“Y’know, I’ve been thinking… The app is missing a couple of things, like This, and That, and it should also do This after That, but not That after This, and maybe even navigate to The Other Thing after 3 Launch events, while also not doing that if the user is under a Pisces moon in the 4th Year of Wilting…”

“So… you want a Rate the App pop-up with specific trigger conditions?”

“What?! No! I want one of those prompts with the stars and the redirect to the Store which lets people post reviews of the app, what are you even talking about?!”

AI Junior Dev: short-circuits

For me, the goal is managing to form as accurate a big picture view as possible. It’s a bit weird to me, too, as although my brain is famished for unnecessary details, when it comes down to the Overall (too early, don’t have a better word), it starts focusing on the essentials, trying to link everything it has gathered in a coherent mess. This may be related to how I grew up, I always had to be aware of the situation in our family for my own survival (know the players and how to play them).

Exactly, it’s like painting through engineering! That’s why I love it, the engagement it offers is incredibly nuanced if one goes beyond the instruction booklets and starts doodling with components! And there’s always a work-around, which is what I love even more in a way. I sorta’ go into a fugue state every time I’m building and end up with things which surprise even me!

Well, fancy that! I’ve recently decided to renovate my old place and turn it into my own little bunker on the ground and, same, I’ve started DIY-ing my way to success! It’s like Legos, but with more splinters! And, yes, art can be fickle once one starts focusing on skill, I’ve found. As the best example I can offer as to why skill has less to do with it than passion and openness, I’ve learnt my first ‘complicated’ bass line in a dream, on a 10-hour train ride, two months into studying the bass (a.k.a. owning and playing around with one). I basically didn’t even have skill of which to speak, just started forming it. All I had was a sense of rhythm and a desire to reproduce my favourites.

As for your last point, I must start with an apology, as I may have improperly expressed myself: it’s not stress, exactly, it’s… it feels like remembering pleasant times from earlier in my life, it really is just a benign sense of melancholy. Learning new things has always been a passion for me, the more varied the things, the stronger the kick! It’s just that the facts aren’t always pleasant (Shpoopiro was partly right, I’ll give him that - long live broken clocks, I guess…). And as for a goal, other than my (at this point) in-built instinct to try to form a big picture view, there is only the desire for truth. To me, truth is a sort of moral imperative, it’s strongly rooted in both my set of principles and my spectrum of values. Vast and varied Knowledge is the best path I’ve managed to find which leads to the truth, thus I have no hesitation.

I’ve had some of those, yes, but it usually comes after learning enough about the ‘affected’ subject to be able to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it would mean to risk seeking mastery of it. It doesn’t come as a fear of completion, it comes as a fear of it taking up too much space and leaving me with too little for everything else in which I’m interested. I genuinely don’t think completion in itself is ever possible, either from a practical or philosophical perspective.

To answer your question, I also like to write (journaling - which has slowly shifted toward writting essays for my own understanding, poetry), to paint, to draw, to mess around with Legos (which is, so far, the only medium which does an awesome job at accommodating both my artistic/intuitive and my rational components), to ponder (i.e. sitting in silence for a while and just chewing through the info I have, trying to establish new and useful connections between all elements), and reading a lot of fiction (primarily hard sci-fi). Oh, and I like to people-watch - which is somewhat improperly said, because I’m not there solely for the people, I like to observe the system of interactions unfolding

That is the flipside and my main motivation for constantly seeking new information. At worst, this entire thing leaves me with a sort of melancholy centered around the idea that one of my desires is slowly chipping away at one of my pleasures, even though the first will always trump the latter in this case (I’d rather suffer with the truth in my lap).

I can certainy understand your viewpoint, there are layers upon layers of unknowns. I can see how that Vastity can be overwhelming.

And we just accepted it, because we trusted that every company was working in our best interest… Jesus, what a long con…

Good point, I guess it would be back to considering the permanence of The Cave allegory. I still have that gut feeling that humanity has a sort of in-built desire for freedom and self-determination which exists somewhere beyond the conceptual, something innate. Maybe its materialisation just takes a long enough timeline and that the species is offered relative stability in terms of genetics/psychological development (i.e. they don’t just outright lobotomise us and turn us into Servitors, or smth…)

My morbid tendencies are fascinated by the idea, but I, myself, can’t help but feel like staring at an incoming tsunami crest.

