We easily adapt and block out stuff we don't want to see.
In big cities we do this automatically - we don't even notice the dirt, parked cars, litter, people.. unless we consciously focus on them. I guess it is the same with ads, they lose their power as we adapt to them.
The solution is to force ads upon you and hope that you accidentally click on one due to sensory overload.
Or more ads.
I actually thought it sounds really good and natural and it freaked me out in a good way.
You can tell that the robots have no idea of what they're talking about, but the voicing, the emotions, etc, really good.. Like talking to a friend on the phone.
Also creepy, because of the potential for abuse of this technology.
But the interesting part to me is that training on voice only is what allows models to learn emotions - voice transmits a lot of emotional information which text doesn't capture. Language has words for a very limited number of emotions - maybe only the peaks - but there's so many more which we can't describe or transmit via text.
You could determine the phonetic tokens which express different kinds of emotions or 'render' text+emotion using a DSL, etc. Exciting stuff.
jank is Clojure, but instead of the JVM it embeds Clang and LLVM, so it can understand C++ headers directly and call C++ with no bindings. Other LLVM languages (Rust, Swift, Zig, etc) are reachable the usual way, through the C ABI.
From the TFA:
Templates, virtual functions, exceptions, overload resolution, and RAII all just work in jank. No boilerplate necessary. Just include your headers and go!
jank can include any C++ source, link to any C or C++ library, and it uses the C++ type system. jank even compiles to C++!
I don't know if it's quite the same. To not have seen movies with sound would have required living under a rock for decades. To not know if the paren problem has been fixed only requires not having tried it for a year, and not being part of any lisp communities.
I'm the first one to admit my ignorance when it comes to LLM capabilities. Hence the honest question.
I think the parent post meant that it's very good at writing code and operating the computer.
I think we're also biased because we've used older generation models and the latest ones are orders of magnitude better than what we had 6 months ago.
For example, for your legal work, it can:
Develop a machine learning model (CRF, running on CPU) for clause extraction from scratch,
Find training documents and training data and train the model for various provisions (you might help it here by pointing it to the directory with annotated documents),
Build an app where you upload your legal documents and it extracts the provisions you want from all documents.
Integrate semantic search and an AI agent into your app which lets it answer any question about your documents with exact evidence from the documents.
All of this from one well crafted prompt, a few skills and a workflow. It could probably complete this in one night, while you sleep.
Or you can point it to your saas of choice and tell it - 'create me a copy of this app'.
All you need to know is how to steer it through the planning/research phase.
So it's not that it's 'accurate' in legal terms, it's that it can build you any tool you want from scratch so that you can become more accurate.
You get used to it after a while and at some point the parenthesis 'disappear' and stop taking up mental cycles.
I often thought about this - at first I struggled a lot and wasted so much time trying to match parens, but after some time my brain adapted and then I actually liked the syntax, especially if your editor supports selecting forms or you use something like parinfer, which matches parens based on indentation.
Clojure has special syntax for collections of various types, so it's even easier to parse after you get used to it imo.
For me, the bigger challenge was wrapping my head around functional programming using immutable data structures, since that wasn't just syntax, it required me to 'unlearn' thinking in OO paradigm and adopting a new way of thinking about how the program works. You get used to that too after a while.
Playing an instrument vs electronic/computer music.
We do forget skills we don't practice, especially fine motor skills (like playing the guitar or typing code).
There's inherent pleasure in playing a musical instrument - practicing improves fine motor skills and produces satisfaction.
You can play for yourself and that can be a great experience.
Often people create music for other listeners - and now the satisfaction comes not just from your skill, but from how the music impacts your listeners.
They say you can put more of your 'soul' into music made with an instrument, but I'd say there's quite a bit of electronic music with just as much soul.
People who create electronic music don't generate any of those sounds with their fine motor skills, but they do have a plan about how the song progresses and what emotional state it elicits in users.
That's why you have DJs which are more popular than others.
If you stop playing the guitar for a year, then pick it up and try playing something, you will feel very rusty. But give it a week of practice and most of your skill comes back.. and in 1 month you're back to your peak skill.
I guess my point is - If you go full on agentic, you'll loose some of your coding skill, but you can get it back fairly quickly if you go back to manual coding. On the flip side, you get better at using AI if you use it, so your thinking is at a higher level, but you give up understanding the low level details of how exactly the code works.
Either way you're making 'music', albeit a different kind of music.
Engineering is not music though. If you're building a skyscraper, and your tower crane breaks, you could go old-school like they did with the pyramids in ancient Egypt. But why would you?
Now, manual labor does have its place as a form of art--take high-precision hand-built timepieces for example.
Ha, I could talk about this framing for days as I think about it a lot.
To add some points on he other side of this analogy:
There is not a lot of purely electronic music that has stood the test of time, at least not when it comes to popularity or, more relevant to the metaphor, profitability. There is usually at very least a human voice in the (literal) mix, but more often than not there are also traditional instruments mixed in.
Take this next point as you will as I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek: While making music-making more accessible to more people is totally great, if I could go a week without hearing a variation of the phrase "Check out my dark ambient drone project!" I would feel oddly accomplished.
Most importantly, though:
> But give it a week of practice and most of your skill comes back.. and in 1 month you're back to your peak skill.
This is only true if you had the skill to begin with. For many electronic musicians, by which I mean junior developers, this is not the case. Does it matter? As a 45-year-old traditional musician... er, I mean hand-coder... I think so, but also ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any.
Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
The solution is to force ads upon you and hope that you accidentally click on one due to sensory overload. Or more ads.