Clojurians Log v2

Re the slavery, etc convo, just to randomly pick up on the word "intelligence," is it possible that we simply let the marketing teams at these companies redefine it? In terms of putting "intelligence" on a pedestal, maybe we are right to put actual intelligence on a pedestal, but RNG pattern-seeking machines shouldn't fall into the same category. Just a random thought

I mean moreso about society. We kinda live in blah-maxing society. Maxing this, maxing that. It's important to have high standards in any domain. But we pathologize it to the point where we're slaves to some narrative of progress. And as a society, we work hard and we're like, "We're working so hard to give a better life for our children." Well, a lot of people worked really hard for a really long time - perhaps more than we deserved, all pushing us towards some progress where our children will somehow be less burdened by the work of, in turn, lessening the burden on their children... At what point do we turn the corner and the burdens start to go back down? Maybe not everybody should be Einstein. Maybe Einstein sacrificed a lot to deliver his goods. I mean, he's still a hero. But if that's the ideal for everyone then that would be hard.

The truth is, the search for truth itself is an addiction

And many puzzles, games and professions involve "dopamine ladders"... short bursts of epiphany when mystery is unfolded

I've always favored reason, in the tradition of moving away from dogmas. But these days I tend to think that some people with some kinds of OCD - they're having reasoning bugs rather than emotional bugs. Emotions help you get bored of a cyclic reasoning loop that you should stop thinking about, but you can't because it is too true, or too relavent to something else, or they've just gotten themselves into some thinking loop. Reasoning helps you rise above your animal emotions, but your animal emotions quickly jump in and say, "This is boring, stop looping on that." It's a reasoning circuit breaker. They somehow need to be balanced. I think society is pedestalizing reason over emotions and it's not healthy.

We're not the things to be optimized

It's good that you can... But it can't be the default that we're all permenantly non-optimized-enough towards some infinitely distant target that will make us progressively less of what we are.

relatedly: https://nxhx.org/maximizing/

I am disgusted by LLM code... actually... I think LLM is merely a crappy simulation of intelligence. If I could actually write maintainable software with LLMs, I may actually stop writing code manually.

I worry that'll happen. I do think I'm less motivated to do things an agent can do easily. When I need to craft something in the small, I still enjoy doing it though.

in matters of mind and body, perhaps there is an element of use it or lose it

hyper-realistic-shocked-pikachu-hd-ultra-quality-make-no-mistakes.jpg

When I realised I hadn't read a non-technical book in too long, I eased back into it with 100-page novellas. Maybe there's a programming equivalent?

https://4clojure.oxal.org/#/ is great for rebuilding the muscle memory of programming in Clojure. best paired with something like http://freedom.to to block stackoverflow, chatgpt, anthropic, etc. I also strongly recommend just straight up disabling wi-fi if you can, not having access to search can also help with memory and effectively using your editor's help/docs setup. Good luck! Practice is important.

> ... it takes a very special value system for children and adults to be able to exist as learning creatures--indeed as humans at all--in the presence of an environment that does all for them. 20th century humans that don't understand the hows and whys of their technologies are not in a position to make judgments and shape futures. At some point it is necessary to understand something about thermodynamics and waiting until then to try to learn it doesn't work. Nature's rule is "use it or lose it"--most social systems that have incorporated intelligent slaves or amanuenses have "lost it". In fact most never gained it to lose. In a technopoly in which we can make just about anything we desire, and almost everything we do can be replaced with vicarious experience, we have to decide to do the activities that make us into actualized humans. We have to decide to exercise, to not eat too much fat and sugar, to learn, to read, to explore, to experiment, to make, to love, to think. In short, to exist. > Difficulties are annoying and we like to remove them. But we have to be careful to only remove the gratuitous ones. As for the others--those whose surmounting makes us grow stronger in mind and body--we have to decide to leave those in and face them. Alan Kay, foreword to https://acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html#Foreword, 1993 I've been thinking about this quote for nearly a decade and it gets more prescient by the month

