u/OpinionsRdumb

If you are not using /remote-control you need to start using it now. It will be life changing. Especially if you feel like even 2-3 agents running at the same time is already overkill and giving you AI burnout. For those that don't know, you can enter /remote-control into either a CLI session or a Desktop session and the session will be immediately accessible and will sync in real time with your phone Claude app.

First obvious super power is I could leave my office while still being "plugged in". I could sit in meetings, go to the gym, etc etc and still be "working", IE just keeping the agents on task and answering any questions they have. Similarly I could be plugged out and then come back at a whim's notice and return to working. Or better yet, answer critical questions in meetings by quickly asking one of the agents to clarify any questions about the data I am handling day to day. Similarly, I could be "plugged out" whenever I wanted and leave these agents on pause for days and come back to them whenever I wanted.

What I have noticed is I am taking way more walks, I am going to the gym WAY more, and all around just feel insanely better throughout the day. I am in the looks for getting a dog as I just want to be outside constantly now. And the feeling of being able to use my phone in voice mode and just handle 2-3 agents seamlessly is just so .... fun, if I am allowed to use that word. It is weird. I honestly think this is going to be the future.

Like literally an earpiece and that's it. And its synced up with one of your devices or even some cloud server you are using and you are literally having agents report back via voice (or sending live messages to a watch/phone for non-voice environments) and you are basically a CEO all day while your agents are doing the grunt work. Even for governance I am finding that this system works and I can easily detect bugs or flaws in the data and fix them in real time. It is actually wild.

Another benefit I have noticed is that I deleted all my social media apps. One of my vices would be to scroll twitter or reddit etc when I woke up and when I went to bed. I've noticed that checking my phone for agent updates gives me that same sort of weird "dopamine" hit and I don't have this urge to go on doomscrolling mode. Instead I've downloaded Kindle and am reading books morning and night. Not to mention another benefit is you don't always have to be "locked in" either. You can literally leave an agent for days and just come back and pick up where you left off (as long as you have an always-on setup like a mac mini etc).

Just overall excited about this and wanted to share

idk if it was the spacex deal or the tweaks they made to 4.7 after all the outrage. But hoooooly Claude has become an absolute workhorse.

2 huge game changers for me. Being able to trust —dangerous mode. And using remote control. I am in utter shock. I plan out a project, remote control it, hit go, start a new project, remote control it, hit go, rinse repeat. Then I have 2-3 agents working while I do something that requires my full attention. And before when I used to get distracted I would go on reddit/fb etc pretending to be “gleaning” information. Now my “vice” is glancing at my phone to answer my agents. Who very very rarely meed help. More often than not I am noticing claude just finishing after a single prompt and 1 back and forth before just going off on its own.

This is actually insane. And in case you are curious I am a scientist, so not just vibecoding ai slop. The things that I am “vibecoding” need to. E verified by tested models and Claude is right 99.99% of the time. Two months ago it felt more like 80%. I feel like I have 5 other postdocs working under me.

What also blows my mind is how many other scientists that refuse to use AI because its all a “scam”. I mean I aint gonn say nothing because less competition for me. But still.. people really do stick to their ways sometimes

One thing that I and probably a lot of other postdocs are worrying about is A) should I be panicking and figuring out my exit strategy ASAP or B) are things not as bad as they seem and I should hold steadfast and keep preparing for this cycle and the next etc. Specifically talking about R1 and R2 TT positions.

Because one scenario I have played in my head is that "waiting out" this terrible phase of academia and continuing as a postdoc could actually be a bad decision because once the hiring picks back up (assuming it does) all the seasoned 5th, 6th, 7th year postdocs will be competing against eachother AND all the fresh talent that is coming into the market as well.

And I know the answer is likely " we have no Fing clue and so you should prepare for the worst" etc but just curious if folks have inside knowledge on their Uni's forecast for hiring this Fall. From what it seems like to me, most schools are in a hunker down phase and dealing with financial uncertainty. But then again, it has also been made a little more clearer that congress seems to have bipartisan support for keeping indirect rates at what they are and also just supporting research in general and keeping things like NSF and NIH from getting budget cuts. And so maybe a little more financial certainty this cycle we will see a small uptick in hiring??

-a distraught postdoc praying for good news

Young 30s male. Never had teeth problems except grinding and some minor gum recession. Last appt I got pushed to do gingi scaling after she assessed my gums (i got mostly 2-3mm's and a couple 4s). Would cost $300 out of pocket instead of the normal cleaning which was free. I politely refused.

So then an assistant came in and proceeded to just give me what I thought was flouride treatment but did not realize until i got home and my teeth felt weirdly smooth and extra sensitive and that they polished them and that was it!

I feel like every time I get a new dentist (I move alot for work) I cannot just get basic cleaning anymore. What happened to this? And the few times I do finally get an honest dentist they tell me my teeth are perfectly fine and they would never in a million years order extra procedures for me.

