I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.
> But is that not also "following a path laid out by someone else?"
Not really. I'd use the analogy of breathing. Imagine you're convinced that you need to breathe properly, so you consciously obsess over each breath (congratulations: you are now breathing manually). Then someone comes along and says "you know, you can just breathe without thinking about doing it right."
Is letting go of that manual breathing and just breathing without thinking about it following a path laid out by someone else?
It sounds to me like their "trick" is simply not acting from the psychological position that you need to do something you're not doing in order to realize your authentic or best self. Wu wei?
Reminds me of the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" and its comparison of spaced repetition and cramming.
Cramming often feels more satisfying, more like you're learning, but actually leads to worse retention. Spaced repetition that includes the struggle of recalling something just at the edge of being forgotten, on the other hand, feels worse but leads to much higher retention.
Even with the latest version of LM Studio and the latest runtimes I find that tool use fails 100% of the time with the following error: Error rendering prompt with jinja template: "Cannot apply filter "upper" to type: UndefinedValue".
EDIT: The issue is addressed in LM Studio 0.4.9 (build 1), which auto-update wasn't picking up for me for some reason.