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efsavage

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AFAIK there's actually only one color and you can wrap it. The wrap kits are supposed to be DIY friendly so you can change it yourself when you want a new color.

If the housekeeper gets to live in a $5m penthouse downtown instead of a walkup with a 60+ minute commute, I'd file this as an unintended win for this policy.

I haven't seen a cash only business since covid

Collectibles (e.g. trading cards) are still a "cash is king" market. Some dealer only take cash, virtually all of them prefer it, and offer steep "discounts" (lack of markup) for cash.

A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.

This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.

bassbuzz.com isn't free but it's really good. I've about halfway through the course and feel like I've already gotten more my money's worth out of it.

I don't think so, to put some made-up-but-illustrative numbers, I think AI is going to be worse than the 1% of people who do X professionally or at a high level, and better than the 99% who don't.

Can Suno make a better song than $YOUR_FAVORITE_ARTIST? Unlikely. Can it make a song better than 99% of a random selection of people? Probably.

I think this is actually a good thing in many ways. If I have a tool that elevates me on things I'm not very good at (like making songs) which far outnumbers the things I am good at, that's a big win for me personally, it's just a loss for the population since people who are going to push music further aren't going to be encouraged to struggle through the curve and find their own path.

I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.

I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard sell to the person struggling when there's an easy button available.

Should QA exist? 4 months ago

Great QA people are rarer than great developers, and potentially even more valuable.

“good enough” for 95% of use cases

Maybe, for current use cases. I'd argue that anyone who thinks they can do everything a 10kW server can do on their 10W device just isn't being creative enough :)

Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8.

I think eventually 4-8 will be collapsed behind a more capable layer that can handle this stuff on its own, maybe I tinker with MCP settings and granular control to minmax the process, but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry about it any more than I worry about how many threads my compiler is using.

Those are all great things to do, but I don't think OP needs to do more things, they need to do different things. The biggest thing that jumped out was that they know they need to be with people but work remote and with a huge time shift.

My top advice would be to get an in-person job, even that means less money or moving, or just pivoting to a new industry. Even better find a job where people are your business so you're not pinning everything on socializing with co-workers. The people I know who are like this do jobs where they have to meet/find customers, coordinate people and teams, do on-site projects, etc. They are energized and fulfilled by these interactions even if the job itself isn't that important to them.

I think you're definitely right, for the moment. I've been forcing myself to use/learn the tools almost exclusively for the past 3-4 months and I was definitely not seeing any big wins early on, but improvement (of my skills and the tools) has been steady and positive, and right now I'd say I'm ahead of where I was the old-fashioned way, but on an uneven basis. Some things I'm probably still behind on, others I'm way ahead. My workflow is also evolving and my output is of higher quality (especially tests/docs). A year from now I'll be shocked if doing nearly anything without some kind of augmented tooling doesn't feel tremendously slow and/or low-quality.

The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

I've always used 2-3 monitors pretty comfortably but with high latency AI agents adding more concurrency to my workflows I'm feeling very crowded. I would love a VR experience with an arbitrary number of screens/windows as well as more clearly separated environments (like having a visually different virtual office per project) that I can quickly switch between.

Claude outage 9 months ago

Early in my career (which started in civil engineering) I was working with a man at the very end of his, which started in the 1950s. I was the young tech-focused intern who found a way to use a computer for everything even when printed and sometimes hand-drawn plans were the standard of the day. He asked me once if I knew how to use a slide rule, which I didn't.

"Well, what do you do when the power goes out?", he asked.

"I go home, just like you would.", I said with a smile.

He paused for a moment and nodded, "you know, you're absolutely right".

You probably have to really try to take too much Vitamin D with any over the counter supplement (<=5,000 IU), especially if you live that far north. For reference, a prescription dose for someone who is low is usually 50,000 daily.

It should be part of your standard blood tests so you should know if you're running high or low and your doctor can recommend or prescribe a good dose.

Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them.

I see your point but we're all imposing risks on each other all the time. I'm sitting on the 6th floor of a 10 floor building, presumably I'm at some non-zero risk of it collapsing, which would be lower if this building was shorter, but I don't feel entitled to compensation from the owner for the marginal risk because they wanted more floors.

I think we've actually done alot better in reducing the externalities of direct vehicle deaths (insurance, safety standards, vehicle inspections, etc.) than we have in other areas (energy costs, environmental impact, city/street design, parking, etc.)

I think the concepts are inevitable, not so much the specific implementations. PCs were an inevitable stop on the fairly standard adoption path from many workers to one machine (Mainframes), 1:1 (PCs), many machines to one worker (I have at least 10 computers within arms reach right now). IBM/Windows/Apple weren't inevitable, they were just manifestations of that. ICs weren't inevitable, but commoditized computer parts were. TCP wasn't inevitable, but a lingua franca for networks was. LLMs weren't inevitable, but AI is.

To your overall point though, and to the contrary of the type of thinking you're critiquing, the timing of these things is not inevitable. Computers didn't have to happen in the 50s, they could easily have waited 50 or 100 years if we didn't have things like wars or other technological breakthroughs that enabled them. For AI we might be stuck on incremental improvements on LLMs for a generation, or they might be obsolete in 5 years. They will be replaced by something better at some point, but confusing (intentionally or not) inevitable with soon is where the hype proves itself hollow.

Always Invite Anna 10 months ago

I overheard two very outgoing co-workers once, where one asked the other if he was having his holiday party.

"It was last weekend", he said.

"Oh, I didn't get an invite"

"That's because you never come"

She looked shocked, I think she genuinely didn't know what to say. After an awkward silence she said, "but I liked to be invited"

"I'll happily invite you next year if you promise to come"

She smiled politely and walked away.

It was memorable to me because it was such a foreign interaction on both sides from my perspective.

I am also the slow-thinking dev married to a quick thinker, and it's a good pairing. I know couples where they're both quick thinkers and things are so mercurial it's hard to believe they're still together, but maybe the excitement keeps it going.

I enjoy watching Harry Mack videos on YouTube where he freestyles and can work in something that happens like someone walking into the frame into literally the next line of his raps. This capability is so absolutely outside of the realm of possibility for my brain I almost feel like he's a different species.