ignu

I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.

It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.

That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.

On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.

After a year I could no longer write for shit.

Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.

Now I don't even write near a computer.

also a very popular messaging platform for [redacted] enthusiasts

I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.

I'm pretty sure there'd be a double-digit drop in LLM use if Google hasn't made search worse every year for the last decade.

As someone who was getting information this way most of last year, I'm pretty sure I'll never want to again.

An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.

I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.

I'd gladly suffer the indignity of stepping on a few leaves if I didn't have to listen to an hour of blaring leaf-blower every Tuesday morning.

AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.

I've seen some prank calls (a YouTuber cloned Tucker Carlson's voice and called Alex Jones) but he just had a sound bank with a few pre-generated lines and it fell apart pretty quickly.

At least for now there's too much lag to do a real time conversation with a cloned voice.

Speech to Text > LLM Response > Generate Audio

If that time can shrink to subsecond, I think there'll be madness. (Specifically thinking of romance scammers)

I've tried giving it languages like Turbo Pascal or telling it to obscure frameworks like fp-ts and while sometimes it's not syntactically perfect, but I can guarntee it's not just scraping code snippets from somewhere.

That's very false in my experience, and I did 100% TDD for years (have a more nuanced approach currently in TypeScript/React)

As a programmer with a problem, you first instinct is to start at the solution.

TDD pulls you back, and you first have to write the api and decide how you verify it.

If you're doing it well, you make both of those things as simple as possible, first. Reduce dependencies and inputs, etc.

That's actually the most important part, an easily consumable api that's easy to verify, not the implementation, and TDD forces you to do it first.

Also, a pet peeve of mine is seeing a line or more of code that doesn't do anything. With TDD, such detritus is impossible as you can't write production code unless it's making a red test turn green.

jfc, a coinbase recruiter emailed me just six days ago.

I used to live on a semi-busy street.

About once an hour a motorcycle would drive by so loud it would set off multiple car alarms that would then blare for ten to fifteen minutes.

This might sound very annoying.

But after countless months of this your mortal coil just dissolves into an entity of pure hatred and you completely transcend the material plane.