4 ms·
> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immedi
by Swizec 7mo ago
> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things
You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.
Make sure you fit the rocks first.
- big-chungus4 7mo agoYou fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.
- auggierose 7mo agoWhat?
- ghurtado 7mo agoPsilocybin? Not sure, I used to be better at diagnosing this type of episode.
- NikolaNovak 7mo agoI assume post used extreme example to demonstrate that wise-sounding metaphors may not have inherent point or value.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoThey're talking about Archimedes' principle, displacement of water. The fish makes the water bottle overflow, so be careful when you add the fish so that it doesn't. It's a counter analogy to the rocks one above.
- spencerflem 7mo agoThey’re pointing out that if the jar was _filled_ with sand, then of course you can’t fit any rocks in because it’s full. It’s cute but misunderstands the original metaphor I think.
- sritchie 7mo agoHahah, I just have to reply and say I loved the original comment and was happy for the laugh. Obviously this is the answer to the riddle of > Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any additional containers I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors recently, love leaning hard into this one.
- ghurtado 7mo agoIn a more advanced civilisation, you would be put in the pillory for the townsfolk to throw rotten cabbage at you until the Lord fixed whatever made you say that.
- jareklupinski 7mo agoyou fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
- wiml 7mo agoThen you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river, ...
- gzread 7mo agohttps://xkcd.com/2348 https://xkcd.com/2348
- johnnyanmac 7mo agoI'm so glad that style of inerview was dying out right when I graduated. And I love puzzles. But I don't need wannabe IQ tests for a job that expects me to work in legacy code and coordinae with other engineers.
- hedayet 7mo ago> You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, [some water overflows], you remove half of water... That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an observable event.
- otterley 7mo agoYou put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.
- Vegenoid 7mo agoThe point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a metaphysical connection. Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not mean that said metaphor is bad.
- hk__2 7mo agoYou write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it, you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the first one, and… nobody understands anything.
- gzread 7mo agoIs it the ultimate result of LLM use? People internalising the idea that writing is about stringing words together like a Markov chain without realising they're not saying anything of substance?
- imtringued 7mo agoThat is the philosophy of "humans are just token predictors", yes.
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoBut if you teach the bottle how to fish it will be able to feed itself for life.
- wizardforhire 7mo agoIf that ain’t the secret to solving an np complete problem I don’t know what is!
- d0liver 7mo agoI think that's kind of the point though: AI is the sand, but it's the rocks that hold all of the value; the further you get away from using AI the more real value you obtain. Like, a few of the rocks have gold deposits in them, and the sand is just infinitely copious but never holds anything valuable. And you've got a bunch of people running around saying, "Behold my mountains of sand!"