NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on Digg has shutdown (again) in ~tech
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Comment on Digg has shutdown (again) in ~tech
NaraVara (edited )LinkI did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality...I did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality of discussions and content was basically on the floor. It was full of people trying to recreate our own Reddit with blackjack and hookers rather than a concerted effort to do anything new. And the rest was just content mill slop. It is not an issue of just bot traffic, there’s plenty of actual people trying to get their content off the ground by just posting like commercial marketers. It’s a cultural problem with the internet as a whole now. The dream used to be to make enough money by building an loyal audience to quit your job. But I think as soon as the expectation became being able to get “fuck you” money the game just changed. Everyone is traffic farming by posting optimized slop now and it drowns out sincere contributions by people who just want to interact with a community. I’m not sure the problem can be solved any way besides intentionally keeping a community small and curating it, as Tildes does.
And as is usual when the entire site ethos is purely reactionary to something else, almost all the discussions pivoted back to complaining about Reddit. No funny memes, the current events discussion was performative liberal engagement/rage bait combined with barely veiled Nazis thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy getting all their takes downvoted and yelled at rather than them just sucking. There was absolutely ZERO “look at this cool thing I did” which is what the “golden age” of these sites was about.
All that said, I don’t really hold it against them that they took a swing and missed but the fact that this stuff they’re saying is some kind of surprise to them should, frankly, be extremely embarrassing and sounds like they didn’t do any actual research into the problem domain AT ALL. This is all stuff tech and culture writers, and basically every online publication with a comment section (that hasn’t devolved into a PE acquisition slopfest) could have told them. Like they didn’t have a conversation with anyone who produces content on the modern internet before locking in their business strategy? They just had an idea and then dove in with a bunch of money to do what’s functionally a hackathon?
This is no way to run a business man!
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Comment on “This technology disrupts [...] Democratic—voters, [and] increases the economic power of [...] male, working-class voters” in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentThis isn’t the first dumbfuck thing he’s said. I also have degrees from prestigious universities and I’ve met and dealt with lots of idiots along the way. They might be able to recite references...This isn’t the first dumbfuck thing he’s said. I also have degrees from prestigious universities and I’ve met and dealt with lots of idiots along the way. They might be able to recite references about the specific thing they studied, but simply be idiots at everything else. This means their average take (which probably won’t be about the thing they studied) is going to be stupid.
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Comment on “This technology disrupts [...] Democratic—voters, [and] increases the economic power of [...] male, working-class voters” in ~society
NaraVara LinkKarp is an idiot who evidently does not know what the fuck he’s talking about. LLMs, if anything, increase the employability of “feminine” humanities and liberal arts types, and they definitely...Karp is an idiot who evidently does not know what the fuck he’s talking about. LLMs, if anything, increase the employability of “feminine” humanities and liberal arts types, and they definitely benefit from having a college (or a very good high school) education to use them well and not shoot yourself in the foot. Many of the core skills needed to use LLMs and agentic workflows productively are management skills.
Being able to clearly articulate needs objectives, being able understand trade-offs between different courses of action, being able to monitor delegated tasks to ensure they’re being done correctly and aligned to the ultimate goal, being able to effectively allocate limited time and resources, etc. Anyone who actually does things besides making grand pronouncements at investor panels understands these are rare skills that are difficult to hire for.
And on top of the management skills, you need some different fundamentals than are usually recruited for. These are language models and interacting with them requires a mastery of language, a thing you learn from spending a lot of time writing. You not only need to be able to write coherently and succinctly so it has a clear idea of what you want and doesn’t need to burn tokens inefficiently on parsing pointless digressions. You also need to understand that the model is trying to predict what response to give based on real world training data. This means that it will reflect back to you how you write to it. If you talk to the LLM like a rube, it will talk back to you like the kind of person who regularly has written correspondence with a rube. If you want medical advice from an LLM (you shouldn’t, but this is just an example), you are far more likely to get a good response back if you talk to it like a very informed patient having a knowledgeable discussion with a doctor that you respect because the most statistically likely sorts of comments you would get to that would be the sorts of comments a knowledgeable and respected physician would make. If you, in contrast, try to talk to it like a crunchy granola woo hippie then you are increasing the odds of getting a response that a snake oil salesman would give. (There’s complicating factors here, the actual chatbots do a lot of post-training and impose rules to steer them away from providing undesirable replies like that regardless of how dumb you’re being, but these are countermeasures to mitigate against an outcome that is inherent to how it works so it won’t be perfect.)
