But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.
The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction.
If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
The issue is we have let the attention economy overrun us. It’s not people being too verbose. Shorter content is the objective these days.
You are more consistently rewarded, typically financially, for putting out 100 terrible blog posts than 10 great ones. The terrible ones tend to be short too.
Your time is saved letting ChatGPT write all your emails. The recipient’s time is wasted by emails with little to no substance that the sender couldn’t even bother to spend time on.
Hell there are people using LLM’s to comment on forums now. That’s not what I come here for. This has always existed to some degree but it has, as another person pointed out, been so democratized that it’s becoming a bigger problem. Now I have to constantly expend mental effort questioning if I’m talking to actual people. When I discover it’s a bot, it’s infuriating. It’s disrespectful, frankly.
We all came here to talk to each other. Not be duped by facsimiles of each other. I want to talk to you.
We are never going to live in a society that doesn't expect people to work. There may not be enough work for half the population, but people will still be expected to work to live. We already live in a society that could feed every last poor person and we still choose not to, cuz "but muh tax dollars!"
I mean, assuming we don't hit some limit with AI, we're going to get to the point where the best way humans can affect productivity is to just get out of the way.
You can't regress to the mean and call it creation. LLMs don't make novel content. This is why all the people using AI-summarizers to understand their boss's AI-expanded micromanaging emails aren't getting anything new done. Anti-compression is going to accelerate climate change.
I'm still waiting for the last ML movement to revolutionize business intelligence. Back when regression models were going to give us all forecasting. Turns out garbage in still equals garbage out and there still aren't any silver bullets. The organizations that couldn't get their act together to collect good data about their businesses for traditional analysis methods to work are shock-faced that model-overfitting writ large isn't saving them from their doofus C-suites.
This is something I've been working on in my own professional writing for years. I used to write very long emails, thinking I was providing insight and detail, but nobody would even bother reading them because it was such a chore.
I consider more than three paragraphs and more than two sentences per paragraph a "writing smell." It's relatively easy now, especially when I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.
I try to limit my emails to one, clear, strong point—usually just factual statements—in the active voice, eschewing adverbs as much as possible. The emails almost write themselves now, because there isn't much choice on what to write anymore.
Milchik's problem was that he worshipped--quite literally--the company. I do this for my own gain. I started getting much more of what I wanted out of work and other formal relationships (my kids' teachers, my doctors, etc) when I got honest with how I was communicating and how I was being perceived and changed my habits to suit.
Part of the mechanism of psychological addiction is unreliable, intermittent rewards. People feel like they are in control but can't figure out the optimal win strategy. One effective means of treating gambling addiction is to just teach people how to get good at gambling. It removes the mystery of the system and puts the subject back in control. So, making every hand winnable may actually help to make the game less addictive.
Came here to also throw in a vote for it being so much easier to just use SQLite. You get so much for so very little. There might be a one-time up-front learning effort for tweaking settings, but that is a lot less effort than what you're going to spend on fiddling with stupid issues with data files all day, every day, for the rest of the life of your project.
Even then... I'd argue for at least LevelDB over raw jsonl files... and I say this as someone who would regularly do ETL and backups to jsonl file formats in prior jobs.
Frankly, this reads as sometime going way too far to be contrary. Yeah, sure, Act Utilitarianism is different than Rule Utilitarianism. News at 11. But most developers don't get the luxury of fighting for the greater good. Most are fighting to keep their paycheck flowing so they can eat. What I'm saying is, insecure software comes from organizational dysfunction, not "bad developers adopting software too quickly." It's a corporate political problem to which you're attempting to apply technical management to solve.
Dude, this mode of ex post facto rationalization is waaaay older than communism. It's basically one of the main "retention warnings" of most religions.
If you have a stock pot, a steel bowl that is large enough to sit on top of the stock pot, and a Pyrex measuring glass, you can start distilling now.
Put the glass in the center of the pot. Fill the pot with not enough mash to float the glass. Top the pot with the bowl. The condensate will form on the bowl and run towards the bottom center of the bowl, where it will drip into the glass.
