So obviously completely full of shit.

I have had two jobs in the past posting inside the department that 2 or 3 people had to waste their time interviewing for with zero chance just as a matter of policy. The manager had to interview x number of people in the name of fairness or something like that.

I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.

I love keeping a blog as my own private journal. I wouldn't want it public though because I can keep it as unstructured/messy as I want with it being private. Mostly a collection or random notes / thoughts / code that I wouldn't want a potential employer to get an impression of me from.

It has huge value to me. The value of reading someone else blog at this point is basically zero to me. Mostly throw away, surface level articles for branding and networking purposes but if that is the dance you are trying to learn then it makes sense.

Not 1984 but just standard 20th century type dangerous cult of personality with one person having way too much power.

From my experience I wouldn't even say LLMs are stupid. The LLM is a carrier and the intelligence is in the training data. Unfortunately, the training data is not going to get smarter.

If any of this had anything to do with reality then we should already have a programming specific model only trained on CS and math textbooks that is awesome. Of course, that doesn't work because the LLM is not abstracting the concepts how we normally think of in order to be stupid or intelligent.

It hardly shocking that next token prediction on math and CS textbooks is of limited use. You hardly have to think about it to see how flawed the whole idea is.

It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch.

I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".

It is like a hyper version of de Tocqueville now. No matter how poor someone is, they still don't feel that far from being rich and famous in America.

This creates enormous status anxiety coupled with the reality of student loans and inflation it is a really bad deal for young people's mental health.

I just looked on midjourney reddit to make sure I wasn't missing some new great model.

Instead what I notice is the small variations on the themes I have already seen a thousand times a year ago now. Midjourney is so limited in what it can actually produce.

I am really worried that all this is much closer to a parlor trick than AGI. "simple trick or demonstration that is used especially to entertain or amuse guests"

It all feels more and more like that to me than any kind of progress towards general intelligence.

Not that arXiv doesn't contain bullshit also but outside of that, in English at least, the internet has completely failed.

The biggest thing to me is to not blow the small handful of opportunities that randomly present themselves. In this context, there is a good chance those won't be in agents or robotics.

At 50, I am happy with my life but I have blown almost all my opportunities. I have grinded out a decent life but it is pretty minimized vs what could have been.

I was offered a nice career at 21 in the financial markets from my part time job while going to college for CS so turned it down. CS was delusion with my math skills and I dropped out. Ended up spending a decade grinding to get into the financial markets after college.

Before CS I thought I would get a PhD in psychology. A real Freudian fan boy professor made me abandon that. I thought Freud was so absurd on first encounter. At this point I have read almost all of Freud's work on my own. I should have stuck with the original plan in psychology.

On the other hand, maybe the path I have traveled is the optimal path because at 50 I am not done. I still have huge dreams to make this all be the right path. The bar is not that high.

It is all a relative valuation.

If you look up business analyst type jobs on JP Morgan website they are still hiring a ton right now.

What you actually notice is how many are being outsourced to other countries outside the US.

I think the main process at work is 1% actual AI automation and a huge amount of return to the office in the US while offshoring the remote work under the cover of "AI".

It is why I like a low end Samsung android. It is borderline disposable and I would never view it as more than temporary storage. Works until it breaks or I lose it then start over. In the meantime, if something is that important it mounts easy in linux and I copy over what I want to save.

I knew the first cigarette I smoked was a cancer causing terrible idea.

The reason I did was because I was young and most other people I knew were doing the same thing. Same with social media.

The links don't even work anymore on CMU.

Common Music might still work but I can't imagine bothering with Nyquist. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/clm/

There is just not much reason to not use SuperCollider or Csound instead of these though.

Edit: I did just find Nyquist has been rolled into Audacity scripting that sounds pretty cool https://audionyq.com/

Especially to put what it is actually called in parenthesis as if everyone calls subtractive synthesis "Eastcoast".

This is certainly something very specific to the path you took with synths.

Someone would call the cops for the amount of noise now before the party even started.

Then factor in fentanyl.

Maybe most of all though, in the mid 90s electronic music was a new thing in the US.

The first rave I went to , I really didn't even know what I was going to. The reason I stopped going was the novelty had completely worn off. Amazing times but the falloff was rather steep.