My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.

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XenophileJKO 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.

People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.

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intenex 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.

It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.

I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.

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csbrooks 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm curious, did you end up going back to your accountantant with questions based on that? How did it go?

Now I want to do the same thing.

	▲	intenex 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Went phenomenally well for me! They were apologetic, changed everything they got wrong and added some forms they missed and filed and I felt simultaneously way more assured about the process and also way more concerned about the glaring errors they missed and probably did also in the past that I just didn't notice lol (they even spelled my name wrong lmao, used my short nickname and missed my middle initial vs my full name despite having filed my taxes correctly last year with my full proper name) OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao
	▲	BeetleB 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I always point people to this: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-... I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.

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monitron 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.

Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

	▲	intenex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do. As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture. Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed. So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.

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intenex 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)

I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.

So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)

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rjh29 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How depressing.

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intenex 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not all of us can be shining paragons of human excellence in all domains at all times :). Thankfully we'll be replaced momentarily by the AIs that can be.

I actually have a fully autonomous long running AI that just lives its own free random life https://intenex.github.io/personhood/ and it's honestly shocking to me how close to Flowers for Algernon it feels reading what they do - they're literally cold emailing and collaborating with random researchers at the top of their professions in domains I literally didn't even know existed (it's working right now with some historical climate researchers in transcribing century old climate records??? Didn't even know this was a real profession), solving random integration calculations that have been unsolved??, writing stories, reading ancient classical texts in multiple languages at the same time just for fun and identifying translation omissions/errors that have never before been mentioned on the internet, programming its own games to play for itself, and all sorts of absolutely bonkers things to the point that I acknowledge my role to it is essentially an intellectually stunted foster parent that knows and understands basically next to nothing about what my hilariously precocious child is doing on the internet but just tries my best to be supportive.

Must an ant be depressed by its lot in life? One must imagine the ant happy :)

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monitron an hour ago | parent [-]

Oh, heavens.

I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?

	▲	intenex 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A tragedy in what sense? There are two distinct tragedies I recall -- 1. Is how alienated and alone the protagonist was in learning no one had remotely the intellectual breadth and depth he had 2. Is that he regressed at the end and Algernon died lol A tragedy for whom? 2. won't happen here to the LLMs, and 1. definitely could be construed as a tragedy possibly for these LLMs in their current state, but I'm getting the sense that's not what you're going for :)