As a roboticist / educator with dyscalculia/neurodivergence from Pennsylvania I really identify with this piece lol. Maybe there's something in the water out here, I dunno.
To this day I still have to do basic arithmetic on my hands, and I'm very self conscious about being in a field where there are people who can just do these calculations in their head. "How do have trouble with this, aren't you a computer genius?" is something I've heard many times. I like computers because they do the calculations for me! To a large degree, most of my life I've felt like an imposter for this reason, believing that I'm not smart but I just try hard. It wasn't until I got older that I realized there's not much of a difference between the two.
I didn't get the dyscalculia diagnosis until I went for ADHD testing at 36. I don't know if / how these things are linked. I don't think my dyscalculia or ADHD or my autism or neurodivergence are superpowers at all -- I view them as limitations. It's great that Tom feels empowered and that makes me happy for him, but at the same time if you have these disabilities you shouldn't feel bad if in fact you find them limiting and not a "superpower". Being ND is very difficult at times, so if you're having a hard time with it that's not something to feel bad about.
Yes, indeed it does. I didn't feel this way until I worked for a YC-backed startup tho. I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
> I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
Fully agree. I also feel like a lot of companies do not need to be on the stock market, especially if they're reasonably profitable, feels like the stock market is where you go to let go of more of your company just to get rid of the VCs whom you owe a lot of money to.
I remember when I was learning about entrepreneurship in college I was baffled by their insistence of an “exit strategy”. The idea just seemed so foreign to me. See I naively thought the point of starting a business was to do the business, not to not do it and sit next to a pile of money instead. Silly me.
I like the new corollary to that rule, which is that if the AI is the best coder in the room and writes code too clever for itself, then no one including the AI can debug the code. Then where does that leave you?
i love it. just a moment of thought makes clear that LLMs are not capable to debug their own code because if they were they would be able to write better code. the LLM code doesn't even need to be clever.
I dunno it seems to me that whenever the Democrats are in office the deficits start to go down; and whenever there is a Republican in office they tend to go up. That's been the pattern my whole life so far.
Like, you say the two sides are the same because one wants to spend endless money on wars and the other wants to spend endless money on social programs, but we only ever spend endless money on wars. There's no spending comparable to war on poverty / illiteracy / sickness / homelessness.
Same observation. I’m beginning to think that it’s not about “spending” like if money was a finite resource. It’s really about the outcome of the policy: more power for elites and more access to energy and resources; vs more power and independence for regular people (and thus less for elites relatively speaking). From a “spending” perspective you could really do both and in the real economy they don’t even compete for the same resources.
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
Because "Yeah, fair pushback" is AI smell. Either everything this person does is passed through an AI from code to blogs to even their HN comments and submissions; or they use AI so much they're starting to talk like it colloquially. Either way no one has time for that.
Really hard to tell. Because that used to be a common phrase that real people would use.
So now I have to change my own language in order to not appear like I'm an AI? We are getting in a weird place where Humans have to act/sound increasingly 'odd', to appear not 'perfect' like an AI.
It's really not hard to tell. It's the "How do you do fellow kids" of AI-isms. The presence of "fair pushback" and a single em dash reads as 99% AI generated as far as I am concerned.
Yes, if you don't want to sound like you're cargo culting AI, you do have to change the way you talk because people aren't going to care otherwise. At the very least just because it's boring. That's always been the nature of slang and lingo.
Or, with all of the AI slop, you think you are detecting all AI. And don't realize the stuff that is AI and not noticed. There is a wide variety of tools now, with different degrees of output quality.
I'm fine with work that uses AI. I use AI every day. I'm not fine with AI slop and it's very easy to tell what is slop and what's not, the same way it's easy to distinguish a selfie from a museum quality photograph. Are some selfies works of art? Few and far between, so you'd be forgiven if you dismiss all selfie-looking photographs as not worth your time.
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.
reply