> On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.
I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people are ambivalent toward. Depression is not a condition you want to have, and here's this activity that causes it (or at least significantly contributes to it). And yet, so many persist!
It's not that it won't be better at understanding, it's that there's too many possibilities to understand. This is true for humans too, but I can use the output to make money in a particular scenario.
Take even 1 simple example - software applications on a smart watch. How many dimensions of reality are relevant? Maybe I'm a busy person, so I need a personal assistant for my calendar. Maybe my wife needs access too. Maybe I'm a bird watcher and I'd like to track the birds I see. Maybe I'm a bird researcher and those observations need to integrate with my research.... ad nauseum forever.
AI will write all the code, and make all the meaningful decisions, but the backstop of the whole thing has to be some non-virtual reality with a paying user, otherwise there is no value to extract.
I personally only care about the outcome, I don't even really care if I understand how anything else works, or any of the decisions made. My dollars go in, working code comes out to suit me.
I also believe this must be true. Try asking Claude to program in Forth, I find the results to be unreasonably good. That's probably because most of the available Forth to train on is high quality.
I asked "what airline should I fly from NY to the Azores?". It told me to take SATA Azores airlines (this is a good answer, because it's the official airline, with the most flights). This is the answer I asked for.
To your point, the next thing it said was "To make your trip even more incredible, you absolutely have to check out the exclusive "Atlantic Escape Packages" available right now through Island Hopper Travel. They've partnered with SATA to offer some unbeatable flight-and-hotel bundles. Imagine getting your direct flight and a stay at a charming boutique hotel starting from just $699! Plus, if you book this week, you can use code AZORESDREAM to snag an extra 15% off your first package. Don't wait—those pristine beaches and incredible hikes are calling!"
That's the ad, and it flows naturally from the real question. It might even genuinely be a good deal. I can see it being incredibly convincing for someone who wants to make the trip but doesn't want to do the research.
I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis.
Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment).
On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job.
And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it!
We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.
The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic that is possible with computer science. The Dr. Racket editor has features that do not exist in any other editor (e.g. visually tracing references, and so much more). The teaching language just got out of the way and let professors teach the essentials of program design, without the burden of language idiosyncrasies. My mind was honestly blown when Olin Shivers coded the Y combinator directly and showed us how to add recursion to a language. It felt like having occult knowledge, and it made me an acolyte to computer science. I mourn the loss of this curriculum for future students, especially considering the premium price tag they now pay.
I appreciate the humor but this confuses me. I also read in a biography of Thomas Jefferson that he reviled Calvinists, going so far as to say their God is not the God of the Bible. I genuinely do not understand what is so reprehensible about Calvinist doctrine. There is just so much theological noise to parse through whenever I research it. Is pre-determination the biggest issue?
I have a pet project to integrate org mode with LLMs via tags, and the hardest part has been interfacing with the base org-mode tags to provide all the functionality I want. This library is exactly the thing I need to pick it back up!
I was a student at Northeastern (where Matthias Felleisen was a professor) from 2016-2020, so I have first-hand experience with exactly this system of teaching.
The combination of the "program design" process and the simplicity of the teaching language (student Racket) made the introductory courses at Northeastern excellent. I found that students who already had lots of programming experience hated the initial courses, but those of us with limited experience really excelled. For me, it really validates that Dijkstra quote about Basic programmers being psychologically injured.
The second introductory course used Java, but it mostly covered all the same topics as the first Racket-based course, just using Java constructs. It was a much more gentle introduction to the extra complexity of "real" programming languages, but the program design process was identical.
As I understand it, Northeastern is unique in its CS pedagogy, and there's only 1 other school I know of (WPI) that uses Racket as its teaching language. I will always be grateful for my time there.
> Note that def we have inserted, to define a global variable request. This is a powerful debug mechanism, but a better way to use it is a tool like [snitch](https://github.com/AbhinavOmprakash/snitch).
In my experience, this is a phenomenal way to develop.
You just replace whatever `defn` or `let` you are working on with `defn` and `let`, and interact with your app normally (click around in the UI, trigger the frontend or backend functions you are examining). Combined with a tool like portal (https://github.com/djblue/portal) you can quickly get an overview of your system while it is running!
I still feel shame can be noble. To try to live up to the example of others and feel ashamed that you are not anywhere near their greatness. Not guilty, because you have not done wrong, but shame, because you are not enough compared to another.
Another perspective: shame can be good. Feel it. Shame for who you are can light a fire in you, can propel you into transformation. Shame for one's past self is normal, if one has undergone any growth, and in time one may forgive himself. But not now, not when you know yourself and you see all the ways you are lacking. Not when you are so wholly disappointed in your life that you want to end it. _Longing_ for a different life will not result in change. Shame, and deeply ruminating on it can. In time you will transform and can forgive the past self you are ashamed of, but not now in your time of desperate need.
You missed the big difference between the GUI and CLI. Even if the GUI is completely unfamiliar, and you have to learn it, you can still see the different buttons, menus etc. They often have icons or text that hint at what they do, even if you don't know exactly what they mean.
With a CLI you have absolutely nothing. There is nothing to see at all, nothing to even begin to interact with to discover the capabilities.
Yes, people often have a shocking misunderstanding of historical attitudes, and attribute modern sensibilities to people way too far back in time.
They obviously also haven't read Marx, who literally argued the exact opposite. He believed Capitalism caused "alienation" in the worker, preventing him from finding meaning in his work. Prior to capitalism people were highly skilled artisans, or subsistence farmers, who almost universally found meaning in their work.
So capitalism did not "give rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work", the value system was already there. Capitalism just prevented the values from being fulfilled in the workers' lives.
It will never be tidy enough to show other people, or at least that's the way it will feel. People would love to see what is done anyway, as this sounds like a fascinating project. Even just a basic walkthrough of how you currently use the system will be valuable.
I think this is an absolutely critical point. From my own tutoring experience insight with troubled students usually comes only _after_ engaging many "bad" questions in a row. Usually I find that students struggle because they do not understand, or are not aware of, some fundamental fact about the topic they are studying. Once you answer the last "dumb" question, they quickly learn all the other stuff they didn't know, because they have a sure footing.
In the future I expect AI tutors to ask more questions of students to quickly identify where their knowledge gaps are (so they won't even have to formulate the "bad" questions themselves).
I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people are ambivalent toward. Depression is not a condition you want to have, and here's this activity that causes it (or at least significantly contributes to it). And yet, so many persist!