blitztime

For better or worse I’ve been finding it difficult to stay motivated at times for sharpening my craft. I’m currently reading Learning Go 2nd and it’s cool learning the idiomatic ways to write code in a language. However part of me feels like even if I strive to write “clean code”, now the bottleneck seems to be shifting to reviewers time and expertise.

So I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t and don’t want to review everything my coworkers put out, and code has always been a means to an end for leadership anyways so it seems difficult to justify carving out time for the team as a whole to learn, especially in the age of genAi.

How do you keep the context.md updated as the code changes?

I’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”

The readme and the emojis seem heavily AI.

I found out about mermaid recently and have been using it to make diagrams. How do you use it for data modeling though?

Incredible the amount of new tech that goes into this device. Still seems pretty niche and I’m skeptical about how good the controls will be.

I think they’re referring to the recent Terra/Luna crash.

This reminded me of a different article by Scott Alexander which also addresses the topic of certain ventures like the stock market and job interviewing being “anti-inductive” aka resistant to formulas that worked in the past. You could say that successful independent thinking is also a highly anti-inductive activity.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-ant...

For me working remote has come with a mix of upsides and downsides. One of the main upsides for me has been mentioned a few times in this thread, and that's the fact that without having people physically present, your performance is now necessarily more tightly tied to what you actually accomplish rather than how long you're present in an office. This gives employees a lot more autonomy and freedom with how they spend their time as long as they manage to get everything done. No energy and time needs to be spent keeping up the unproductive facade of looking busy.

On the other hand, losing the ability to have spontaneous hallway conversations does cut out a lot of the communication that would normally happen in office. The signal-to-noise of these conversations may not be so high in terms of actually communicating purely work related topics, but they do a lot to foster a sense that you're actually part of a team with people you enjoy working with. With IMs and video calls, communication happens much more deliberately so coworkers feel much more like these virtual entities who you only contact for purposeful knowledge transfer. Perhaps some people actually prefer this and see it as more efficient, but I personally find it to be a somewhat dreary proposition.

Ultimately, I think what I would prefer is a flexible WFH policy, with maybe 3 days in office and 2 days of flex.

This is very sad news. I spent a great deal of time in my childhood playing games on Kongregate. I remember reading strategy guides for Kongai, their CCG that admitted wasn't very good but I always tried to complete the game challenges to earn that weeks Kongai card.

Eventually it seemed like everyone moved away from browser games to console and PC games, at least that was true for me. It's been a long time since I've even thought about Kongregate, but it's still sad to see it go.

I'm pretty sure zaaakk was being sarcastic here.

An article that gives some insight into why these tech companies seem to have a bloated workforce is https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/.

Part of it is that the MVP might be easy to create, but scalability and edge cases add a lot of extra complexity. The other part of it is that it's not so much that a company _needs_ every employee it has, but it will keep hiring until the marginal benefit of an employee is no longer positive.