This is such a weird thing to read. You try to project your ideas on the kids, thinking that is the best thing to do. Let them be.
I learned Linux when I was like 13 or 14 and not because my father told me. He didn't know much about computers in early 2000/late 90ties.
The curiosity, the desire to learn, the need to set up my own isp, the need to start to make money, the curiosity of how html, php and other stuff worked let me to Linux.
Teach them how to be curious and feed that curiosity, the rest will happen.
And if they choose Mac over Linux, just get of their way, otherwise they will rebel.
You're not wrong. But I think you fail to realise that everything you did on computers in the late 90s and early 2000s had friction by default. Even on Windows. Modern devices are friction free and designed to passively hold your attention as much as possible.
Introducing alternative computing to your children so they actually learn skills isn't about control it's about giving them exposure. If all they see are iPads and Chromebooks, they’ll think that’s all there is and then compare the frustration of trying to do things with a real computer to the ease of just consuming content. I think that frustration is the point for a developing brain. It teaches problem-solving. Requires focus and patience. Rewards perseverance.
Curiosity needs a spark. Sometimes that spark is just showing them a terminal and letting them poke around, or getting them in to Scratch or any of the similar game design visual coding platforms.
Not everything has to be fun or easy. Struggle is part of learning. As a parent, we are up against an industry built to keep kids from ever getting bored. There's no guarantee they'll go down a more rewarding and impactful path if you are too handsoff. Especially in the early years.
I’d agree that projecting ideas on to kids isn’t the greatest thing since it’s top-down. But so are most ideas that get pushed to kids via media, school, friends, etc. And many of those aren’t the best either.
That's what parents do. My dad brought home a C64 back then, and a book about BASIC. We didn't have a joystick for it, so we built one together. He showed me how a speaker works by taking one apart. He taught me about HAM radio. Showed me neat stuff he built with electronics. Helped me with my math homework, because he was a goddamn math wizard. I watched him disassemble our piece of shit washing machine and fix it several times. None of it was mandatory or forced or nothing. It was more like, hey son take a look at this cool shit. And I thought it was cool, and my dad was the coolest dad ever because he knew all this stuff!
Sadly, he was taken from us too soon. I often wonder what he'd think about the tech and electronics of today.
Rolling your own generally has mainly downsides in the context they are in.
1. This is clearly a small team with very little spend
2. Tomorrow someone leaves and next engineer will have to manage all of this.
3. I don't think they realize that they actually increased cost of this service not decreased it. Now they need to manage their own Kafka monthly. Engineering time is expensive.
I do. I use assistants as containers for different conversations for my GTM work:
An assistant for marketing and copywriting
An assistant for customer support
An assistant sales conversations.
These agents aren't super smart: just few PDFs for context plus a few sentences system prompts.
I do get what I want in 80% of use cases (not measured, just a feeling).
This is a weird demand to have in my opinion. You have plenty of applications on your computer and they only do what they were designed for. You can't ask a note taking app (even if it's open soured) to do video editing, unless you modify the code.
I've had to work around keyboards on phones that try. How is that different? Given enough trying, you could get what you want from the LLM too, they're just better at directing you than the shitty keyboard app.
Thanks for sharing ChatbotUI. While I'm not an author, I use it extensively and contribute to it. Thanks to the permissive license, I could offer ChatbotUI as a hosted solution with our API keys. https://labs.writingmate.ai.
This is very well written and entertaining post. I enjoyed reading it.
Selfishly, would you mind sharing literature or blog posts that led you to this level of understanding of LLMs? I'm trying hard to understand the inner workings via experiments but definitely far behind your expertise.
I'm surprised that only 3 people reported the error.
While problem is not trivial, my initial reaction was "it can't be 3, it's too obvious". And it seems that a lot of people in the comments here do get to the right answer on their own.
I'm grateful to have parents who in their age, have energy, health and financial freedom to join us for celebrations from overseas. I'm grateful for my parents to be friends to me and all my friends.
As someone said here, I'm extremely grateful for free quality higher education I have received in my home country. And I'm saddened that many are in student debts for decades.
I'm grateful to be in the best health I've been in last 10 years.
I'm grateful to myself for quitting alcohol more than a year ago and sticking with it.
I'm grateful, for the first time, to feel financially stable for many years to come.
I'm grateful to United States of America for being our home and safe harbor for the past 10 years, especially last 3, given the global instability.
