theneverfox

My point is just that the statement "children do better when their parents stay together" is responsible public health messaging. Elaborating on it is heavily discouraged outside a technical setting, because a lot of people will leave that room with the exact opposite take away if you start talking about counterexamples

What you're describing is following best practices (although he might also have a punchable face, he doesn't sound very charismatic)

No, that's my point exactly... Public health communication is deliberately oversimplified and stripped of all nuance like this. It's a deliberate technique taught in school

Disfunction isn't the only scale though - people break up for all sorts of reasons. It can be just as simple as "I'm not in love with you" or "I found someone else" - or just the fact their lives suck and they expected a partner or kids to make it better

Ultimately, when you communicate to the public, nuance doesn't get across. You can't say "the COVID vaccine is right for everyone, unless you have certain allergy or autoimmune disorders". People hear what they want to hear and will latch onto additional detail - the best you can do is distill a message

For another example, we signal "daily flossing is inversely correlated with heart disease". People who practice hygiene to that level are probably a lot more health conscious, and we've never proven a casual relationship - but putting the thought out there does more good than harm

I'm not familiar with the guy so maybe there's more not mentioned in this thread that would change my mind, but the core message itself is solid - staying together is better for kids. That's true for most people, and thinking divorce won't impact your kids is nonsense (ask anyone who grew up through that). That should be part of the mental calculus in people's heads

If you need professional help, they can deliver the nuance - that's another public health messaging "see a therapist if you're having problems". You can't get into how some therapists suck and how getting the right match is critical, but most people would benefit from the idea seeking therapy is just self care

Going further, they're like magic. They're good at what takes up a lot of human time - researching unknown topics, acting as a sounding board, pumping out the fluff expected when communicating professionally.

And they can do a lot more otherwise - they've opened so many doors for what software can do and how programmers work, but there's a real learning curve in figuring out how to tie them into conventional systems. They can smooth over endless tedious tasks

None of those things will make ten trillion dollars. It could add trillions in productivity, but it's not going to make a trillion dollars for a company next year. It'll be spread out everywhere across the economy, unless one company can license it to the rest of the world

And that's what FAANG and venture capitalists are demanding. They want something that'll create a tech titan, and they want it next quarter

So here we are, with this miracle tech in its infancy. Instead of building on what LLMs are good at and letting them enable humans, they're being pitched as something that'd make ten trillion dollars - like a replacement for human workers

And it sucks at that. So we have OpenAI closing it off and trying to track GPU usage and kill local AI (among other regulatory barriers to entry), we have Google and Microsoft making the current Internet suck so they're needed, and we have the industry in a race to build pure llm solutions when independent developers are doing more with orders of magnitude less

Welcome to the worst timeline, AI edition

I don't think it's an unfair thing to say - as a professional doing public communication, staying together for the kids is in the child's best interest, generally

Obviously, if there's abuse of any kind anywhere in the house, that's no longer the case. And it's not always going to be the best choice, but it's a good idea to at least try

I wouldn't read that as "we should make divorce harder, legally or socially" - if they went on to say that they'd be way out of line IMO

Can we please not?

Compared to full paralysis? I think a lot of people would still want it

All I knew until today was you apply headon directly to your forehead. Why would you do so? If I had to guess, I would've said for headaches, but that's completely an assumption

If there's any chance they've heard about a concept, I'll ask if they've heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they're kinda nodding impatiently, I'll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there's no judgement either way with you I've found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don't know something, so that might play in too

It's quite possible, although I'm inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines

I've come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back

Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There's no direct money to be made there though

And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go "wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos" is how you avoid fuck ups like this

I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"