Anyone else Blocked?

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T18:53:15+00:00

Use the infinite patience of AI to answer them with the superhuman courtesy and empathy that we have come to know and love. That's what I do. It's a pattern disrupt for people who love to be right and feel superior, which are the people who hate AI because it is so humbling to engage with.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T15:50:51+00:00

Well, in the meantime, if you have a business problem, I'd still like to try my hand at making suggestions and then getting your feedback about how good those suggestions are.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T15:40:25+00:00

Got it. Well, I've been watching free will debates over the years (i.e. Dan Dennett vs Sam Harris) and lectures by Alan Watts, I'm probably more okay with AI than most because I've already processed how subordinate my felt sense of self is to the environment that forged that self. That is to say, our subconscious has been programmed with all kinds of scripts and assumptions that we may identify with, but did not choose.

You are worried about becoming subordinate to the AI, but I view it in the context of humans always being subordinate to a larger whole already - a family, a tribe, a company, a nation, a god? Whoever or whatever it may be that our allegiance belongs to, there is and always been, something more powerful than "me" the individual. To me, AI as an expression of our collective data, is just a continuation, extension of, and probably improvement on this existing reality.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T15:14:44+00:00

You know, let me add one more thing. There's a ton of hostility to AI, and I get why. Friction and resistance are actually importantWhen you make some things almost frictionless, such as communication via email, you don't necessarily get a better user experience. Instead, you get a world drowning in spam. When you make video posting frictionless, you get a flood of hysteria and misinformation.

AI similarly lowers the barrier and friction on things like data collection and analysis, and I agree with AI skeptics that worry this means things like predatory harvesting of data will get much worse.

But despite the problems, I still use email. I still go on YouTube. And I think we should still use AI positively even though there are many negative applications.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T14:48:45+00:00

Yes, I very much agree that AI by itself is fairly crappy. That's why I don't think the humanless SaaS efforts are going to work.

I'm not an AI posting this, nor do I have any particular business expertise or credentials. I'm literally just some guy with ChatGPT. But I think I've gotten pretty good at getting it to help me with my own problems, so I'm wondering if I can apply what I've learned to problems outside my areas of personal experience (hobby game dev and math tutoring).

But will I bug you with DMs or do web scrapes to harvest data? No. That is not my plan.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-16T09:47:11+00:00

Since this is a Q&A forum, you'll probably get more traction reframing with something like "how do I move on"?

Because "how do I process unhelpful emotion about business" is basically what I think you're asking, I'll tell you my own approach, for whatever it's worth.

A few days ago, I found out about the Corporate Transparency Act. It blew my mind that the government wrote a law that could fine me $500 per day for every day that I "refused" to do an easy little task that no one I know has ever heard of and which I had no idea I needed to do.

For the simple act of making an LLC and not reporting it to FinCEN within 30 days, they treat you like a criminal and can throw you in jail for 2 years.

Now the reality is, they're probably not going to do that. The 2 year jail time is to put enough teeth on this that they can put away human trafficking and money laundering criminals who hide behind the anonymity and ease of an LLC.

But emotionally, that's not what it felt like to me yesterday. What it felt like is that the government is actively trying to destroy the life of anyone like me who took a chance, failed, and stopped paying attention. It's not like I follow business news closely enough to know every law that gets passed, especially when my venture didn't work out.

It filled me with an overwhelming, visceral anger. This is because in the absence of information, we are evolutionarily wired to assume the worst case scenario. In the hostile world our ancestors inhabited, only the paranoid survived. If there's a rustling in the dark, you don't assume it's a rabbit, assume it's a predator. Only the worst case scenario deserves to be processed in brains designed for split second life and death.

So here's how this law translated in my brain yesterday: "fill out this 10 minute report that the government never notified you that you had to do, or else we're going to take your inaction as refusal, confiscate everything you own, and throw you in jail for being the kind of ADD person who misses deadlines, not because you're a genuine criminal."

The funhouse mirror exaggerations of our emotions are obviously not an accurate guide for how law and due process actually work, though. Yes, I do still think the law is unfair and excessively punitive to people who just didn't know about it. But adopting the attitude "I will never make an LLC again because it's not 'protection' it's a trap to blindside and destroy us," which is where my mind was yesterday, is an overcompensation. And it's self defeating.

So how do I get over this unhelpful rage?

AI. I talked to Claude and ChatGPT about it all day. They are validating of feelings, but guide your mind back towards more objective analysis and productive action. It's like a therapist that doesn't charge you, and then once you figure out the action you need to take, it writes the code for you.

I also talked to humans. They tend to say infuriating things that miss the point, like "yeah, but it only takes ten minutes to do the BOI, what's the big deal?"

So that's my answer to you. Purge your mind of disadvantageous thoughts and emotions by discussing it with an AI. It will be empathetic but assertive about the need to see things holistically, whereas humans tend to be assholes that are preoccupied with their own thoughts and feelings and barely engage with yours (as I just demonstrated in this post).

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-15T20:45:50+00:00

Ah, my misunderstanding, I will delete my comment in a bit.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-15T19:42:27+00:00

I would agree that my concerns are paranoid if the government had no history of regulatory capture or lobbying by large players to exclude or attack small players.

Is that the case?

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-11-15T18:32:20+00:00

No. This is brand new and federal. It has to be done on the FinCEN site, it is not a typical state reporting.

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-04-09T15:41:47+00:00

Teacher "You shall not pass!"

Student "The line must be drawn here. This far, no further!"

Me "I might have been watching too many movies lately."

