Cynicism is something I was curious about, particularly what drives people to feel this way. It’s such a powerful emotion that tilts someone’s worldview.
It comes from negative experience and not dealing with the effects of that experience. The weight of that negativity is what tilts your views to be overtly cynical. You don’t just choose to be cynical, it’s part of your predisposition.
Idealism comes when you are younger in age and as you get older, you become more cynical about things, because you have been through many more experiences.
Young people should not be overtly cynical. They should look at the world with bright eyes and try to change things for the better. A young person who is overly cynical is a tragedy.
In regard to playing politics, I think that is just intellectual laziness. Getting people on board with your ideas requires thoughtfulness. Try to find common ground on something you both believe in is a challenge, that requires effort. Treating people as individuals, showing genuine curiosity in their beliefs and exchanging direct feedback in a respectful way, is how you get people on board with your ideas.
Cynicism in younger people is merely operationalizing the adage “prepare for the worst and hope for the best”. Hope just isn’t a great foundation for basing decisions on if you have any other foundation available.
Hope is a great foundation, especially if you’re in a negative environment. It’s important to deal directly with reality, but sometimes reality is harsh and you need a break from the present moment. Hope is that break.
In my 25 years in tech, there were no meritocracies. I came from a simple working class upbringing and experienced upward mobility into the white collar class.
I differentiated myself by always finding ways to solve problems, that others weren’t willing to do. People expected things to be done a certain way, I expected nothing and did everything myself my own way.
I never had mentorship that taught me “how to play the game”. People saw me as a threat, some would copy my work and take credit for it. I don’t have the mentality to fight with people over a game, so I let people win, to my detriment.
I never had hunger for title or compensation, so it was never offered to me unless I voiced my desire to exit.
My friends who played the game are sitting on a fortune, where they have more material possessions, but their kids are struggling and they are struggling, to find peace and happiness, because they are “owned” by the game. They have no substance in their life and compare themselves to others who play the game. A endless cycle of jealously.
I sit here with peace and very high life satisfaction, understanding I have skills that help people, that fulfill a purpose, that comes with healthy integration with my unbreakable values.
Learning to think independently while ignoring superficial reward signals with focus on self concordant goals is the recipe to life satisfaction.
Some things LLMs can do are amazing and some things they fail at miserably.
I do enjoy programming and low level programming helps you build a mental model on what a system is capable of. If you know what a system is capable of, you can form higher levels of abstraction, that the LLM will never figure out.
AI in its plain definition is the automation of human cognitive process. Having AI work on cognitively demanding tasks gives you energy to focus on other things, like higher levels of abstraction.
I cover a wide set of domains, LLM is much better at some of them, worse at others. I learn from my mistakes, I also learn from the LLM mistakes.
If your intention is to be a good programmer, you will use it as a tool to learn and be productive. I love the stack overflow experience, but now they are a data provider to llms. This is the shift in how technology is being used, even according to stacks ceo, “I think we will see a lot of job displacement in the next two years”
Adoption for code gen and workflow execution is too significant to be ignored.
>> But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.
This is exactly how I use it. I prefer Gemini 3 personally.
I try to learn as much as I can about different architectures, usually by reading books or other implementations and coding first principals to build a mental model. I apply the architecture to the problem and the AI fills in the gaps. I try my best to focus and cover those gaps.
The reason I think it is inconsistent in nailing a variety of tasks is the recipe for training LLMs, which is pre-training + RL. The RL environment sends a training signal to update all the weights in its trajectory for the successful response. Karpathy calls it “sucking supervision through a straw”. This breaks other parts of the model.
My god, what terrible marketing, totally written by AI. No flow whatsoever.
I use Gemini 3 with my $10/month copilot subscription on vscode. I have to say, Gemini 3 is great. I can do the work of four people. I usually run out of premium tokens in a week. But I’m actually glad there is a limit or I would never stop working. I was a skeptic, but it seems like there is a wider variety of patterns in the training distribution.
There is $8 trillion said to be earmarked to build 100 AI data centers[1]. At 10% hurdle rate, the industry will have to generate $800 billion a year to pay it off, while GPUs are replaced every three years by faster chips.
If you watch Ilyas recent interview, “it’s very hard to discuss AGI, because no one knows how to build it yet[2]”.
There’s nothing in there that I couldn’t capture with a very basic imagination.
While I appreciate how women face misogyny, we have made great progress where women are showing better progression than men in income and career achievement. I am a father to a young woman and feel our social group is full of very successful and inspiring women that we all appreciate to be around.
The author does women a disservice, instead of being inspiring with her climb to success, she’s venting that the world is just not good enough.
To become a pop star comes from pure luck and what is marketable in the moment. For this case, the observations are more of a cliche than anything interesting.
I thought her writing was 10x better than your comment, which was completely unoriginal, retreads old cultural tropes, and added nothing of value.
Of course you father of daughters doesn't think she's a good feminist role model for your girls. Thank you, good sir, for being an actual feminist. How brave.
Tell me more about what you think would be a service to women? Do you have a Substack where I can read your manly wisdom?
