I think people are just confusing cause and effect here.

Anxiety triggers release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which trigger a host of physical symptoms ranging from cold hands (reduced blood flow in extremities) to upset stomach, nausea, increased heart rate, etc.

Brain can anticipate these changes and associate anxiety with the effects of these hormones. There might be all sorts of interesting interactions, but saying that gut is responsible for processing of these feelings is definitely a stretch.

Another physical reaction which is associated with an emotion is blushing. But somehow nobody is talking about face skin taking control...

Yes actually in my experience the physical feelings concomitant with anxiety often make the mental feelings of worry and dread much worse. If anything the author sounds like they are conflating having bad feelings for “processing”.

What's the value of making a supervisor? It seems to be mostly about gluing together some system APIs.

In some industries it’s critical. Think about aerospace where code is almost always homegrown or done by specialized company, and are specific implementations for specific needs. You don’t have that many COTS due to the criticality etc.

The thing about specific needs is that they are usually narrow. You could throw darts at the dartboard of problems, working on very narrow problems for years and never get a job solving any of them. If a problem calls out to you and you won't stop until you get a job with it, then the effort could be worth it. But sometimes, even if you get THE job, you'll have a slight twist in constraints that makes most of your prep go by the wayside.

Solving a variety of problems makes you better at solving problems.

I agree, but we all have to pick our battles. Do you want to solve real problems, enjoy other things in life, or solve some problem that a guy on the internet said is essential for any "real" programmer?

Hmm, you need $40/month plan just to try it out.

Not sure who's the target audience

We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome.

E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.

In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!

And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.

Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!

Another book by Greg Egan - "Zendegi" - has more overlap with MMAcevedo. It covers a different approach to mind uploading (possibly) more practical in near future: a generic model of the brain is fine-tuned on responses from a specific human. The generic model itself is made by averaging over many scanned connectomes. The other part of the book is VR Shahnameh which, honestly, was a bit too boring.

He also has a whole bunch of short stories on the same topic. Some assume reader is already familiar with concept of sideloading, as it's explained in the passing:

1. Bit Players: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/BIT/BIT.html

2. 3-adica

3. Instantiation

4. Uncanny Valley (available online)

Other:

1. "Reasons to Be Cheerful"

2. “Learning to Be Me”

3. Closer

That's not really true. Some of his works are science-heavy, others are not. Particularly, many of short stories require little-to-no context.

That's nonsense. If Carrie Fisher "withdrawn consent" of her depiction in Star Wars, should we destroy the movies, all Princess Leia fan art, etc?

No, because the replacement value of those things to others is very high, and generally outweighs Carrie Fisher's objection. But we should take her objection into consideration going forwards. The Lena test image is very easy to replace, and it's not all that culturally significant: there's no reason to keep using it, unless we need to replicate historical benchmarks.

It's a ridiculous idea that once you retire all depictions must be destroyed.

Should we destroy all movies with retired actors? All the old portraits, etc.

It's such a deep disrespect to human culture.

That's of course not the meaning of that message. No one is suggesting that.

Software engineers have been confidently wrong about a lot of things.

E.g. OOP and "patterns" in 90s. What was the last time you implemented a "visitor"?

P. Norvig mentioned most of the patterns are transparent in Common Lisp: e.g. you can just use a `lambda` instead of "visitor". But OOP people kept doing class diagrams for a simple map or fold-like operation.

AI producing a flawed code and "not understanding" are completely different issues. Yes, AI can make mistakes, we know. But are you certain your understanding is really superior?

Last time I used a visitor, it was probably last week when I created a lint rule. Visiting every node in a tree (ast or otherwise) with lambda is doing the pattern regardless of what you call the pattern. Tools like eslint still literally use the visitor pattern. I would point to software engineers dismissing tried and true ideas as the better generalization.

That means you don't understand visitor pattern: it's specifically an OOP pattern using OOP dispatch.

A tree traversal is a tree traversal.

I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies.

Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching

Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.

Humans are also non-deterministic code generators though. It can be possible that an LLM is more deterministic or consistent at building reliable code than a human.

You're missing the point. Consider this:

Mathematicians use LLMs. Obviously, they don't trust LLM to do math. But LLM can help with formalizing a theorem, then finding a formal proof. It's usually a very tedious thing - but LLMs are _already_ quite good at that. In the end you get a proof which gets checked by normal proof-checking software (not LLM!), you can also inspect, break into parts, etc.

You really need to look into detail rather than dismiss wholesale ("It made a math error so it's bad at math" is wrong.)

Just wait out until you find out how vulnerable the average house is to robbers. The only difference with software is that we have somehow discarded deterrence and law enforcement as reasonable parts of a security strategy and keep insisting that technological defenses need to be 100% tight no matter the cost.