To beat the enemy we must become him!

Not to worry, we will cover the expense.

The feeling of constant acceleration is valid. It will only get more intense in the coming years, so consider this your practice round.

In spite of the marginal results a lot of current LLMs can deliver, they are making a difference in some areas of work. I’m a data engineer and working with an agent over the last few months has been a revelation. You have to wrangle it just so, but with an adequate context well-defined, you can plow through months of tedious due-diligence and fine-tuning in days.

I wouldn’t trust it for medical advice… yet… but the time will come when it stops being “ai” and becomes like autofocus or voice transcription or shopping cart suggestions, just another tool. Something else will take on that mantle, and be a different, even more disconcerting mixed bag.

There was a book that came out about 20 years ago by Ray Kurzweil, named The Singularity is Near that discussed this phenomenon in detail, and so far has been prophetic. It will help you understand what’s happening and what’s coming next.

Welcome. I too disagreed with the wrong people on Reddit and can no longer participate there.

Yeah presently Lemmy is not Reddit-scale. But, it also is not Reddit-moderated, or Reddit-algorithmed. I find I can sign into Lemmy, do a bit of scrolling and commentary to scratch my itch, and get on with my day. No dynamic selection designed to retain my engagement through emotional manipulation, a far lower population of malicious bots and actors, and generally more thoughtful discussion.

Quality beats quantity. Federated social breaks the toxic monoculture. Distributed media like this is able to support a broader diversity of people. In the end, this is the future.

That darn constitution, keeps getting in the way of people exercising their freedom to hurt others who make them feel uncomfortable.

Homeboy might be more credible without that fucked-up haircut. Seriously, are you that disconnected from the world of normal people that you can look in the mirror with that ‘do, consider it critically, and say, “yeah, that’s just what I’m going for"

There are some things you need a shared workspace for. Most of what we do in the US, having converted largely to an email-and-spreadsheets-based economy, does not.

My full-flavor, everyday workspace requires a comfortable chair, decent internet, and intermittent access to elecricity. It fits in a backpack. All of my coworkers are similarly equipped. Our 40-person startup has a minuscule office that we couldn’t begin to fit everybody in. We are making lots of money.

At least you got the tender version.

WHERE do I find that gigantic USB delete key?

I feel like, having read your comment, I should stop feeling so grumpy about Russia fucking with us. We can’t get thru this late-stage capitalist nonsense fast enough.

Kids are little disease vectors that drain your life-force and murder your dreams.

If you enjoy being broke, fat, tired, and boring, you should totally have kids. Come on, do it! Your friends and family just assume you’ll squeeze out one or two, you don’t want to disappoint them , do you?

Just install Amphetamine on your Mac, duh

Nick Bostrom takes himself waaaaaaaayyy too seriously.

I’m only aware of a lot of what I find distressing because of my superpowers. I can know what’s happening everywhere in the world within minutes of it happening. Somebody I will never, ever meet in person can say something mean about me and put a shadow on my mood, if I choose to pay attention to it.

My day-to-day is idyllic. Modest, urban, a bit ecclectic… but comfy, by American standards. Food, shelter, medicine, recreation, community, art, adventure, mobility, and friendship are all in adequate supply. I’m employed and paid fairly. Accepted by friends and family, valued by my colleagues. If my sphere of awareness and sphere of routine travel were the same, I would think myself a prince.

But my sphere of awareness is vast. So, I know my comfort is a byproduct of privilege, which is withheld from millions of other deserving people because… reasons. I know there are other parts of the world where logic and justice and tolerance are in widespread, societally upheld ascendance, and that those places are far, far away from where I live.

Immediately outside the personal bubble I labor to maintain, there’s pain, violence, fear, hunger, and hatred. One misstep on my part and I could find myself there as well. I know that fear is wielded as a tool by people who live in fortresses made of money, by people who claim to represent the ideals of my nation, but only care that they are the winner and everybody else is the loser.

So yes, there are many nagging feelings. I wish my comfort was more than the byproduct of somebody powerful wanting something from me. Much angst, as I sit in my comfortable chair with my expensive technology, in my lovely house on a gorgeous spring day. I wish I was stupider, less aware, less experienced in the motivations of horrible people.

Scroll through your typical node_modules directory without learning a little something about software bloat. Yikes.

It’s quite a lot, what we expect from our technology now. But we made it this way because the marketplace has deemed there must always be a winner and a loser, so it’s a never ending game of accelerationist oneupmanship.

The market pressures the competitors, the competitors pressure the engineers, the engineers pressure each other to deliver faster and faster. Sometimes they’re backed into a corner and have to focus on more speed and efficiency, which is shortly thereafter consumed by frameworks, languages, and operating systems that are also competing for adopters, and thus supply stuff like JIT compilers and UI frameworks.

Even before we were plunged into the hellscape of vibe coding, you could knock an app together with a kit of parts using a pinch of glue code, having no clue what’s happening underneath the gui. Who cares? My Mac at idle is running hundreds of processes, it can take it. Until of course it can’t.

Back in olden times, a piece of software was painstakingly hand-built in assembler and C over a course of many months. But ain’t nobody got time for that when your manager can shit out an app with Claude in an afternoon.

Narrow down your inputs. Isolate until you feel calm. Yes, this by itself is very difficult and could take a while.

but, if you manage it, begin reintroducing stimuli one at a time and monitor your inner state. Sit with it for a while and see if that experience contributes to a level of unease. Record your impressions. Repeat.

Maybe its too on the nose to say so on Lemmy, but fuck Reddit right in the earhole. Their pearl-clutching, risk-averse, pro-corporate moderation-bot and tattle-tale system was the last straw.

At my local zoo, there are two pandas named Hentai and Bukkake. I keep my distance when visiting. Mostly.

FEAR! FEAR THE DRIZZLY SHITS! OOOOGA BOOGA BOOOOOGA

So, business as usual, then?