But only on micro tasks, coming with explicit instructions, inside a very well documented architecture.
Give AI freedom of expression and they will never find first principals in their training data. You will receive code that is not performant and when analyzing the output, AI will try to convince you that it is. If the task goes beyond your domain, you may believe the wrong principals are ok.
What you created is a version of “am I hot or not” for skin cancer. The idea is constrained to the limitations of your programming capability. Showing a photo and creating 3 buttons with a static response is not very helpful. These are the limits of vibe coding.
I was thinking to train a convnet to accurately classify pictures of moles as normal vs abnormal. The user can take a photo and upload it to a diagnostic website and get a diagnosis.
It doesn’t seem like an overly complex model to develop and there is plenty of data referring to photos that show normal vs abnormal moles.
I wonder why a product hasn’t been developed, where we are using image detection on our phones to actively screen for skin cancer. Seems like a no brainer.
My thinking is there are not enough deaths to motivate the work. Dying from melanoma is nasty.
The goal of my app is to educate patients so that they recognise that they need to take further action.
Regarding AI-assisted skin cancer diagnosis: This is a huge area that started with the publication of Esteva et al (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21056) and there have been hundreds of publications since. There are large publicly available datasets that anyone can work with (https://challenge.isic-archive.com/).
I have no doubt that it will be possible to train an AI model to perform at the same level as a dermatologist and AI models will become increasingly relevant. The main challenge at the moment is navigating uncertainty / liability since a very small proportion of moles / skin lesions that appear entirely harmless both the naked eye and with the dermatoscope (skin microscope) are cancerous.
You're talking down to a technically unskilled dermatologist for successfully producing a useful app without the help of an engineer? Curious behaviour! This is far from the first story like this, in combination they're a potent bellwether for the future of our little corner of the universe, engaging in denials really doesn't help anyone
I wouldn’t call it “successful” or “useful”. It was a low effort attempt to make something interesting and it wasn’t. It’s a response to the hype of vibe coding. Lowers the bar for what good software really is.
Perhaps you may want to question your bias and ability to process criticism.
Anyone who shares their ideas publicly will receive criticism. Not only is it ok, it’s helpful to expand the discussion beyond your bias.
> It was a low effort attempt to make something interesting and it wasn’t.
Maybe to you, but others in this thread found it interesting.
> Lowers the bar for what good software really is.
Software is a means to some end, not the end in itself. I can make the best coded software that does nothing [0], there is no point to that other than to practice one's skills, but again, those skills are to achieve something in the end.
The issue is that your criticism is misguided and not very helpful. In your parent comment you totally miss the forest for the trees. Or, the reason why this app has been made in the first place.
Further, your suggestions are inactionable, and again, miss the point. It’s a low effort - “Lol, why don’t you just…”. No, the point is not to find skin cancer. The point is to show a bunch of pictures to people who are interested, and let them see if they can identify worrying skin lesions.
Improved my score from an abysmal 40% in under 15 units to above 95% accuracy. Also realize that I have skin lesion that warrant an immediate dermatologist visit.
I disagree, I found this very helpful. In a very short amount of time I was granted the insight, in a very clear way, that I am not very good at determining whether moles need treatment based on how they look.
I really don't think you can publish the app you described in any developed country without an army of lawyers. And this army had better be prepared to lose many battles.
“am I hot or not” is a great paradigm for many things, is it porn or not etc. 3 buttons are perfectly sufficient for getting this information from the users for rating systems in general. This is not a rating system as samples are labeled from actual test results.
AFAIK Netflix got rid of their 5 star rating as the signal over 2 stars wasn’t worth the mental overhead from users having to decide between a 4 and a 5. Also star rating are culturally dependent so you have to normalize for that effect. In general it’s a total hassle.
Every dermatologist (and developer with a dermatologist relative) in the world has had that app idea since most of your daily checkups are moles that you categorize in seconds.
The app already exists btw. Did nobody in this thread google it before saying it couldn't work?
What an utterly disappointing comment. FWIW I spent 15min on the app, and found it very helpful to see examples of the various kinds of skin lesion - it will likely motivate me to see a doctor when I see a similar malignant skin lesion. Educating people is very helpful.
We need liability reform - any app in the US would either tell you ~everything is skin cancer, or it would show one false negative and get sued into oblivion.
It comes from negative experience and not dealing with the effects of that experience. The weight of that negativity is what tilts your views to be overtly cynical. You don’t just choose to be cynical, it’s part of your predisposition.
Idealism comes when you are younger in age and as you get older, you become more cynical about things, because you have been through many more experiences.
Young people should not be overtly cynical. They should look at the world with bright eyes and try to change things for the better. A young person who is overly cynical is a tragedy.
In regard to playing politics, I think that is just intellectual laziness. Getting people on board with your ideas requires thoughtfulness. Try to find common ground on something you both believe in is a challenge, that requires effort. Treating people as individuals, showing genuine curiosity in their beliefs and exchanging direct feedback in a respectful way, is how you get people on board with your ideas.
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