I disagree. It allowed me to get rid of many useless remote contractors who made the projects stretch forever. Slot machine or not, I am so happy not to deal with those people anymore.
It amazes me that you can tell people "I get better results with AI than the people I was paying" and their response is "no you aren't, you can't tell the difference". It's mind boggling.
As if the remote developers weren't writing spaghetti code or removing vital parts. At least the AI understands intention. A few years ago, one of the Indian developers removed the checkout button from an e-commerce site because I told him there was a specific issue at checkout and I described it in detail. His solution was not letting people check out for 1 whole day until we caught the issue after 300+ emails overnight. Even ChatGPT 3.5 is more logical. And this guy was a senior, certified Magento developer. Another Ukrainian developer inserted a card skimmer at the checkout, and we caught it in 2 days. This was also a certified developer. I can list the nightmare stories for days. I am just so happy not to be dealing with these people anymore; end of story.
Don't get me wrong, we still pay for Local real developers, and if we catch them doing dodgy stuff, we hold them accountable. It is so rare compared to what we've dealt with overseas developers.
I am so happy I don't pay these lying remote developers thousands of dollars anymore, and we can do it all with a much smaller, smarter local team.
> Why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation?
Because getting the mortgage to buy the house involves parting with a large sum of money, after which some part of the mortgage payment goes towards something called principal. If it just goes towards interest, it may as well be rent.
Not to mention that when you try to sell the thing, there's some expectation by one or more third parties of some percentage of it.
Makes no sense to me. You take a loan to buy something you cannot otherwise afford, then you pay back the loan. Bank wants % on the loan, this is legal, therefore you pay back more than you borrowed. The amount gets split into two buckest, "interest" and "principal", presumably because of size and length of the loan, but arguably mostly to let the bank do various shenanigans that lead to them making more money on it.
Nothing in this gives any good reason for one to expect homes to appreciate in value, other than that some buyers want it to, and I haven't heard any good reason why those buyers shouldn't just be told, "no". If these people then decide not to get mortgages, due to it not being an investment, then all the better for everyone else, who want a home to live in.
They do, because if you cannon keep up with the repayments, the loan (mortgage) is secured on the house. So the bank will take possession of the house & sell it as quickly as possible (because banks don't want to own houses), which means they won't get a great price. Additionally, when people can't make mortgage payments, it's likely to be a bad time for the economy, meaning prices of houses will be low. All this creates risk for the bank, and rising house prices reduce this risk (it is more likely they will recover most/all of their money if they need to). That in turn means they will lend the mortgage at a lower rate than otherwise.
But at the same time most people do the bare minimum to maintain their house, so the quality of the property continually decreases. I don't drive a car for 20 years and then expect to make a profit on selling it.
ChatGPT suggests the land might have appreciated, the neighborhood may be more desirable, inflation, or development potential. We don't need programmers anymore because LLMs can do it. It must be an expert on home values too.
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad that you've prefaced it with "temporary" - it suggests perhaps that the effects are known not to be permanent for you and that you are on the mend, which is marvellous. Godspeed.
To be clear, the people I encountered who had these interactions with me were very ill over a long period of time. At least one of them was sectioned after a failed suicide attempt (that involved trying to roll his car down the motorway and jumping off a bridge - thankfully nobody was hurt and he came away with just a few bruises). I was asked to go to the secure unit he was sent to, to convince him I was not controlling his brain, by his wife, who was acting on his request.
Another refused to get help after I urged him to talk to his doctor and became threatening enough I had to start forwarding emails and texts he was sending me to others as "witnesses" in case anything happened to me.
I am not the hero of these stories. I'm just part of them. When people you know behave like this towards you, it is deeply unsettling. Almost all cognitive changes in people you know can be disturbing. Talking about that is not me making myself the victim: it's saying how it affects me.
If I'd known PKD while all this was going on, and was aware of it, I think I'd be both saddened and terrified. That was my point.
Good luck with dealing with your own recovery, and I hope you're well soon.
When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.
I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.
This is fascinating to me. Your experience is so different from mine.
When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.
I’m open to correction but my understanding is everyone dreams when they have REM sleep and everyone has some REM sleep every night unless there are rare medical conditions which would be unhealthy if there is a long period of no REM sleep.
People who believe they never dream (including myself before I learned this) simply don’t remember it. If you were woken artificially during REM you might remember fragments.
The last time I dreamt was in April. I'd make a note about it in my day log txt file when it happens. It's not the same as a normal night's sleep, and I would remember it. But I assume not having REM sleep for the past 4 months would mean reduced cognitive functioning, which is obviously not the case, so maybe I simply cannot remember my dreams most of the time.
Perhaps memory and consciousness are closely related or even the same process, as there is no way to tell them apart from the inside.
Sleep is very subjectively different from anesthesia, in my personal experience. Sleep still carries a feeling of the passage of time, and in fact dreams can feel "more real than real" (I remember my dreams to varying degrees, most often when I drink alcohol, although I don't like to use that as a specific method to remember dreams on demand). Anesthesia, for me, resulted in the absolute cessation of time experience during the process. From my perspective, I went out in the OR and was immediately in the recovery room, even though it had in reality been about an hour.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar
Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.
Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.
Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.
Well we do know you can't feel pain, because we've actually done the MRI studies to confirm. Which makes me feel a lot better personally.
But I also have a doctor friend who tells me how removing my appendix actually worked: I go under. Then they take out the appendix. Then they wake me so that I can, with help, move from the operating table to the wheeled bed. This part is not a part of my memory, but people can talk to me and I can get down from the table and onto the bed (again, with help).
