amerkhalid

Another question to ask is what you’d do when you retire. This really helped me figure out what to focus on now.

Questions like “what would you do if you won the lottery” feel too unrealistic, so I would just dream about wild startup ideas.

The “one year left to live” question is better than the lottery question, but thinking about retirement may provide another perspective.

> I would never assume the AI answer to a consequential problem to be authoritative, unless it shows me the source and I can click on the link to verify the source and the data presented (search engine use case).

That remains the elephant in the room - the tendency to make up fake answers. Until that's fixed, LLMs are only useful for problems where the cost of such errors is an externality, dumped on the consumer.

That’s one of fears. The general public and politicians alike will trust AI without scrutiny. We’ve already seen examples of judges relying on flawed software, with devastating outcomes for innocent people. With the rapid push and widespread enthusiasm for AI, a darker future looms if these problems aren’t addressed.

Today's kids have smartphones, PCs/Macs, Video Game Consoles, and movie streaming devices and are unsupervised on the Internet. For role models, they have rap stars who sing about sex and drugs.

I don’t know if there are any stats to back this up but anecdotally I know plenty of kids with all kinds of freedoms and gadgets who are extremely respectful, well-mannered, and responsible. They respectfully disagree with their parents on some issues and some of old fashioned parents may consider disagreement as disrespectful. And they might not accept mistreatment from authority figures, but hardly any real misbehavior issues.

Maybe it’s my circle but average gen z kid seems like way more mature than us when we were their age.

Rude kids that I have encountered are mostly from parents who are already rude, entitled, or have macho mentality. Kind of people I rarely hangout with. Many of these kids have more restrictions too, no video games, must play sports, extra tutoring, cannot dress certain ways, etc.

Maybe it’s a culture thing — most C# devs use IDEs. Not sure what PHP devs use, but I suspect tools like PhpStorm will make this easy to work with somehow. Devs using no-LSP editors will likely have a different view.

This is probably one of the big factors. I am also not a huge fan of “magic” even though I use IDE (vscode). I started off as a PHP dev, directly editing files on production server using vi. Any “magic” simply slowed me down.

Years later, now I can simply cmd+click to anywhere in code but it feels a bit off to me. Perhaps, I still miss my old days of dev.

Same. And another issue with games is that every game is so long. Games like Tomb Raider used to be 10 hours. Now such games are more than 20 hours. It is a bigger commitment even if you like the game.

That’s why I prefer to buy older games that have received enough reviews from regular people.

Nothing beats plaintext format. I use Google Sheets but download it locally as csv every year or so.

If company has 10 positions open for X months but their headcount is still same, then you can argue these are fake postings. We have big enough population that high bar, unless unrealistic, should not be problem.

And try sharing a phone number. Almost every service assumes that everyone in a household has their own phone. Which is of course not true.

It just makes many services such as Credit Karma unavailable to anyone but the first person to signup.

Why in the name of all that is unholy would you ever think that?

Seen it many times where engineers are making more than their managers. I had jobs where there was no real difference between my pay and my direct manager's.

There were fewer programmers for each programmer's role than managers for each manager's. Not sure if it still applies though.

Recently, I canceled a subscription for a newspaper, they make you go through chat to cancel. The agent was so nice that it was annoying.

I don’t mind waiting in silence, but when they keep asking about weather, vacation plans, etc, I find it hard to not respond. This might part retention technique though.

Read your lease carefully, there maybe a clause that restrict mining or other abuse of "free" electricity. They may not have individual power meters but they may have other means to determine if one of their tenants is using too much power.

I am a gamer dad too. This is something I worry about. I have been playing Minecraft with my son but he is learning about these other games.

I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.

How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?

I think that would be fine, I have seen at some Pakistani/Indian restaurants where they apologized and said could not remove the ingredients or prevent cross contamination.

just like when you take a quote from someone for home repairs.

Is that considered normal?

Maybe I am too polite but I always let contractors know if I am going with someone else or not proceeding with home repair.

This reminds me of some communications training where they were saying that the most things are not worth disagreeing on and just agree with whatever.

And I think I read in some parenting books too that it is not worth correcting kids over things that don't matter like if they say dinosaurs and mammoth were alive during same time. Over-correcting hurts their confidence.