They’d need to come back and plant something else, because the side-effect of shortening attention spans has also increased the frequency at which we require new flavours of brainrot. I think this method of doing things is somewhat ineffectual.

Honestly, if I were to guess how someone would stunt us, is to “help” us improve our industry before we even grasp its implications. It essentially created Baron-Gods (and we sure do like triangles and shit!) while ensuring that we’ll choke ourselves out.

Surely, if something/someone intentionally caused our existence, they must be pulling out clumps of hair at this point (or equivalent gestures).

Although… well, this is purely speculative and quite a bit philosophical, but I guess it all comes down to how they’d manage fear and greed. I initially wanted to say that viciousness seems to be a facile trait for sentience, but I only have us as a sample, so…

I genuinely don’t even know what to think anymore. My sense of scale and value has been completely shattered by our contemporary debasement with Fascism and burning the planet and everything in between and around, not in a million years could I have believed humanity in general could be so stupid as to do the same horrid shit all over again, and especially not after our forerunners’ fervency in purging the very concept of Fascism. Hell, maybe it was just Marketing…

I mean, how can anyone consider a governing system so unabashedly inimical to life as a feasible way of doing things?! I… I just don’t understand it. I don’t know if I’m too stupid, or too naïve, or cloistered, or whatever the fuck else, but I just cannot process the idea of anything which looks like me behaving in such a horrid manner. I can grasp that capacity for violence, because I have it, too, but to use it in such a manner? No. That’s where my system hangs.

Oh, no, it’ll be a massacre…

Honestly, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would risk it! We’re certifiably insane when in large masses, we’d ruin their civilisation if they’d get us all.

We’d deffo see Bezos/Musk/Zuck/etc. becoming the Breens of our timeline, and we already hate’em!

Edit: plus, why bother? It’s enough to cause a Pandemic, we’re aces at making things worse by ourselves! Planet cleans itself up, move in, adapt existing infrastructure, no risk of random nukes… sounds like a good deal to me!

Now, now, let’s give ourselves fair share of the credit, we’re dumb enough to come up with Flat Earth on our own, tyvm!:)))

These are noteworthy and relevant breakthroughs, yes, but I don’t see us doing anything dramatic with this technology in less than a decade, maybe two. And that’s just for something like regrowing teeth, way longer timeline for anything fancier. We’re still just basically optimising old tech right now. New battery designs incoming, solar panel tech is getting better (slowly), we are moving, yes. But it’s like watching people paint the living room at this point, and I assume long-distance space travel still isn’t “cheap” for them, even with their fancy manoeuvering.

Up next: Nintendo thinking of suing everyone with a Mario tattoo into slicing off affected bit of skin.

If I were The Aliens, I would’ve stopped coming here somewhere around 2013-2014. And I don’t say this with any kind of undertone, I just feel we haven’t developed in significant ways over the past decade. They most certainly haven’t presented any social interest, so it’s a study. They’d only need vertical slices every half century to a century or so.

Which snap apart the instant you try to carry more than a laptop and some chocolate wrappers with’em…

Honestly, I don’t think the action’s the problem, I enjoyed creating interlinked databases with tens of thousands of entries in Spreadsheets. I think it’s strictly to do with the complexity itself, I need more. I like the concept of every piece having a specific move set, I’d just need more of them. And add more complexity to them, but at that point may as well just play grand scale combat games, like 40k.

Edit: plus, to be honest, this lack of complexity doesn’t even let me properly enjoy a victory. Maybe it has some fetishistic tinges at this point, but a protracted victory is so much sweeter, make me feel like I pulled my brain through high intensity training for a couple of hours. Either that, or something which can start acting as a reflex, like backgammon.

Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.

I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn’t complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my hand at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.

I still can’t do chess, though… It’s like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game and be done with it. Gimme a 4X game, and I’d need reminders to pee every 12 hours.

Oh, wow, I can’t believe I forgot about that… Feels weird, like remembering the better times of past relationships, Jesus=))