santadays

I agree. I am just reminiscing on what came before StackOverflow. How it changed things, what it's intents were and what it actually became. We had alot of people doing their own thing, on their own blogs, creating a community of sorts. But there was a downside that it was incomplete, everyone presented their information in whatever format they wanted, etc, etc. StackOverflow definite did it's job in making this all more efficient in getting the question you were asking answered. But that seems to have come at a cost, it was a kind of harsh environment to participate in.

But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.

I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.

I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.

The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.

There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.

I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.

Was just wondering if I can quit my job and live off of llm agent managing a fleet of vending machines for me. Curious is anyone here doing this? What's life like? How do you find meaning and purpose?

I genuinely don’t know why people feel so certain about things like this. It’s like they mix up salience with reality.

I mean what can a person really be certain of, an experience is happening. I might be wrong about everything or confused. But I know I am having an experience. Do I know other people are? No. I assume they are.

Ask an llm what is truth that it is most certain is true. It will answer something similar. Do I believe it is conscious, no. But I also believe “I” exist, which is weird because where is the boundary between “I” and everything else.

So ok, we create meaning, not truth. Maybe just accept that.

I agree energetically that this is how it turned out.

However, the prosecution did bring charges for both against Holmes, harm caused to patients by Theranos, and the defauding of investors. She was only convicted of defauding investors, by a jury of her peers.

Sunny Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients and Theranos did settle a class-action lawsuit against them.

I do believe the publicity around Holmes in part was about distancing the investors (the list you provided) from any kind of responsibility or PR blowback.

Anyway, the game is rigged, I just think it's important to see how it is rigged. I don't like to shed doubt on jury decisions, it really is the best thing we have. Prosecution motivation can be swayed, defense can be under/over funded, but a jury of your peers, while imperfect, really is the best way to make these decisions.

I also don't know what legally an investor can be held accountable for.

Yea, there are good ones out there. I had a horrible experience with unnecessary work done because I didn't know any better, drilled too deep, root canal, then installed a crown that cracked. Told me everything had to be filled.

Next dentist basically just said I need regular cleanings, or to learn to floss better. I've been going to him for 10 years now. Recommended lots of people to him.

Another signal is, how nice is their office? Is it a little converted bungalow with drop ceilings? Or a big modern monstrosity with floor ceiling windows.

I've also had experience bringing a friend to Mexico to get work done, which worked out well. Ended up saving a bunch of money, got the work done that day.

And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.

My kids and their friends say “search it up”. I have no idea if that’s representative of the tween/teen population. But google as a verb will likely die on its own. It’s been a while since I’ve xeroxed anything.

Doesn't the fact that it's general purpose warrant a new term? It's partly that it doesn't need to be trained, but it's also able to play games based on game state, I'd imagine it would be hard to train a classifier to do something like this because you'd need to represent a good distribution of all the states. The general purpose llm world understanding underneath it allows for this.

I've used it to do web research where it follows the most appropriate links, decides what to record in state, etc. I struggle to see how you could implement something with a classifier. That said, I have no idea how deep the technology is and it might be replaced with open source pretty quickly since its drafting of the frontier models and the open source models seem almost as good.

I like the term decision model and I think it's warranted.

There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.

The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?

I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.

Whats going to happen when we have misanthropic model?

I read it as the liberal elite hate young men... so damaging them is a good thing.