Sounds like you found peace. Good for you brother/sister.
What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.
Most grocery co-ops these days are staffed almost entirely with normal W-2 employees, the one standout exception being Park Slope in NYC which requires you to work a shift in the store to be able to shop there. The other ~170 co-op grocers in the US don't use this model, and in fact, don't require you to be a member to shop there at all. The co-op I work at is a little different in that it's a hybrid model, jointly owned by shoppers and workers, whereas most grocery co-ops are exclusively shopper-owned.
I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).
- How many individual components do you need for it to emerge?
Most people would be okay with saying that individual cells are not conscious, maybe even that tree are not conscious even thought they are made of many cells. Neurons seem to be the determinant factor in deciding whether something could have a consciousness, but again how many do you need? Does growing 1B neurons count as a brain if they are not organized?
>- How many individual components do you need for it to emerge?
If it is about the relationship between components, then I would imagine just two. Then it is a matter of scale.
This seems to be anathema to many people. I'm not sure why but the notion of something having a tiny bit of consciousness that is imperceptible seems to be unacceptable. There are so many things that we cannot comprehend at small scales. Nobody really has a handle on how large a Planck length is.
For some reason it comforts people to think there is a threshold at which it all switches on, but for what reason would there be a threshold?
Maths skills have been slowly falling even before the advent of LLMs. I have a story but this is anecdotical so take it with a grain of salt.
I was in my 3rd bachelor's year studying physics (France) and overheard a conversation between two of my teachers. They were discussing how they should modify the 1st year program to now include math, because he had been noticing how more and more students were failing the more math-heavy subjects like body and newtonian mechanics. He said that they should now teach (or re-teach) calculus to 1st year students, which was not taught when I entered college (it was assumed that you learned it in high school and we would only cover linear algebra in 1st year).
I can imagine things are only getting worse with students that can now get under the illusion that they know math because they have a tool that can do it for them. Which raises the question: should programs adapt to this, like we adapted to having calculators?
Not teaching analysis to 1st year physics students seems to me rather crazy, TBH. Yes, people (are supposed to) learn basic calculus in high school, but university-level math just hits different. And at least around here stuff like actually applying analysis in physics and having to integrate and solve DEs (rather than assuming constant acceleration, for instance), is definitely not covered in high school.
There is also one thing I would like to add, and you can correct me if you disagree: coding benefits much more from thorough planning. Now, I exclusively work by first writing a plan that has well-defined steps and goals, which can of course change over time.
It seems to me like it would be more difficult to achieve with legal documents and, in my experience at least, writing a concrete plan has been the decisive factor that make my AI coding robust (plus all that you mentionned).
I'm not sure about that, I actually think planning may be just as important in both domains. Outlining before drafting is an almost universal best practice in legal writing that is drilled into law students to the point that outlining as exam prep is something students spend several weeks on each semester. So personally I always have a fairly detailed implementation plan in the form of an outline before I ask an LLM to draft a more detailed legal document.
I've also adopted an AI coding workflow that involves a lot of planning, although I actually write very little of the plan myself anymore. I have a chain of slash commands like this: create-issue -> plan-issue -> build-plan -> pr-into-dev. I write a relatively brief description of what I want accomplished to create the issue, and then the agent fleshes out my description with more detailed requirements and acceptance criteria. I review the issue description, and the LLM often identifies open questions I failed to consider, so I revise as necessary and then the agent posts the description to the GH issue. I have planning separated because I often create issues quickly when something occurs to me and then circle back at a later date to implement, and want the agent to create the concrete implementation plan with an up-to-date snapshot of the code in context. Then I review that again, adjusting as necessary, and then the agent posts the result as a comment on the original issue.
Like you, I've found this detailed planning makes for a very robust coding agent (again, also in combination with the aforementioned best practices, especially requiring 100% test coverage because forcing it to exercise every line of code avoids hallucinated dummy tests that assert on nothing). Interestingly in comparison to legal writing, I also rely on the agent to decompose complex tasks into separate issues or subissues as appropriate, which is something that is never necessary for legal analysis because pretty much every every legal analysis can be one-shotted.
For legal writing, my workflow is nowhere near as structured as that. For context, I have only ever used LLMs for drafting what are effectively emails to clients or memoranda of law for clients that are a step up in complexity and formality from an email. So not something that will be filed with a court necessarily but very much in the same format and style as a formal motion that would be submitted to a court on behalf of a client. And never a contract, will, or judicial opinion, nor a communication with a counterparty like a demand letter or C&D. So YMMV for other types of legal writing.
That said, I typically start drafting a memo by conversing casually with an agent to explore the general boundaries of an issue I am evaluating, by identifying relevant sources of law, potentially related issues, and the analytical process I need to follow (i.e., what issues to evaluate and what order to evaluate them in, more or the less the analytical "algorithm"). Once I have a good sense of that algorithm, I put together a high level outline and then ask the agent to draft a detailed memo around that outline. Or at least that's what I used to do before the last few months, since when the models have matured to the point where I increasingly just ask the agent to write the outline based on the conversation we had, then review that, then ask it to write the memo based on the outline.
As I have been writing this, it occurs to me that actually I am following almost the exact same process for writing code and for writing legal memos, and should probably distill the legal writing process into a similarly well-structured set of chained skills/slash commands. In both domains, I describe an issue at a high level, get the LLM to fill in some of the broad outline level details, review that, then get the LLM to implement the complete final product. (Also perhaps worth noting while I do occasionally conduct general high level research by talking to a frontier lab LLM, I have always used locally hosted OS/OW models for drafting memos where I need to provide concrete, specific factual information about clients to the LLM, to avoid attorney-client privilege issues, so the quality has lagged behind the frontier models, which is part of why I haven't developed this workflow into as structured of an approach as I have for coding).
In both coding and legal contexts, I think that this planning or outlining step is critical not (or not just) because it forces the agent to create a higher quality product, but because it forces me to review what I am asking the agent to do at a sufficiently detailed level that I can catch errors before they crop up in the implementation. A lot of the time, the errors that occur if I skip this step aren't because the LLM has made any clear mistake, but because I failed to specify some aspect of the task and the LLM is forced to guess at what I really intended, which is where agents often struggle.
So I guess I would tentatively suggest that legal writing does in fact benefit from thorough planning, though it is hard for me to quantify whether those benefits are greater or less than the comparable benefits for code.
I also find it amusing. I also heard a lot of "4.7 is garbage, everybody hates it". Shows you how important proper validation techniques are, not just gut feeling.
Honestly, scientists too.
I did 10 years of research after deciding that it was not worth it. There is a vast amount of research with no direct application that gets published under the assumption that more knowledge is always better, but in my experience scientists rarely question the usefulness of their research (because most of the time, they find it interesting, which is motivating enough).
Granted, I am talking about harmless subjects, but there is also the dimension of resource usage that almost no scientist considers (the amount of plastics and chemicals used in biochemistry and cell biology is... concerning).
I think it has taken a rather negative connotation with the development of psychology, marketing and "influencers" which are usually people that try to influence you to buy into something.
I also immediately thought about his book on creativity. Thanks for the talk. For me, instead of staring at a wall, I just take a short walk. I think doing any activity with low mental load helps creativity.
It's the same story since at least 2012. It is well documented in the book "The chaos machine" by Max Fisher.
Facebook employees, journalists and psychologists have studied the phenomenon and Facebook's (as well as Youtube's) response is always the typical "We have done something" to calm the protest, but it's never really the case. It's a constant game of deflecting, delaying, diminishing, denying.
What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.
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