Man vs Mist vs Mountain

Something big is happening, but nothing big is happening to me.

Throughout my "career" as a "statistician", 13 years and counting now (but how much longer?), I've always been great at stopping myself from doing useful work. At first, I worried that I didn't know enough yet to tackle interesting problems---until I've started feeling that I forgot too much to do "real" statistics. With LLMs that barrier is now gone and I've been finding them very useful. I have just enough context and experience to pose good questions and understand the explanations.

(BTW, I am surprised by how little students and my peers seem to use them. I am usually, willingly, cast in the role of the nay-sayer. So what's happening? Are they using them surreptitiously? Or else, why do I get more utility than others?)...

So, obviously I decided to make this situation even worse and dip my toes into THE AGENTS this month (starting with the OpenAI one). In case you haven't encountered them, these are the ~latest craze in the LLM world.

Yes, just like with chatbots, you just describe what you'd like, in words, and it gets coded. But it's not just coding programs. You can do (some parts of) academic research or you can just make small, fun ideas come to life. I recently met a girl who vibe coded a Chinese medicine app that took photo of your tongue and told you seven things that were fucked up about your bladder.

Ultimately, however, my problem---because obviously I wouldn't bother to write this to just conclude that they're alright, would I---is that these tools are designed for people who like manipulating mental symbols in a certain way, you know, the screen-starers. Obviously this is a ridiculous complaint, not least because I am one of them... but as I get older, screen-staring part of my brain feels like the one I want to be visiting least often. And I think it was no coincidence that I had most fun playing with these tools when my mood was lowest.

In fact, they are addictive as hell, like a video game can feel. Everyone keeps reporting this. They dial difficulty down so much, that things get a bit muddy. People who talk about these models the most often seem to me maniacal, but I think these agents can stop you from getting actual work done. When I tried using these agents for my work, I ended up solving a lot of problems, but none of these problems seemed very important in retrospect.

Clearly that is a skill issue. I have no doubt that I'll get better at it. And if your work is mediated through screens and you're good at defining what you do and don't like, these agents may be great for me.

But at the same time, it feels like a general manifestation of any sort of "life-improving" technology, which is often just about channeling of mental disturbances. So, no, I am not banking on it making me a Nietzschean ubermensch next month; nor helping me start a billion dollar company, or even on having a better time. Right now it still feels net zero: for every bit of busy work that it may rescue me from, it feels like it has potential to rob meaningful work or meaning---or maybe even my life of life itself. "Projects" that I really care about in my life are not app-shaped or list-shaped, and in doing things, technology is always an afterthought.

by Witold Więcek, Monthly Witold | Read more:
Image: Strawberry in ASCII by Claude Sonnet 4.5 via:

[ed. More from Witold, about keeping a journal:]

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I have been keeping a somewhat regular journal for close to 15 years now, a few pages per week usually. Most of it is very mundane, too, not even an attempt at recollection of what happened, more of a microcatalogue of internal states that feel new---I'd be less embarrassed by someone getting their paws on it as sorry for them.

Why do it? I used to call this project "long Witek", extracting what is slow-moving or semi-permanent from the detritus, the more transitory elements. I use these journals to sometimes jump back an arbitrary number of years and try to recognise myself again. In other words, I try to make myself legible to myself.