cjohnson318

Well, my bad. I won't ask dumb questions like "was this written by AI".

Was this written by AI? This is just "I automated some things, use skills instead of scripts". Like, what did you automate? How much time did you save? How can I reproduce that?

100% I picked up shorthand to take notes quicker, but I'm still half-in/half-out of the conversation, mentally deciding what's important enough to jot down. This sounds like a great solution.

I went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.

I typed in my dentist's full business name and location, "<name> family dentistry <city> <state>", and it was still #5 in the results. I still, out of habit, tapped the first link and called that number instead. It's ludicrous. In 2010 that would have been the top hit, next to the Wikipedia page on dentistry.

Yeah, and cameras changed art forever.

Can confirm.

I was consulting like this too, but my wife also had a full time corporate job. It all kind of ended with her team having layoffs around the same time that most of my clients figured out that they could use AI to do most of my work at a tiny fraction of my rate. I had built up a lot of experience working with oil and gas software, and I thought that was pretty solid, but it's hard to compete with $20 a month. Anyway, after all that, I found a stable job with good health insurance.

This spacing reminds me of Turing patterns, or activator/inhibitor systems, but I'm gobsmacked that this occurs in random matrices.

What would I use this for? Everything in the examples is pretty easy to do in scripting languages like Python, JS, and Ruby.

I got a stable job! I was unemployed for a few months, we paid a small fortune for health insurance, and I got ulcers from the stress, but things worked out! I enjoy my team, and I'm hopeful about 2026.

Same.

Bro you can't just leak operational secrets on the world wide information highway like this.

They probably use Excel, maybe Microsoft Access.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing that makes me really enjoy the internet.

The thing about language is that words have a weird distribution. The most common 100 words show up in every single sentence, but then tons of "common" words show up statistically almost never. Like, "octopus" is a common word that is only going to be useful if you're talking to a marine biologist, or a three year old that's obsessed with octopuses, otherwise you're hardly ever going to use that word. There's a lot of words like that. "Spine" of a book? It's probably not "spine" in your target language.

So much for being a safe and lucrative place for all the best minds of the world.

It would REBOLutionize everything.

I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.

That an interesting perspective, about working on a lot of your client's vibe coded fever dreams. Yeah, I'm don't envy 19 year olds looking for software work right now. God help them.

Well, I moved into a more conservative role, which I think was a good move considering the economy and the job market.

Racism? Lack of social awareness? Problems with impulse control? Trolling? Pick several.

I've lost consulting work because I'm a lot more expensive than $20 a month. I've literally had clients say, "yeah, I would have called you, but I was able to figure out that bug with ChatGPT."

Yeah, well, I was trying to be generous.

It's just a clever title. The article immediately walks the thesis back, and then relates some trivia about English. Five minute read, three stars.

I tried Spanish. I wanted to test a few words that are different in Spain versus Mexico. I didn't get any results for anything I tired.

voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.

This hits the nail on the head. Before you talk to someone, there's no telling what planet they're going to be on. Maybe you can talk about the weather. Maybe they think the Democrats control the weather with space lasers. There's just no telling.

I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.

Thanks, I was just looking for ClojureScript material!

Dysfunctional media is a big one, dysfunctional families, the disintegration of the middle class, the rise of techbro culture where a whole generation suddenly had this expectation that you can and should be as wealthy as a doctor, with a fraction of the training or oversight.