I've had some (anecdotal) success reframing how I think about my prompts and the context I give the LLM. Once I started thinking about it as reducing the probability space of output through priming via context+prompting I feel like my intuition for it has built up. It also becomes a good way to inject the "theory" of the program in a re-usable way.
It still takes a lot of thought and effort up front to put that together and I'm not quite sure where the breakover line between easier to do-it-myself and hand-off-to-llm is.
I commend your effort in eating the cat turd of trying to provide them a different perspective into life. Their resistance to even considering that you’re not saying something insane + inappropriate is a mark on them, not you.
For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.
Someone (throwtato@protonmail) sent me a death threat from my hacker news email alias over this thread - ridiculous, but not surprising given the left wing extremist violence. The most hostility I've see on HN is from trans leftist activists.
Sustainability and efficiency, sure - you're definitely right on that. I'm going to take a bit of a devil's advocate role here though:
There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shifting in the geographic region (water, food, electricity generation) that has to occur in the surrounding area which negatively impacts not only the city but the environments it pulls those resources out of.
Sprawl leaves room to interweave humans with the rest of the natural world in a way in which densely packed cities do not. It leaves room for trees to grow, critters to roam, rain water to be reclaimed into aquifers. It also spreads the strain of resource extraction and reduces the impact from hot spots at the most granular level.
Car focussed development destroys far more land (e.g. parking) than similar size developments that enable walking/cycling/public transport.
Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.
That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.
I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.
The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
I’m with you. Sometimes it really just feels like we’re just tacking on the cognitive load of managing the drunk senior in addition to the problem of hand instead of just dealing with the problem at hand.
A hundred times more time is spent reading a given piece of code, than it took writing it, in the lifetime of that program.
OK I made up the statistic, but the core idea is true, and it's something that is rarely considered in this debate. At least with code you wrote, you can probably recognize it later when you need to maintain it or just figure out what it does.
In the olden days I read the code I wrote probably 2-3 times while in the process of reading it, and then almost always once in full just before submitting it.
This type of comment betrays a lack of understanding of Iran’s desire to fight Israel to the last Palestinian. They’re both victims of Iran acting in ways that most of this thread doesn’t really seem to understand but the person you’re responding to does.
I'll give you my perspective having gone through something similar. I was in a pretty similar pit, hit rock bottom, and only then did every high achiever in my life open up to me that taking a sabbatical was the best thing they had done for themselves.
Your original comment especially about not enjoying things, not knowing what your hobbies are, etc, are indicating that you've just lost yourself a little bit. I was in very much the same place. It takes some time away from what occupies most of your thoughts/attention (work) to re-learn who you were and who you are now.
For me, I took 3 months away from work. For the first 2-3 weeks I basically did "nothing." And it was only after that initial period did I start to remember things I enjoyed to do and felt motivation to go do them. After that, the remainder of my sabbatical was spent finding every minute I could spend with friends and family that I could.
I came out of that sabbatical with a, still fuzzy but a bit clearer, understanding of what I wanted but I was still the same ambitious person I was before. Chances are, you would still be too. If you're going to do it, think of it less like a 3 month break and instead as giving yourself 3 months of room to think and experience and re-introduce yourself to yourself.
As an aside - if you're feeling and thinking these things, your partner likely notices too. I have no idea what your relationship is like but can guarantee that all this definitely has an affect on y'all and you won't see what it truly is without said room to think and contemplate.
Pretty much. We’re in the healthcare space and most of our customers are large hospital systems. Anything except “SOC2 compliant, no exceptions on report” will take an already long deal cycle (4-18 months) and double or triple it.
If you’re a startup it also means that your core people are now sitting in multiple cycles of IT review with their IT staff filling out spreadsheet after spreadsheet of “Do you encrypt data in transit?”
Feel free to watch the video evidence: https://www.hamas-massacre.net/.