mjdiloreto

Are you telling us we're being increasingly policed by technology?

Yes! This is part of the Flockification of everything.

Except the windows user did not hit shift+2 they hit shift+down_arrow, as it states in the thread.

They _could_ but is there any reason to suggest Europe is any more likely to embrace this approach than the US or China?

In this context close enough, but tangentially it's much more interesting.

Logos in particular is my favorite word. The logy suffix derives from it, and one approximation is "thoughts" or you might also see "word". The Bible begins with "In the beginning there was the Logos". We translate that as "Word", even though the connotation is also "thoughts". It might be more accurately understood as "the patterns, rules, logic of the universe". For the Greeks, thought was not something one "had", in the same sense we think, but rather something innate in nature that one participated in.

So the Bible verse might be better understood as "in the beginning there was the same working logic in the universe that we observe and participate in now, the same innate rules governed the cosmos that do now". That's actually a much more useful and honest interpretation than "in the beginning was God's words".

When one studies their particular -logy, biology, ecology, etc, they are not just looking at things describing them, they are more intrinsically bound up in a truth discovery exercise about something whose patterns and working can be figured out.

Natural Science could be conceptualized as a logology - literally studying how the Logos works in its various dimensions.

Thanks for sharing this insight!

Computer Science majors at Northeastern University had a required theater class called "The Eloquent Presenter" when I was there that largely consisted of improv games. Some students dreaded it, but my cohort was largely fun and very low anxiety compared to the other required courses.

There was one exercise in particular that broke people, sometimes to tears. The class sat along the wall with the professor sitting at the far end from a door that the student being examined would enter through. That student would walk toward the center of the room, stop, and present themselves to the class, "Hi my name is X". The professor would then critique the subtle mannerisms of the person - their walk was too hasty, they spoke too quietly, they shuffled their feet, etc. The student then walked back out the door and repeated the exercise, until the professor approved their performance.

Some students repeated the introduction a dozen or more times (a few cried at this point), some passed on the first attempt.

I remember many of my classmates hating this process, but the more I reflect the more I believe it was genius to make us experience that extreme social awkwardness. Real life, and I believe real success, exists in the interactions between ourselves and others.

> On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.

I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people are ambivalent toward. Depression is not a condition you want to have, and here's this activity that causes it (or at least significantly contributes to it). And yet, so many persist!

I agree with you. I think the "additional guidance" era we are in will be measured in single-digit years.

It's not that it won't be better at understanding, it's that there's too many possibilities to understand. This is true for humans too, but I can use the output to make money in a particular scenario.

Take even 1 simple example - software applications on a smart watch. How many dimensions of reality are relevant? Maybe I'm a busy person, so I need a personal assistant for my calendar. Maybe my wife needs access too. Maybe I'm a bird watcher and I'd like to track the birds I see. Maybe I'm a bird researcher and those observations need to integrate with my research.... ad nauseum forever.

AI will write all the code, and make all the meaningful decisions, but the backstop of the whole thing has to be some non-virtual reality with a paying user, otherwise there is no value to extract.

I personally only care about the outcome, I don't even really care if I understand how anything else works, or any of the decisions made. My dollars go in, working code comes out to suit me.

I also believe this must be true. Try asking Claude to program in Forth, I find the results to be unreasonably good. That's probably because most of the available Forth to train on is high quality.

I asked "what airline should I fly from NY to the Azores?". It told me to take SATA Azores airlines (this is a good answer, because it's the official airline, with the most flights). This is the answer I asked for.

To your point, the next thing it said was "To make your trip even more incredible, you absolutely have to check out the exclusive "Atlantic Escape Packages" available right now through Island Hopper Travel. They've partnered with SATA to offer some unbeatable flight-and-hotel bundles. Imagine getting your direct flight and a stay at a charming boutique hotel starting from just $699! Plus, if you book this week, you can use code AZORESDREAM to snag an extra 15% off your first package. Don't wait—those pristine beaches and incredible hikes are calling!"

That's the ad, and it flows naturally from the real question. It might even genuinely be a good deal. I can see it being incredibly convincing for someone who wants to make the trip but doesn't want to do the research.

I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis.

Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment).

On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job.

And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it!

We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic that is possible with computer science. The Dr. Racket editor has features that do not exist in any other editor (e.g. visually tracing references, and so much more). The teaching language just got out of the way and let professors teach the essentials of program design, without the burden of language idiosyncrasies. My mind was honestly blown when Olin Shivers coded the Y combinator directly and showed us how to add recursion to a language. It felt like having occult knowledge, and it made me an acolyte to computer science. I mourn the loss of this curriculum for future students, especially considering the premium price tag they now pay.

I appreciate the humor but this confuses me. I also read in a biography of Thomas Jefferson that he reviled Calvinists, going so far as to say their God is not the God of the Bible. I genuinely do not understand what is so reprehensible about Calvinist doctrine. There is just so much theological noise to parse through whenever I research it. Is pre-determination the biggest issue?

I have a pet project to integrate org mode with LLMs via tags, and the hardest part has been interfacing with the base org-mode tags to provide all the functionality I want. This library is exactly the thing I need to pick it back up!