So this dentist that I started seeing 6 months ago, did a normal cleaning the first time I saw them. In fact, I am pretty sure they called this a "deep cleaning" since it was my first time.

Then on my second visit they asked me, "You're here just for a cleaning right?" And I said yes. And so then an assistant came out and just did tooth polishing? I thought it was the flouride thing as it looked like she had put on a paste material on this electric brush type thing etc but I noticed she went very hard and aggressive on my teeth and did what I now know would be "polishing" which I did not want.

The dentist then came and did a gum assessment and then recommended what she called "gingi scaling" or something along those lines and that it would cost me $2-300 out of pocket. So I refused and then that was it. And at that point I assumed the "polishing" was the cleaning but it was not until I got home and googling that I realized they basically just did polishing on me and no actual removal of plaque and tartar.

Another note is they wanted to do x rays on me since it had been 6 months since my last one and I politely refused since that seemed a bit excessive and they seemed a bit annoyed that I was refusing. For record I have no history of dental issues and even this dentist commented that I have great teeth. So very confused by this whole thing.

Is this normal?

Idk if it is from recent updates they have done but 4.7 is noticeably so much easier to work with now. It is definitely still incredibly slow, but I have noticed I can much more reliably just let it do its thing, and it really only needs to ask me 1-2 questions that are often pretty spot on before going off and doing its own thing.

Got an email about "review results available" but when I log in all it says is a JIT. Any idea what this means?

I actually am in utter shock it is this bad. Like 1800 feeling like 2.1 ... sure I guess maybe. Even that is bad this late into seas. But 1600 bracket being 2.1ish??? Like how

I feel like this past March will be known forever as the ultimate honeymoon phase with AI. It was the month when almost every single dev and their mother were hopping onto Claude Code and just being utterly astounded. People we were up working until 2am and talking about Claude psychosis and the possibilities were literally endless. It really felt like the world was coming to an end (in a good way).

But I feel like April was the month where a lot of people got hit with a reality check. Basically realizing that no AI was not going to do absolutely everything for you. That combined with compute hitting physical limits, and we got one of the fastest 180s I have ever seen in the tech field.

Now instead of posts about people claiming they had never felt so giddy in their lives, we get posts about how Claude is unable to hold a 500k line codebase into its context window and how it was unable to make someone's B2B SaaS up and running in less than a day. This may also just be due to the fact that there is just more of an influx of vibecoders versus actual devs.

But either way, I have felt it myself where the early giddiness is definitely fading away, and now I almost feel like this nagging guilt when I am trying to relax where my brain goes: "You could be running another agent right now..." And so it almost feels stressful in a way that it wasn't before.

Another thing is that whereas before, when Claude messed up, it was almost cute. The same way you watch her toddler child throw a baseball incorrectly or something. It was like, "Well ofc it can't be perfect!"

But now we have had enough time where those mistakes are just not cute anymore and we end up screaming in all caps at our agent. It's like the difference between a toddler's brain that is smarter everyday just due to pure biology, versus a toddler's brain , who yes is an amazing being, but that is almost robotically stuck in place and you have to handhold them through their mistakes every damn time.

It's demoralizing because it is just so blatant. Like so blatant in a way that it would take a Blizz employee just 1 millisecond of gameplay to be like "oh.. shit.. yeah that is pretty bad.."

Playing at 1700 when you know it really is 2100 or playing at 2k+ knowing that it should be 2.4k+.

I get that we need to just "play for fun" and "its about the game not the rating"...

But damn it is just__such__an___easy__fix and it happens every single damn season that it just feels pernicious, and malevolent at this point.

It feels pernicious because we have a whole community of players who literally sub to this game, buy the expacs every year, for the sole purpose of playing pvp. Playing a game that is coincidentally at the heart of how video game streaming took off in the 2010s.

And yet we get what is basically a gamebreaking bug at this point. I am not sure what else to call it. We have a whole slough of rewards that are completely unobtainable. And it happens every dang season. There will be 10 more posts like mine. There will be 100 more tweets from R1 streamers. And then finally after weeks and weeks and weeks of complaints:

We will finallyyyy, way into the season, get a random blue post claiming ,"We have been monitoring pvp arena rating, and it is a bit lower than we would like it to be for shuffle and 3v3 and will be adding in some gradual inflation etc etc etc". Every. Single. Season.

The reward system needs a revamp. Percent rewards. Auto-inflation. A customizable pvp mount renown system. SOMETHING.

Literally anything other than queueing 400+CR lower than you should be.

So one thing that has become clear to me is that academia, more than other fields I have been in, is so dang good at dangling this "possibility of great success" carrot in front of you, especially early in your career. Whether its the daily google scholar alerts (that one paper that you swore you were gonna do this year!), new grant application opportunities whispering in your ear that this time is different, that one colleague who always elicits a tiny pang of envy deep inside you; etc etc etc.

