If luck = something you didn’t choose or had no control over, sure.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
I’ve seen about 8 therapists and 3 coaches at various times in the last 15 years. 5-6/8 and 2/3 respectively were, I eventually realized, mostly in it for the money and didn’t actually care too much (if at all) about me making any positive changes permanent. It wasn’t all bad; having someone confidential to talk to is in itself valuable, but the cost/benefit ratio is not at all consistent.
With that kind of benchmark comparison, it’s not all that hard for AI to present some kind of favorable value proposition, even if also inconsistent but with a harder ceiling on the upside.
Yeah, because sleeping directly on the ground leaches heat from your body too fast, because of said lack of insulation. Sleeping too directly on the ground is also particularly dangerous in survival scenarios, doubly so if you are cold or wet. A common mistake when assembling a temporary shelter is to spend all your time on the “roof” but very little on the “floor”.
Yeah, I really think this should be the new universal standard. Mostly for respect reasons, but also going through and saying “what DOES my app actually do?” (which is something writing a README forces you to think about) is pretty much the minimal last line of defense attempt at quality control.
You can and probably should do more quality control than that, but it’s a reasonable assumption that if the initial landing document hasn’t been quality checked, the rest hasn’t either.
It’s true that about half of all adults overall never use chatbots, but it’s not out of a negative perception, it’s largely just lack of interest with a side of privacy concerns and inaccuracy concerns. While people do tend to think AI will eventually be a net negative in society, this isn’t like an overwhelming feeling and opinions on the impact to themselves personally is less strong, not more.
You are conflating "uses chatbots" with "likes AI," and seemingly ignoring your own link's findings that young Americans are especially negative towards it.
Personally though? I’ve made peace with the fact that I might have a 20/month subscription indefinitely. It’s slowly working its way towards being like a cell phone or Internet bill, although there’s reason to hope that the amount might decrease over time eventually.
I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.
I don't notice it's hallucinations (in the sense of making up answers) so much as where it's simply wrong. For example, earlier in the week, I was working with product X, and since the original vendor of X doesn't really support it any more, I asked "who else sells product X under their own brand", and Google AI quickly told me that noone else sells product X, that it was full of proprietary tech and quickly devolved into replaying product X marketing spiel. Except...I knew that at least one other vendor did sell product X, only difference is paint job. After too much "no, you're wrong..." and "Yes, you're right...", it finally coughed up that there were 2 other vendors that sold it. And if I didn't already know about another vendor, I probably would still be putzing around with poor support and little documentation.
I think one of the big problems is that the AI Mode and the AI Overview thingy rely on the found web sources too much. They seem to be the ground truth which often conflicts with Gemini's internal knowledge rather than "enriching" it.
I’ve long been curious what you (and a lot of people that express this) feel the cutoff is to know how to code? Because obviously there’s a sliding scale between truly knowing very little, being able to adapt similar work, extensive modifications, coding everything from scratch, etc. on top of understanding certain programming concepts and organization.
Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only.
For context to my above comment re university course.
The final project we had to do was make a very rudimentary room reservation server/client on the terminal. Java, however you wanted to store the data was fine, TCP sockets were the parameters given.
It took me all of a week to finish it. Lots struggled to even begin. We were given 10 weeks.
I didn’t know much then but I read the docs and figured it out.
Yeah, not the one you are responding to, but I wouldn't define it as from scratch.
Personally, "know how to code" is basically having the logic an reasoning skills to read and understand and apply documentation for whatever subject you need for this job.
If you have never written a web app in your life, but you can follow next.js tutorials and customize them beyond the tutorials afterwards, then you're at the point where the only thing you need is more time or more docs based on what you need to do at work.
> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI
If companies would start hiring people who are fully experienced and qualified but can't do the monkey dance of performing live coding, maybe they would find these types of programmers again...
When I looked at “Claude Science” which is a beta, separate desktop app, I came away with the impression that it was mostly for biology and a bit of chemistry - presumably there’s some value it can get from consulting obscure literature and uniting disparate threads of already-known stuff, but since I don’t work in either field I can’t speak much more to it.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
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