Although well orchestrated agentic workspace could write most (if not to say 100%) of the code for me, I'd still feel more comfortable to have it use a language that I feel myself confident with. Not necessarily because I'd want to read through the code. But still, occasionally it is easier for me to check something out by looking directly into the code rather than wasting time and tokens to haggle with AI model on some nitti-gritty detail. And, more importantly, I want to be able to understand the maintenance of and be able to troubleshoot the deployment stacks related to the programming language -- their virtues, their quircks, their security postures etc etc etc.
Meeting duration x N participants = how much human life time burned?
Put it on big screen, hit Start. Display runs in realtime speed, multiplied by the number of people. Everybody will see how much human lifetime gets burned in a matter of minutes. Hit Stop in the end. You’ll get the receipt, send it to participants as a post-mortem to digest what just happened.
In some inexplicable circumstances I ended up attending a sort of leadership training last weekend. In another coffee break, after enduring a “hands-on exercise” of holding a “meeting about discussing how to make meetings productive”, I couldn’t help myself but create the thing in one sitting. One prompt. One single html file, all necessary JS & CSS included. Upload it to cloudflare pages. Done. The thing that you see here is not exactly the version back those couple of days, though, but functionally identical. The initial design was ugly to my tastes. Got a bit better version from claude.ai/design after returning from the “leadership training”.
The tool is silly, but I enjoyed the soothing therapeutic experience of creating it. If you look at it, do you see any corporate silliness still not properly getting captured by the meeting receipt?
For those for whom the gym seems too intimidating to start convos with strangers, another option is to try spotting and signing up to the hobbies where social interaction comes naturally, if not even unavoidably. Things like amateur choir singing (which I do), amateur folk dancing groups, sports clubs where people train in interactive groups (a cross-country ski club in my case), etc. -- these give regularity and allow the persisting social interactions with the same people over longer periods of time to form into true friendships.
I am guessing the open source locally run models will become more appreciated in value when the enshitification reaches the industry. Any guesses on how much time we still have until then?
Fascinating. Considering the industrial scale fat production that the neanderthals managed to operate according to this article, it makes me wonder even more whether we still understand why exactly they went extinct in 80 thousand years later.
The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.
Sounds plausible indeed. Anyways, neanderthals operating a large scale fat production 125 thousand years ago could be a good plot for another hollywood movie scenario. Any takers?
If it's 2% now after 2000-3000 generations, it must have stabilized because any number <.995 is basically zero when raised to the 2000th power. The neanderthal genes would have to be 1-10^-5 as fit as a the sapiens genes, which is basically noise.
Doesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable.
If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
Outcompeting includes murder, rape, war, and cannibalism. But we have population overlap for millennia, so that’s kinda factored into numbers.
All primates are resource competing, so outcompeting is also drinking up their milkshakes. But, again, that’s the baseline.
Non-conclusively, from my lay understanding, the tail end of falls into general bi-lateral competitive practices and breeding rates leading to ‘us’ not ‘them’. All columns all the time, not one crisp incident or behavioural change.
[And there’s no indication that ‘they’ geno-rapo-ate us any less than we them… if being slightly better at mass murder was the difference, then yay for our side?]
Great question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
Sure it does. We see cultural displacement in the archaeological record all over the world. Bones marred by marks of damage by weapons. Otzi the iceman was possibly hunted down and smote on the mountainside like the Balrog Gandalf did in.
I’m not saying violence didnt happen, of course it did! I’m saying the evidence is not that neanderthals were simply eradicated like animals that were hunted to extinction and that multiple factors led to their gradual decline over time.
Not necessarily, it could also mean that homo sapiens was just more successful - better fed, bigger population, etc. It's not likely that early sapiens was so organized that they intentionally genocided neanderthals, it's more like they were subsumed etc. A slow process across thousands of years.
Biological classifications are one gigantic mess. There are multiple ways to define what qualifies as a "species". One of them is procreation and viable offspring, going by modern human DNA and the Neanderthal fragments contained in it we where one big happy family all along.
Depends on whether they were considered competing, and whether "we" were as organized, single-minded and competitive as this statement seems to imply - "we" probably weren't, not until larger kingdoms and empires started forming ~4000 years ago.
Ah yeah looks I wasn't on the mark here. The "outcompete" framing is more accurate for neanderthals but for many pleistocene extinctions "hunted to extinction" did happen in some cases so it was not a good comparison. Thanks!
Ah, trip down the memory lane... I guess I have to try to recall now how the game was played. There is a great likelihood last time was more than 25 years ago.
