Yeah, "not understanding" means they aren't engaging with the issue honestly. They go on to compare to carpentry, which is a classic sign the speaker understands neither carpentry or software development.
The anti-LLM arguments aren't just "hand tools are more pure." I would even say that isn't even a majority argument. There are plenty more arguments to make about environmental and economic sustainability, correctness, safety, intellectual property rights, and whether there are actual productivity gains distinguishable from placebo.
It's one of the reasons why "I am enjoying programming again" is such a frustrating genre of blog post right now. Like, I'm soooo glad we could fire up some old coal plants so you could have a little treat, Brian from Middle Management.
Inventions can be useful recombinations or applications of other inventions. They don't need to be wholly unique unto themselves. Indeed, the vast majority of them are not wholly unique.
As far as the patent system is concerned, 20 years and a million years are the same thing. If you combine some million year old things in a new way, you can get a patent.
There is a point you made here "losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking)" that I think is The Key, but also not what people think when they hear it without experiencing it. Someone hearing that line might think it makes food "unenjoyable," as in "bad." That is not the case. It is "unenjoyable" as in "lacking in a joyful experience."
After talking with friends of mine who are similarly aged to me but have not had the major weight struggles I've had, I realized one of the biggest differences between us is not our drive or discipline (they envy me in many of these areas), it's in the sheer level of enjoyment that I get out of food and drink that they do not.
There are certain foods that, if I have them, they make me more hungry. I can't physically fit enough spaghetti or chocolate pudding into my mouth to satisfy my craving for it. My favorite beer feels glorious all the way down my throat and into my stomach; I can go from depressed to happy in 10 seconds just from that first gulp. And it's just those specific things. I'm not going to scarf down hard on lasagna or chocolate ice cream. While I enjoy whiskey, wine, cocktails, and other beers, I can have one in a night and be done.
There are also foods that are the opposite. I physically cannot stomach muscles or cuccumber. Putting cauliflower--in any form--on my plate is likely to start an argument. All leafy greens feel like a punishment; I can choke them down, unlike muscles, but I'm not going to like the person who made me do it.
But my friends without weight issues have never had these experiences with any foods. Food is just a way to avoid hunger. Booze is just a way to get drunk. There's no strong emotional connection to any of it.
And GLP-1 agonists completely remove that. I've heard it called "The Food Noise." It's basically a re-baselining of my relationship to food back to what should be "normal." Nothing has a feedback loop of pushing me to consume more anymore. Nothing gives me such strong revulsion that I can't eat it anymore. It's just food, on my plate. I don't even feel hungry, the only reason I'm eating it is because I understand at an intellectual level that I have to in order to not pass out in the middle of the day.
It just makes me eat less. I enjoy food every bit as much as I did before, just less often and in lower amounts. I still get hungry eventually and still want to eat and food tastes the same and if anything has a stronger emotional appeal than it did before because I eat so little.
I still enjoy drinking an IPA just as much, and really I enjoy it much more since I have one every few months instead of 5 every night. I could enjoy one every night, but I don't really need to have it, even though it would be delicious and the buzz is enjoyable, I just don't feel compelled to get it and I know it's not good for me. I knew before it wasn't good for me, believe me as the child of an alcoholic I knew it wasn't good to drink every night, but I did anyway because I had something inside pushing me to do it.
So maybe that is what you are describing, that thing that pushes you to do things you know are bad for you, and which you will regret immediately, but yet you feel like you have to do anyway. It's not enjoying something more, it's more like feeding withdrawal.
Overall I feel like there is someone in control now. I can just decide that drinking a beer every night is bad for me and not aligned with my goals and then I don't do it, and when I rarely think about it I'm just not a person who drinks alone anymore and my thoughts quickly move on to figuring out how to make croissant dough or looking for a scene to post to instagram or some work problem that has been bugging me.
Why don't you eat 5 entire pizzas instead of 5 slices? It's like that. One pizza seems like a LOT of food now. Three slices seems like too much. Before I could eat a whole pizza without even thinking twice. I look forward to it just as much, if not more. The first bite is just as good, but honestly seems better since I didn't just have a snack an hour ago. I ate like 5 Takis for a snack the other day and they were delicious and I really enjoyed it, but before I would have eaten the entire bag and not really even taken the time to taste them.
I would say it takes longer to get hungry even though I eat maybe 1/3 to 1/2 as many calories as I did before (that is to say 2/3 less than before). If I ate this little before GLP-1 I would have felt like I was dying and would have been thinking about food and hunger all day and night.
