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.