I did resort to "self-diagnosis" once, though: for R-CPD (no-burp syndrome). Most doctors simply don't know this condition exists. I brought it up with my GP (whose referral I needed to see a specialist in Ontario), prepared for some pushback, but was pleasantly surprised that he did some brief research and then helped me forward.

Then again, I may have been lucky. I still hear stories of doctors who are less than cooperative when patients bring them "self-diagnoses", even for something as open-and-shut as R-CPD. But if most of those "diagnoses" are BS, then I can empathize with the docs, too.

It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)

They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)

Who's in control? Everyone is, to some extent. And no one is: when you're hungry for food, are "you" in control of that? You can consciously repress your impulses to go eat something, but your mind didn't create those impulses.

Human societies develop impulses and minds of their own, emerging (weakly) from the impulses and minds that comprise them, and they make decisions in mysterious ways.

Of course, it sure is nice when we can come up with a compelling story for the motivations behind something. Easier said than done…

> Introduce and enforce structs for passing context and input shapes around. So as to stop fighting with NULLs, lack of keys in maps and other maddening cases that inflate your coding lines for no other reason than programming languages not having higher-order constructs on well-researched and mostly resolved computer science problems

Amen to that.

Communication skills, teamwork skills...

How to cook better, maintain relationships better, keep a tidier space...

Not perfect! But time well spent.

One could learn this skill in their 20s or beyond, but there's an opportunity cost – why not something else that would actually improve work performance, or that you enjoy doing?

I still wish I'd been taught in elementary school, though, because it would've been really useful as a student. Some of our teachers discreetly handed out practice booklets to students who'd "expressed interest" (their parents taught them the basics and teacher noticed); most of us were not so lucky.

By analogy, consider that many have referred to classical, deterministic computing as some kind of "thinking" for the last half century+. Does this stop being kosher when the computer has an uncanny propensity for human language? Perhaps, but the computer is still clearly chewing through problems that would have required a lot of human thinking (e.g., arithmetic) in ages past.

I haven't seen any genuine proposals for words to replace the human mind analogues, let alone proposals that the anglosphere would plausibly adopt en masse.

I don't have empirical evidence for this claim, but best I can tell, security patches are the principal source of observed bugs in software of a certain vintage, because they cause churn. (Just think of Windows updates that break drivers.)

It constantly takes whatever is currently visible in your editor to feed its context. If you get a nonsense/hallucinated suggestion, you can accept it, get it to read the error message from LSP diagnostics, undo, and then it'll correct itself next time. Or if you need to make changes in 5 places, and the next 4 changes are easy to guess after seeing the first one, it'll guess the next 4 for you.

I still use standard IDE features extensively. The intelligent autocomplete is just another tool to reduce typing when the next change is easy to guess.

Oh, and I turn it off when I'm writing prose or need to actually think deeply. Then it really does hurt more then help.

(Worth noting: I currently work primarily in Go, which is a language that's ridiculously verbose and has lots of repetitive patterns. YMMV for more expressive languages.)

> To avoid this, you will probably need to intentionally write in a very different style than you usually do (or to have AIs rewrite all your prose for you, but, ugh, that’s not a world I look forward to living in).

I agree. The amount of vague and cliche'd AI writing I read on the daily is already exhausting enough.

It would be interesting if you could train a model to sprinkle random red herrings throughout your text in a minimally disruptive way. But I fear you might have to stretch the definition of "minimally disruptive" to make it robust against detection.