A few related thoughts from my spiritual tradition...
resist evil, but flee temptation.
Build willpower through disciplines, such as fasting, meditation, stillness.
Think about the larger value that a smaller temptation points to - junk candy food is an echo of the celebration food from a community event - the connection of enjoying delicious food together with others is something beautiful, so invest and look forward to that. How can we have more deep celebration times, and less binge snacking?
Massive plus one for Language Transfer. It's well presented, interesting, and kept me engaged. The whole concept is finding connections to language you already know, and gets you thinking in fuller more complex thoughts and sentences really quickly.
The audio lessons are free on various podcast platforms / YouTube etc.
I've recently been enjoying Book Overflow https://www.youtube.com/@BookOverflowPod - they're reading and discussing really interesting (programming / software engineering) books, getting interviews with authors etc.
The AI tool report shown to the dean with "85% match" Will be used as "proof".
If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
Well, right. If I'm using an LLM to create code, I'm going to use all my skill and experience to review and shape the code to standards I'm ok with.
But for people with extremely limited experience, LLMs offer a "create an app by talking!!" Zero understanding required. So they won't know to not leak user PII in JSON responses or have publicly writable endpoints or keeping private keys for external services server side and outside of the code base, etc... Let alone anything more complex.
I just played with townie AI for an hour or so... Very cool! Very fun.
There's still some glitches, occasionally the entire app code would get replaced by the function the LLM was trying to update. I could fix it by telling it that's what had happened, and it would then fill everything in again... Waiting for the entire app to be rewritten each time was a bit annoying.
It got the initial concepts of the app very very quickly running, but then struggled with some CSS stuff, saying it would try a different approach, or apologising for missing things repeatedly...and eventually it told me it would try more radical approaches and wrote online styles... I wonder if the single file approach has limitations in that respect.
Very interesting, very fun to play with.
I'm kind of concerned for security things with LLM written apps - you can ask it to do things and it says yes, without really thinking if it's a good idea or not.
But cool!
And anything which helps with the internet to be full of small independent quirky creative ideas, the better.
Also rich patrons supporting artists was how many of the greatest artworks of many civilisations were commissioned for thousands of years...
Is writing software closer to growing potatoes or designing the Sagrada de Familia, or writing the Clarinet Concerto?
I'd argue that writing a web browser is a lot closer in scope to writing a symphony than building a house - at least in audience and durability. In a house's life time, maybe 100 people live in it, and perhaps 2000 people visit it, but a browser, or a symphony, will have an audience of millions.
The market is massively smaller. The impact massively larger.
Ask it to write a sitcom comedy screenplay about a software team asked to do exactly this same situation, but where it goes disastrously wrong. Give enough info to the prompt to make it parody your own company. Make sure it's not offensive.
Then use an AI image generator to generate cartoon pictures for the characters in the screenplay.
Then use an AI voice system to generate all the voices for it.
Then put it all together as a video, present it as a early storyboard concept pitching to them for funding to turn into a full TV series.
If I was their security team, I would be fine with them publishing articles about our security set up - as long as it wasn't 100% accurate.
Possibly mention a specific virtualization system, and then run a honeypot version of the above to try and catch directed attacks at it while actually relying on a totally different system...
My day job is Django - and the ipdb based `shell_plus` from the `django_extensions` package is invaluable.[1]
I have a shell open almost all the time, and use it constantly for testing functions, writing queries etc. It drives me crazy watching other Devs change a query, wait for the server to reload and refresh the browser repeatedly, when editing in the REPL is so much faster.
Being able to `dir` and tab complete experimentally is so fast. (I also have this in the ipdb debugger... Also Django extensions has a debugger inside templates which is really nice)
Being able to `%edit 1-20` and have the repl session instantly in my editor to copy paste is fantastic too.
I also use a lot of TDD for tasks that fit that style, mostly where I'm writing business logic or data processing functions... but for exploring data / APIs /queries / data shaping, interactive just feels instantly productive. Once I've got the API or whatever it is to correctly produce the happy path, it's then easy to copy that into the codebase knowing what shape to expect, I can then turn that into unit tests and throw all the weird external data and edge cases at it with reasonable confidence about what should be happening underneath.
It also has a mode to print out all SQL statements it runs underneath your code - which is great for checking that you've not missed a join or something and got n+1 sneaking in
My parents are both very computer literate (my mum was a programmer, my dad also wrote code & managed database teams...) and they were really good friends with the head teacher at my primary school (UK, 90s).
They worked together with him to write a curriculum they used with the entire teaching staff in our school to learn the systems before the new Windows computers came in to replace the old acorns or BBC micros or whatever, including several "inset" (?) days.
The big problem with all the teaching things at the time was being called "Windows for Dummies" or "Microsoft Office for dummies" or whatever - was that the teachers were really smart people - not dummies at all. So the "you don't understand the computer, therefore you are a dummy" was extremely degrading and put up walls instantly.
How people respond when you teach people as "smart, interested and motivated, but currently still extremely unfamiliar and somewhat apprehensive" compared to "not especially clever, and it's a very complicated thing so don't expect to really understand it" is very different.
I suspect there are a lot of other factors to take into consideration here:
- population growth over that time
- percent of people able to afford cars and fuel over that time
- % of those numbers that are in London ( and other big cities) - so the number of people able to afford to live in London compared to jobs there... Many people were priced out, and so have to commute, and pollution taxes and parking prices are now there to discourage cars
- how much train line maintenance has been dropped, and will be coming up as needing replacement "soon" but not done
- how much subsidy the private companies are actually getting still.
...
Trains in the UK are really not great at all... Compared to the rest of Europe anyway.
Maybe part of the problem is that IBS(-like) symptoms, and many "fuzzy" / hard-to-diagnose ones (fatigue, etc) are also caused or exacerbated by anxiety and frustration and emotional distress.
So if I'm not hyperchondriac, but am frustrated and stressed by (x) random symptom or covid related (y), or being off sick w/ "normal" Covid & struggling to regain energy, then if I'm emotionally distressed by it, then may develop IBS and fatigue symptoms on top of that - which then feeds into the loop...
(Said as someone for the last several months currently struggling with a whole bunch of symptoms and not managing to get any helpful diagnosis or area I can work on to improve things...)
resist evil, but flee temptation.
Build willpower through disciplines, such as fasting, meditation, stillness.
Think about the larger value that a smaller temptation points to - junk candy food is an echo of the celebration food from a community event - the connection of enjoying delicious food together with others is something beautiful, so invest and look forward to that. How can we have more deep celebration times, and less binge snacking?
Life is complex!
Peace