Long story...

I have been using ChatGPT for a while, and moved to the Plus subscription for their GPT-4 model, which I must say, is quite good.

1. ChatGPT makes us very productive. Personally, in my early 40s, I feel my brain is back in 20s.

2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. [[EDIT: I may have implied a wrong meaning. To clarify - nobody's going yet because of ChatGPT. It is just raising the bar high and higher. What took me years to learn, this thing can do already and much more. And I cannot predict the financial future of OpenAI or the markets in general.]]

A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference is that I can start trusting a human to improve, but I cannot expect ChatGPT to do so. Not that it is incapable, but because it is restricted by OpenAI.

And I have gotten better at using it. Calling myself a prompt-engineer sounds weird.

With all the good, I am now experiencing the cons, stress and burnout:

1. Humans work 9-5 (or some schedule), but ChatGPT is available always and works instantly. Now, when I have some idea I want to try out - I start working on it immediately with the help of AI. Earlier I just used to put a note in the todo-list and stash it for the next day.

2. The outputs with ChatGPT are so fast, that my "review load" is too high. At times it feels like we are working for ChatGPT and not the other way around.

3. ChatGPT has the habit of throwing new knowledge back at you. Google does that too, but this feels 10x of Google. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Good thing is we learn a lot, bad thing is that if often slows down our decision making.

4. I tried to put a schedule to use it - but when everybody has access to this tech, I have a genuine fear of missing out.

5. I have zero doubt that AI is setting the bar high, and it is going to take away a ton of average-joe desk jobs. GPT-4 itself is quite capable and organisations are yet to embrace it.

And not the least, it makes me worry - what lies with the future models. I am not a layman when it comes to AI/ML - have worked with it until the past few years in the pre-GPT era.

Has anybody experienced these issues? And how do you deal with those?

* I could not resist asking ChatGPT the above - couple of strategies it told me were to "Seek Support from Others" and "Participating in discussions or groups focused on ethical AI". *

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37126182

Points: 163

# Comments: 192

I have worked on multiple strategies. - Strategies using technical indicators do work, but you have to reasonable. If you find these giving higher than expected returns, or too many consecutive wins - take the money. Stop live trading and continue dummy trading - eventually there is a point where you can start live trading again. The thresholds will be determined from backtests.

- Statistical strategies work for swing trading. However, these are very difficult to figure out. Need a lot of data (for backtesting). These work consistently over a longer period and might look loss making over a small period.

- Scalping within 5-10 minutes works pretty consistently, signals based on options data.

- Understand and realise the law of large numbers, and use that to your advantage.

- Give importance to understanding the concept of Time. There is a whole lot of weird and scammy pseudo-science around it. Therefore do not blindly rely on one theory.

For me something snapped one day after age 35. I was relatively successful, married and I suddenly lost interest in my work or any kind of work. Even retired for 6-9 months, only to come out extremely bored - pledging that I would never ever take a retirement. It took me 3 more years to understand what was happening - I felt that at 38 too, and ideally it was still too early to experience a mid life crisis.

Some tips based on my experience:

1. Take very good care of your health. Regularly exercise (including at least some resistance training) and mostly healthy food. Measure health parameters. 2. Rule out any medical illness and/or deficiencies. Get a full body checkup done (including a detailed blood/urine tests). Do not cut corners here, but if not recommended, you could skip tests involving radiation. 3. For a month or two - take less stress (don't overperform or even try to overperform) and find periods of emptiness. After some time fill in those times with some activity that you love to do - doesn't matter how illogical it sounds. Let your intuition guide you. Make notes weekly. 4. On the work side, try to get into a management role. My situation was a little different, I was not an employee.

I do not know whether I am out of the woods(at early 40s), or just got used to the new reality. But I do feel quite better and may have made significant progress - only time will tell.

Many years ago, one junior programmer asked me "How do you do it?". And I answered - "Trust your intuition". I realized later it was a "dumb" answer - but few years later I have realized the following (this may not be true for all 10xers):

I cannot remember a lot of things. Probably these memory issues are due to an undiagnosed ADD. But to compensate the memory issue, I have from an early age picked up the skill to see patterns, asking the right questions and attempting to understand things fundamentally (as much as needed to connect the dots). It exponentially increases the learning effort - but may be that extra effort gives me the intuition to solve/narrow down certain problems quickly. On top of that, I have tried to solve difficult problems just for fun - nobody had to ask me to do that. At times it is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I would become obsessed with solving that problem even if I had pending studies for exams next morning. All that added a plethora of experience/hours. If I find somebody solving a problem quickly when I am stuck (which in itself is a rare, because I tend seek help quite late), I typically ask questions on what they were thinking. May even dig into their mindset (to their discomfort) like a psychologist.

On the other hand, I am miserably just-average when I am not interested in certain work or do not understand its purpose.

If somebody feels like a 10x in their company, I advise them to move out to a team/company where they are back to 1x, and keep doing so until age catches up and slows them down.

Not really. It is part of the journey towards evolving efficient systems as a whole. If you go by the 80/20 principle about workplace/work (which is true in most cases) - will you fire away 70-80% of the staff as a manager/entrepreneur? or will you give 80% the privilege of not doing as much work or taking on responsibility as the 20%?

Learn to automate stuff at your job. It works at programming jobs too.

Prefer the workplace is a product or SaaS/product company. My experience with it shows that it has a lower cognitive load after the initial 6 months to 1 year of hard work. Yes, you have to put in extra effort early on to reap the benefits later on. This does not mean programming more, but understanding the product in depth and in domain.

On top of that prefer an established product which has sizeable management and team size. Things move slowly here.

Stay away from lead/architect/management roles - it would be unethical to take up any of those.

Prefer a development (programming) role. Over the years, I have realised that "time is elastic" with programming roles.

Keep away from consulting companies/consultant roles. Some of those pay well, but then you are not looking to earn more.

In ideal situation I would recommend leaving toxic places - but embrace and learn to manipulate workplaces that give more importance to "visibility" than "actual work".

And the last piece: All of the above should be temporary for few years - it will hurt your psyche the longer you keep doing it. Explore and change your earnings to something that will work for you long term.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25758764

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Fair access is not provided by the official website. When one clicks "Book" and then suddenly get an Internal Server Error in network logs (while UI shows in-progress icon) or gets logged out - where is Fair Access? If Railways gave 10 Rs for each such failure, they will go bankrupt within 2 hours. First-come-first-serve does not mean fair access when they can't fix their technical problems.

And this guy charged money only after the cost of the servers was high. To give a context the alleged amount between 2016 and 2020 he earned in 4 years is in the range of 27k-30kUSD. That is as per Railways. It is likely to be inflated. Pretty sure he was running into losses.

However I doubt he is totally innocent. Most developers would know this app would be illegal. Or may be he is just too naive - hard to say that since he is an IITian. The railways will probably find out each ticket booked, heavily penalize each such booking, add huge interest to that till date and make the total amount sound like a huge scam. Adventures with Indian bureaucracy will cost him big unless he manages to heavily PR himself as a victim.

EDIT: I know about email clients setup to backup data, but there are other reasons I do not like to use those - unless of course that is the only way to protect data