Swimming! I started going 2x a week. I took lessons as a kid but hated it due to a fear of water after a traumatic experience in the deep-end. I don't have that fear anymore and I really enjoy it now. I can tread water! And I can float! The mechanics of swimming and floating make a lot of sense to me now. Now I'm swimming laps to find a technique that lets me swim the longest for the least amount of energy. Mostly I copy the techniques of older folks who are also swimming laps in the lanes next to me. lol.
I figure if the game I'm working on doesn't pan out then I'll go become a sailor or something. I think thats what I'm training for, potential career change.
I swim a great deal, but I don't really like having to constantly rotate my head back and forth because I have the ear canal equivalent of Freeza so I picked up a front snorkel. Fair warning: it makes a continuous overhand style into a brutal cardio exercise partially because your focused on purely swimming and also because your "air intake" is smaller.
I learned this year too! Didn’t know how to swim at all and went to the pool almost every other day and did exercises from the book and Udemy course called total immersion swimming and was able to finish a triathlon this year, (very slowly but it was the most relaxing part). Hope it works out!
What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago.
I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again.
Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare.
Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards
to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability.
OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!
About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.
Yup! I find Elixir makes it really intuitive to know when to represent a collection as a map and when to use a list of tuples. And its easy to transform between the two when needed.
I read it this year. I loved it. I think if I read it a few years earlier it would be totally lost on me.
For my self what I found interesting is the depiction of Russia in the 19th century, and the on-going transition from a peasant agrarian society into "modernity" and all the confusion it creates. I am not Russian, yet it all seemed so familiar to me. Why? Because I think this same transition is going on in my ethnic country - though 200 years later. Because the archetypes of people shown, the attitudes among former aristocrats and landowners, inefficient (and unserious) bureaucracy, conflicting ideas about religion vs secularism, inferiority complex towards "modernism", changing views of women's role in society, etc I've seen all the same things.
And of course, the book finally convinced me that I should not give into nihilism and pessimism even when everyone around me does.
I just remembered, Irvin Weil has a bunch of Dostoevsky lectures for free on YouTube. He provides a lot of good info and speaks really well. A lot of it is biographical and historical context
A bit unrelated to the main topic but whenever I exceed a certain threshold of smoking cannabis (>0.3g) it seems to induce some automatic rhythmic movement in me. If there's music playing I can tune into the rhythm of the music. If there's no music, I will move around a lot while twisting my limbs, stretching my arms, holding positions and breathing, in various rhythmic and also strange ways. Some people have described it resembling a form of yoga or tai-chi. Whatever it is, it feels like a benefit? I've noticed my posture has improved and in the gym my numbers have also gone up despite 0 diet changes. Its like a full body stretch that activates all these minor muscles in my body.
I don't know - whenever I think about quitting this "bad" habit, I remember that it would just be replaced by sitting around looking at my phone. Being put into this physical trance by a drug has to be infinitely more healthy than that right? I trade one addiction for another.
THCs effects on proprioception are interesting enough to be worth pursuing if you have any interests in the physical realm. Dancing, climbing, lifting weights, running. Clearly one should be careful and I wish weed was still good for me but it’s just anxiety city so I’ll leave it to the folks who haven’t ruined their brains to enjoy.
I see this take on the internet a lot usually combined with some statement of how Schizophrenics are secret geniuses and were the prophets of olden times. It just doesn't square off with my own observations of schizophrenics in real life. How is the condition subjective when you see the same types of symptoms across people? I've seen it with men and women afflicted by the condition - always the persecutory delusions, belief that they are some king or prophet/chosen one, disorganized thinking, and word salads. Why is it always the same symptoms? You're telling me that's not rooted in any common condition?
> always the persecutory delusions, belief that they are some king or prophet/chosen one, disorganized thinking, and word salads. Why is it always the same symptoms?
Your argument is as good as calling Martha Mitchell crazy and dismissing entirely possible organized exploitation on a premise of made-up symptoms that are composed of zero scientific evidence.
