
With code like OpenScad it was just too exhausting just to have to think rationally every single detail. And you spent hours doing the most minimal project.
Then LLMs appeared...
Now I use OpenSCAD a lot because with LLMs you have the absolute control that code gives you without the pain of using your logical/rational mind all the time and taking 1/20 of the time for that.
I create my own furniture as hobby. Mostly I use standard IKEA metallic pieces, standard metric screws.
I generate paper blueprints automatically of how the wood panels must be cut and they cut it for me. My Blueprints are pdfs that I print very similar to IKEA blueprints so the one that cuts the wood can not make a mistake. I choose and provide the panels myself.
It is ridiculous how easy it is now with LLMs to do all of that. I can do a new design in a couple hours, including the pdfs. Most of the code is already created and I just have to reuse it.
I use Claude Code. From time to time I voluntarily teach children to do just that. Some of them are really good after a couple hours of instruction and some mentoring.
Maybe is people used to drive for moving, not imagining anything else as a possibility. People living in islands learn to pilot a boat and boom, you can move all around the Mediterranean and even the world.
Islands in the Mediterranean were the most connected things you could get in ancient times. And islands today continue being one of the most connected things there are.
In Ibiza there was ancient contact with Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Arabs, vikings, and later people from Aragon, Napoli, and Turks, then the French, the British, the Germans, then the Americans. The American hippies that hid from Vietnam occupied the island, Russian oligarchs on their yachts and later the Germans.
Almost everybody there living from tourism and commerce, not specially isolated disciplines.
The Canary Islands were the essential link between America and Europe.
It is over ten times cheaper to transport anything by sea than by land. Go to Ethiopia or Central African Republic to see how not having access to sea is a dramatic thing for a country.
The consequence is that the Homer Simpsons do not feel the need to drink alcohol anymore.
We created a system for measuring future trends for a food company and the trend of people avoiding sugars and alcohol is the strongest now.
For people outside the US to understand, you need to know that all foods in the US supermarkets are flooded with sugars in a way that is hard to comprehend unless you come from outside. You have the highest obesity levels in the world.
Those drugs have secondary effects but obesity has too, and they work very well.
Even myself tested his firsts cigarettes.
It was so painful. The body reacts violently when you try to poison it. Severe coughs that people try to hide, trying to appear strong while they could not help it making impulsive movements. It tastes like sh*ht, it burns your lungs. You stink, your clothing and breath stinks.
It takes a lot of concious and painful work in order to force your body into accepting that.
For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction, so I just did not continue.
I couldn't help but see that this way. I read a lot so I knew what was coming next. It is like casinos not inviting mathematicians or physicist to conferences, as because of their training, they can see the probabilities inside out and never fall in the emotional trap.
In Spain multiple big ferris wells were found in mines and also some parts of machines that were using to pulverise rock. There were machines for hammering the rock using water, made in wood.
The Romans probably used machines for polishing the stone also so it could fit with other stones, as they did everything this way and those machines were done also with wood.
We also know that they had machines for lifting the enormous rocks as we can see the marks that the gripper left, done in wood.
And every arch done in Stone needs to be build first in wood. The romans loved to use the same arch so they could reuse the wood. The romans standardised everything so everything could be reused or mass produced.
When I had partners in my business I studied them first deeply like I was going to marry them because I WAS going to marry them!
You should agree on your values or else the company will go nowhere. One founder will raw one way and the other the opposite making the boat to stay in the same place.
I have a software company and the opposite problem: I am obsessive about testing and meta programming. We write way more testing code than code, we automate everything with meta programming.
It was clear several times that we tested and automated way more than necessary. We automated things that only used once for example(although we used later multiple times on other projects).
So we had not the usual problems than companies have like bloat or security vulnerabilities but we had the problem of having software that was was super expensive because we did double or triple the code than the competition with tests that developers hated(they are boring to write). Our software took also way more time to market.
Companies love to buy the cheapest they can today and tomorrow we will see, so that put us in a difficult position. It was specially hard at first, but then this principles gave us an edge(because most companies would compromise early and not reap the benefits later).
Had I a business partner with a different mindset and beliefs, it would have been impossible to me not to change course of the boat in hard times.
BTW we use LLMs with great success. It let's us test even more spending way less than before.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
So this way there will be a lot of false positives like with school assignments.
I think a better solution would be to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead, so this way no machines are used and you don't need to read a text that 100 of your trusted friend/trusted readers flagged as artifitial.
By the way, this man does not care about AI slop. He cares about AI usage. In the same way there is very good code created with the help of LLMs, albeit a minority like Linus Towards says, there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.
Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity.
By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books.
If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.
Claude and AI partners have taken all what they could from the Open Source projects without giving credit or respecting the licenses. They have increased the traffic on websites in an absolute disrespectful way increasing the hosting cost in inefficient and ridiculous ways.
They have taken all the important books and not asked permission from the authors.
Fair enough. Fair use.
Of course I would create a competitor software to Claude or any others if I could. Using Claude(and others) of course.
I am not paying you 200 dollars/month for you to tell me that I could not create code that competes with you. If you try to go to court in Europe with this you will lose.
It is just the same fair use you proclaim for taking the data from others.
If I want to talk about "Seattle" and use "Siadol" a lot of people are not going to understand.
It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.
Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.
For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.
About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.
It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?" "Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).
Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?
If you want to sell your app you will need to explain it for humans, like this guy is doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROEJe-nBmqQ
You will need to get better at public speaking and telling stories. I recommend going to your closest Toastmasters club.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
Once I had finished I could earn 3 to 4 times more on several places.