Really the sort of person who will thrive here is someone with a broad foundation in general knowledge, very strong language skills, decent logical reasoning skills, and has read broadly enough and possesses sufficient empathy to be able to understand how to talk to elicit the kind of response you want. To get really deep into using them for specific professional purposes they will reward a very strong knowledge of theory and logic but deprioritize a lot of technical execution competencies. You don’t need to know syntax or basic operations as a programmer, but you will still need to understand why you would choose one sort of architecture over another and whether its doing things in ways that line up with your long term vision. It’s sort of in the same way that easy search and lookup tools made it much less important to have a lot of general fact knowledge in your head. We don’t strictly need to remember everyone’s phone numbers anymore so we just don’t.
I actually think people who practice improv might actually get pretty good at this, because the whole deal there is to understand how your scene partner thinks and do your bit in a way that leaves enough raw material for them to pick and build off of. Either way, toxic incel dweebs would think all of these skills are “gay” or “femoid” or whatever.
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Comment on AI was eroding trust in my classroom — so I got rid of typed papers and bought my students notebooks instead in ~life
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentThat’s kind of funny because growing up one of my least favorite things about writing assignments was having to type them up neatly on my mom’s digital typewriter after I already hand-wrote and...That’s kind of funny because growing up one of my least favorite things about writing assignments was having to type them up neatly on my mom’s digital typewriter after I already hand-wrote and proofread my draft.
And that was WAY better than having to do it on the even older mechanical typewriter because I had a delete key and could edit in line without having to commit each keystroke to print.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentI don’t have a link but I just remember a hypothesis floating around that “Long COVID” might be a result of COVID resetting the immune system in a way that allows previously infected but dormant...I don’t have a link but I just remember a hypothesis floating around that “Long COVID” might be a result of COVID resetting the immune system in a way that allows previously infected but dormant viruses, like Epstein-Barr, to pop back up. Hence why the symptoms seem to be so broad and inconsistent from case to case.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentThere’s a decently supported hypothesis out there that getting a bad COVID infection seems to un-train your immune system so it stops recognizing many viruses that it used to be able to identify...There’s a decently supported hypothesis out there that getting a bad COVID infection seems to un-train your immune system so it stops recognizing many viruses that it used to be able to identify and respond to before. It’s basically like our anti-virus has been reset to factory settings and forgot how to find the weak spot on a bunch of stuff it used to be able to speedrun through.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentThat is unless your daycare does drop-in care for elementary school kids on school holidays. Then you get sudden infusions of new contact as a bunch of kids from random elementary schools all over...That is unless your daycare does drop-in care for elementary school kids on school holidays. Then you get sudden infusions of new contact as a bunch of kids from random elementary schools all over the area all pop in for a day or week to create a fresh melange of contagions by combining germs from each of their respective Petri dishes every month or two.
Oh and live in a city where like 70% of people in your income range have jobs that require frequent work-related travel. So parents can go to other states or countries and bring their exotic germs back to their children to share with the class.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara LinkTry having kids and you’ll see how resilient your immune system really is. Also there’s just generally less crowding and more sanitation than there used to be. There’s still hand sanitizer...Try having kids and you’ll see how resilient your immune system really is.
Also there’s just generally less crowding and more sanitation than there used to be. There’s still hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere and people are way more habituated to washing their hands. A lot of people still work from home or have hybrid schedules so there’s less people rubbing up against each other in public leading to illnesses spreading around. Restaurants and stores still have some of the health protocols in place for people handling food.
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
NaraVara Link ParentI think the big change with Claude Code will be democratizing a lot of software development. Relative neophytes will be able to set up a scalable, enterprise-tier architecture for an application...I think the big change with Claude Code will be democratizing a lot of software development. Relative neophytes will be able to set up a scalable, enterprise-tier architecture for an application with very little help. This can only mean a flowering of many many startups and many many internal corporate development projects to solve their problems instead of relying on some commercial off the shelf tool.
