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monophonica commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?   newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal
A_D_E_P_T · a year ago
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.

So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.

Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.

monophonica · a year ago
I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.

Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.

It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.

It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.

I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.

Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.

monophonica commented on Thoughts on a month with Devin   answer.ai/posts/2025-01-0... · Posted by u/swyx
verdverm · a year ago
I've been tempted to try Cursor because of vocal fans like yourself. Then I went to their website and forums yesterday. I am no longer tempted.
monophonica · a year ago
It is worth trying.

It is just a fashion choice though with UI.

Personally, I just prefer the chat interface directly with no Cursor UI.

For me, the best way is to write my prompt in a txt file, away from anything to do with LLMs. The bottleneck is not the update of the files like Cursor is good at.

The bottleneck is the clarity of my thoughts.

I looked at your website.

How to get past Barry Schwartz ideas is the main problem that we face in 2025.

The Godel, Escher, Bach stuff to me is just nonsense. As a huge Bach fan boy it is from when Bach was massively overrated in cultural importance.

Hierarchy Theory? How about O-information?

Doesn't seem the O-information wiki entry exists, yet.

monophonica commented on Transformer^2: Self-Adaptive LLMs   sakana.ai/transformer-squ... · Posted by u/hardmaru
verdverm · a year ago
They do not change it, from what I have seen, o3 is more hype and marketing than a meaningful step towards models which can exhibit real creativity and reasoning as humans perform it (rather than perceive it, which is the root of the hype)

For example, a small child is completely capable of being told "get in the car" and can understand, navigate, open the door, and get in, with incredibly little energy usage (maybe about the amount of a single potato chip/crisp)

Now consider what I have been working on recently (1) evaluating secops tools from both a technical and business perspective (2) prototyping and creating an RFC for the next version of our DX at the org. They are very far from this capability because it involves so many competing incentives, trade offs, and not just the context of the current state of code, but also the history and vision. Crafting that vision is especially beyond what a foundation in transformers can offer. They are in essence an averaging and sequence prediction algorithm

These tools are useful, even provide an ROI, but by no means anywhere close to what I would call intelligent.

monophonica · a year ago
Would love to know if you know any other papers like:

Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18654

Maybe the analogy is something with gold mining. We could pretend that the machines that mine gold are actually creating gold. Pretending the entire gold mining sector is instead a discovery of alchemy.

Maybe the way alchemy kind of leads to chemistry is the analogy that applies?

I don't even know if that is right though.

The intelligence is in the training data. The model then is extracting the intelligence.

We can't forget Feynman's ideas here that we aren't going to make a robot cheetah that runs fast. We will make a machine that uses wheels. Viewing things through the lense of a cheetah is a category error.

While I agree completely with you we very well both might be completely and utterly wrong. A category error on what intelligence "is".

monophonica commented on Ask HN: How can I realistically change careers?    · Posted by u/throw101010101
monophonica · a year ago
For me, I am just always learning something new. I have a list of 12 books to read this year and already knocked out two.

The biggest variable to me is if you can justify taking money out of the market to pay for college. For me, it is a non-starter. A completely laughable idea.

Pushing 50, I need one more re-invention. Starting over in something like cybersecurity, I would just be getting beat out by the 25 year younger version of myself. I need an AI hedge basically. Something highly creative, non-standard, not something everyone else is already is doing. The process of trying to figure this out is what I think will lead me there.

My AI hedge is that I don't want to start trying to do this if I find myself completely unemployable with my previous experience and skills pushing 60.

It seems like we either get AGI and I am not employable in 10 years or we don't get AGI and we have such massive malinvestment that the job cutbacks also make me unemployable on my current path.

monophonica commented on Ask HN: How can I realistically change careers?    · Posted by u/throw101010101
reify · a year ago
Back in the early 90's when I was 35 years old I hated my job but I had family commitments and mortgage to attend to.

I had always enjoyed reading psychology books and decided to attend night college and train as a counsellor.

For the first 2 years this was 1 evening of 3 hours each week, then 2 evenings each week for the final 2 years until I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor. I worked full time in my regular job during this period.

Once I had qualifed I realised I had absolutely no experience working in the care sector so I worked as a full time volunteer in the substance misuse field for a whole year gaining the experience and knowledge to allow me to get a paid job in the field. During this period the company provided an extensive traning package. I was after all giving my free time.

