On one hand, I think this project is super cool and something I would use and/or would have loved to build myself for my own use.
On the other hand, it makes me wonder if we’re just heading for a future where everyone is just always working, at all times, even while doing other things.
“Wow look at our daughter taking her first steps! She’s doing so… wait hold on… No, Claude. I said to name the class “potatoes”, not “‘pot’ followed by eight ‘O’s,” you dumb robot!”
I don't disagree, but I think there is the otherside of that same coin... What if we could do other stuff while remaining productive.
Rather than the example of missing first steps, what if we had, "Ok Claude, prepare a few slides for my presentation, I'm going to watch my childs mid-day recital..." maybe you get a success/failure ping and maybe even need to step out for part of the event, but in another world you couldn't have gone at all.
Well, at some point it's up to us to say 'no.' Weekends have not always been a widely accepted ritual[1]. They only became one because of collective action.
Dedicating any and all of your free time to work only becomes a norm if we let it.
Well, they did specify your _newly_ freed time. So if you work 8 hours now and AI lets you do that work in 4, then you'll just do double the work in 8 hours, not get more free time.
I don't think there's an obvious point to take collective action.
we kind of already are with our phones and Slack, the difference at this point is negligible. i personally won't have airpods in 24/7 with my kid (or ever) so if i were doing something like this, it would be through my phone, which is already something i use fairly often. not too much difference there IMO (at least anecdotally speaking)
I don't know what kind of work you do on a daily basis. But, the difference between sending a Slack message and sending a message to kick off an agent to chain a bunch of tasks together is a vastly lower activation barrier. I think many people will jump over that lower barrier out of FOMO, to avoid being outcompeted by those who already jumped.
As an IC though, me sending a slack message is perhaps less impactful than a PL responding to a report :)
Maybe I'm just an idiot but...which one is the lower activation energy one?
If I need something done and I ask one of my team members to do it, I trust them to get it done without supervision. They are good at their jobs and I leave them to it.
That's a fair point, and I had the exact same thought while building this. I had previously resisted the urge of integrating Claude Code with e.g. ntfy.sh for this reason. But in practice, this works for me. I end up being less likely to spend time on the computer and more likely to be doing something on my feet.
For context, I'm a PhD student. Work-life balance is already... elusive.
Sticking to the magnetile theme of the OP, my kids and I have spent the most time and most occasions playing with the mangetile marble run kits. It works so well.
The difference is ISPs usually have monopoly/duopoly pricing power and LLMs already have freely available open source models. If one AI company decides they want to start gouging, they have to compete with other providers AND open source. And if all of the ai companies start colluding on price gouging, there’s always the option of new competitors cloud hosting open source models.
That said I do think eventually prices will increase somewhat, unless SOTA models start becoming profitable at current prices (my knowledge is at least 6 months old on this so maybe they have already become profitable?)
Only ~14% of respondents had <=5 years of dev experience. And 55% were >10 years dev experience.
One thing I did find funny though was this survey found that devs overwhelmingly visit stackoverflow aka the site that puts the survey out found that so many people that use the site, use the site.
It does. Whatever they are, they aren't junior developers any more. As a hiring manager, I wouldn't hire a dev with >10 years experience into a junior role - if they're still at junior level, it's not that they're a junior, it's that they're unable to progress, which is a whole different issue.
I think the person you're responding to has likely read this quote or one like it, and perhaps you haven't? I assume that they're referencing it in an offhand way.
Since I started using ChatGPT, I rarely visit stack. If I need some code ChatGPT will tailor it to my example and I can get up and running quickly to figure out how it works.
I was confused when reading the abstract so I ChatGPT’d a summary and it just so happened to include this exact explanation:
1. What does a “critical regime” mean?
In neuroscience, a “critical regime” is like a sweet spot between too much order (where the brain is slow and rigid) and too much chaos (where it’s noisy and erratic). In this state:
* The brain is highly sensitive to inputs.
* It’s capable of flexible responses.
* Some researchers think this is ideal for things like learning, memory, and information processing.
BUT — that’s during waking states.
During sleep, especially NREM sleep, the brain is supposed to be less active so it can:
> Relatively recent work has reported that networks of neurons can produce avalanches of activity whose sizes follow a power law distribution. This suggests that these networks may be operating near a critical point, poised between a phase where activity rapidly dies out and a phase where activity is amplified over time. The hypothesis that the electrical activity of neural networks in the brain is critical is potentially important, as many simulations suggest that information processing functions would be optimized at the critical point. This hypothesis, however, is still controversial. Here we will explain the concept of criticality and review the substantial objections to the criticality hypothesis raised by skeptics.
A search for `"critical regime" brain sleep` turns up a review article discussing various studies about criticality in neuroscience, including a section reviewing studies related to sleep, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neural-circuits/article...
Made a “machine learning movie recommendation” website. It went through some relevant questions and had you select some of your favorite movies to base the recommendation off of. Then it “calculated” and finally recommended Weekend at Bernie’s to everyone regardless of what you answered. Then gave you an option of another movie, which was always Weekend at Bernie’s 2.
I had no specific reason to build it other than I thought it would be funny.
