It is going to be easy this year. I'll make up some bullshit story about how I used Claude to improve my productivity, and how learned and used AI tools to speed up the feature delivery process. It doesn't have to be true...
Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah, so good for our souls?
> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?
I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing itself. I, myself, learned a lot about complex SQL queries just recently using LLMs. But I really don't know how to write complex queries myself.
People often confuse reading about a thing with knowing the thing.
I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.
Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?
I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.
It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.
As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.
Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my job.
One reason I am not giving my two-week notice is that I don't like "difficult conversations" with my manager.
My "strong" performance rating got me a raise less than the inflation rate this year in the US. I guess I am not using enough tokens to justify a bigger raise.
The theory of (basic) linear algebra is pretty easy. The practice of proper linear algebra is very difficult. People spend entire careers on things like error propagation in matrix operations. There are entire books on inverting matrices using a litany of approaches using things like QR décomposition, SVD, etc. I think it is fascinating...
I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.
My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.
> Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py.
Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Same goes for every modern aircraft, space vehicle, etc. Far from being outdated.