tldr:

Calories: Amount of energy in food.

Carbs: An energy source that is abundant in plant food.

Glucose: Most carbs are digested into glucose. It gets absorbed by each cell and burned into energy.

Gluten: A protein in wheat that makes the dough stretchy. Causes gut issues for some people.

My wife changed her facebook status from married to widowed. Should I be worried?

I used to laugh my ass off at some of those funny yahoo answers. Those were the days…

Only a part of the universe is observable. All the stars that can be seen are in this region.

So we cannot answer this question with certainty. But I would lean towards more galaxies than obervable stars because the universe could be very large or infinite in size.

yea I imagine some Haskell genius already wrote the greatest script in the world. But they are not famous because only a few shy programmers can understand it.

It’s probably C that’s closest in the programming language world. It’s old, stood the test of time and is still popular.

Making a new programming language is like inventing a new musical instrument.

It represents the creator’s vision of what good music is and how easily and well it produces these sounds.

There are already excellent answers. We can attack it from another angle and analyze what causes the fear of death.

1. Fear of separation

Death means leaving everything behind. The life you have built. Friends, family, home, your identity, and your body—even the clothes you have on.

2. Fear of pain

Death is usually accompanied by a lot of physical pain. We fear pain and live our lives running away from it.

We can use philosophy and deep thought to alleviate both.

Everything you are being “separated” from were only in your imagination. There were no “you” or “your people” or things to begin with. There is just reality. You have categorized sensory information as “this is me. This is my body, this is family etc.” If you continue this line of thought, you will realise nothing special happens during death. You are still a part of reality in a different form like a cloud that becomes rain.

Next is the fear of pain. Pain is a protective mechanism in your brain. It is a signal telling you to stay away from something or to draw attention somewhere. It’s nothing more. If you realise this at a deep level and keep your mind at peace even in extreme pain, your brain will not perceive it as a threat. Instead it will release endorphins to reduce the pain.

I know what I have said is not easy. It requires a lifetime of mental training and meditation. But it is possible.

And there are many stages to this. First is to not fear death during normal life. Next is to not fear it in the presence of a great threat. And the last is during the actual process of dying. Each stage is harder than the previous.

If you want to do it naturally, combining prolonged water fasting and endurance exercise is the way.

I once lost 18 lb in 10 days with it. I am already quite lean so I stopped.

You have to build up to it. Both in terms of walking or slow running long distances and being fat adapted. I started with intermittent fasting, omad etc.

Reminds me of an episode of House md. A 17 year old girl finds Dr House really attractive, hits on him really hard and starts stalking him.

You are still alive. You have a smartphone and a data plan. You are clearly educated. You are healthy enough to think and type.

So realistically, I’d say that puts you miles ahead of most humans of the past and the present.

I have used krita on my system. I’ll check out the experience on mobile.

ooh. I do use image toolbox for shrinking and converting images to other formats.

Didn’t occur to me that you can add text to images, draw, and make collages etc. It covers everything I need to get stared. Thank you!

None of what you said contradicts what I said, so I guess nice strawman?

I wrote it to prove that for most people LLMs impair learning.

cost effective

Yes counting the billionaire subsidies. But it’s very costly on the planet.

Ok? Don’t develop parasocial relationships with AI? Don’t use it to skip learning?

Sorry most people do. Few people use heroin to get better from sickness doesn’t mean the majority of people who get their hands on it will abuse it.

4 is anecdotal

Everything you said is anecdotal—that too a very unpopular opinion at that. Lol.

An accountant is going to become less sharp at math

yay we both agree. What has worked in schools is banning a calculator until a student gets proficient in basic arithmetic and math.

That’s what has worked. You can obviously use a calculator to check your answers etc without cheating and get better at math.

But that rarely happens in the real world.

Are you going to criticize every dev for not knowing how to code in assembly?

If you haven’t done even a little bit of assembly then you don’t know the fundamentals of CS—how a processor works etc. Yes I would criticize such devs.

AI can help enable people to learn things they previously could not

They fool you into thinking that you learned a lot. Why don’t you learn something with ai and then take a university exam or apply it in the world with chatgpt off?

I’m sure you’ll fail horribly.

Hmm. If you are confident that learning from ai will work out for you better than learning from humans or human created materials, go ahead.

But as I said it doesn’t work in the real world.

1. AI has been shown to make people stupid and mad.

2. All professors know this. Students are using llms to cheat in exams and skip learning.

3. Gen Z has the lowest attention span and reading comprehension skills mostly due to ai summaries. Few can even sit down and read a book anymore.

4. Using ai for coding and “agents” have eroded the skills of developers. Many have said so and I have seen it among my colleagues too.

I have a feeling we won’t make any progress here. I’ll stick to learning from humans and the learning materials they have left us.

But how would that be different from learning via a book

AI averages all the text on the internet. So you cannot rise above this bar if you learn from an llm. It’s only possible by reading text books written by human experts.

I can give my field as an example. It’s been objectively measured that AI generates terrible code compared to humans on average. So if you learn coding from an llm it’ll be disastrous compared to learning from text books or courses.

Benefits of llms for learning are not demonstrated in the lab. Studies have only shown the opposite—that ai makes you stupid and delusional.

You can ask it questions you might be embarrassed to ask actual people

lol. Reminds me of the Subnautica 2 drama. A CEO has a rich guy breakdown and asks Chatgpt how to avoid paying the developers of that game after it becomes a huge success. Chatgpt gives him a failed plan which gets him sued.

And all his embarrassing deleted conversations with chatgpt were retrieved by police.

True. The people around you IRL become an echo chamber and fool you into thinking that it is missing nowadays.

So many send me ai slop in chats, go on endless speeches about how they wrote an email, created a poster in 1 minute with chatgpt etc.

I started working on a side project recently with a dev on the condition that he would code without llms. We were aiming for very generous deadlines. But the quality and style of the code were horrible and inconsistent. It was as if each change was written by an amnesiac or a different intern who didn’t read the rest of the code.

I confronted him about it and he admitted to using llms from the start. Turns out he was spending 20-30 min a day generating ai slop and creating PRs. His response was “who cares the code is readable and it works.”

For sure. I have learned the basics of mountaineering, cooking and fermenting foods. I make sourdough bread, sprouts, and natto at home. And it’s so meditative. 😄

If you want someone to talk, I’m here btw. :/

Thanks so much for your kind words. There was some upside to this lol.

I have left my boring IT job that forced me to use AI and ship ridiculously fast. I vastly improved my fitness now and started working in outdoor adventures. It’s quite fun too.

They’re losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.

Ikr. I’m eagerly waiting for it.

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