Clubber

But you have to remember every time to flip it before a meeting starts and after it ends.

Agree, but it's an easy habit to pick up.

If you don’t then it will start being ignored because its never accurate.

Yes, that pavlovian response works both ways. If people keep interrupting my meetings, I'll remember to put up the thing. Remembering to take it down when the meeting is over is more problematic though.

It also doesn’t work if you get an impromptu call or meeting you weren’t planning for.

It does. I've never had a meeting where it didn't take me a few rings to get my AirPods in anyway.

I totally agree with most of what you said and I appreciate the technical solution presented. Like I said my mind is just into finding simple, non-tech solutions right now. Also another benefit of the simple solution is it costs probably a buck or two, cheaper if I made the tag myself with scissors, part of a cardboard box and a marker.

The problem with both solutions is it doesn't work for dogs who typically can't read. An even simpler solution just occurred to me. Shut the door when I'm in a meeting.

This is very cool and I'm glad you were able to build it.

On the contrary though, I've been fascinated with simple non-technical solutions to problems lately. For example, my buddy hates it when people use his driveway to turn around. He lives on a corner lot and the layout is prone to people turning around in his driveway, and apparently this is a pet peeve of his. He was talking about installing a gate, or a retractable pole that he could extend from a hole in the driveway, all these intricate technological solutions, etc. I gave it some thought and got him a street cone off eBay to put in his driveway. I leveraged human psychology over technology and it worked like a charm and only cost $30.

For your example, I would just put a do not disturb sign on the door. The flip around kind they have at hotels. It takes getting up, but just as effective and you get a few steps in. Of course you don't get to learn and build stuff, but like I said, I'm fascinated by simple solutions right now.

It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.

This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.

To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.

This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.

Maybe I'm just old and salty. Get off my lawn!

We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.

That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.

Google is certainly a monopoly in several sectors, search and YouTube come to mind. Amazon is a duopoly with Walmart and both need to be dismantled, but the damage to main street was done a long time ago. I'm not sure where Apple is a monopoly. People argue the App Store but only for the iPhone and iPad, but I feel that takes some mental gymnastics since it's somewhat niche and other stores for other phones exist.

That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.

This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.

Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).

This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.

Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.

Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.

On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.

Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.

Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.

You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.

If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.

Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.

All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.

All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.

Technically 2.

It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?

It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.

Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.

It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal.

I would imagine the state takes the vast majority of their pay.

He was virtue signaling. It's sadly all too common these days. As if he or any human isn't capable of horrible atrocities given the right circumstances. Don't let him or anyone stifle your speech. Say what you need to say regardless of the sniping. You can't turn in your karma points for anything anyway, not even a little eraser.

Lying under oath would catch a perjury charge as well.

In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.

Stick at it for at least 2 years, keep improving, it will get better. I got a BigCo on my resume early on and I'm glad I got it, but I don't particularly care for BigCos; all the friction makes it too hard to get anything done and it drives me nuts.

The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered, almost like 100 different hero engineers added their own "tricks" just to seem clever, make a name for themself, make everyone else's life harder, and then pat themselves on the back while writing extensive documentation about why their little chrome extension or alternative way of doing things solves X,Y,Z (while completely ignoring how convoluted and burdensome they've now made something that, while technically inconvenient, was utterly simple to understand prior).

This is what endless interviews full of leet code questions buys them. At least all their engineers can estimate how many ping pong balls will fit in a school bus.

Cybertrucks are all over the place where I live. Watching them drive by is like a blip in some futuristic movie.

you are fed up with specific positions/companies that are a poor fit for you

Agree. With no degree, but a skill and interest in programming coupled with experience, you're actually in a pretty good place. Find a company that doesn't suck. They seem elusive but they exist. They might not pay as well, but you can get through the day without counting the seconds until it's over.

Shit companies are always hiring because they have high turnover, so it would seem like all companies are shit, but they are not.

Maybe get out of NYC. If you are in the straight tech industry, think about doing tech in another industry, they all need it.

FWIW, there will always be times of stress in tech, but if the place is actually well managed, those times would be minimized.

So upon check out you're just getting a fee and sometimes it's egregiously high and sometimes it is nonexistent? If you're buying a $100 item (and let's say a $50 cost basis) that has three versions: US made, Japanese made and Chinese made you could get a $0 fee, a $5 or a $50 fee.