One point missing from this comparison is that cell phones just don’t take all that much electricity to begin with. A very rough calculation is that it takes around 0.2 cents to fully charge a cell phone. You spend maybe around $1 PER YEAR on cell phone charging per phone. Cell phones are just confusingly not energy intensive.
And for reference, it takes around $10/year to run a single efficient indoor LED lightbulb. So charging a cell phone for a years-worth of usage costs less than 1/10th of running an efficient LED lightbulb bulb for the full year.
Again, cell phones are just confusingly not energy intensive.
This comment really resonates with me. The annoyance at the label, the realization of internet addictions being a coping mechanism for uncontrolled stress (subconsciously finding myself scrolling hackernews or Reddit on my phone when I run into a problem that doesn’t have an immediate solution), the feeling of failure from not being able to be productive 100% of the day.
I’m glad that you were able to find a solution, and I’ve heard some others(and ChatGPT) say similar things, but I never understand what it means to “solve stress”. Like what does that mean? To me, stress isn’t a singular task that can be killed/solved, it’s just a long running background task that takes up more resources than it should. Likely you won’t want to get into your personal life here, but can you give an example(even if you have to make it up) of what it meant to remove the stress from your life?
Yeah so that's the thing. In my case, I'll call what I received from my therapy "a self-goodness". I think others may term this nebulous quality "self-esteem", "a deeper understanding of the universe/cosmos/God", "motivation", "confidence", and so on. But "self-goodness" is something I came up with so it resonates with me personally.
In my case, "solving stress" (or perhaps "reaching inner peace" in my own words) meant being capable of enjoying whichever activity I put my mind to, success or failure, and being able to look forward to the future in a generally positive light.
But hold on. This sort of thing I had already read in probably dozens of pithy self-help books for years in the past. It is not knowledge that I nor I'm sure many other people don't already know. And it is repeated in places like here and elsewhere ad infinitum.
What I accomplished was not being made aware of what the solutions out there are, but becoming able to enact such solutions I had heard over and over and over again for years for my benefit, but couldn't, because of what most people would call depression.
But this is only a surface-level answer. Allow me to go deeper still:
The main lesson I learned, and try to put into practice each day now, was that a fulfilling life needs to be experienced, not taught. Basically, it's the difference between watching a video of someone bungee-jumping, and actually bungee-jumping yourself. I think concepts like "qualia" and the "Mary's room" thought experiment are relevant here. A good example of this is talk therapy. In my case at least, talk therapy was ineffective because my therapist had all the experience and was eager to tell me all about it, but because of the limitations of words, she could only impart knowledge to me, and prod me in directions I was unwilling to go in to begin with. That leads to guilt and shame for not living up to the expectations or suggestions of others, and led nowhere.
So beyond an issue as simple as "being depressed" and "going to therapy" to try to solve it, my issue was this: due to limitations of my experience (commonly termed "depression" by most people), I was unable to impart any meaning to the knowledge I did have so that I could put it into practice, and thus gain experience in a way that brought me satisfaction. And I had a lot of knowledge, through endless rumination about how best to deal with my situation that didn't lead to a conclusive answer for a long time. None of that knowledge made me happy or brought results. And with no way to enjoy experience, I had no force driving me to get it for myself.
Okay, so what is to be done about these problems?
That's the thing. Literally nothing I've just told you in the paragraphs above would have put me even one step closer to solving my issues - because I'd heard it all before, for years. In fact, there are entire systems like the authors of self-help books that basically rehash versions of the above treatises in endless different flavours - all of them having little effect except imparting knowledge when the optimal solution would be to impart experience.
This limitation is not the fault of those self-help authors. Because they're only using the tools they know how to use - words. And mere words have their limits. In fact, since my psylocibin therapy I've opened quite a few self-help books and remarked just how much I agree with pretty much everything the authors say - because I have enough experience and knowledge to just agree with them and learn nothing profound. The difference between now and then was my willingness to put such knowledge to use. I am convinced that none of those very self-help books would have ever taught me how to cultivate that willingness with any amount of hard work. My belief is that it is extremely hard or impossible to discipline yourself into gaining this willingness with effort, especially if you are already depressed.
(Aside, this is why I find Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus so fascinating - it mirrors the way I see the world now, by building up an extremely complex system of interlocking rules only to declare all of it nonsense in the end, stating that there are certain things beyond mere words that still hold importance to philosophy.)
No, more fundamentally, what I lacked was this willingness to experience things in life - a sense of "self-goodness". This is the thing that lets one convert knowledge to experience. It's motivation, focus, confidence, ability to just get-up-and-go without being prompted, and so on. I know what this is now, and I didn't have it before. I can now engage it at will pretty much every day and get good results. I did not understand (experientially) such a thing existed before my therapy. It was all new experience to me, even if I had knowledge of what it was supposed to be like by reading books, watching romantic comedies, etc.
So how did I obtain this "self-goodness"?
My whole life, society had told me that reward only comes with hard work. If you don't put in hard work, you don't get results, and are screwed. This reflects poorly on yourself, and you need to try harder. Going to talk therapy was one way of "putting in the hard work", and yet I never got results. It was clear that this way of viewing the world was not helping me.
