Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading.
More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
> we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI.
Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that.
I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of mentorship for the mentors. Mentoring has sharpened my thinking and pushed me to articulate why things are true in a way I never would have gone to the effort of otherwise.
If there are no juniors around to teach, seniors will forever be less senior than they might have been had they been getting reps at mentorship along the way.
I haven't heard this benefit for mentors clearly articulated before (probably just missed it), but definitely felt it - I guess it's a deeper version of how writing/other communication forces clarity/organization of thoughts because mentorship conversations are so focused on extracting the why as well as the what.
I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.
I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).
I tried reading Proust's In Search Of Lost Time some time ago, in which the first 10-20 pages are about a guy lying in his bed at night and observing his own thoughts (roughly). And I quickly realised how I was reading the words and even sentences, but couldn't grasp the meaning of them - I couldn't produce a "mental model" or image of what it was about. It was a very humbling experience.
I used to be an avid reader as a child, even as a teenager. That was a long time ago. I'm looking forward to that time when I will have the mental capacity to read long prose again.
Another one is: Don't use GPS in your own city. Try to learn where you live. Read the map in advance if you are going somewhere new and memorise the turns.
A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.
Do you want a Stairmaster with that elevator? Life is for living, ostensibly. This Inevitabilism drone choir[1] may be correct that it will take my current job and after that maybe there will nothing fruitful in that department left. But I can’t imagine a life situation where I’m both surviving and using thinking-with-my-brain as some retirement home pastime/ “brainrot”-preventer.
> Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
Here’s how the rat race looks in the age of AI and how you can stay ahead.
Given your shattered hope and the fact that you came to it from the same author must have meant that something in this latest comment appealed to you. Sorry to disappoint! Can I interest you in some of my other musings instead? To salvage that hope of yours.
I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.
But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture.
I recommend everyone stop using these infernal cloud devices and start with a nice local model that doesn't instantly give you everything, but is quite capabable of removing a select amount of drudgery that is rather relaxing. And as soon as you get too lazy to do enough specifying or real coding, it fucks up your dev environment and you slap yuorself a hundred times wondering why you ever trusted someone else to properly build your artifaces.
There's definitely some philosophy being edged into our spaces that need to be combatted.
I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary.
The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.
True, but the tools make the default behavior so tempting.
I have a friend who uses Google Maps to find places, then memorizes the route there and closes the app to navigate because he wants to build a better mental map of our city. Meanwhile, I just check the app every five seconds like a dummy, and my hippocampus stays small.
This is a good parallel. In the 90s when I learned to drive I was quite good at navigating. Now google maps is on a screen in my car telling me where to go whenever I drive beyond my most common routes.
Really all the research telling us about AI skills atrophy.. We should have guessed from previous experience.
Sometimes, if I’ve been using my iPad for awhile and switch over to my MBP, I might reach out and touch the screen out of habit. I can’t be the only one.
I had the opposite problem when work issued me a ThinkPad - I would accidentally brush my screen with my caveman knuckles once a day and somehow nuke a dozen lines of code.
My kids do this all the time. They also use the touchscreen in conventional laptop configuration (not folded-flat tablet mode) on their Chromebooks all the time. It's bizarre to me. I'm always trying to get them to use the keyboard, but they don't care. Example: enter password on the keyboard, then tap the log in button on the screen with their finger, rather than just pressing enter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My 3 year-old never had access to tablets or phones but sees us using phones all the time. So when he gets curious and touches the laptop screen (something he does with our phones occasionally as well), he's shocked to see it doesn't react.
I do this on my iPad with Magic keyboard and I'm a die hard command line user otherwise.
I think the reason I started doing it on the iPad is that the keyboard focus is sometimes inconsistent, so clicking or tab-tab-tab-enter is slower and less reliable vs. just touching the screen. Definitely feel the gorilla arm though.
I used to think this but it only seems to be true for a shallow tech advantage, which isn’t this scenario. A sufficiently deep stack of compounded tech is robust against even aggressive talent poaching. The knowledge is embedded in the network, not the random individual.
With these very deep tech stacks, does it really matter if you publish or not? Execution is still very hard for manufacturing these items, and will be for awhile.
We’re very very far from prompting to a silicon fab
I mean, even north korea has figured out the nuclear bomb, the original greatest secret deep stack of compounded tech. Seems like anyone can figure out anything if they are hell bent on it on this earth. Engineers seem to be more fungible than people anticipate I guess, and no one really comes up with unprecedented unique ideas. The whole research process incentivizes incremental work on known concepts to justify receiving funding at all, since it is in high demand and short supply.
With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.
There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.
Why would that concern you unless you are working on the cutting edge and the very limits of that hardware?
The current generation is insanely fast. I am planning to get a gaming PC for my wife and a mix of gaming + workstation PC for me (or maybe just base it off of the Ryzen 9950x3D and call it a day). We plan to hold on to them for 10 years.
I don't care if anything 6x faster comes out. For what I need the current generation is even an overkill.
I'd even go as far as to say that it would be quite OK if that's the very last generation and no further hardware development ever happens.
I am on the edge of current available hardware and do feel the desire to upgrade. As stated before, I am unhappy with the current maximum when combing frame generation, resolution, and graphics quality.
My dream spec is UE5 at 120hz on an 8k oled. I think that sounds like a super sick experience I would buy tens of thousands of dollars of hardware for.
Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.
Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.
I would argue that the segment of the market whose purchases incentivize personal responsibility on their PCs is outweighed by the segment of the market blowing their disposable income on tablets and smartphones who just want things to work and want whatever they see other people using on social media.
We both know which segment of the market the large companies want to win that battle. They want to sell rented compute resources through nothing but impossible-to-locally-administrate devices where every sensor spies on you and it's impossible to store any data or documents locally, let alone privately.
Even One Drive is pushing hard to literally erase your hard drive and only host your documents on their servers.
High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.
Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.
That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.
True, I can only know that the owner of the private key signed but not how the document was created. But I suppose there is some trust involved that a person I know who signs doesn't sign some AI generated stuff.
To establish the initial link, I suppose we need something more mainstream/scalable than the old key signing parties I remember from CCC etc.
But at least for friends and family it should be possible to create some flow where every member has a key-combo and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote etc. and have local mini-keysign parties.
You have far too much faith in humanity. The majority of my extended family members are not smart enough to resist continuous attacks and would eventually not only sign, but give away the key in question.
Simply put I think we are stretching humanity farther than intellectual ability allows in a lot of people.
Do we need new key signing for friends/family? I can trust that all messages coming from a friend/family’s account originated from them, or else their account was compromised. I don’t see how a ‘non-ai’ key adds enough more trust to be worth it.
Three 9s is a perfectly reasonable bar to expect for services you depend on. Without GitHub my company cannot deploy code. There is no alternative method to patch prod. In addition many development activities are halted, wasting labor costs.
We wouldn’t couple so much if we knew reliability would be this low. It will influence future decisions.
More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
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