kixiQu

This is interesting to me because in my job as a senior dev I can tell that there are greater opportunities for me if I can improve my skills. As a result, I think this may speak to your work environment more than the nature of being senior.

Plausible-sounding mechanisms like you're presenting here do not add value to the discourse without data. There are tons of plausible mechanisms we could make up absent empirical evidence to distinguish them.

Which is better is ultimately subjective

Most folks subjectively prefer having light after work because that's when it's more fun to do stuff. Unfortunately, the health impacts are (objectively!) worse under permanent daylight saving time.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7954020/ https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/prevention-wellness/s... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6436388/ (I've heard there's been some debate on this one, though the association positions stay the same)

My sense is the same as the authors that LLMs + an Anki-like -> mediocrity. But I feel like there ought to be such potential there! Even just things as simple as rewording the same question a bunch of equivalent ways to avoid recognizing the sentence structure...

Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should strive to automate/eliminate.

I would also support this if there were a way to do it without privacy implications for actual adults. Unfortunately, there is not, and more unfortunately still, there is not widespread understanding of that fact. I think our industry owes more honesty to the public about the trade-offs.

https://hidefromit.substack.com/p/there-is-no-evidence-you-s... <-- somebody claims that's kind of a ghost citation effect. (for what it's worth, I'm quite pro-sunscreen, it just seems to keep working over time better than this advice implies)

https://vbuckenham.com/blog/how-to-find-things-online/

V used game guides as an example of how LLMs corrode a culture of user-generated material provided out of love / desire for clout / etc. and I think about this a lot. Funny to see this specific example come back

This is not rambling and it is not abstract. The content here is about the second-order effects of "getting AI to write code for you" in less supervised ways. I'll cede the author could have polished this to more concise effect, but at the level it's at, a reader's failure to understand the substance doesn't imply there's mystification going on.

I fully agree! It is in keeping with that sense that it is important that I object to a system where society expects non-parents to do it for free within a mesh of social obligation, and where that burden falls disproportionately on one gender.

My great-great-grandmother was made to drop out of school to take care of her nephew after the child's mother died. This, too, is what a "village" looks like – stunting a girl's future for the needs of someone else's child.

Believing "if X, Y" is not unacceptable in 2026. That was the analysis of the recent FT article too, pointing to the fertility rates in different countries with different success in expanding education to women. The difference is what you did not state, which would be to say "Therefore, we should not allow girls to attend school beyond 16 or women to have professional careers". That would be quite a take in 2026 (or in, frankly, 1926).

https://wol.iza.org/articles/how-does-grandparent-childcare-...

In theory very little of it has to be about women specifically, but practice is different. (The expectations that used to exist for ~teenage girls to babysit for free for their relatives are somewhat undersold relative to adult labor, maybe)

I wish society had taxed me (desired path zero children) more in some way that would have routed the resources to my friend who would have wanted to start having kids earlier and have more. Instead, the combination of regional housing crisis with contemporary parenting standards meant she and her husband waited for career progression to have the money for the space to start.

Do you believe the same people were saying those things? (Were they really?) The idea that "different attitudes towards labor have been expressed by different people" doesn't feel too remarkable

Imagining a version of this that scales by how long I've been using the phone since the screen's been off. If I need to check something quickly, I want the internet and processing to be fast, because checking my phone a lot is fine with me – just not zoning out for long periods of time. First 60s or so unpenalized. Then beyond that, if I'm getting close to my daily target, it starts throttling. A little longer than 60s? Maybe only a bit slowed down. 5min? I want it to get cronchy. Not sure network's the right axis though. Maybe actual screen responsiveness?

This is an addiction and reaching for the phone is just what gives relief to whatever pain one might be experiencing. Just removing that is laying ground for a substitute.

This model would not suggest the results seen in studies like this:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11846175/

(The intervention was not "face the roots of your problems", it was "stop using your phone so much", and it produced positive impact.)

This is really interesting! I don't know that I would have expected the result, but it's laid out well. Easy to absorb the wrong paradox into one's mental model of the world...

I'm pretty sure all these models have terms of service that make the user assert that they have permission to use the content you're feeding into them (clickwrap infringement-is-the-user's-fault). This kind of integration makes a mockery of that.

Amazon is big and inconsistent enough that "somewhere in Amazon, <XYZ> is occurring" is statistically true, no matter how nutso-sounding your <XYZ>.

If you work in construction, you need to lift and carry a series of heavy objects in order to be effective. But lifting heavy objects puts long-term wear on your back and joints, making you less effective over time. Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”.

My parents were both construction workers. There is an understanding that you cannot lift heavy objects forever. You stop lifting objects and move to being a foreman, a supervisor... and if you are uncomfortable learning to get others to do work that you before have done yourself, you burn out your body entirely and the consequences are horrible.

This is factual reality, but it is also a parable that has been important for me to internalize about delegation in my own career. It is not irrelevant to AI use, but I don't think it slots onto it totally as neatly.

Young people have more poorly developed impulse control.

To lambasting them when they express any desire to actually form a family.

What is this referring to?

This person took a different attitude toward it and it was fine. Do you know someone who was attacked for interrupting a set or something?

We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex.

I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.

I like the idea of various extensions of LLM context using transparent plaintext, automatic consolidation and summarization... but I just can't read this LLM-generated text documenting it. The style is so painful. If someone ends up finding this tooling useful I hope they write it up and I hear about it again!

I'm always interested in write-ups when folks try new attacks on self-study.

I will also admit that this part hurt my heart to read (vicarious embarrassment):

the recruiter mentioned I needed to pay more attention to code debuggability (whatever this means - I assume that under the corpo-language, they mean that I wrote invalid code)

So I know it's a little bananas to answer this with a link to material the length of a novel, but my feeling is that the real spirit of a postmortem is best carried across by:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/stamping-on-eventstream/

He goes through the process, which he describes:

The constant zooming-out is key here: it’s not enough to find out why things broke, but find out why “why things broke”. In theory you’re supposed to keep doing it: if someone skips a step because of managerial pressure, you ask why the manager was pressuring them in the first place. If the manager was worried about production quotas, find out how the quotas were decided. You just keep going and going and going.

There are different procedures folks can use to capture bits of this to different degrees, but I think this write-up illustrates well both how exhausting it is to do this right and what the value can be. Even if your goal is to get to Action Items, this kind of understanding of your event is what should generate them.

If a person doesn't understand the value, I would imagine they would write something very close to TFA's

when something goes wrong [...] they explain why they made the decision, and then explain the contextual factors that influenced that, and then explain why those contextual factors existed, and then explain why it would have been unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the downstream effect of those factors, and by the end you have some fat five paragraphs that contains maybe one sentence worth of information and reads like a legal defense brief written by someone who knows they are guilty.

Maybe it's a silly question, but what are you using the assistant for? I love the idea of voice interfaces. Matt Webb's thing about distinguishing data and instructions by addressing "Diane" (https://interconnected.org/home/2025/03/20/diane) to work through a more substantive task by talking has some magic in it. And yet I've rarely gotten more use out of these things than, you know – toggling lights, setting timers. Plugging them into more meaningful integration seems really interesting.

This is so cool! I would love to hear what stavros ends up using it for – actually, in general I'd love to hear more about how folks are using voice recorders. It seems like now's really their moment as STT finally doesn't suck too bad and natural language can actually be turned into stuff.

If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.

The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration.

The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!

"Daylight Saving Time" refers to adjusting the time in a way that noon does not try to track solar noon for a timezone in order to shift daylight later in the clock-day.