May 10 2023
The 1% (programmers), the ego-driven war of building vs buying & youtube hate comments
Quotes
His firsthand experience with illicit drug dealing would inform his lyrics when he began rapping under the stage name Jazzy, soon shortened to Jay-Z (a name that may also have been derived from the proximity of the J and Z subway lines to the Marcy Projects). (View Highlight)
I'm always surprised when I talk to people in NYC and they haven't made this mental connection
It's difficult to estimate the exact percentage of the population that can code fluently, as it varies greatly across different countries and regions. However, according to recent statistics, only about 1% of the world's population can code at an advanced level.
Used to be back in the 2010s that most non coders could reliably get to "Hello World" and "foobar" without being fluent in programming. Today with LLMs, is this statistic even valid? How would you be able to tell? Perhaps 1% of the world can still quickly verify code.
Machine-learning is metal-beating. Brilliant people have done remarkable things with it. But the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It’s a premise for an SF novel, not a plan for the future. (source)
idk man, natural selection just meat-beating (pun intended) and that seemed to work out pretty well.
After all, who cares? Salary has nothing to do with value. Instead, salary has everything to do with status, which, in turn, has everything to do with culture. And it is in the land of culture that idealists reign supreme. Idealists demonstrate their loyalty to the company, the faux owners, and the owners by reverently taking up the cause and sacrificing their own wants and needs at the altar of being a “team player.” A big part of this is an hours-per-week arms race, in which competing idealists show who is more “all in” by being present in the office or generally available for more and more time. (Location 1204)
be the least surprised at how quickly emotion separates people from their hard earned income or scarece resources like time. desire and loss avoidance are deeply powerful levers in the human mind
Thoughts
As I was working on Moon this week, a few things things happened:
- I found BubbleTea and felt the urge to rewrite my whole stack from cobra/promptui
- I scaled back the idea greatly. The only command I kept was orbit, which offers the list of custom commands including file pickers and clipboards, but now instead of having to mentally manage phases all results are stored in the
moonsfolder - I started thinking of my end goal of building this software in the first place. Thing is, I'm only contextually near my Terminal in VSC. My goal -- it seems -- is to have a list of GPT templates I can fire from anywhere on my machine, and chain the results together so I can have more leverage anywhere on my device. Then I remembered I already do this with Alfred. I use
scto open my shortcut to quick add to obsidian so many times per day the keys show signs of wear. I usealt-sto open Spotify Mini. Orytcto cut a youtube clip from a full video. The point is, I think that Alfred may actually be the home for a project likemoonnot a CLI built from the ground up. At least for now.- The real lesson here is to ask what technology can enable for you, what cost does it lower in terms of automation or in terms of ambition? What is accessible that wasn't before?
Images
i mean, he's not wrong. i did publish a popular template on how to use Obsidian which was more than 10k words so…
Videos
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