avador

“our stupid little lives”.

Stupid and little in relation to _what_? You cannot ascribe lives as stupid or little unless you’ve got a smart and a grand. So: what is the smart and grand you’ve got? I want to take note of it.

For me, it’s the following sentence that gives the meaning to that one.

The countryside is literally so beautiful that the beauty cannot (be) beheld [sic]. That is, the sunlight hitting that bit of the world at that bob of time is so intense that the viewing is indistinguishable in its ordinary pieces because of the sheer pleasure. The view is just a singular whole all at once, because the thick and luminous real is everywhere and dripping off of every thing. The abundance drowns out the particulars.

You’re squinting, but not because of pain.

There’s a very real dichotomy at play here. Position 0: humans depend upon AI. Position 1: AIs depend upon humans.

At first blush, it seems achingly obvious that position 1 is true, whilst position 0 is a false play by con artists.

Well, at first blush I agree! But first blushes are notorious for being famous last words (blushes).

You see, we always knew that the tool shapes the hand. That is, as we use computational (discrete) devices, we ourselves become more computational, discrete.

But what we did not anticipate is that the tool would fool others as the ACTUAL HAND. I am so fooled. Daily.

My friends. Does technique encompass being? Answer me this!

Once I began the “start from zero” routine at work, I could not stop. It meant I had to know what to do to get back to my ideal dev env every morning. It meant I had the choice to automate that, or to leave some bits (or all bits) manual. It surprised me how much I preferred manual, and taught me to recognize when things were actually tedious vs premature shortcuts. Clarity trumps convenience, but, you know, not always.

I have always cringed at the senior-junior distinction, especially because it is mostly espoused by those calling themselves senior, and that felt unnecessarily imperious.

Any senior in any workplace is senior because of their specific and narrow experience in their particular role, over a sufficient amount of dedicated time. So it felt wrong to me to allow such a bifurcation of human ability with a senior-junior framing.

The thing is, when some people employ the senior-junior language, they are implicitly referring to that very particular, unique, and narrow situation of the role-space they have found themselves in, and justifiably so.

We are all juniors in a much larger space than we are seniors. Does it irk that someone is a senior in the nest they have made? It did, for me, but not anymore. “I tilled this field 17 times; I know it”, is a statement not only of knowing a single field (as opposed to any other fields), but also about some way of tilling.

Without a universal standardization over behaviour, we’re all mostly junior mostly all of the time. Any claim of “senior”ness is therefore a claim of finding something cool in some narrow space. It’s worth listening to and extracting the value from such claims, if the practices therein are producing evidently worthy outcomes.

That said, “senior” is a very small boat in a very large sea. Better to be aware and humble, no matter the efficacy of your current practices in your current environment.

Not normally, no. Can you point to a divergence of the bitterness in the subsequent text?

What I find to be the normal pattern (by intuition) is that the condensed leading text belies the expansive following text. This is likely lazy (a shortcut) and I am open to correction at your effort. If a call to your effort (I apologize) is unpalatable then I concede.

Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”?

If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion.

For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds.

I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title.

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Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.

The inability to tell if a model is improving is, I think, a tell that the model has improved up to your level of programmatic (analytic, computational) capacity.

A lot of the information (blogs, tweelches, plosts) that I consume seems to be converging on the idea that we all depend on the models. However. It seems to me that the exact opposite is true. The models depend on us, and _desperately_ so.

There must have been stories, books, movies, made about this intellectual (and propositional, legal, factual) inversion.

The majority need the minority. Has always been the case, I now think. But what has newly developed is that the majority can take a dependency not on the minority, but on a select few companies who are abstracting and compressing the minority into latent spaces.

Well, if it works on step one, then why not step two? Where would different folks draw the line? My grandparents might continue on a while, whereas I would not. But if it also “works” on step two for me, should I take a third?

What counts as “works” is the important bit, I think.

Yes.

Useful - thank you. I will contact them.

epicfurious.com is blocked by my service provider. It’s a small, local, fiber company called mornington.

They do not say why in the returned html.

I do not approve of such blockage.

Nevertheless. Knowledge is knowledge. So I post for everyone’s sake.

I _think_ what you’ve said is “go shallow, not deep”. That is, don’t let the walk you make inside the latent space a long one. Twenty-five short and peppered steps, from de novo, is better than one long, protracted stew.

Is that accurate?

I think you and 7e are both right. Being able to iterate some N orders of magnitude quicker is a big deal. This doesn’t eliminate design and UX. Rather, it merges it with high iteration speed to produce a form of “play”.

“Play” is what produced at least two (likely more) generations of attentive (and therefore competent) programmers. The hype around LLMs is painful, yes, but attentive human minds will ultimately bust through it.