It’s gonna be a bad time for B2B SaaS, and any business line that relies on slinging bits around is going to be commoditized out of existence by a thousand bespoke mom&pops. But it’ll be a great time to do IT for a traditional company that has to interact with the real world, making stuff or moving stuff. They’re starved for talent and resources and they’re about to see a world where every random clerk is able to directly solve a bunch of small problems that they didn’t know how to write syntax for automation scripting or macros for before and do now.
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
NaraVara LinkSo one thing I’ll add from my own experience. I started my career as a data analyst/data scientist and it was a role I was very good at. Like good enough to where people were willing to let a lot...So one thing I’ll add from my own experience. I started my career as a data analyst/data scientist and it was a role I was very good at. Like good enough to where people were willing to let a lot of unprofessional behavior slide (not anything immoral more things like talking back to my manager in front of others, flouting administrative paperwork stuff, that sort of thing, general refusal to manage up out of pride, etc.) because people were generally willing to let a lot of things slide because I was pretty much irreplaceable.
But I switched career tracks into project management after that initial stint due to burnout (the flip-side of being “irreplaceable” is that you end up being the single point of failure on everything you touch). About 6-8 years in I started managing teams of data scientists and in the time between when I left that specific field of expertise and then started managing people who did the job I used to do the discipline had basically completely changed. Like much of the stuff I was skilled at that set me apart from others were basically table stakes now (and a whole other set of skills that used to be table stakes are precious jewels now but that’s another story) and the level of sophistication of data sets, technical tools, canned functions, and other stuff at people’s disposal is genuinely staggering.
But rather than eliminating data scientist jobs this ended up creating way way more. The job looks a bit different now than it did then. It’s a more python and less stata, etc. but the changes happened gradually enough for people in it that it doesn’t seem like as radical a leap as it is for me who left and came back. It also requires a different kind of brain and background to be good now. Data wonks used to come from the social sciences and now it’s its own discipline. We used to care a lot about the underlying math and methodology details and now you don’t really have to (though I’d argue you still should). It’s all way more efficient now but since the cost of doing analysis has gone way down, people have found way more occasions and places to need data analysis. If anything it’s gone too far and we’re allowing data to make strategic decisions to inappropriate degrees.
But the discipline has changed. You have to think a lot more like a programmer now and you’re less close to the reality the data represents than you used to be IMO. But I don’t think I’d have been as interested in it if it was like this when I was coming up. Insofar as I add value as a manager I often feel it’s more like an ability to inject some of the “old ways” into caring more about what the p value says about objective reality than what your p value says about the data.
All that to say I think over time LLMs will make it so people are still writing software, but the software developers will look different and apply different skills from the ones who came before. For some this will be a natural transition but for others they’re not gonna make it. I think you’ll see some of the work of building new features start being done by people who would be “product managers” today and there will just be a lot more of them and they’ll start learning skills that programmers have now. So it’s not “over” it’s just going to look very different. As different as medicine transitioning from visiting with herbalists and apothecaries to the evidence-based medical establishment we have today.
The technology is still immature so we don’t actually know what LLM-centric business processes will look like. Only once they arise will we start to understand what kinds of tasks and choices will still need a person doing or at least supervising them. I think more than the problem of jobs disappearing I worry about the brittleness and stagnation we’ll be introducing if we cut those jobs in a fit of over enthusiasm for a technology with limitations that the people making these decisions don’t understand.
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Comment on Apple announces Macbook Neo, a new budget Mac in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentI think the target user is someone trying to upgrade from a Chromebook, so this will beat the pants off that. People who are trying to get a real computer at a discount are being steered to the...I think the target user is someone trying to upgrade from a Chromebook, so this will beat the pants off that. People who are trying to get a real computer at a discount are being steered to the MacBook Air, which starts at $200 more. That’s maybe $50 more than what 8GB of extra RAM would cost at Apple markups anyway, and you’re getting a lot more for it.
