sweetheart

Came here to share the same general idea about using this as an opportunity to recognize when we've based our sense of self-worth on something external, and therefore out of our control and unstable. Which I also hope wouldn't come across as patronizing, though I can see how popping into the comments to say "I hear you're sad, but it's actually because you've failed at understanding yourself!" is far from seeming helpful lol. But the author uses a lot of language that directly signals this.

I'm navigating the same feelings as the author, though maybe to a lesser degree partially because I had to kind of reckon with this last year due to being laid off and burnt out. The thing that's helped the most by FAR is challenging myself to reframe my sense of self around things that being a Software Engineer was a mere _manifestation_ of, like being curious, creative, going deep on technical problems, trying to optimize things, etc. There are infinite ways to embody those tenets, and it helps to make the changes to our industry feel less existential without requiring me to feel like a different person, someone without a place.

maybe it will be an answer that entices them to understand more :)

Lean _is_ code. FLT cannot be proven by exhaustion because it's domain is an infinite set: the natural numbers above 2.

It really is, it's fascinating.

This has recently become a pretty pressing issue for me, as it's starting to severely hinder my ability to be productive with the models. It's hard to tell if its getting worse with every model release, specific to Anthropic's models, a reflection of my ADHD, all/none of the above, but holy shit do I get aggravated when I'm forced to parse the most unintelligible, jargon-dense bullshit explanations in whatever the model output is. And then I feel silly getting genuinely tilted by the model's inability to just... explain something semi-normally, without it requiring me to berate it into simplicity.

For some discrete skills I use, I include a final step on the the output that runs through 1+ subagents to de-slop the text and to actually simplify it, but so far nothing has worked as well I've hoped. Considering hopping off Anthropic's models to try out others to see if they're less egregious.

It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.

I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.

Okay!

I think it’s possible.

They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.

But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).

I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.

What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.

Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.

So, so much of human history is just us trying and failing to find reasons we're unique, as if uniqueness is somehow the source of value, meaning, or joy in life. We really seem to react strongly against the widening of our consideration for the experience of non-human life (or human life, if it looks just a little different).

I'm pleasantly surprised to see this! Last year a few people I know in person, and a podcast I enjoy, talked about or to Ed Zitron and I felt like I was going crazy because so, so much of what he argued was either woefully outdated, or just a fallacy. It's also annoying because it'd be such an interesting topic to explore rigorously and without motive. As mentioned in the article, those analyses _can_ be found. But man, Ed Zitron just seems loud and silly.

yeah