It won't be the progress in AI, but the ever increasing human tolerance to bugs and shitty software, hardware and products in general. This is what will enable AI to thrive.
I worked at a company famous for making printers on a highly secretive and innovative project 8 years ago. You all know the fainting goats that get stun because their nervous system shuts down when flood with overexcitement? An innovative idea appears and suddenly, every single person wants a stake in it so much that no movement forward is possible. On top of that, no one knows what they are supposed to build anymore. Large and inflexible, these corporations are great at hiding the stagnation until the budget eventually runs out.
It was more like a jump from a dumb phone to today's smartphone, but instead of a phone, imagine... A printer, and instead of apps, imagine enterprise features and services.
I really enjoy writing me some of that F#, esp. with Bolero, but I would take `value |> foo(%)` over actual F#'s `value |> (fun x -> foo x)` any day. However, I agree that the "F# proposal" comes across as better, esp. when we consider -copypasting- consistency of the language. Now, considering everything in JS already, you are right, we did it again, didn't we? After couple more years, the Perl and Javascript languages will finally merge and become one.
I have recently started wondering about the nature of a very specific bullshit enabler these days, which is attention commoditization. It almost looks like in the pre-AI days, there was a surge of online marketers trying trying to learn about people and behavior, occasionally employing dark patterns to get you to click. Later, with the surge of social media use, AI models were used to recommend content incongruent with the user's best interest. And it worked as it becomes increasingly difficult to go out in the internet to get a particular job done, but the sheer amount of rabbit-holes ventured to must me astounding. And now the trend seems to be shorts/stories/tiktok, which only looks to me as means to groom human attention for even easier override with clickbaits and ads.
I wonder how many people daily fail to focus on what matters because of the attention problems induced by the modern tech and is there any research about it?
You know, contrary to what others have said, you can debug yourself to a reasonable extent. It just takes shit ton of time and effort. And on top of that, you still might not get anywhere. For these reasons you might want to listen to what others have advised as it is a solid advice.
Warning: the following text is based only on anecdotal evidence and I am not a medical professional at all.
If I understand your situation correctly, your main problem are toxic habits you have formed, that of procrastination and then trying to excuse yourself. For every habit you have, there is a trigger. What you need to do first is to find the trigger(s). Get really good at noticing the triggers, first after you act on them, gradually try to do it before you act on them. Think about them. Ask yourself, what is their biological purpose. What is it that you are trying to compensate for (the answer is almost always dopamine), follow up with why do you need such compensation. Develop your own questions. Write the shit down. All of it. But do not ever be judgemental, only observe. This important, as judging yourself will prevent you from deeper introspection due to pain and clouded thoughts that are related. Do not judge yourself or your feelings. Just observe what happens. Gradually you'll see you have developed a habit of thinking instead of procrastinating. You can expand then your thinking to what would be more appropriate responses to your triggers and start mindfully executing them. The key is not to beat yourself to it, there will be setbacks and it is normal.
A side note, depending on your procrastination circumstances, it might be a good idea to refrain from visualizing big success in your head, esp. after small achievements. It just might spark the dopamine craving (and thus to procrastinate) and it might become far too easy to overcome.
What this approach does is it allows you to better understand yourself, your feelings. Procrastination might go away, it's just a habit and replacing a habit is actually scientifically examined process. One more thing is, as you become to understand yourself more, you also stop feeling hateful towards yourself.
Now, I am going to repeat, seeing a therapist is the best advice you could get, feel free to disregard the wall of text above. See multiple ones before deciding which one works for you the best. Good luck.
You know, I actually prefer the original paulgraham.com. I can read the smaller font easily, find the article excerpts useless (as opposed to seeing more titles at once) and the publication dates are also misleading. PG categorizes the articles by month, putting in a day (always the 1st) seems like being lazy to change the template.
None of these has anything to do with beautiful in my book.
How do you find what you're really good at? I don't know. Here's what I did. I started doing a thing I considered intriguing. I tried figuring out how to tell if I'm making a good progress. In the beginning, I was terrible at it. After some time, I was still terrible, but there were I had some "data" about making progress. Only after years did I become good. And yet, the more years I put in, the more ways of being terrible I discover.
Having written that, I'd suggest
1) picking something that seems at least mildly interesting to you
2) don't expect much
3) don't be afraid to start all over again multiple times
This is it. You'll always be bad at something until you've gotten enough practice. Piano is only enjoyable after enough days of laborious exercises. Then one day you're good at it and it's fun. Everything worth doing is the same way.