It would be more obfuscated than that. They're scummy, I didn't say they weren't clever. A company probably wouldn't make the exact same product in three different countries and Amazon probably wouldn't stock all three, they'd just pick the version they could make the most money on. Also, they probably wouldn't make the difference obvious, just a few cents or dollars here or there. They would say the tariff is $5, when it really was $4.50 and they'd just round up. At scale that really ads up.

Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.

Most of them lost trust a long time ago. I mean, what companies do you trust? I don't trust very many, if any.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should all trust Amazon...

Edit: Amazon said displaying tariffs was never approved and won't happen. More junk news.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/amazon-considers-displaying-...

This isn't sales tax, this is tariff. Not sure if they are any laws regarding that or not.

It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.

Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.

The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.

Passing the cost to the consumer isn't a requirement. Sometimes it's impossible and stay competitive with local business.

Say local business charges $110. Imported charges $80 but a 50% tariff making it $120. If the import charges $120, they won't be competitive on price, so if that was their only differentiation, they would need eat at least $10 in tariffs.

I think he means the display price. When you buy something for $100 and it ends up being $110 on checkout, the taxes are obfuscated on the display price.

Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.

Yes, good point. I suspect the numbers won't be precise. The objective is to qualify raising prices, not necessarily their own transparency. Of course this is signaling that Amazon is choosing to distribute the costs to customers rather than absorbing them in any way, so take that for what it is.

Nah, not worth the energy.

The big difference for me is that what's actually fun (hard technical problems like e.g. writing an OS kernel, a db engine, a path tracer, an LLM from scratch...) is mentally challenging, and might progress your career, but it's not actually in any way sellable.

I'm not saying it's worthless by any means. I assume this would be the baseline. The benefit of making an actual sellable product is you learn how to finish, which is often a lesson not learned from hobbyists. It's fun to work on new tech, but if someone never learns how to make a product that can ship, their value in an organization is probably more limited than someone who can.

Your effort would go mostly to the market analysis and your product would need more polish meaning that for a personal project,

It's the polish that's valuable, I couldn't care less about the business side of it, leave that to business people.

Let's use your example of working on the Linux Kernel. If Linus just made a kernel and said, "this is great!" we never would have had the GNU/Linux revolution. It was packaged and installers were created and distributions were made and it was eventually able to be installed pretty easily by anyone. That's making a viable product, that is finishing.

To make something sellable, you usually have to make it not-so-technical and not-so-complex.

Sort of, you have to make a not-so-complex wrapper so other people can use it. The complexity is still there, but you have to abstract it so devs without that knowledge can use it. I feel that if no one else can use it, where's the value?

“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”

Another simplistic example is I'm working on making a custom domain specific model. Getting it to infer properly is great (getting there), but the value to the company is to make it fast, wrap it in a usable API, get it to log useful errors, and integrate it into our software. The first is the fun part, the second is finishing to make it useful. That's value.

You've made a whole lot of assumptions in that reply, all from 10 sentences. Maybe ask some questions next time instead of making assumptions that fit your preconceived notions. Your intuition is a bit off.

Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs?

I absolutely do. Money and power is a great motivator. I don't feel bad about any of it. I took my shot and continue to do so.

What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it?

It was not. I made some good side money. I always joke that I program to feed my computer habit. The benefit of it is you actually code like you are making a product, and there is usually a big skill difference between someone coding for fun and someone coding to make an actual sellable product; it's the 80/20 rule. That last 80% is what separates the good from the great. Like Jobs said, "Real artists ship."

This is a half truth. This is what I found.

"Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned states that they will lose federal funding for roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects if they continue to foster diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, impede President Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts or defy other directives from the administration."

It far time to stop taking what the news says at face value. They've been doing this for decades.

I doubt it, police departments issue tickets as a major source of revenue. I've heard it said if you want to get rid of police departments, just have everyone follow the driving laws.

I suspect they'll allow just enough over so that police can still get their sweet, sweet tax revenue in this brave new world.

Most police cars that I know of have license scanners and that scanner will inform police if the owner of said car has a suspended license, which results in an immediate trip to jail.

And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like?

They are not. This is a very common misconception. I suggest you go purchase one at a gun store.

It goes to show that the common system of employment, in which we spend our time toward the purposes and meanings of others, tends to provide no purpose or meaning for ourselves.

Work certainly provides meaning, you'll notice this when you can't find work for a while, ie. involuntarily unemployed. Also, you have to find deeper meaning outside of work: church, social clubs, raising kids, taking care of elderly parents, volunteering, etc. Getting paid to do moral work is rarely a thing and somewhat defeats the purpose.

Because they caught him later? There are cameras everywhere these days.