mns

I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again.

I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.

I find it somehow like a dystopia that things like these happen. This isn't about kids dying in some foreign country on some distant continent and we're investing in fancy robot taxis. This is actually that some people have the privilege of living in a bubble and using this technology that these huge corporations put money in (for the profit of their shareholders) while in the same time ignoring the core issues of the society that lead to such acts happening (stealing in broad daylight stuff from a car while people are inside it). I know people will say that this isn't for Google to fix (yeah, they only fix and lobby for laws that help them make more money) or for the tech people working for these companies and browsing these forums to fix, but I do find it a bit disgusting.

I also find this weird. Even though the companies I worked for didn’t have any crazy rules or restrictions (never had phone from work), but I never used my work laptop or computer for anything personal. I have friends doing their own side projects on theirs. Even though in the countries where I worked/work they have to let you know what they track if they track, I still remember one of my contracts that stated that any work done on the work computer belongs to the company. That’s why, even if maybe it’s not legal for them to say that, I never ever used any subscriptions, hardware or tools provided by my employer for personal use.

But you know what's not amusing, but rather sad? the comments here. It's wild that people now are upset that the big bad EU is somehow doing something against companies that make profit from selling products that could hurt people, products targeted for kids that can poison or kill them, but the main issue, as seen by tech people, is the EU targeting Temu...

When I first read the comment I thought this must be satire, it sure does sound like a Silicon Valley episode, but in modern times. I've been a skeptic for quite some time, but managed to get quite good results with Claude in general, not even going through the normal limits for a Pro account, but what people are describing here seems like just tokenmaxing, brute forcing a solution, I don't understand what code people need to write and what projects people are building, is everyone just constantly rewriting systems from scratch, or what is everyone spending these insane amounts of tokens on?

Yes, MONEY. Companies and their management couldn't care less about DEI, they care about pleasing whoever in in power in order to get benefits and make as much money as they can. You could literally have Hitler in power now and you would see what companies would do for their survival.

It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).

Is this one of those things like the old Facebook games where people were answering personal questions that can be used to guess all kind of secret answers for taking over accounts? Are people actually uploading real photos of themselves here?

The site is selling SaaS templates and AI courses. The post is just an ad for whatever services it is offering...

Did he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.

They had official trainings on how to use Copilot/ChatGPT and some other tools, security and safety trainings and so on, this is not some people deciding to use whatever feature was there from Ms by default.

What do you mean? Deloitte has been all in on Microsoft AI offerings for quite some time, people have access to a lot of AI tools through MS.

Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage, could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?

If you work in a medium to large company, you know most of the documentation is there for compliance reasons or for showing others that you did something at one point. You can probably just put slop at the end of documents, while you still keep headlines relevant and no one will ever read it or notice it.

Unlike virtue-signaling corporations that burn the planet down just to get more shareholder value in the next quarter.

But why are you lying? It's not about you, no one is stopping you to go and throw everything you own in a landfill, this is about the companies that act environmental in their marketing, but then go ahead and destroy new and unused products.

I'd rather get judged by a human than by the financial interests of Sam Altman or whichever corporate borg gets the government contract for offering justice services.

OpenAI releases an electron slog of an app, while they have basically unlimited computing power, compared to anyone else except their direct competitors. Why aren't they just pumping out proper software built by their own AI/Codex...

He still had a decent player career, and anyhow, this is a completely different field. The issue is that good engineers are not promoted to management positions because their skills are needed or they don't want to get promoted because of politics. But one of the things that I noticed a lot is people "specifically trained" to be managers. Our company is full of project managers and POs that never built anything their entire life, they never led a team, they never did anything except start with something like an assistant or QA and then all of the sudden they want to manage people. This is what I find frustrating, people that never in their life did something productive or build or contribute to something, but their expectation is to be a manager, just because they were "specifically trained in that discipline"

As I was following Siemens Energy in these years, I remember them getting a huge bailout, or you can call it help or whatever, at one point and from there on the stock price started going up.

Is this a US thing? We renovated the apartment in Germany in the last year and every faucet and piece of equipment that we got has a manual including a table with list of parts and technical drawings and how to take it apart. We also got from the original owner all the manuals of the existing things, and this helped a lot in finding the proper part to replace and fix the bathtub drain. None of this is old stuff, the building is 15 years old.

And not only that, but YOU need to pay to work, starting at only 199 per month.

I started reading it because I saw it recommended here 2-3 years ago on one of the end of year book threads. I’m still somewhere at around 40% according to my Kindle. I like the style and the way Mann paints the world so to say, like the world it creates in your imagination, but I find it so dragged and boring, I just can’t get myself to read it for long.

Relentless work, or simply not caring about the people that you need to crunch in order to achieve the outcomes that you want. The western world could also build things fast again and innovate faster, we just seem to value human life a bit more now that we used to...

The attitude here is quite astounding, seeing how any criticism of the author or this piece is seen as some sort of reductionism of his views and european smugness (?!?), all the while the author reduces an entire nation (Germany in this case) to the anecdote of a Georgian mass murderer, probably one of the most ruthless and diabolical people that ever existed, so yeah, very balanced discussion here.

Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the performance of people in the company and people that use our platform (let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and AI and how amazing it could be to do this.

To be honest, I'm a bit annoyed that I installed maybe 2-3 extensions, and in the last year or so whenever I open one of their IDEs I need to update anywhere from 10 to 25 extensions. What are these things? Where did they come from and why do I have them, I used to see only the extensions that I actually installed, and now there's all kind of stuff that I thought was basic functionality.

Considering how much money they invested in countless AI VS Code forks and other vibe coding platforms, he needs to hype up the market.

It probably also depends on where you are and how deep you need to drill. It seems to be working out for Munich in Germany, there are a couple of city districts (including mine) that are heated by geothermal, and they invested in this since the early 2000s. Can't really find an english page for the whole project though: https://www.swm.de/unternehmen/geothermie

Some countries are even working against people having children. Germany introduced a new law that now if the parents have their combined salaries over a certain amount, you get 0 child care. And the funny thing is that that limit is very low for people living in a big city. This policy came from the Greens actually, which are supposed to be more left leaning. But they couldn't care about this, or women or families, for them anyone who earns a bit above average needs to be punished. In our case, just when we were actually thinking of having a baby, we realised that if we actually would do it, our income would be basically more than halved because my wife earns even more than me, so not only would we earn way less, but we would earn way less with an extra child in our family, so yeah, thanks for the support.