Imagine being a high-ranking NYT exec, watching a computer hellbrain churn for a few minutes and spit out a five letter word.

“See? We can help!”

As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.

Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a “here’s how to approach a problem, here’s how to get the data you need, here’s how to keep track of it all, here’s how to articulate your thoughts, here’s how to ask useful questions…” sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you’ll never know everything.

Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or – in my case – the teacher’s textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they’re out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.

100%

Yeah I’d argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.

Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says “look how creative and artistic I am.” Is he? I’d argue he isn’t. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.

He’s real good.

Shout-out to software engineers having the lowest use outside of work. I have a coding chatbot that work wants me to use. Even when I have it set up right with only the correct tabs open in my IDE it just hallucinates stuff that looks ok but doesn’t actually work.

I mostly just ask it if it poops. One time I got it to admit that its garbage collection routine could be roughly compared to the act of pooping and it was the best day ever.

I don’t think introducing the computer science equivalent of Muzak is going to do any favors for the games industry.

Nah it’s just extra protein.

Next steps: remove roof, re-submit as “Red convertible (compact).”

This is the hardest thing to un-train with new employees: be honest about your mistakes. I will not get mad about a mistake. Everyone makes them. The best thing to do is call it out so we can move to fix it. If you keep making the same mistake, maybe we have a talk about your process to see if there are any blind spots.

So many people try to hide their mistakes or reframe them as successes and please do not do that. Own it, see if you can learn anything from it, and let everyone know so we can help you fix it.

Yeah. Also, superficially good looking people can still be sketchy weirdos. Vibe, context, and prior relationship are much more important than looks. Of course, some people can’t get their head around this and start blaming literally anything else: their height, their bone structure, a worldwide conspiracy against them. It’s crazy.

I became a dad late (around middle age) and was telling dad jokes way before that. My theory is it’s less about becoming a father and more about getting older and just wanting to annoy people for my own amusement.

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with

This is pretty coherent for an ambien post. I had a friend that used to hang out on groupchat after he took an ambien and at a certain point he’d just start sending random strings of text, but really emphatically.

It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”

So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.

The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.