Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.

Sad news for his family.

I do wonder though about these people that hang on to power all the way up until death. Is that fulfilling?

What was the point of all that amassing of influence and power, just to spend the last few months of your precious finite time on earth sitting in a little office arguing with people.

I wonder if there is an afterlife how many of those that held onto power with an iron grip up until death look back and go “I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I had used some of that wealth and power to enjoy the fruits of life. I can’t believe the last heathy months of my life were wasted doing these things that in retrospect seem so unimportant.”

There is this group of old billionaires and politicians that are bound and determined to run up the high score as high as possible and for what? Billions of dollars and still heading into the office day in and day out stressing about the next product launch? Why live your life like that?

Isn’t the point that you can get out of the rat race at some point, not just become the fastest rat?

I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
2. See if this is an XY problem.

I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

I’m sure after a crisis of that magnitude we put robust safeguards in place that have only been strengthened over time.

Right? panic right?!?!

We gave out risky and predatory loans to people with bad credit and now they aren’t repaying them

Shocked pikachu

Live by the DoorDash bnpl die by the DoorDash bnpl

Pretty hard form trump to physically kneel and kiss Xi’s ass over the phone.

Fart of the deal

I think the Simpsons summarized this best

Marge holding up a new baby on board sticker

Look what I got. Now people will stop intentionally ramming our car.

I think there is something of a concerted effort to lionize these boring jobs that used to support a family.

It is amazing how many country / blue grass songs are about coal mining.

The thing the wealthy don’t seem to understand is that what made these jobs worth identifying with was that they could support a family. People were proud to provide a good life for their loved ones.

They are hoping they can get people to identify with the jobs, be proud of them, without having to hold up their end of the bargain.

The entire world right now seems to be the wealthiest people going “can’t I have a little bit more though?”

I wonder what kind of plane Syria gave him

I get sometimes going “I’ll roll the dice”

• Me: I’d like my steak medium rare
• Government: That could expose you to some health risks because it’s not cooked well done.
• Me: Yep, I’d rather enjoy a medium rare steak and take my chances.

What the fuck was the logic on this one though?!

• RFK: I want to swim in sewage
• Government: it’s a bad idea to swim in sewage
• RFK: I LOVE SEWAGE!!!
• Government: you are a Kennedy right? You all dont have a pool?
• RFK: worm in brain need poop, poop in water, yum yum poop

Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

I never really understood the idea of the popular kids in high school. I wasn’t popular but wasn’t unpopular, just sorta a regular dude.

I remember thinking how odd it was that people liked people simply because a lot of people liked that person. Or that those people felt like they were better than others because a lot of people liked them.

Then I graduated and got into the real world and there were celebrities but beyond that there were no popular kids anymore. And celebrities were generally well known for some actual thing they could do exceptionally well, acting, singing, sports, etc.

Then social media gave us influencers which are just popular kids for adults. People follow them because lots of people follow them and some of them are genuinely talented but a lot of them are just flexing with wealth (or pretending to) or just attractive.

I remember being relieved that the “popular kids” was a thing people grew out of, and kinda appalled that we somehow engineered it back into adulthood.

Waiting for the announcement from the White House that they just saved 2.5 billion Americans from dying.

Every person in this nation now owes 10 life debts to dear leader.

I like how trumps entire negotiating strategy is “this will work great if everyone just blindly follows exactly what I say”

Hey Hungary, close your borders to China and you can have access to all the wonderful things America makes. Do you need sports betting apps? We got a shit ton of those. How about cash for gold strip malls? Would you like some insanely expensive private health care that delivers average results?

Black people around the nation wait to find out which Haitian gang they’ve always been a part of as part of their deportation.

Truly America is the land of the free*

*terms and conditions apply, may not actually contain freedom

Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.

I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?

The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.

We investigated, seems like a lot of people fucking loathe you. Hope that helps!