something_else

@Leo Gura Have you tried out any agentic models like Claude Code? I feel like outside of tech nobody has really seen these models much and what they can do. They are not just chatbots, they’re a tier above. They are extremely autonomous and can perform actions, gather new data, plan and orchestrate stuff etc.

I think we pay $100-200/m per developer, something like that. We're on a subscription, not metered by tokens. Devs here are on average using about $500-$1000/m in metered tokens, although we don't really do much to conserve them. It's relatively reasonable for the value it provides tbh. We have to de-vibe it sometimes, but it's not that much effort. We cycle through with Claude and help point it in the right direction to produce the best output. Sometimes it does stupid stuff, but most of the time it's really good. It helps that we have solid CLAUDE.md files and that we establish strong architectural patterns already, so Claude has lots of good examples. The work has shifted more towards the development process, systems and big picture stuff rather than writing code.

This is a good question. In short, yes, they can. They need oversight but not nearly as much oversight effort as it would have taken to do the task yourself. I can give a very concrete example of how this works for my own field/job which is software engineering. This is what has happened at the company where I work: Before AI adoption Previously we were a team of 8 developers, which was split into two squads of 4. Each squad works on 1 project at a time, so the entire company is working on 2 projects at a time. Those projects would typically aim to take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to complete and would be for small to medium sized features. Occasionally we would have 'large' features which we would set aside 3-6 months for a team to implement. After AI adoption 2 devs left and the company opted not to replace them, so we are a team of 6 now. We have restructured into 'pods' where each of our 6 devs works on a single feature at a time with the help of AI, a human designer + human product manager. The AI agent writes the vast majority of the code and the developer guides it with some oversight and prompting. Usually one other dev will review the work before it is released, but this is probably an average of 30 minutes worth of effort of review per dev per day. We no longer distinguish much between feature sizes. Almost any feature we could want to implement can be implemented within 1, maybe 2 months. We are shipping 6 medium/large features in the same amount of time we would previously have shipped 2 medium features, all while having 2 less devs employed.

I don't know if you've ever seen proper agentic AI working. Most of the chatbots you see embedded in Google, Gemini, ChatGPT etc. are just that: fancy chatbots that are good at writing text. Once you put those models in an agent harness, which allows the LLM to loop, talk to itself, think, use tools, operate autonomously for long periods of time etc. they are incredibly competent. A lot of people who aren't in tech haven't seen these agents work. It's extraordinary. You can give them a task (a single prompt of a few lines of text for what you need them to do) and the process it will follow after this (fully autonomously) could look something like: talking to itself to come up with a very rough overall approach to take brainstorm ideas connect to tens of external services to pull in the information it needs research what the best practices / standards are for this task fire of 5 subagents primed with different skillsets to go off and do some more research in different areas spawn 5 more subagents to adversarially critique or summarise the output of those first subagents compile all of those findings + brainstorming down into a plan execute that plan via connecting to external services or modifying text/code/data in whatever mediums it needs to to achieve the end result Once they have an end result, they'll test it extensively and check that what they implemented works Perhaps it will spawn some more subagents to adversarially critique and verify the end result until it fixes every problem it has found with its own implementation Publish/push/commit/save the end result of that task for you with a tidy summary And all of this takes like 10-30 minutes. To finish a task that may have taken a human a week. It isn't perfect and it will make mistakes, which is why it typically works best when done in combination with someone who is competent in the field. But in the past you would have one senior working with 3 juniors and a mid-level, now you may just have a senior working with one AI agent.

In the ways that matter for achieving results in white collar jobs (largely text and data driven), it is almost certainly more capable than the average person within the domain of those careers. Programming is a good example because Claude is a much better programmer than your average junior/mid-level developer, hence why companies are hiring much fewer junior/mid level developers. It's more efficient to scale out AI agents and let seniors guide them. As another example, Claude can solve university level quantum mechanics papers with a higher success rate than an average student taking those classes. You'll also get a better philosophical discussion out of an AI agent than probably 99.9% of humans. Are these the be all end all of intelligence, or is it AGI? I agree, no. But it certainly is a kind of intelligence, and it has more of it than your average human in many fields. And enough of it that it isn't just going to go away. Perhaps it isn't correct to say that AI agents are more intelligent than most humans, but they are certainly more capable in a fairly wide variety of fields. And ultimately this is where most value comes from when using these tools. They produce incredible results that no human could in the same time frame.

Jobs that involve physical labour will be the last to be automated because robotics is a really hard domain. However in the domain of text and data (and to an extent images), AI seems to rain supreme, at least compared to the 'average' human. And the vast majority of white collar office jobs exist in this domain, done by average humans. Most are not particularly creative. AI doesn't need to be more intelligent than 95% of people in white collar jobs, if it's more intelligent on average than 50% of them and costs 1/10th the price then it's going to have a massive impact. Following from this, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that something like Claude Opus/Fable is more intelligent than 50% of people in the domain of text and data. I still think AI is overhyped, and we're probably approaching the limit of what LLMs can do now, but I would say there is legitimate cause for concern.

Basic bitch

I've found asking people what their favourite fruit is and what their favourite vegetable is ends up creating some surprisingly deep conversations about personality Boring questions can reveal a lot about someone if you ask them with the right energy and some playfulness. Making boring questions interesting is an S tier social skill

So far I would say they are a massive improvement. I didn't know it was possible for me to function this consistently. My energy levels have always been all over the place, now I am awake and motivated early then my energy slowly drops throughout the day as it should. Then I'm tired in the evenings and sleep at a consistent time. Before my energy levels would be like a fuckin rollercoaster not just throughout the day but throughout the week. Often I'd be at my most motivated and energetic at 2am. I haven't really had any side effects, except I did have a lot of anxiety one day. I had a work call that spiked it right as the meds were kicking in and they seem to have a tendency to lock in whatever state you are in 1-2 hours after taking them for the rest of the day.

