My AI experience has varied wildly depending on the problem I'm working on. For web apps in Python, they're fantastic. For hacking on old engineering calculation code written in C/C++, it's an unmitigated disaster and an active hindrance.
Just last week I asked copilot to make a FastCGI client in C. It gave me 5 times code that did not compile. Afer some massaging I got it to compile, didn’t work. After some changes, works. No I say “i do not want to use libfcgi, just want a simple implementation”. After already one hour wrestling, I realize the whole thing blocks, I want no blocking calls… still half an hour later fighting, I’m slowly getting there. I see the code: a total mess.
I deleted all, wrote from scratch a 350 lines file which wotks.
At some point it becomes easier to just write the code. If the solution was 350 lines, then I'm guessing it was far easier for them to just write that rather then tweak instructions, find examples, etc to cajole the AI to writing workable code (that would then need to be reviewed and tweaked if doing it properly).
> Because in the software engineering world there is very little engineering involved.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've been given the time to do a planning period for something less than a "major" feature in the past few years. Oddly, the only time I was able to push good QA, testing, and development practices was at an engineering firm.
I've housed two sibling that were labeled as "mentally unstable"(raised by mentally abusive narcissists) and "lazy"(has narcolepsy), respectively. Both situations were pretty bad before they landed in our home, but everyone in their lives called us "angels" for taking them in.
Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).
Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.
The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.
Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.
And this is the problem with homelessness. There are two drastically different “classes” of homeless people. There’s the working single mother waitress or nurse who fell behind on bills due to medical debt, maybe rent went up and is just bad at managing spending, saving, etc. Now she’s living in a car.
Then there’s the batshit crazy dude who’s living under the bridge who’s staring off into the trees and can’t hold a coherent conversation. This poor soul is not homeless because his landlord raised his rent from $2000 to $2200 and he just can’t eke by.
However the mother in case 1, could absolutely benefit from:
1. Better health insurance
2. Better financial education
3. A credit on housing or whatever.
This is why no one can agree on homelessness because half the population imagines the “noble” woman scenario and the other half imagines the bat shit dude with his pants around his ankle.
The solutions to each are drastically different. So you sound like an idiot when you say “we just need more homes” when you’re picturing scenario 2. But equally people sound like idiots when you say “we just need more mental institutions” but the listener is picturing scenario 1.
We’re talking in circles and English needs more words to describe these two drastically different types of people.
There's also scenario 3, which you can see pushed throughout this thread - that scenario 2 doesn't really exist, because "that bat shit crazy person smoking fent and screaming at passerbys" was once just a regular, down-on-their luck mother (scenario 1), who was driven insane / driven to drugs by being homeless".
We don't really need more words to describe the scenarios. It's all politics, we know what the game is. Whether you see homeless as primarily category 1(/3) or primarily category 2, seems to align overwhelmingly with your preferred brand of politics. And as such, in the current social milieu, there's effectively no constructive conversation that can happen. It's just political extremists being handed their moral justification for their position, refusing to accept any other version of reality that conflicts with it.
I knew what this link was before I clicked it, and it's a must-watch for anyone who's interested in basically any aspect of film making, cinematography, or light science in general. Extremely cool topic.
> but norepinephrine is actually the common thread among all ADHD medications
Anecdata, but my ADHD (and depression!) didn't significantly improve until I was on both lisdexamfetamine and buproprion. Both drugs lift production of both neurotransmitters, but they "specialize" in dopamine and norepinephrine, respectively.
> People who have been doing this their whole lives can probably aim with a precision of a Marine Corp Sniper but to us
I bought these sprayers for my house when people lost their minds hoarding toilet paper during the initial COVID lockdowns in the US. It only took a few days to start getting it right the first time, every time.
> LLMs can reliably solve the problem of a blank-page.
This has been the biggest boost for me. The number of choices available when facing a blank page is staggering. Even a bad/wrong implementation helps collapse those possibilities into a countable few that take far less time to think about.