> most social systems that have incorporated intelligent slaves or amanuenses have "lost it". Wow, super salient observation from 1993. Yeah, I think the retrospective concensus is that abolishing slavery leads to the blossoming of an industrial economy. Perhaps because self sufficiency drives innovation and productivity... having slaves makes both you and the slave lazy, perhaps... Stagnant economies. Now they're saying slavery was the real cause of the fall of Rome. So, not only is slavery abhorent for all the usual reasons, but it's also a net negative on the slave holders. And if these AI become "slaves to humans," does that contribute to a fall of Rome scenario, due to the laziness of the agent owners? Certainly not a future without risk. We could have said the same of horses though... It may well be that, before horses, humans could run faster... That's a kind of animal slave. I guess the question is, what degree of leverage will these agents confer to us, in exchange for us being able to do it ourselves? The horses got us further than we as humans could have gotten on our own self-sufficient accord.

> i've noticed that i procrastinate WAAAAAY too much, that i don't have the motivation, patience or willpower to actually create usefulness <updates job title to "project manager"> trollface I'll see myself out 🙈

Slavery was the reason for the fall of Rome indeed, just as serfdom was the reason for the fall of feudalism, and I'll let you decide which class is the next one to cause the fall of what in the modern age...

Counter argument: what if we're putting intelligence on a pedestal? What if the better thing to do is to be able to forget things and relearn them more quickly? How quickly can you change from being efficient at one thing to being efficient at another thing? I can quickly become an accountant now, with agentic assistance. I can become many things I wasn't able to before. Opportunity is democratizing. It's more of a question of what you can become than what you are.

We complain about burnout but then have nostalgia for the grind in the name of excelence

Counter-counter argument: you can't quickly become a Rama/Electric programmer, in fact you cannot quickly become anything which is actually a fundamental paradigm shift from how things have been done for the past 30 years. All AI does is reproduce the outdated patterns, struggling at comprehending (because it indeed doesn't "comprehend" anything) the newest things. In other words, you can be very quickly writing one thousand lines of C/C++ code with AI (and you will constantly need to check them), but you'll only need to write a lisp macro once to be even faster with it forever, to be writing the equivalent of 1000 of lines of C in mere seconds by hand, because your macro does the generation deterministically under the hood, and it doesn't need expensive GPUs to expand either. So there is not fundamental shift to "being able to become anything super fast", knowledge is not inherently "democratic" so trying to "democratize" it is counter-natural. Knowledge comes from effort, don't forget we are complex systems which learn from interaction! And a ton of the emerging fields need expertise that can be reduced to knowledge. Knowledge != fact I can quickly google. Knowledge is a complex web of connections, in fact knowledge itself is a massive topic of debate among philosophers and neuroscientists, so it cannot possibly be outsourced. We can outsource moving things back and forth because we have completely rigorously researched literally every atom of a generator. We have not done that with knowledge, so therefore we cannot even outsource it in a way that will be as reliably bringing us benefits as the steam engine has been for the last centuries.

Making knowledge available democratizes that knowledge. Making inference over that knowledge available democratizes inference over that knowledge. It just so happens, lots of useful inferences can be outsourced, thus making those inferences available to people all over the world that they would have otherwise had to pay experts for. That's actually pretty massive, in terms of the distribution of opportunity.

To your point though... You have a point about AI not making you a rama expert. It's more likely to make you a react expert. So yeah, not all walls have fallen. We still need humans to explore forests of possibility using taste and intuition that are outside the LLM's distribution. Once some humans find a new path through the forest (perhaps with the assistance of AI), then other humans can follow in their footsteps. Then social engagement around that solution can increase. Then the LLMs learn more about it and it enters their distribution. And, if it becomes popular, rama/electric will start to enter the distribution like react. And I agree with you, we still need humans to become experts in rama/electric/etc before other humans can, let alone LLMs. But once you've become an expert in rama/electric/etc, don't define yourself by that expertice. Don't take pride in that knowledge. It's useful for you for a given purpose at a given time. Hopefully rama/electric gets so popular that knowing it stays useful for a long time. That's certainly true of Clojure. So, becoming in an expert in clojure will help you tread new paths through new jungles towards rama/electric solutions, so others can follow in your foot steps. But expertise in something is downstream of the more important things in your life that those expertises serve, like having time to enjoy the fruits of your labor and touching grass and living life.