Agreed. I feel like cheesy pickup lines are not that great. If you are funny you can improvise them on the spot and they may work quite well, but I suspect many dudes with pre-planned 'funny' pickup lines are likely coming across as a bit weird, not charming. I've never really done much approaching outside of nightclubs or bars to be fair, but in bars/clubs I always just found some way to start a normal conversation. "Hey, how's your night going?" was my go to. I believe in myself enough to know that if I start a conversation with a girl it'll naturally go somewhere interesting, I don't need to force it. And if it doesn't then it wasn't meant to be.

@Yimpa @Jannes Thanks for your insights! It depends on a lot of factors. If I'm interested or excited by the work or if there is a deadline for it tomorrow then it will be quite easy to focus on it and get it done. Sometimes on a good day I can also focus on stuff I have to do but that I don't enjoy, but that feels like maybe a couple of days out of every two weeks. If it is an average day, I don't enjoy the work that needs to be done, and there is no deadline then it will take me 3x as long as it would take someone else because the mind just continually gets distracted and hunts for dopamine. And even if I manage to get my mind to start doing something hard that I don't want to do, it will not give it it's full effort. It will half ass it or rush it just so it can be 'done' but then the work will often be full of careless errors. From the outside this can look like laziness, but that is not really how the experience is on the inside. It's more like knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, knowing all of the right things to do, but your mind just will not co-operate.

For me I think it is the other way around, I think the ADHD causes social anxiety. I did not have social anxiety as a child, in fact the opposite, but I did have quite noticeable ADHD symptoms. Looking back, the ADHD behaviour from my childhood is likely what caused me to get bullied so badly which is what ultimately caused the more traditional rejection-fearing social anxiety that I struggled with for many years. I'm now over that rejection-fearing social anxiety and just left with what feels like the social anxiety caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain. I know I'm socially capable and I don't really feel any more scared of rejection than a normal person, but it feels like when I'm having a conversation my brain is just not locked in most of the time, it just will not produce words to reply to the person I'm talking to. This causes me to run on stress instead of the relaxed playfulness and presence that creates fun conversations. Trying out medication completely reversed this. It felt like I actually had space to breath and relax in conversations instead of being fuelled by stress all of the time. It also felt like my brain started naturally producing replies to other people without me needing to use stress as a motivator to get my mind to produce words. Have you ever tried it at all? Even just as a once off?

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD. When I look back on my life, especially childhood and early adulthood, it really should have been much more obvious. However it never really occurred to me that a lot of my troubles could be caused by ADHD until the last year or two. I thought a lot of the stuff I struggled with was just 'normal' and that everybody was like that. Anyway, I've been prescribed Elvanse (Vyvanse for people in the US) and it will be arriving shortly. I have tried Ritalin and Vyvanse a couple of times before (just as a one off) and based on that I feel like consistently taking these meds has the potential to be life changing. It was truly insane to experience what it is like to have a mind that just does what you want it to do instead of fucking around all of the time and self-sabotaging you at every turn. I also notice that they significantly improved my social anxiety and made me realise that most of my social anxiety came not from shame, but from a lack of ability to trust my mind to pay attention and behave during conversations. I'm curious if anybody here both has ADHD, and has experience with ADHD meds and the effects they had? Thanks

Dude... just admit you made a mistake, it ain't that hard. This is some weapons grade mental gymnastics I used to vape and have largely quit. I still do it occasionally when out socially with friends but it's not something I do daily anymore like I used to. The 95% figure comes from the NHS (health service in the UK). It is somewhat misleading in the sense that smoking is SO bad for you that being 95% healthier than smoking cigarettes is still pretty bad for you. But realistically when you look at what you're inhaling into your lungs in a vape versus a cigarette it's pretty intuitive that it should be orders of magnitude less harmful. e-liquid is basically vegetable oil with flavourings and nicotine. Nicotine isn't that bad for you itself, just highly addictive. The biggest risk is probably heavy metals from cheap vape coils, which is bad, but if you have anything other than a cheap disposable vape it's a non-issue. Compare that to the (literally) 7,000 different combusted chemicals you inhale from a cigarette. 250 of those chemicals are confirmed to be directly harmful to the human body. 70 of them are confirmed to cause cancer. You're inhaling carbon monoxide from cigarettes, hell there are even traces of hydrogen cyanide in cigarettes. Compare all of that to some super-heated vegetable oil and flavourings. There is really just no way it's possible that vaping is even remotely close to being as bad for you as smoking cigarettes is.

It is undoubtedly better for you than smoking according to all major modern research. Obviously it's still really bad for you, but if you are a smoker it is like 95% better for you to switch to vaping instead of continuing to smoke. You do typically consume more nicotine with vaping if you use full strength e-liquid, although there are two things worth noting here: with vaping you can control the dosage very precisely because you can choose the amount of nicotine in e-liquid you use — a common way to quit smoking or vaping is to continually lower the strength of your e-liquid by 2mg every week or two until you hit zero nicotine without even really noticing nicotine itself is not all that harmful to your body, just very addictive — it is the delivery mechanism (cigarette tar, heavy metals in vape coils) that harms you This is like a 101 course on exactly how not to talk to people with an addiction