Yes you do fill up faster, and your stomach empties slower, so there is actually a physical 'being full' that happens with less food than previously.
Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.
Two comments about this...
- "Housing as investment" might not be the best policy
- Side effect of above, people have strong incentive to ignore all the negative externalities caused by that policy (ie, sprawl and lots of car mileage when society would better with more compact towns)
You’re allowed to advocate for your own interests, but there are limits to what you’re actually allowed to accomplish with that advocacy. At least in the US. You can’t just pass laws to confiscate the wealth of your political opponents, for instance. You can advocate for it (free speech), you just can’t do it.
I think the ROI criticism is generally off the mark. Most homeowners that resist rezoning, etc. are concerned about quality of life issues rather than home values (although those are aligned if significantly lower quality of life reduces home values). For example, the idea that I'd benefit if my area was upzoned because I could sell my home/land for much more doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want to sell my home, and I don't want the neighborhood to change around me in a way that I would eventually want to.
Casting shadow on their backyard. Bringing noise to their street. Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.
The key problem of US housing is that a house is seen as an investment vehicle, which should appreciate, or at least appreciate no slower than inflation. Keeping prices high and rising can't but go hand in hand with keeping supply scarce.
Is this regularly true? IME, in Northern VA, land values have always increased with infill development. Thinking specifically of Arlington in the Courthouse/Ballston/Clarendon strip in the 90s and 00s. And now Reston.
Traffic and noise concerns might be legitimate, but I'm not buying the loss of value argument.
Is it always true? More than once I heard fears about undesirables moving in, crime rate growing, the neighborhood "losing its character" that commands the high prices, etc. The resistance is real at some places.
The land value argument is downstream of the real issues - some people don't want change and fight it.
If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
I have no idea who this guy is (I guess he's a fantasy novelist?) but this video came up in my YouTube feed recently and feels like it matches closely with the themes you're expressing. https://youtu.be/mb3uK-_QkOo?si=FK9YnawwxHLdfATv
My IT department is convinced these "ChInEsE cCcP mOdElS" are going to exfiltrate our entire corporate network of its essential fluids and vita.. erh, I mean data. I've tried explaining to them that it's physically impossible for model weights to make network requests on their own. Also, what happened to their MitM-style, extremely intrusive network monitoring that they insisted we absolutely needed?
No, it's actually you who is the one who is misunderstanding.
The product review, while it does stand on its own, is not the main purpose.
The point is to render absurd the incredulous comments from Pam Bondi, "How did these people go out and get gas masks?" Bondi did not ask this question to receive an answer, "oh, they go to Home Depot and get model X-54-Whatever." The point of her question was to cast aspersion on the protestors, to attempt to delegitimize their grievances by painting them as paid, professional agitators. It's the sort of "I'm just sayin'" bullshit rhetoric we've all had to deal with from racist uncles at Thanksgiving for the last 25 years.
Jeong's article works by failing to engage Bondi's comments on Bondi's grounds. Jeong's use of product review as a structure for her article is a conceit that treats Bondi's comments as a legitimate request for product reviews, side-stepping the concept that only paid professionals could ever know anything about gas masks, because information on the Internet is and wants to be free.
Just how big are your glasses? These aren't goggles that try to seal around your eye sockets, they are shields that seal around your face, sitting in front of your face by an inch or two. If you're worried about the glasses temple breaking the seal, it's still going to provide the vast majority of benefit.
If you are the kind of person who has forgone wearing a mask or eye protection while working on a project because you thought you could be done quickly or it was too much of a hassle or too uncomfortable for the "little" amount of benefit it would have: get a full-face mask.
Full-face masks are so much more comfortable, so much clearer to see through than those stupid yellow sunglasses that get scratched up all the time, so much easier to put everything on, so much better in every aspect that you won't think twice about it anymore. You walk into the shop, grab the one thing, put it on, and get to work.
The anti-LLM arguments aren't just "hand tools are more pure." I would even say that isn't even a majority argument. There are plenty more arguments to make about environmental and economic sustainability, correctness, safety, intellectual property rights, and whether there are actual productivity gains distinguishable from placebo.
It's one of the reasons why "I am enjoying programming again" is such a frustrating genre of blog post right now. Like, I'm soooo glad we could fire up some old coal plants so you could have a little treat, Brian from Middle Management.
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