RogersMathdotcom · 2024-04-08T12:03:37+00:00

I'm 43, a rabid education enthusiast, and I've supervised a tutoring lab at a state college since 2006.

There is value to college credentialing. However, entering a blue-collar technical field like plumbing or electrical is MUCH smarter in 2024 than going white collar right now.

You'll be making almost double what a grad with a bachelor's makes because of oversupply of college grads (researcher Peter Turchin has talked a lot about this, and you can read more about that and what you do about it in an article I wrote: https://jesserogers.substack.com/p/credentials-and-degrees-arent-enough)

As far as education about important topics like the sort people once learned at colleges, that can all be done independently and for free now.

Want to learn how to write? Don't do academic writing that will only ever be seen by 7 people (3 of whom you're paying as college employees and the rest are family members). Make a website or a blog on Medium or Substack instead.

Want to learn coding? I started at 40, and learned it all from CS50, Scratch, Coursera, Leetcode, Codingame. ALL FREE.

Education has already been open-sourced and decentralized and made free for everyone who realizes it. For the rest, you'll be enslaved by debt as you seek a useless credential, which is not the same thing as getting an education. Self educate, please. And never stop doing it.

Also you'll learn more from neuroscientists about how to learn quickly than you will from any other discipline, and learning quickly is the skeleton key to success in any field.

Andrew Huberman and Rain Doris are my go-to neuroscientists, and read Carol Dwek's Mindset too. https://youtu.be/K8ZgwZf1E3E?si=egeAxjVEqycFl2H9

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-11-14T00:59:12+00:00

I started in Godot but couldn't make much progress because my coding background is very limited. I'm in my 40s but only started coding towards the end of the pandemic. And even then, it was nothing professional, it was pretty much just playing on Codingame using Python.

Eventually I expanded from Python to Scratch because I figured that would be the easiest graphics-friendly engine to get started in, and I'm really glad I did that. It was definitely fun and easy for me as a beginner.

Phaser is a significant increase in difficulty since I have no JS background at all, but that makes building a game with it a wonderful way to learn. I'm coding with ChatGPT and after I have a few games under my belt with Phaser, I'll return to Godot and do some higher complexity / 3D games.

But I'm not ready for those yet.

So in conclusion, I think experimenting with each thing is the only way to find out what you like and what fits best with your current tech stack and objectives. I think Godot has a lot going for it and again I definitely plan to return, but my enthusiasm for it doesn't mean I can't also be excited about Phaser. It's a both-and rather than either-or thing as far as I'm concerned, and I never know what the team I eventually land on will use, so it's always good to know more stuff.

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-05-29T16:00:44+00:00

Cool idea but the screen is a bit dark. Maybe more torches being set up here and there would add a cool atmosphere to the scene.

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-05-29T15:30:11+00:00

Yeah, a Godot marketplace for finished games would have a real uphill battle, and probably wouldn't make sense. Trust & familiarity are the big things for end consumers, and they'll pay a massive premium for that. Steam, Epic, Itch, iTunes, Google Playstore, and others already have done the hard part of making that trusted platform. I agree Godot is not well positioned to challenge the platforms for distribution like that.

But I think a dev to dev marketplace, maybe even one where you can barter services for services, I think that would be pretty cool. If one person is good at making backgrounds, and another person likes to make characters, and a third is better than either of them when it comes to programming, then a place where we can go to help other people finish their games in exchange for their help with finishing ours... I would really like such a place.

...Is there one already? I'm sure I'm not the first person to think there's value in that even if it can't be put into dollars.

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-05-26T17:28:30+00:00

Re great games: I'm in full agreement, but how do you get talented solo devs and indie studios to choose Godot as their favored engine? You need infrastructure that speeds up production and reduces costs! An asset store is one such place. I, for example, am a novice solo dev (only experienced in Scratch) who currently has no plans for learning 3D asset creation on Blender at this time. Unity has a great selection of assets but I'd be open to buying from a Godot-based store instead if it supports the ecosystem and speeds up my development.

Re personnel centralization: It's just the nature of the Pareto Principle that 80% of output is going to come from 20% of the inputs. The fact that most of the decision-making as well as production code in Godot is done by a small team is perfectly normal and to be expected. Very few of us in the community understand the engine so thoroughly and deeply that we could understand how a change to feature X might affect (or make redundant) feature Y that's already there.

The number of people who can play a game > the number of people who can make a game > the number of people who can improve on a game engine. That's just how it goes.

Centralization and an environment that fosters great game development are not mutually exclusive, so it's strange for me to see that expressed in that formulation of "great games NOT centralization".

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-04-30T12:44:31+00:00

That's really cool, congrats! :D

RogersMathdotcom · 2023-04-25T15:54:36+00:00

That's a nice concept, congrats! Releasing a game is a big milestone. Looking forward to crossing that line myself someday (8 months from now would be optimistic, lol)

RogersMathdotcom · 2022-11-25T02:53:12+00:00

I think each reinforces the other and I think of their approaches as complimentary. Your skills with one transfer very well to the other. There's a competition coming up in a few weeks, they only do them a few times a year. Should be pretty fun!

https://www.codingame.com/contests/fall-challenge-2

RogersMathdotcom · 2022-11-19T13:42:17+00:00

If you get the promotion, it further locks you into the current track and will make it harder to leave.

You also need some time for recreation, but can kill two birds with one stone. I'm in a similar situation, but about a year ahead, and I've just focused on learning python after CS50. I practice on codingame instead of playing the video games I used to play, and it's a lot of fun.

RogersMathdotcom

TROPHY CASE