I don't understand the reasoning? I've been working on an MMORPG game since quitting my job - and I settled on using Elixir for this project despite never using it before. I have a good understanding of distributed systems, and the features/tooling Erlang & Elixir provided were like a dream for me. Initially I thought I'd just try making some proof of concept thing. Fast forward several months later, and I seriously credit Elixir for how far I've gotten with this game. Most of my time is spent writing server-side gameplay code, not tracking down obscure networking & memory bugs. Its even caught cascading bugs caused by gameplay system interactions - when players and a.i were being (wrongly) resurrected from the dead the system just crashed! When 500 a.i agents doing pathfinding every single tick was starting to make the a.i system lag and delay inputs - it was trivial to understand the bottleneck causing the system to degrade. I can go on and on.
I feel the exact same way. I have felt 0 need to use an LLM in my current workflow. If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet.
By the way - I think AI or ML whatever has some valid uses right now. but mostly in image processing domain - so like recognizing shapes in some bounded domain OK yea. Generative image - NOT bad but theres always this "AI GLOW" to each image. Something is always off. Its some neat tools but a race to the bottom and mostly users want to generate explicit content lets be real. and they will become increasingly more creative and obtuse to get around the guards. nothing is stopping you from entering the * industry and making tons off money. but that industry is always doing good.
a friend recently suggested to use AI to generate generic icons for my game. Thats a really good use case. but does that radically change the current economy?
[BTW GENERIC STUFF ONLY UNTILL I could hire someone because i prefer that experience way more. you can get more interesting results. 4 eyes are better than 2.
>> If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet.
I am an experienced programmer, but I find myself (for the first time) doing a deep-dive in SQL and specifically building code that will run against multiple SQL engines.
I fed my list of engines into AI. As I'm discovering the really weird corners of SQL I asking the AI to compare one db against the other. My prompts are usually no more than 3 or 4 words.
It gives me quick helpful answers highlighting where things are the same and where they are different. I can then follow up in the specific docs if necessary (now that I know the function name.)
Personally I'm somewhat anti-hype, I'll let others rave about "changing the world". But I have found it a useful tool - not so much for "writing my code" but for acting as my tutor as I learn new things. (I'm using it for more than just SQL or computers now.)
I'm not sure it "changes thr economy" - but it can certainly change individual lives. Some jobs will go away. Others might be easier to do. It might make it easier to learn new skills.
Recently I saw the process of filling for 2 insurance claims through 2 different entities. First one used a great ai voice agent that does the process of filtering your query. it understood me perfectly. But then I still had to wait in line for an actual agent. Ok wait for 6 hours. Whatever. Call again - the 2nd time going through the same agent is painful. Its so slow. And all this just to connect me to a human - who was EXCELLENT. What did ai add? And for now a human has to be involved in any complex permission changes to your account. AND I like that.
The 2nd agency I called them through phone. No ai. But it is excellent cause they do async processing. so you reserve a slot and they call you back. i don't care if those are not answered urgently. Because I just want to talk to a human.
AI lets the agency better be able to afford to hire and keep the excellent humans around to solve complex problems. It's better than a human that also can't fix your issue themselves and has to ask you to transfer to the other person. Ideally, the AI agent would have let you book a callback time with the specific right human who's best able to fix your issue. Some companies are able to do this, and you, the customer, never realize that of the 100 specialists in the building, you got connected to the one person who understands your issue and has the tools to fix it.
Customer service is hard because it has to filter out 90% noise, 9% fairly straightforward tasks, and the <1% of complex issues that need to be sent to the right human.
DONT get me wrong. What you're saying I actually support. If this allows that company to have quality staff I'm all for it. The less time we both spend on each other the better. So just offer async processing.
Your point is that AI is bad at some things, and in some cases misused. Which is of course abundantly true.
But equally it doesn't prove, or even assert, the opposite. A bicycle may be bad at cross-country road trips, but that doesn't make it a bad choice for some other situations.
Hence my earlier comment - I (and I suspect others) are finding it useful for some tasks. That is not to imply it is good at all tasks.
Is it over-hyped? Of course yes. Welcome to IT where every new thing is over-hyped all the time.
I think llms are useful when you're trying to write something in a language you don't know well; then it speeds up the part where you need to check for simple idiosyncrasies.
If you don't know the language at all it's dangerous because you may not understand the proposed program (and of course if you're an expert you don't need it at all).
But llms won't help to find solutions to a general, still unspecified problem.
You could also use these techniques as steering behaviors for a group of autonomous agents? Each agent is a point on the segment. It'd be like a team doing a dragon or lion dance.
I figure if the game I'm working on doesn't pan out then I'll go become a sailor or something. I think thats what I'm training for, potential career change.
reply