Egregoros

@sun Just to be clear -- it is extremely useful and I use it very regularly. But I think it has bad second order effects, especially for lots of everyday folks, but even for me when I use judiciously.

I'm very optimistic on the potential long run economic effects of AI, but pessimistic in the short-run -- very pessimistic on the potential psychological, cultural, and existential implications of AI, but not in the annihilative or apocalyptic sense. Either way, not only to keep up with tech and culture, but from a security standpoint, it has to be leaned into.

I do think there's something to this notion of "cogsec", and that those on the lower end, exporting their critical thinking on even any and every task, are going to have heavy atrophying of the mind (but we probably all will to some extent).

Could open new doors, of course. Coming around to the idea that the luddites are often wrong in saying the relentless historical march of the technological brings us nothing of value -- it does & often great deal of it too -- but they might be right that something of value, sometimes incommensurable w/new values, is irretrievably lost.

@sun

I am horrendous at programming/coding and just picked it up as a hobby to create twitter bots long ago (when the API was open. smdh) -- but one thing I made that

The most "elegant" (in theory) thing I created, and am still proud of despite its abject failure:

Was teaching classes online to European students during late covid (lockdowns in some places were freaky long) and they insisted on using a horrendous, university-approved zoom-knockoff that couldn't do basic things like attendance. Wanted to make a simple script that could copy and paste page content to do attendance, track participation in group settings, etc., but make it minimal as possible and pluggable into excel where other student records were. Problem was that there was redundant content, the page layout varied a lot, and the page changed through the session & it required copying/pasting sometimes more than once as the lecture went on -- all of this required more script than I wanted.

At the time, I got really interested in Gödel numbering thanks to a friend, so made this simple script that assigned prime-numbers to strings, multiplied everything in the copied text to take care of redundancies, then it was basic division -- unfortunately it turns out that excel has maximum numeric magnitude & I needed a super computer.

Worked in very small classes w/little activity & holds-up in theory!