I think there often is the claim that age is just a number, and many a book/podcast/blog that will go on and on about the same examples of "Jk Rowling didn't publish her first book until X years, Morgan Freeman didn't land his first role until Y years, Oprah Winfrey didn't do this until..." to try and motivate people. But these have often been debunked as incredibly exceptions to the norm, in which, your "impact" or "success" or whatever you want to call it, is likely not going to change by an incredibly amount once you reach a certain age.

A recent paper, that made some headlines, looking at a massive dataset of 300k+ authors, even found that reversing your success (in both directions) was incredibly rare the later you got into your career.

Personally, I think I am still coming to terms with my scientific output and impact. And dealing with this "imposter syndrome". I often have many days/weeks/months where I am convinced I am about to make the next biggest breakthrough in science and am incredibly excited and amped... until as often is the case, you get back your first set of reviews and are deeply (and often rightfully) humbled back into reality, that no, this is might be interesting and cool but it is not revolutionary because of XYZ.

I wonder if folks here resonate with this at all. Where academia often puts you in this almost never-ending path of a possible grand success story being dangled in front of you but a more stark truth that just mathematically speaking you are more likely to be "normal" in your field. Which in this day and age, "normal" is likely describing an amazing scientist who is giving up a huge part of their life to trying to help society in a million different ways. I just find it hard to remind myself of this on a day-to-day basis.

https://preview.redd.it/eknngb28m9yg1.png?width=119&format=png&auto=webp&s=66bf394ec0dd7f912a80e2da5a2e59a856f35346

So as a scientist myself you might be surprised that I am asking this question. But I am dead serious. The only thing you need to know is that I am in the field of biology and have always used math but only in the applied sense. IE "and then we employed XYZ's theorem to determine ABC" etc etc.

What I don't do and someday wish to do is

"and then to determine ABC we modeled X as function of Y where X=2Y divided by the length of so and so which we will call Z. Thus X=2y/z provides us with an estimate for ABC under these assumptions.." etc

Anyway, I hope that made somewhat sense. Basically I am just blown away by these papers that come up with some new mathematical equation because in my head I am always like, oh yeah I guess that does make sense if you think about it. But when it comes to my own work, I can NEVER come up with these mathematical relationships. I've taken concepts where I know for a fact that A and B are related in some way but it is not linear, and a lot of times you can't even really plot A and B because they aren't just simple discrete units if that makes sense.

Like for example, lets take your probability of death. One thought I've always had is that every year you live (past say 10 yrs old) you increase your chance of dying because, well, the older people get, the more likely they are to die. Just basic biology. And indeed if you look this up, you will see that after 10, the probability of dying is straight up a linear increase with age.

But putting this in the form of a mathematical equation just completely escapes me. Even though I know this must be quite simple.

Like P(probability of dying) = k (some constant) and(some mathematical property) A(age) ..but like I just have no idea how to put this into terms.

Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality

Quick google search gives me this beautiful equation (attached) where u is risk of dying and x is age and lambda is some constant for background mortality (car crashes etc)

I guess what I am asking is can someone give a sort of guide of how one would have to start employing math into their research (as a non-mathematician?). I understand this may be a literal paradoxical question in itself and I am just describing what it takes to be an actual mathematician which is years and years of learning.

I actually am a bit in shock. Like I knew that ever since they announced combat addons being removed it was going to be game over for PvP UIs... But Idk, maybe it was the fact they actually went ahead and made an in-game DR tracker (which for awhile was up in the air whether they were going to make one"), I just felt a bit of hope we would be given at least the bare minimum.

And this is after I actually made a post here before midnight launch predicting this would happen

>Prediction: PvPers (and PvEers) will be forced to find workarounds and the game will be overall worse off without addons
by u/OpinionsRdumb in worldofpvp

And everyone actually downvoted me which was pretty funny.

But I actually cannot believe this is basically the game we are being left with. Currently there are a dozen or addons that KINDA give you a glimmer of what we had before. Some of the kicks are trackable SOME of the time. Some CDs are trackable some of the time. Some of the enemy CDs are trackable, again, some of the time. And basically the people who have the most cutting edge access to addons (dev experience, discords, etc) have an advantage over people who just want to queue up and play with just the bread and butter ones installed like miniCC and bbp/bbf etc.

So now instead of reducing addon anxiety for everyone, they have actually done the opposite. Everyone is constantly wondering what addon came out next or what miniCC update allows what new loophole to track XYZ. And every piece of info gives you a major advantage at least above the basic bracket ratings.

I actually just cannot believe this. PvP feels so lifeless and clunky and just dead.... not sure how else to describe it.