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Comment on Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband in ~life.men
NaraVara Link ParentWhen you’re doing a survey across multiple countries, cultures, and languages it’s basically impossible to localize those sorts of nuances in wording in a way where meaning will be consistent...When you’re doing a survey across multiple countries, cultures, and languages it’s basically impossible to localize those sorts of nuances in wording in a way where meaning will be consistent between them. The simpler and more blunt the statement the more internally valid your findings will be. But even the bluntest sounding statements can end up having nuances in how they’re interpreted after translation. It’s a hornet’s nest.
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Comment on Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband in ~life.men
NaraVara Link ParentI think this is basically tracking number of men who have been married/in long-term relationships with women before and understand how they work vs. men who are operating mostly on naive...I think this is basically tracking number of men who have been married/in long-term relationships with women before and understand how they work vs. men who are operating mostly on naive theorizing from ambient messaging. So it’s going to track closely with age.
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Comment on Audible offers Standard membership plan - $8.99 for access to Audible Plus and a book a month that is NOT retained when you're unsubscribed. in ~books
NaraVara LinkI have to assume there are ways to retain it, though perhaps through methods IP lawyers would deem to be . . .unnatural.I have to assume there are ways to retain it, though perhaps through methods IP lawyers would deem to be . . .unnatural.
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Comment on What’s your preferred work monitor setup? in ~comp
NaraVara LinkIt actually depends on OS. If it’s a Mac I prefer having one big monitor, like 32” at least. Maybe with a smaller side monitor, but an iPad set up would work as well. If it’s a PC I think at least...It actually depends on OS. If it’s a Mac I prefer having one big monitor, like 32” at least. Maybe with a smaller side monitor, but an iPad set up would work as well.
If it’s a PC I think at least 2. Just because Windows UI seems to not do well unless windows are maximized. Everything seems designed to run full screen.
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Comment on Writers who don't read books: a response in ~books
NaraVara Link ParentFrankly most creative outlets are going to need some amount of initial practice before you can actually start enjoying them. You kind of have to suck it up and learn to enjoy the act of...Frankly most creative outlets are going to need some amount of initial practice before you can actually start enjoying them. You kind of have to suck it up and learn to enjoy the act of learning/practicing/training.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe “proactive step” would have been not getting onto a centralized platform hosted on someone else’s computer in the first place. As soon as you do that you’re in basically a semi-public zone...I've been through this enough times that I'd rather take proactive steps early on to get off the train instead of riding it into the wreck.
The “proactive step” would have been not getting onto a centralized platform hosted on someone else’s computer in the first place. As soon as you do that you’re in basically a semi-public zone where you don’t have much expectation of absolute privacy.
They always boil the frog. They won't ever publicly announce such a thing.
They don’t “always boil the frog” actually. If anything, they tend to try and move out way too aggressively, get way over their skis, and never fucking shut up about their plans to do evil for the sake of doing evil. The people wanting to do this stuff are clownish caricatures, not secret shadowy puppet-masters.
Or anyone who may feel vulnerable to an oppressive government that does not want to give out data that they browse LGBT content.
Age verification doesn’t meaningfully bring that any closer or farther away though. They literally can identify you right now if you’re a person of interest unless you’re taking pretty extreme measures to obfuscate your identity, which isn’t really something one would do on Discord in the first place.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe irony is that the American reflexive aversion to government data collection or identification of any kind ends up making our PII less secure as we yield up all the information to each and...The irony is that the American reflexive aversion to government data collection or identification of any kind ends up making our PII less secure as we yield up all the information to each and every service provider who all sell it to the same handful of data brokers on the back end. But it’s not the government so it’s fine, it’s just Mark Zuckerberg. . .
. . .who sells it back to the government anyway with fewer data protections, transparency, audit, or oversight than if it was just done by a public agency.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThis is true of everything though. It’s fine until you push it to the point where it’s not. So you just stop using it once it’s not instead of catastrophizing about how everything could...This is true of everything though. It’s fine until you push it to the point where it’s not. So you just stop using it once it’s not instead of catastrophizing about how everything could potentially be a theoretical step towards doing something else that there isn’t much indication they’re doing.
It’s not even like they couldn’t just lock out LGBT content now if they wanted, that’s a control on the content rather than the identity of the viewers. All this would do is enable them to lock it out only for <18 users rather than globally.
It also means bans can have teeth because doing something ban-worthy is functionally getting you slapped with a fine.