Maybe LLM been trained on these ideas or maybe it is start of science fiction nightmare and AI really think that it is not worth arguing with mere humans.

I bought a thermal camera as a fun toy, it is great at finding studs especially for walls that face outside. Also you can see pipes easily when hot water is running through them.

But it was not cheap, cost about $300.

If you just want to just find studs, use magnetic stud finder. Cost about $10. Very easy to use and accurate.

I would say most devs use same GitHub profile for work and personal projects. GitHub provides pretty easy way to join various organizations with same handle. It almost seems exception when a developer creates a new profile for work.

There are a lot of rich people who lack confidence and rarely look into anyone’s eyes. And sometimes when they try to fake confidence, they simply come off as assholes or weird.

I have old Oculus Quest 2, and yes even with lower resolution, it is far superior experience than watching movies on the TV. I can only imagine what it is like with Vision Pro.

I think it’s not just about picture quality but also about its ability to isolate you from your surroundings, can’t take a quick peek at your phone during boring scenes, screen appears huge, etc

I have been there, several times.

I got real estate license as it seems to combine my love for exploring new areas, meeting people, and freedom to set your own schedule. But I could not go full-time into it as I have kids and didn't want to be away showing homes on weekends or in the evenings.

Other times I tried to do part-time portrait photoshoots as you get to be outside. But again as a father, I didn't think it was worth it. But you can make decent income with just outdoors family portraits.

I feel a little sad about not pursuing these a bit more. But I am taking my kids outside as much as possible, getting them into photo- & video-graphy, and just having fun. This seems to make me not only happy but also more motivated at the work. Perhaps, you can pursue some outdoors hobbies before making any big moves.

I believe it is illegal in the US to ask someone's age during interview. Only after you are hired and filling out paperwork is when they ask for your birthday.

Not sure if it is same in the EU, but if it is illegal don't volunteer your age. No need to lie.

I agree, I try to be a good mentor and understand new developers have higher level of anxiety and I help them as much as I can. But I also teach them how to get help without being too disruptive, remote or local.

That's good to know.

But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.

When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.

Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.

I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.

I remember reading somewhere that one the greenest thing you can do is have less children. I cannot find it now but iirc, if every one on the planet had one less child, climate crisis would be averted in so many years/decades. It makes sense that intuitive level but would love to verify details.

Your comment makes me wonder if it is indeed about “save the planet” without scarifying “growth” is what most people care about.

I really enjoyed Console Wars by Blake J. Harris. It doesn't go into very deep technical details but there were some details about how some of the technical decisions were made.

And it was very nostalgic read for anyone growing up with video games in 80s and 90s.

The real problem with real world is that it is so boring most of the time.

Well designed video games can be hard or even harder than real life but they give you constant endorphins or dopamine hits to keep you going.

And you can take a break from video games without any negative repercussions.

cd -

  git checkout -

Plus, I can't build a nice, physical library with a bunch of pdf and epub files.

I moved back to physical books as I posted in my other comment. Building a nice library that I can give to my kids is one of my goals. Hopefully, they will be happy to have those books. And if they don't want it and then we can donate books to a library or a school. It is a win-win situation.

I have gone from paper books to Kindle and then back to paper books.

I really loved the experience of reading Kindle, especially Kindle Keyboard. It was amazing experience compared to physical books because I had all my books on it, I could also send blogs & articles to it. Physical page turn buttons were easier to use than turning a page but also provided satisfying tactile feedback. The real keyboard was really useful for taking notes.

And when I was tired of holding it, text to speech was good enough to listen to a few chapters. Text to speech was also great when I was reading, it kind of helped me read faster and I remembered what I read longer.

Sadly, after my Kindle Keyboard died, I end up buying new Kindle. the reading experience on it was not as great but I had spent so much money on e-books. So I kept it.

But now I have kids. I don't want them to see me on another device which to them is same as phone/ipad. Also all books are on it, there is no way to turn on child mode on Kindle before handing it to them.

So now I only buy physical books. They are easy to share, I can easily see from distance what books my kids are reading, they cannot accidentally purchase tons of books, and if one book is damaged, it is just one book.