I was a depressed teenager a long time ago and I am almost certain mushrooms made things worse.
I didn't need mushrooms. I needed therapy, friends, a social life, a sex life, goals, something to look forward to in the real world.
All I found on mushrooms at the time were horrible existential loops that just made things more hopeless. I would read about people having these peak wonderful experiences or Mckenna alien experiences and just get more depressed that even the mushrooms didn't help me.
It is almost blasphemous in this space to say what actually ended up changing my life were SSRIs. A little prozac fixed something that was just chemically wrong in my head.
What seems obvious is there is enormous variability in people's brain chemistry so the tool to fix the problem has to be quite specific for the individual.
Like denying that more efficiency without a commensurate increase in product demand means the demand for labor goes down, which means fewer jobs, and lower salaries? You don’t pay people what they’re actually worth, you pay people what they’ll work for. Requesting more money because you’re making the company more money is only viable if there aren’t qualified people lining up for the chance to take your role. Even without more money, well-paid people tend to regrettably get laid off in those circumstances.
It is a 19th century economic observation around the use of coal.
It is like saying the PDF is going to be good for librarian jobs because people will read more. It is stupid. It completely breaks down because of substitution.
Farming is the most obvious comparison to me in this. Yes, there will be more food than ever before, the farmer that survives will be better off than before by a lot but to believe the automation of farming tasks by machines leads to more farm jobs is completely absurd.
Gen AI is the opposite of crypto. The use is immediate, obvious and needs no explanation or philosophizing.
You are basically showing your hand that you have zero intellectual curiosity or you are delusional in your own ability if you have never learned anything from gen AI.
I play with generative AI quite often. Mostly for shits and giggles. It's fun to try to make it hallucinate in the dumbest way possible. Or to make up context.
E.g. try to make any image generating model take an existing photo of a humanoid and change it so the character does a backflip.
It's also interesting to generate images in a long loop, because it usually reveals interesting patterns in the training data.
Outside these distractions I've never had generative AI be useful. And I'm currently working in AI research.
Exactly. The idea that ideas are cheap and all that matters is execution is absurd.
Imagine saying this about a great record album in music. Or any masterwork of art.
From growing up with my young brain being programmed by surrealist MTV videos, in a society driven by tiktok brains, creativity will be at an absolute premium.
Just the idea that this is a bad time for the solo developer is so uncreative that it boggles my mind but it is hardly surprising.
A huge part of implementation is how it’s done. A lot of companies made mp3 players, Apple made the iPod. Their implementation was different. It was done with more care and thought. The idea was cheap, 1,000 songs in your pocket. An implementation that connected with people and brought it to the mainstream was hard.
Someone quickly vibe coding something might fulfill the requirements of an idea. However, their implementation will likely be poor and lack the care needed to connect with people on a way that makes them want to use it.
I think understanding this has always been the key to standing out. That doesn’t change in the world of LLM, it becomes more important than ever.
There have been times in history when merely having the ability to turn an idea to software has been such a marketable skill you could fairly effortlessly get rich off it, like the early mobile app era saw some examples of that.
Those times were always pretty brief, and those markets were quickly saturated by people looking to make it rich. It was certainly not the state of anything in the years leading up to agentic coding.
This is the standard stupidity here based on emotion and denial. This is the narrative that people want to hear.
Of course, trying to automate with chatGPT 4o was stupid. Trying to automate with Sonnet 4.6 will work better. Trying to automate with the models a year from now will work all the better.
To believe we are going to stop and go back to 2019 at this stage is seriously delusional.
I wish it were true. I would love to go back to 2019 but we obviously are not. We never go backwards.
“Regularly scheduled programming” includes progress, not stasis. It just means the AI hype firehouse runs out of money and we rerun to normal sane progress and productivity enhancements without all the overpricing and under delivering of the last few years.
The article just reminds me that I hate modern journalism and try to not read any news articles.
Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong.
So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip.
You shouldn't conflate a pop science magazine with all of modern journalism. Try a high quality outlet like The Economist. "I try not to read any news articles" screams anti-intellectualism.
The GP has a point about the state of journalism generally and the pervasive nature in which Yellow journalism is returning.
One need not be anti-intellectual to find the state of reporting to be difficult to deal with and not wanting to read it. In addition to the GP’s complaint; journalists of any ilk also tend to conflate editorializing with reporting. You see this all the way from pop science to NYTimes to Fox News and yes even the Economist.
A question is whether the more fact based reporting of the early-mid 20th Century is the exception to the tendency of Yellow journalism that existed before and seems to exist now.
I think it depends. While AI has flooded YouTube and further degraded its quality, some channels are still useful (or can be). Daily Dose of Internet is still semi-ok, as one example, though I also noticed I have fatigued quite a lot lately - too much time wasted on youtube in general.
Yes, a common issue now with Youtube content, enormous variability in quality of content. Gemini does a good-enoug job of debunking Youtube transcript, and I use that when I have a doubt, but clearly will all the slp I get sent by well-meaning YouTube-watching acquaintances, I don't want to butn too many tokens on that treadmill... I wonder how man Terms & Conditions of use some distributed debunk-data repository for videos would cross? Users vetted by hckrnews-karma checks posting "this video is bunk because"... Would be a real boon.
I love those Drumeo challenges. I don’t even play drums. But watching creative people who are excellent at their craft solve an unknown problem in a new way - when we are all familiar with the original solution - is fascinating.
Conflating New Scientist with all modern journalism is a category error. New Scientist has been a zombie mag for going on two decades at this point. As with many magazines, the internet killed it.
What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time.
I think what you are missing is that it might not be possible to stay in business if you can't use AI to solve problems.
Before the dot com bust, I was paid in college to file papers in file cabinets all day at an office. Ten years on from that, the paper was gone, the file cabinets were gone, obviously the paper filer job was gone and even that business that employed me as a paper filer was gone because they were a dinosaur who couldn't leverage technology well and were put out of business by competitors who could.
There is huge denial on this board that everything is going to be fine hand coding on the legacy systems of dinosaur companies. Seems more likely that if the company has so much technical systems debt that models aren't useful, those companies are not going to be competitive in their area of business.
I didn't need mushrooms. I needed therapy, friends, a social life, a sex life, goals, something to look forward to in the real world.
All I found on mushrooms at the time were horrible existential loops that just made things more hopeless. I would read about people having these peak wonderful experiences or Mckenna alien experiences and just get more depressed that even the mushrooms didn't help me.
It is almost blasphemous in this space to say what actually ended up changing my life were SSRIs. A little prozac fixed something that was just chemically wrong in my head.
What seems obvious is there is enormous variability in people's brain chemistry so the tool to fix the problem has to be quite specific for the individual.
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