https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AST/AST_1957_...

For me, it doesn't matter much. I've blacked out the windows in my bedroom because any light while I sleep isn't good, and morning sunlight triggers migraines, which isn't a great way to start the day. Since I'm on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, I will miss a lot of summer daylight.

Seriously, I find I need to slow down the rate of change. I don't move forward until I understand the change proposed and have updated the docs. At the same time, I find that keeping up with the LLM/agent is exhausting. 3 hours with an LLM leaves me as tired as 6 hours with a keyboard had previously. I find that coding when tired or fuzzy yields code that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Sadly, once it's been written and debugged, the temporary fix becomes permanent.

If you say, “We should have invested more,” I point you to the 40% of current retirees that were not in a position to invest because their jobs didn't pay them enough above the cost of existing. And then there are any number of events, such as age discrimination, common medical issues, divorce, and bankruptcy, that destroy retirement plans.

From what I can tell, it's not possible for the vast majority of the population to be able to save for a 20 plus year retirement.

One of the things that keep people from saving are the activities driven by their investing in the stock market. To increase returns, "Activist investors" and private equity drive companies to shed jobs. You shed a job, you destroy a person's ability to save for retirement, which makes them more dependent on the social contract of Social Security and Medicare.

Cutting benefits will only cause suffering. The cost will fall on society in other ways in terms of elderly homeless people filling the ERs, begging in the streets, or committing suicide. Is it time for a "Modest Proposal II"?

For example, borrow, spend, die is effectively a financial instrument to cash conversion.

Inheritance: Get rid of the inheritance taxes and treat it as cash for tax purposes and have the estate pay the tax.

Make stock buybacks illegal.

I can see there would be an advantage to storing the income averaging part of the tax code so that if someone like us mortals gets a big windfall (inheritance, IPO grant), you can spread the income out over time.

My 92-year-old mom has been the same way. Until one of her daughters moved in, she lived by herself in her house and garden. Just being able to go outside and experience the green space she planned and planted has kept her alive and healthy. If she were in some senior living place, she'd be dead by now. She would have withdrawn into her room and waited for her time.

Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.

I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.

---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly

Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).

Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.

I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.

[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]

A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.

Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.

The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.

So, if not Grammarly, what?

However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.

Taking that concept to programming, I wouldn't start with a desktop or a web app. I would start with a little embedded system like an ESP32 or one of the small Raspberry Pi controllers (2350). I've come to this opinion because of the people I've mentored as they improved their code-writing skills. The ones who did best were the ones who started with embedded systems.

I believe you have to get down and dirty with the machine to understand the code and what it's doing. If you're making a motor controller work, you can use an LLM to generate code using a library or some cut-and-paste MicroPython code. But when it doesn't work, you have to break out the cheapy mini scope you got from Amazon and look at the waveforms.

Seriously, get your hands dirty at the controller level; understand queues as driven by hardware, not hidden in a library. Or, even simpler: you need to understand why the blinking lights are blinking, but not the way you thought they would.

If I were writing a course on programming, I would give students deliberately and increasingly wrong cut-and-paste code and leave the solution as an exercise to the reader.

As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.