I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.
You'll have to do your own research on the finer details of making this work. I figured it out from first principles in the middle of doing it, so it's not that hard. Hell, people have been distilling for centuries, before they even knew what caused fermentation. Anything pre-Industrial Revolution peasants could do, I should be able to figure out in my modern house full of power tools. I'm not here to teach you how to do this, just inform that it's possible with equipment you likely already have.
> I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.
My grandfather used to make something called Apple Jack using a method known as freeze distillation. He'd put fermented cider (widely available in rural New York) in a cask and place it out in the barn on a really cold night. The water would freeze, but the alcohol would not and could be tapped.
So "the water freezes, the alcohol does not," is not actually how freeze-distillation works. The entire batch freezes solid. You then let the block melt and collect the first meltings. If you start off with a 5% ABV solution, freeze it, and then melt off half of it, you'll end up with two halves where one is maybe 7% ABV and the other is maybe 3% ABV. You will need to reprocess those halves to further concentrate (yes, both halves, you want the alcohol from the 3% portion, too, but you have to do them separately or you're back to where you started) with your level of efficiency being limited primarily by your patience and how cold your freezer can get. Probably not cold enough to get above 20% ABV [0].
One problem with freeze-distillation is that it's more like removing watery alcohol and taking everything else than it is like in boil distillation where you're trying to remove alcoholic water and leave everything else behind. So you still need to make multiple runs to get the ABV up, but boiling will remove impurities, whereas freezing will concetrate them.
[0] IDK, that's just a guess, I'm not inclined to look it up. I'm not writing a reference guide here.
Just telling you how my father remembered it. Not sure how big the cask or barrel was, but if time and temperature are controlled, how will that affect the rate of ice formation inside the cask? What happens to the remaining unfrozen liquid in terms of ABV?
Sorry, it's just that these kinds of threads have a lot of people repeating things that aren't really all that correct. It creates an image of things that doesn't match reality that continue to persist in the collective conscience. Like how hibernation for bears isn't really "the bear sleeps all winter." Anyway, neither here nor there (I'm still not happy I lived 35 years of my life believing bears curled up in caves and take 3-month-long naps for winter. It's preposterous on its very face).
Solutions of alcohol and water are weird. If you had a solution of salt and water, you could boil 100% of the water out in one go and have 100% of the salt left over. With alcohol and water, you don't get that. You get a continuum of concentrations that changes over time, as the distillation progresses.
And there is more than one alcohol that you're dealing with, with different phase change temperatures for each. So it's a bit like homeopathy. At any particular point, you are dividing the batch into two sections, one that is increasing on the gradient of alcohol concentration and one that is decreasing. But each part of the batch will actually have some proportion of each chemical in it. All you can do is change the relative proportions and repeat until you've changed the ratios such that the one you don't want is negligible.
Water's freezing point is 0C, of course. Methanol's is, like, -97C. Ethanol's is around -115C. Something like that. So "the water freezes first". But it's not just water. It will be some proportion of all three, as well as trace other acetyl alcohols where the flavor comes from. It's just that more of it will be water than what you started. On the flip side, the ethanol freezes "last". But again, it will be a certain proportion of all three. So the "remaining, unfrozen liquid" increases in ABV over time. But the frozen liquid is not free of alcohol. And if we were trying to run a production distillery, we'd want to reprocess the frozen portion to extract the remaining aclohol from it as well.
It's an infinite series on which we're performing a manual, physical Taylor expansion approximation.
One of the nice things about boiling distillation is that it is the methanol with the lowest boiling point and the water with the highest. So, you can more easily bracket your product away from the beginning parts of the process to avoid the methanol. You can't really do that with freeze distillation, because the methanol is sitting in the middle between the water and ethanol in the phase change spectrum. Thankfully, it's impossible to make yourself go blind from in-good-faith home brewing and distilling. The amount of methanol you can produce will--at worst--give you a wicked hangover. But that's why more people don't do freeze distillation.
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