I also enroled in a psychotherapy masters degree. Now qualified as a counsellor I had all the core knowledge in place. The masters degree was one weekend each month for 2 years, so very doable.

After a year I applied for my first job as a keyworker then over the next few years I slowly worked my way up the ladder to care-coordinator, methadone dispenser, trained as a auricular acupuncturist etc etc.

six years later, aged 41, a master degree in hand and my new life ahead of me.

My friend did a similar thing and he became an architect.

monophonica · a year ago
That is great.

The problem now is the cost of college. I would be working on this same path right now but I can't justify the terrible relative investment that is college in 2025. It is just night and day different compared to the 80s/90s.

The time would be no issue at all for me. I am bored and would love something to do like going to class again.

It is criminal I can't get a psychology degree online for a fraction of a state school price at this point. To have the same degree cost much more than before the internet is just completely insane.

We can figure out as a society how to ban Tiktok but not how to have dirt cheap education like we could. I can't imagine the price we pay in GDP growth for this between the student loan debt and the sub-optimal work force configuration.

monophonica commented on How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)   statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/tchalla
slibhb · a year ago
For some people at that time, smoking was a non-trivial part of their identity. Or even a significant part of what it meant to be a proper Englishman (that and tea). Fisher strikes me as that sort, just look at pictures of him.

The (fairly obvious) lesson here is that people lose their objectivity when it comes to fighting over stuff that involves their identity.

monophonica · a year ago
My first thought was that obviously he was a smoker.

I loved cigarettes. I haven't smoked in almost 15 years and I might say I still love cigarettes. There really is no replacement for the feeling of being a smoker, waking up in the morning and drinking coffee with a cigarette as the sun comes up. That is a large part of what makes the addiction so bad.

I say this even with the benefit of knowing how horrible they are for health. It is why I quit eventually.

It is really hard to be objective about your partner when you are in love. A highly abusive partner at that.

I suspect the only thing stronger in humans than love is denial. The combination can be especially deluding.

monophonica commented on David Lynch has died   variety.com/2025/film/new... · Posted by u/wut42
ryanmcbride · a year ago
David Lynch has been my favorite director and one of my favorite people for most of my life. His work and outlook has influenced almost everything I've ever created. He changed the way I saw the world for better. I'm really sincerely going to miss what he brought to the world
monophonica · a year ago
Same here.

Julee Cruise/Lynch/Badalamenti - Floating into the Night album is really fitting music for right now.

Into the Night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLJxUEbkG8

monophonica commented on David Lynch has died   variety.com/2025/film/new... · Posted by u/wut42
Trasmatta · a year ago
I'm so grateful he was able to make Twin Peaks: The Return before he passed. It's one of the most brilliant and moving pieces of fiction I've ever experienced. If they had started it just a few years later it may have never been finished.
monophonica · a year ago
I hate season 3 so much. I don't even consider it part of the story.

The greatest ending ever to a TV show is the end of season 2. Nothing can ever touch that as an ending. Season 3 was not needed but I am just glad I got to watch the show when it aired originally.

That ending in 1991 on prime time network TV next to corny sitcoms is just so out of time. Like a transmission from another dimension.

monophonica commented on David Lynch has died   variety.com/2025/film/new... · Posted by u/wut42
scoofy · a year ago
Eraserhead is borderline unwatchable. I love David Lynch, sort of, but without telling people that they're about to sit down and watch an hour-and-a-half of what is effectively an unwatchable piece of avant-garde cinema, then they're not going to be able to appreciate it.

There is nothing worse than getting excited to see a famous director's debut film, thinking you're going to have a good time, and then getting Eraserhead.

monophonica · a year ago
If someone is not into art films, to not start with Twin Peaks is absolutely insane to me.

First two seasons of Twin Peaks are his masterpiece IMO and his most watchable.

Those are some of the best characters of any film/tv show ever.

From there I would go to Lost Highway next for a stronger dose of the more out there stuff.

monophonica commented on Show HN: I made an open source directory of where to showoff your projects   github.com/KingMenes/awes... · Posted by u/soGeneri
monophonica · a year ago
Thanks for this. Really nice resource.

u/monophonica

KarmaCake day15January 16, 2025View Original