At one point or another—for most, this occurs in the crucial years between watching Saturday morning cartoons and the crushing weight of very bearable high school monotony—we realize that our own lives are quite quotidian. Not in a soul-rending, $ROPE 0DTE calls way, mind you. Just a casual confirmation that although we can struggle, in the grand scheme of things, marginal outcomes all lie in the same variance band.

i mean, how much difference is there really between being a quant trader or an AI researcher ;) not enough money to buy real things, too much money for normal existence

Even the brightest amongst you,

which i imagine everyone reading this thinks of themselves as

our gifted and talented little scholars who grew up into grizzled and transactional young adults, have surely reckoned with the reality of being one pea in a larger than expected pod.

But I digress. The point of this isn’t some sharp critique of our individual failings. Rather, I hope it ends up as a reflection of our collective consciousness—the trite human experience that makes us far more normal than we’d like to have admitted as kids.

When I was but a wee lad, I was convinced that I was special.

like i hope all wee lads are

I had little idiosyncrasies I thought my own, small habits and ways of thinking that felt deeply personal, private. Not pillars of my existence, but maybe things that gave me a little sparkle, made the little spot called Abi in the human monolith just a slight bit different.

Then, the inevitable shock of a Reddit thread or a stray comment. An audible huh? Maybe a head snap for a reflexive double take. Maybe my experiences aren’t mine after all? I mean, if this fundamental quirk wasn’t mine alone, who knew what other experiences I shared with everyone else.

How do we know what’s normal? I guess the standard, well-adjusted response is “through formative experiences, particularly in youth.” Or maybe “by interacting with and experiencing a wide variety of people.” But what about for slightly introverted, somewhat socially awkward creatures with a hint of ‘tism sprinkled in?

not me i swear

And I mean, come on. What if I am actually weird? You can’t expect me to take the risk of embarrassment by asking one of my markedly well-adjusted friends.

“Soooo, does everyone eat 600 calories of Kit-Kats at night curled up in bed like a shrimp…”

Sir Chuddlus Chuddington the Third

Enter stage right: a non-judgemental, definitely non-sycophantic tool with the ability to synthesize most knowledge.

computa, update my PR, text my girlfriend, lift my weights, fix my life. make no mistakes, work diligently, question your assumptions, validate your results unironically me with Fable prayge

WEE WOO WEE WOO UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT

In a world of data center haters and AI naysayers, I stand in proud defense of our LLM overlords. They may pale in comparison to the 2020s we imagined—hoverboards, holograms, human colonies on the Moon—but long gone are the days of Stack Overflow hell. No more trawling through Google, squinting at screens trying to piece together actual sources and come to conclusions.

bye bye doctors too; chatgpt can take care of me just fine

And most importantly, no more letting stray musings stay in your head because you aren’t quite sure who to vocalize it to.

Of course, I would rather learn about things through lived experience. This isn’t some silly claim that a language model is better than the things it mimics. Merely that it is lower friction and more available. Often, I find that value exists not in some personable, therapeutic conversation but rather in a grounded assessment of behaviors compared against population medians and outliers for the specific qualities in question. The same spots where a nutritionist or a personal trainer can point out deficiencies, so too will a properly tuned and instructed agent. The areas where encounters would have ideally shaped habits, an autoregressive, decoder-only Transformer’s output distributions form the basis for understanding.

[CONCLUSION HERE]

disclaimer: data centers bad, ram and gpu prices hurt my wallet, blah blah