nfh

I know a few people though work who are interested in self-hosting LLMs. There are people in real life who are some amount of pro-LLM.

Most people here are somewhere between neutral and very opposed, so I wouldn’t say the community is split, but there are certainly a range of perspectives, and I can understand where a large chunk of them are coming from, even beyond those I agree with.

My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I’m usually between 85-105%.

If I’m doing ~30 hours a week of work I’ve been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I’m probably in a pretty good place. I don’t tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I’m still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.

If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it’s the norm, the whole system has failed. I’m well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.

Insofar as “modern societies” refer to the people who hold power in them, I’m not so sure modern societies are interested in handling these kinds of problems.

I agree with the sentiment of what you’re saying, but I think this is actually not quite the right rule.

Some things schools teach don’t really have a clear factuality, like skills. Sometimes it’s hard to determine the facts, like you might encounter in high school literature class, “what did the author mean when they said this” might have multiple reasonable answers, but the author died, so we can’t ask them. Sometimes there are even cases where we teach things that aren’t accurate, because the nuance is too complex, like teaching 3rd graders that you can’t divide by zero, because introductory calculus isn’t developmentally appropriate for their math skill. Even simplifications like “sex chromosomes are XX or XY, and that makes you a boy or girl” that can cause harm if people don’t learn the nuance, are an example of teaching things that aren’t really accurate.

I would say schools should seek to teach kids the baseline knowledge to understand the world, and the skills to sort fact from fiction, to analyze why people say and do what they do, and continue to learn and grow in the information landscape we live in.

I feel like this isn’t a great explanation of nihilism, someone might think it functionally is materialism, or some sort of skepticism.

Nihilism is the rejection of meaning, ethics, or knowledge as things that actually exist objectively. An existentialist accepts some form of nihilism, and grapples with its consequences. One key idea across existentialist thinkers is that Existence precedes Essence, that existing is always shaping who you become, rather than some kind of intrinsic being that nihilism would reject.

Yeah that’s the surname used by members of their family who don’t get the Prince/Princess title, since princesses and princes don’t need surnames for some reason.