evklein

I don't disagree with your idea at all, just with the approach. I think if you exist within an environment where you can still thrive leeching off of an ineffective organization, and you're okay with this because you understand that they view you as an expendable asset, then the right thing to do isn't to just keep doing that; the right thing to do is find a better spot to work.

All of this is easier said than done, and there's lots of reasons to stay put and half-ass a good thing while you can. I can't fault anyone for making that choice, and I don't even really view it as particularly malicious. Just not something I can do and simultaneously go home feeling good about my place in the world.

Something the author sorta neglects to mention is that this makes you feel like shit, if you have any sort of conscience at all. Corporations largely don't care about individuals, and so maybe you shouldn't care about loyalty to your employer, but if you pride yourself on a skill or being able to do your job competently then doing mass time theft comes up with a nasty side effect; the time you spend planning trips or doing hobbies, or doing anything that you shouldn't be, isn't time that can be fully enjoyed. Additionally, you're taking a big risk, and you're opening yourself up to all kinds of scrutiny and potentially even losing your job if you're caught.

This is what I am seeing more and more of, both in tech online and in the minds of people around me. Despite peoples' innate curiosity of how LLMs work, they still don't understand at the end of the day that they are just models. Augmented with tools and more capable than ever, yes, but still a piece of math at the end of the day. To expect of it anything other than credible output is science fiction.

Not really, but I'm happy to share more here :)

In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio.

The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges.

I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually.

Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer.

Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.

So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.

It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.

It's easy to live in shareable spaces when you're young and unattached - it becomes a lot more difficult as you age and want to grow a family. I'm not sure I want the kind of life where I have to share a kitchen or a bathroom, spaces I consider very private, with people I'm not related to. Maybe this is a uniquely midwestern/American sentiment, I'm not sure. But I am confident that there are more people like me than there aren't. The picture of the American dream is familiar, it's a house with a car in the driveway. I feel that may just be who we are now, regardless of any way we used to be.

Edit cause I had more thoughts: Honestly, probably one of the biggest mistakes we've made as a country have been not putting up enough resistance to RTO. The single family home is, I believe, probably one of the nicest standards of living in the world. Plenty of space for hobbies and activities, privacy, usually some community among neighbors. The only problem is that it's hard to square the circle when it comes to single family living and living close to an economic hub. To afford this standard you have to live close enough to a hub that you can afford one of the well-paying jobs that exist there, but not so far that your commute significantly eats into your life. With RTO, I think we lost a pretty good opportunity to weaken our dependency on the geographic economic hub. We could have had a diaspora of knowledge workers which gave people the opportunity to pursue a better life at a lower cost, and we sorta just threw all of that away.

Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).

It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.

Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.

If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?

I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:

You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.

A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.

Anytime I create a new cloud resource, I always wonder how catastrophic things would actually have to get for toggling GRS to _not_ feel like total overkill. If you're an infrastructure dev doing any work in the mideast, I guess you're gonna learn.

"Interests." I'd love to know what the price per barrel the U.S. has paid in the last few years when you factor in additional costs incurred due to involvement in Iraq and Syria.

I would imagine U.S. foreign policy, particularly the prolific use of sanctions contributes to this wane as well. There was some discussion about this a while ago - effectively as the U.S. continues to rely on a strategy of imposing sanctions against foreign adversaries, those adversaries increasingly reorient their economy towards non-U.S. economies such as Russia or China. The more the U.S. utilizes sanctions, the less effective they become.

You're still captive to a product. Which means that when CloudCo. increases their monthly GenAI price from $50/mo. to $500/mo., you're losing your service or you're paying. By participating in the build process you're giving yourself a fighting chance.

The way god intended

Well I'd probably consider myself a materialist but I'm not sure I'd agree. The evidence to me seems that it can really only come from two places: additional compute or new breakthroughs in AI learning. Compute's coming, certainly, but that only has the potential to improve things if it's added in conjunction with a commensurate AI breakthrough. I think the trend in improvement for transformer could be logistic, not exponential, like a lot of the snake-oil salesman like to state. And while there's plenty of evidence for compute there isn't much for the AI breakthrough that leads to an exponential jump, and if it does exist it's a trade secret, so until we know we don't know.

grok, summarize this for me

There's a subset of sleepaway camps for adults that are quite popular for musicians - they typically consist of sleeping in cabins at night and attending lessons and workshops throughout the day. I went to one a few years ago, and even though I was a full standard deviation off from the mean in terms of age I still had a good time. This seems like a cool idea too.

Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small?

I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.

Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way.

Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.

Do you believe there's a threshold to how good this stuff can get, or do you think it's all infinite upside?

Okay so, I gave this a shot last week while studying for one of my finals for grad school. I fed it the course study guide and had it prompt me. I got the sense that it wasn't doing anything remarkable under the hood, that it was mostly system prompt engineering at the end of the day. I studied with it for about an hour and a half, having it feed me practice questions and flashcards. I believe that it really only pushed back on me on one answer, which made me feel like I had the thing in the bag. My actual result on the final was fairly bad - which was irritating, because I went in feeling probably a bit better than I should have. I don't know if I can lay that corpse at OpenAI's feet, but regardless I don't think there's enough there for me to keep using it. I could just write my own system prompt if I liked.

The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at.

Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?

I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are.

I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.

Yeah, seems like it's even worse in that it's a _death cult_. The people in it know that it's not worth what the market prices it at, so they know any sudden moves in the wrong direction and they're gonna lose all that value. That leaves no choice but to double down and never stop. The collapse of this thing is going to be incredible.

Can someone who knows more about Tesla tell me what the chance is that we see Musk pushed out? I think given his recent scattered priorities, foray into American politics, reported drug use, etc., he's probably lost a lot of the doubt that investors were willing to give him the benefit of.

Imagining that I'm a major holder of TSLA, I'm starting to wonder when the clown show is going to be over and I can get back to making money.

From what I understand static web apps have a 'cold start' where if they haven't been touched in so long they get killed. I need to just add a function app that pings it periodically so it never goes down.

Thank you! Appreciate you sticking around and trying it again :) I am fairly proud of it, even in its simplicity.

Most financial news is basically pure speculation with a few quotes thrown in from people who are "absolutely certain" about their holding position.

Try again, I had to adjust my hosting plan.

Give it another shot. Azure static web apps are no bueno when it comes to reliable hosting...

My personal website is written with Astro. I love it! Admittedly I'm still a little trigger-happy with my JS usage, but overall the ability to write templated pages and utilize islands that don't require big dependencies is the most friendly web development experience I've had.

https://evklein.com