It's been 15 years. Did you figure out how to be less scared?
The solution isn't trying harder to be liked. It's expanding your comfort with being disliked.
Social anxiety is an optimal response when there is a scarcity of other people to interact with. If you are meeting new 100 people every day, it doesn't matter if 99 people dislike you, so long as you get another 100 new people tomorrow; because as long as you keep playing you will continue to gather people who like you.
If your total count of people to interact with is very small, then it suddenly becomes incredibly important to be not disliked, because you will quickly exhaust all your social prospects and be disliked by everyone.
go find people who are better than you by a lot. one way to quickly do this is to join some sort of physical exercise class e.g. running, climbing etc. there will be lots of people who are better than you. you will feel smaller.
or you could read research papers. or watch a movie with real life actors who are really good at acting.
you will then figure out, as @Algon has mentioned in the comments, that the narcissism is load-bearing, and have to deal with that. which is a lot more scary
game-theory-trust is built through expectation of reward from future cooperative scenarios. it is difficult to build this when you 'dont actually know who or how many people you might be talking to'.
I did see the XKCD and I agree haha, I just thought your phrasing implied 'optimize everything (indiscriminately)'.
When I say caching I mean retaining intermediate results and tools if the cost to do so is near free.
Nice. So something like grabbing a copy of swebench dataset, writing a pipeline that would solve those issues, then putting that on your CV?
I will say though that your value as an employee is not 'producing software' so much as solving business problems. How much conviction do you have that producing software marginally faster using AI will improve your value to your firm?
so you want to build a library containing all human writings + an AI librarian.
I think what we have right now ("LLM assistants that are to-the-point" and "libraries containing source text") serve distinct purposes and have distinct advantages and disadvantages.
LLM-assistants-that-are-to-the-point are great, but they
libraries containing source text partially solve the hallucination problem because human source text authors typically don't hallucinate. (except for every poorly written self-help book out there.)
from what I gather you are trying to solve the two problems above. great. but doubling down on 'the purity of full text' and wrapping some fake grass around it is not the solution.
here is my solution
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8
There's an alien race in the above called the baby-eaters who eat their sentient offspring because this alien species is genetically unfortunate enough to produce thousands of immediately-sentient offspring at a time, and therefore they must cull their offspring.
More and more each day I think we are becoming like baby-eaters. Except of course we don't murder our offspring by directly consuming them.
What is murder? What is consumption? It is the reclaiming of productive resource and the denial of future growth. When a poor person, having lived through years of their life giving what little they must to society in order to survive, dies on the street, there is another person that has been eaten by society.
We are eating each other, and often by the time someone has reached their preteens we know that they will be one of the ones that will be eaten. Therefore, in many ways, we are becoming baby-eaters.
However unlike the baby-eaters, not all of our society has normalized baby-eating to the point that we cannot see it as anything other than unquestionably good.
What would we ask of the baby-eaters? How should we act today?