It’s more that software books ruin your brain and make you incapable of enjoying good literature. Same for existentialism which you fled into out of despair from working in and reading about software. It is a hollow and empty profession that only breaks humans or turns them into monsters. Or not. Either way you should be worried if you can’t read fiction, it means you’ve lost the ability to put yourself in someone else’s mindset.

“We are no better than machines, I guess.”

Well, our minds aren’t but we have legs and arms which is cool. But maybe that will change too.

Stan Ulam has a great book discussing his worry about the change in research environments pre-wwII vs post-WWII. Before the war, they’d sit in cafes and draw in tables and just sit and think sometimes as a group. After they would meet in offices with blackboards and no life in the room or fun with direct funding telling them exactly what to study. I think his concern will be shown to be sound.

I wonder if LLMs can help bring that kind of exploratory culture back. Because this is not an exploratory culture.

I just talk to an LLM like it’s a person who is smart, meaning I expect it to be confidently wrong now and then but I don’t have to worry about hurting its feelings. They are remarkably similar to people, though others seems to not think that so maybe it is a case of some people finding them easier to work with compared to others. I wonder what drives that. Maybe it’s the difference between a person who thinks life unfolds before then vs the person who views life as a bundle, with each day a fold making up your experience and through this stack you discern the structure which is your life, which sure seems how these things work.

lol this thread is amazing. Hacker news is truly a place filled with confidently wrong smart people. Showed this to my wife, a barista in Seattle, and she asked me why I go to this stupid fucking site. I wasn’t able to give a good answer other than boredom.