They were also extremely creative taking foreign systems, studying the patent and modifying it to pay zero to the creators of the patents. This was done with things like the aluminium beams for electricity delivery that I think was developed by Italians, or the tunnelling machines that had all the pieces replicated inhouse.
I could do very useful things with that machine. So it is not the end of the world if we have to go back to a world when you merely have thousands of times more memory for 4 times less money.
It could even be positive if it forces people to be more efficient writing code and wasting less resources.
It is one thing to go carving whenever you want, where you want because you have a good job outside it. Another totally different thing is spending all your time training. Most people will hate that.
Everybody wants to be a tennis player when they see one player raising the cup and earning millions. But a professional player spends most of her life doing extremely boring things. And only a very minority get enough money to live from the sport.
Going out for a walk alone to the beach or the mountains was forbidden. It was so ridiculous. And of course I went out anyway and it was essential for my health and sanity.
I have been working from home for a long time. It gives me freedom. I don't have to waste hours moving most of the time, and time with friends and family that I choose.
When I worked in an office I had to spend one hour moving in and one moving out each day.
This study is equivalent to the drugs study done on caged rats. The caged rats being humans during pandemic.
It was discovered later that if you let the rats freedom and the ability to socialise they did not get as anxious as when caged and they did not look for drugs for escaping their miserable lives.
The solution are not better Hospitals to deal with your diabetes or cancer after all your food has sugars it should not have like corn syrup because sugar is cheap. You have so much additives in your food for preservation. Meat is full of Hormones.
Antibiotics on your vegetables that destroy your microbiota. Genetically Modified to fill the fields with pesticides.
Now Americans are obese as they process the growth hormones from their meat and their microbiota dies from the antibiotics they eat in their vegetables and their meat.
Waiting until your children has autism or asthma or cancer is not the solution.
This is like a kid playing videogames instead of studying, you take the console away and force the kid in front of a book and the kid will spend most of his time looking at the wall and dreaming.
I am engineer with very deep programming background that have managed people, with real experience in the real world.
One of the best things about AIs is that you can test crazy ideas and create prototypes very fast. Only one in a hundred will work great in the real world, but you have to create the 100 before to know.
Creating the 100 before AI was extremely expensive, and took so much time.
For me it is liberating and gives me focus because I can spend so little time testing prototypes and spend real time in what is really important and works.
This is something I learned from game developers: If you are going to create a game, you spend a weekend testing the dynamics and the gameplay of your prototype to know if is is fun. You use boxes, no textures, no complex sounds of music.
Then if it works and is is so fun, you create the game! You can spend 2 years creating the game after that.
You don't spend two years doing a Game only to realise later that is not fun, and you either spend 3 more years or abandon it at this moment.
People believe that you can only use LLMs for sloppy programming. But you can also use it for writing ten times more code of Swiss cheese model tests, and domain specific languages.
You write ten times more code than necessary and all that extra code is testing. Projects like SqlLite do that because they need to be perfect.
Before LLMs we had to use engineers for that and it was a painful and repetitive work, and they were always late and made much more mistakes than LLMs, specially because it was dull and tedious for great engineers to spend their time into.
Now we write tests and when all test pass we write new test for checking the tests.
We divide each complex problem in small subproblems and we warrantee each of them by formal means. We have multiple ways of solving the same problem, usually with one brute force solution that is simple and warranted to work but inefficient, and we can use it to compare with more efficient methods.
Before machines could do that, people doing that were burned down and exhausted, and always leaved pending work to complete.
So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.
Please listen to Isaac Moreno Gallo. 99% of the Roman Roads had no big stones on it. Only near big cities you have the stone pavement, basically in the cemetery that was outside town alongside the road.
People with very little idea about engineering wrote the textbooks of the past and some of the wrong ideas are transmitted even today.
For people that have been programming for 20 years, AI is not an issue, on the contrary, it can work for you as you become older. They have trained enough.
For young people, it can destroy them if they stop practicing hours every day, outsourcing all their work to the ai, as they will start losing contact with the reality they are controlling.
But that depends on the personality of people. One of the best uses of LLMs is creating trainers for practicing what you need. For example, I have created programs for practicing my Japanese and Mandarin pronunciation, for practicing chords and note recognition with MIDI, and playing of sheet music, practicing IPA, my handwriting...
Usually I buy some software that does more or less what I want, but them I realise that I need a specific feature the software does not have. So I create the trainer for personalization.
It will be impossible for me to do that without LLMs. There is no time in 5 lifetimes to do that by hand.
I have created 20 utils or so with the help of Claude, in order to practice multiple things like reading sheet music, or rhythms, or different scales. I never expected it to be that useful as my new Yamaha was bought before Claude existed, and having a cable that just works is so great.
I have spent way less effort doing all my utils than this man into just connecting its machine.
Before using it with Claude I used them a lot with Synthesia and GarageBand, but with Claude is like having a personal trainer.
They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thinking about some of the people I spoke with being dead.
Since that I have also been in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as an entrepreneur and engineer. "What are you going to do when drones are used against your infrastructure?" If you followed the Russian war and first Iranian strike it was obvious that drones were going to be used against them. "not going to happen" again.
The have lost tens of billions for lacking proper preparation. They could have been protected spending just hundreds of millions of dollars over years.
It is about humans, not AI.
What happens is that the original idea rarely matters at all. It is the people that implements the idea what matters.
The original idea is almost always terrible, but great people pivot or change the idea gradually while having contact with reality.
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.