alt Hacker NewsI used to get calls often from my friends to ask me questions about my area of expertise. Not urgent things, just friendly "hey--what if..." kinds of questions.
Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.
This sounds like a bummer. But honestly I can't relate to this at all. I've never gotten calls like that. It's just not what my relationships with friends and family have ever been about. (Nobody cares about my expertise, and to the extent they have, they always just wanted me to fix their virus interested windows xp machine, because that's the limit of their understanding of what "computer people" know about, and I always hated that!)