Instead, what I needed to be taught was that this fundamental "self-goodness" is not an experience that can be earned, or transmitted via talking about what it is logically - it must be given, and for free. Most people I suspect receive this self-goodness in childhood by parents that give unconditional love to them, and there aren't as many problems. I was not so lucky, so I had to obtain this sense elsewhere. In order to gain this sense, I needed an experience that I did not have to work for. I had worked as hard as I could my whole life and it did not amount to inner peace.
So where is this experience to be found?
That's the tricky thing. I can only speak for what worked for me, which is psylocibin therapy with a licensed therapist. Some people have religious awakenings. Some people build networks of friends and gain experience that way. In my own experience, nothing other than the correct drug would have done any good. I had several prescriptions for things like stimulants and SSRIs at the time. I tossed them all away the day after. I say this, but ultimately I do believe the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression carried some validity in my circumstance - insofar as it allowed me to get over what seemed like the impossible hurdle of gaining self-goodness, after which I no longer had to bicker about such theories anymore. There are too many more important things to focus on. Psylocibin promotes neuroplasticity in the correct circumstances, so it may have just been a matter of the proper neurons not being linked up in just the right ways. Sometimes (but not always), I reflect and think that's really all it came down to in the end.
But I can rest assured that such an experience took barely any effort to gain, even though I was trapped in my own web of rules and logic. That was the whole point. There is no virtue in fighting so hard for something you were supposed to have been given for free. That sort of effort makes you look at the people who do have self-goodness act so effortlessly and wonder why they deserve that automatic self-goodness and you don't. I think feelings like those drive a lot of sadness between people in the modern world.
Coming back to "stress", I stopped worrying about it so much once I became occupied so much with fascination with the world around me. In fact, stress stops being something to be "solved", but to be tuned up and down according to one's desires. If I relax too much, I wonder what I'm making of myself and strive to work on a skill or two to fill the time. If I work too hard, I desire more time to myself. So stress becomes a sort of neutral force in the world that accompanies your travels. It reemphasizes how a balance in all things is important to keep in mind, even for issues that you may at first desire to "solve" somehow.
In the end, even my rumination served a purpose. I can now put the sizeable stock of knowledge I gained to good use in earning experience. But now my quantity of knowledge looks so small in hindsight, and makes me realize I have a lot to learn. I am quite excited to learn about new things each day.
Ironically, nowadays I end up agreeing with the self-help authors that "effort is rewarding", with regards to things like exercise, cooking, my job, creative pursuits - in every circumstance except gaining a sense of self-goodness. I think many of those authors never had to deal with trying to cultivate self-goodness from absolute nothingness, and thus have no words to describe what such a process is like, so all they can say is things like "you can do it, I believe in you" and "I don't have anything else to tell you". It is my belief that this single idea is one of the most misunderstood self-help mantras in existence. The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who are served by it the least. And some of those who speak about it at length, even with the best of intentions, will end up talking past a lot of desperate people who need to feel an inner peace for themselves to be able to have any chance at understanding it at all.
I really appreciate you taking the time to write this all out for me. I’ve read through it several times now with a couple breaks between.
If I were to summarize, it’s about enjoying the process rather than the result. Much easier said than done, but the ideal goal. The thing that keeps me and people like me from enjoying the process is the constant background of “is this going to be worth it”. Perhaps just the awareness of seeing this happening in real time could help in cutting short that enjoyment-blocker. To call it out and label it as such.
I’m not looking for a response from you, but wanted to take the time to thank you for writing this all out.
No problem! Even if I understand that, in a way, everything I wrote is just nonsense if kept as a jumble of words and not put into practice, I wrote it in such a way that perhaps someone like past me could see relatively easily that there are still solutions out there within reach, even for someone like them. :)
Most people do see productivity gains from using LLMs correctly. Myself included. Just because some people don’t learn how to use them correctly doesn’t mean LLMs aren’t helpful. It’s like when internet search came out and a handful of laggards tried it once, failed to get the exact perfect result, and declared “internet search is useless”. Using a tool wrong is not evidence of the tool being useless, it’s evidence that you need to learn how to use the tool.
hallucinations are literally the finger in the dam. if these models could sense when an output is well-founded and simply say “i dont know” otherwise… say goodbye to your job
Googling a question and finding an incorrect answer every now and then doesn’t mean that googling is useless. It means that you need to learn how to use google. Trust but verify. Use it for scenarios where you aren’t looking for it to be the trusted fact checker. It excels at brainstorming, not at fact giving.
How many times do you think I've heard that over the past three decades? And you know what? They've been right every time, except for this one little fact:
The machine cannot make you give a shit about the problem space.
It's a real issue! But only for people who built the habit of typing in address bar, clicking the first stack overflow link and copy paste the first answer. Maybe break that habit first?
On the other hand, it makes me wonder if we’re just heading for a future where everyone is just always working, at all times, even while doing other things.
“Wow look at our daughter taking her first steps! She’s doing so… wait hold on… No, Claude. I said to name the class “potatoes”, not “‘pot’ followed by eight ‘O’s,” you dumb robot!”
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