Post-Spring

Heads up: rambling related to LLMs

On some weekends, some of my siblings are hanging out on discord so I am able to see them on and message them. Sometimes they’ll be sharing a game that they’re playing and some other friends may watch or just hang out in the chat. It’s fun to pop in and say hi. The time difference with Japan and US is pretty big. Often I am doing something in the morning that makes it difficult to actually be at the computer when they’re on.

Today I managed to land some time with them. It’s really surprising to me. How many of them in the server are adopting linux. I was a computer dork from a young age, so I dabbled when I was in high school and college. But the recent years with Steam making games pretty much seamlessly playable. And I growing out of the multiplayer games (that require suspiciously invasive anti-cheat measures) that are hard to support on linux I don’t have much of a need to use windows. I think Clip Studio Paint is maybe the one bit of software that I wish had better linux support. But I’ve been drinking the NixOS koolaide and it’s been great. But it’s really surprising to see younger people (not necessarily super technical previously, but clearly not afraid to try) start picking up and diving into it.

In todays chat with my sibling, they make music and of course there’s a large amount of frustration around tech companies now. Musicians are getting a shorter and shorter end of the stick. Companies are either paying them less and less, training AI on their creations, or being the good guy long enough to be sold to a larger company who does not maintain the original values of “this is the good site”. And various companies are trying to find more ways to make LLMs shorten other sticks for other creative people. There’s a lot of nuance here, but there’s also a lot of real frustration. When I was in high school and college, technology felt so optimistic. I was quite interested in doing a Masters in AI/Machine Learning before I finished my bachelors degree. I even had a dream of collaborating with an AI to be making things. Be in a DAW and writing music. Getting stuck and saying, hey I need help tying these motifs together. I wanted that so bad. But with how – gestures widely – have been executed. The demos of AI products starting with removing the human aspect from art and not aiding in the creation. Even as it got better, the goodwill is gone. The money involved is so obsurd. Companies seem to be laughing off service outages because it’s in their best interest to not blame the monster they’ve created that’ll spit out gold but then start eating people.

I got into programming when I was younger because I wanted to make games. I wanted to design them and play them. I loved fiddling with video game sprites in paint. As I got into high school, I had a class that tasked us with researching different majors and professions. What colleges have good degrees for it? What kind of starting salary could I expect with a career with that degree? What are the working conditions for those jobs? For game devs, I found starting salaries were half of what I could get if I did computer science. The jobs were unstable or very competitive. I figured if I get better at programming while doing CS then I could just make a game in my spare time (turns out, that game dev is a lot of mental energy and time I don’t usually have after the day job). With that in mind, I went into comp sci. I do not necessarily regret that. Given what I knew at the time, it worked out pretty well. I had pretty decent timing. Had a programming job straight out of college. I’m reminded of something from my dad. He learned to fly air planes at a young age for fun when he grew up. Grandpa warned against making flying his job as to not take the joy out of something he grew up enjoying so much. I feel like I had that in mind when I chose to go down the more corporate development job. With how the tech world is now, I don’t know what kind of advice I would give others at this point. I don’t know how things are going to shake out in the next few years. For all I know, any remaining dev jobs are going to be run on skeleton crews for less pay. At the very least I know you can’t expect something stable to stay that way. And maybe the things you fear in that risk is not necessarily that big at the end of the day.

My recent weekends, I haven’t been excited to do much programming. I signed up for an oil painting class (finally). At an in-person art school near by. I did a trial class last month, but had to wait nearly a month after I signed up for the first class due to holidays and various timings. Only I am two sessions in and working on that first painting that I started in the trial class. I had no idea what I wanted to paint so we just grabbed some random things in the classroom and set them down to paint (some day I’d like to be able to do portraits or something). There was a little red pot and a plastic lemon that we grabbed and arranged. It’s been fun so far. I signed up for twice a month. Might bump it up to 4 later, but want to get a feel for it. If it gives me enough practice talking with people in Japanese I might cancel my Japanese lessons. I am at a bit of a plateau with my online lessons. I’ve been grandfathered into a cheaper lesson price with my online Japanese school so I’ve been hesitant to stop, but I feel like I am stuck where I can understand my teachers way better than I can understand people in the wild. I need to be connecting and speaking with more variety of people over what I’ve been doing. Though… focused study does improve my ability and I definitely have not been doing a whole lot of focused study. Anyways… Painting has been fun so far. I like the idea of making a thing that won’t bitrot. I don’t know I were to make a game and wanted to share it with people in 30 years time that it would still work. And the state of the tech industry makes me much more interested in exploring physical mediums more than ever. A twice a month class is rather… not often. I don’t have a good space for painting in the apartment. So I also recently started trying to practice with charcoal. I had not used charcoal before, but after using it, I understand how it’s very similar to painting in oil. Especially in that underpainting first layer stage. Charcoal can get so dark but also wipe away so much easier than a pencil. It’s been fascinating to try out. Got to practice more with it.