I know Orwell's work pretty well, and I read that sentence, and thought to myself: "Cant remember where he said anything like that, but what the hell, I haven't read everything Orwell ever wrote". So I just rolled with it.
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.
As others have said, rewrite the CV. It's not clear to me who you are and what kind of role would best suit you. Put a summary at the top making clear what you are best at and what kind of role you are looking for. Summarize your skills and achievments. Consider using simple graphics. eg List of tech skills rated with slide bar from expert to familiar understanding.
Lots of different types of tools here. Some are no code, most are low code. There is no clear dividing line between them: they are all configurable platforms with the ability to incorporate code through APIs and add ons.
Some are just special purpose utilities (eg Postman). Some are niche products with a relatively limited set of use cases(eg Airtable), some are enterprise grade platforms which can be used to build huge systems (eg Salesforce, MS Power platform), and there is every type of gradation between these.
This is a multi billion dollar business, growing steadily. It's going to accelerate even faster as LLM Technologies are increasingly tuned to build code extensions.
LLMs make writing code easier, but they don't make it unnecessary. "No-code" is mostly small consumer apps and POCs, but "low-code" is a big industry based on platform building. Much of the work of building and maintaining an enterprise system is (a)data model definition (b) UI/UX construction and (c) workflows. Low code platforms specialise in doing this in a structured, fast and maintainable way without code. LLMs are great but they aren't a magic bullet. Enterprise grade development requires a lot of structure and LLMs don't provide that. Low code provides a pre built, well documented structure, enabling mediocre developers like me to build reliable, professional grade enterprise apps.
The NFL theorem means nothing if all the learning tasks have a common underlying structure. In the real world, they do. The laws of physics and chemistry create emergent causal relationships. Any SSL learning algorithm that learns to exploit causal relationships will consistently perform well over a variety of real world tasks.
Yes, I agree: In practice, all learning tasks have a common underlying structure because our physical reality can behave only in certain ways, determined by the symmetries in our universe. However, as far as I know, no one has formally specified or proved this commonality in learning tasks.
The most persuasive argument I've seen for this view -- our view -- is laid out in this paper by Lin, Tegmark, and Rolnick, written between 2016 and 2017 (although it feels like it was written a century ago!): https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225
you say this as if it is trivial. for example, optimization of the lagrangian function is a recurring theme in physics and is pretty much a model of physical causation. once you have the lagrangian you pretty much have the domain knowledge. if you can come up with an ssl that discovers relevant lagrangians from observing the real world, that would be HUGE. however nfl might still stand in your way ;)
Don't know how accessible or affordable therapy is where you live, but you certainly need someone to talk to.
I had a midlife crisis in my 40's. My career was going nowhere, I was trapped in a job I hated. I felt I was wasting my life.
What kept me going was the sense of obligation I had to others who depend on me. If you have nothing or no one to whom you owe service, then you can change that. Find a partner, or volunteer yourself for charitable work. By helping others, you also help yourself.
I made a point of enjoying the little things in life. Exercise. Walk in the sun. Go fishing. Grow tomatoes. Buy a friend a drink. Whatever, just sneak the little pleasures when you can.
I set some goals. Not boring goals like to make money, goals to achieve something meaningful, that engaged my interests and (modest) abilities.
Things got better. My 50's and 60's were some of the most rewarding years of my life. (I'm 69 now). I achieved some things I'd never thought I could achieve, just by pluggin' away.
Life is hard. John Stuart Mill wrote that most people have a limited capacity for happiness. I think that is true. But the strange thing is that by relieving yourself of the obligation to feel happy, sometimes it happens anyway.
Good point. The essence of processing is the transformation and combination of signs. Processing a sign is a kind of energy transformation. The process takes input signs, performs some kind of energy transformation, and produces a new sign, with different signification, which may be a better or more useful signifier for some purpose. Think NAND gates, or neurons. Example: if it looks like a duck and quacks like. duck, then it's probably a duck. A neuron summing 'looks like a duck' signal and 'quacks like a duck' signals is a more reliable signifier for ducks than either of the inputs. As for signs, see C S Peirce or Ruth Millikan for a clearer explanation. TLDR: Signs are relations between objects and processes (Sign, Signifier and Interpretant)
That's still begging the question - what is a sign (symbol/signifer)?
I'd suggest it's a signifier for a subjective state. You can persuade a symbol processor to do anything to any symbol collection, but the results are only useful if the symbols mean something - which is to say they have some analog to subjective experience.
If that's the case then computers and symbol processing are tools for working with subjective experience.
This does not mean there's a possible mapping between all symbol states and all of subjective experience. It's often assumed this is true, but it's a conjecture and has never been proven. It won't be proven until we know exactly what subjective experience is.
So the best we can say is that computers are tools for working with a subset of subjective experience.
Which is interesting enough in itself without being absolutist about it.
I'm 69, about to turn 70. I'm in a senior technical consulting role which often requires me to go on the tools. I work for a big, successful software firm that can afford to pay well. Most of my peers are 20+ years younger than me and quite smart, so I have to work hard to keep up. But I manage. Next year I will quit my job and 'retire'. In fact I'll be using my financial security to start up a SaaS. business. I have a bunch of ideas I've been wanting to work on. Working keeps me focused and connected. My rule is: stay interested, stay connected.
The Robodebt scandal in Australia didn't spill over to violence in the streets, but it came close. Robodebt was a debt collection system introduced by the Federal government to recover supposed overpayments of social security. It was flawed at every level, including software design, and resulted in nationwide protests. see https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6037228/robo-debt-cen...
Similar but worse, the Horizon scandal in the UK where bugs in Fujitsu stocktaking software sent post office workers to jail and ruined lives because administrators took the software's side when it found accounting shortfalls https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036
I would hesitate before being so quick to say "worse". Robodebt resulted in suicides and primarily targeted the vulnerable. I would suggest that both schemes just be labelled unconscionable.
Horizon was horrific. The spec was so old that the contract was with colonial favourites ICL, before they were fully renamed Fujitsu. Several postmasters committed suicide when the Royal Mail initiated fraud causes against them that were caused by Horizon accounting errors.
It wasn't the collection agents who were protesting, though; it was the people being used by the software who protested against it, not the people who used it.
I studied philosophy to postgraduate level before having to go out and get a real job. Now in late middle age, I am nearly recovered to the point where I have to agree with the author. I now understand that most philosophy, of ANY age or period, including the present, is useless. But there are counterexamples. Hume is still worth reading, on almost any subject. Many of his ideas have not aged at all. Reason as the slave of the passions, is vs ought, compatibilism on free will all come to mind, as do his deep insights on the connections between ideas (Resemblance, Contiguity, cause and effect). These positions are still held by scientifically literate people, and some of them, like the idea of connections between ideas, I have have actually found useful as guidelines for research in AI. And that's without mentioning his influence on political philosophy, which was profound. Hume's notion of the social contract continues to shape political debate in ways not many people realise.
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.