pammf

AI is here to stay. Like it or not.

We will still see several reports of over adoption, mistakes, regression… all will only serve to learn, refine, and hopefully regulate.

I think it’s pretty naive to expect the entire world will simply discard the technology and go back to having humans doing it all.

Trump will go down in history as the clearest marker of the United States’ decline.

In Claude Code, it always shows the diff between current and proposed changes and I have to explicitly allow it to actually modify the code. Doesn’t that “fix” the copy-&-paste issue?

Real reason is humans are way too optimistic in planning and, for some reason, tend to overlook even more rare, but catastrophic risks.

I’m almost sure that the system had some sort of local replication and versioning that was enough to deal with occasional deletions, rollbacks, and single non-widespread hardware failures, so only the very catastrophic scenario of losing all servers at the same time (that for sure wouldn’t happen anytime soon) was uncovered.

If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together

Isn’t the GP describing exactly that?

Such as?

Would it switch the lights if you’re only listening with headphones while your camera is open?

Most of my awkward moments happened with family members casually cruising on my background while someone else had the word. Usually they can hear when I’m speaking and don’t enter the room.

You are right. My comment wasn’t meant to completely invalidate the point of the article or to provide an alternative exhaustive list of causes, but more to bring this other aspect that I felt wasn’t surfaced yet.

A good part of that is a disguised sense of superiority.

Life becomes way lighter when you realize other people are also smart and what you’re “fixing” can very likely be:

- something so unimportant that no one felt it was worthy working on

- something that was supposed to work like that, and you simply don’t agree and want to make it your way

Well, from outside it seems that the list of friendly nations keep getting smaller and smaller… and good luck replacing the vast majority of your supply chain with local workers. Just look where all the products you currently have were made.

Iceberg has the hdfs catalog, which also relies only on dirs and files.

That said, a catalog (which Delta also can have) helps a lot to keep things tidy. For example, I can write a dataset with Spark, transform it with dbt and a query engine (such as Trino) and consume the resulting dataset with any client that supports Iceberg. If I use a catalog, all happens without having to register the dataset location in each of these components.

I share the sentiment, and I also get downvoted every time I post something on those lines here. Only thing that can make you even less popular is saying that using cloud services can make sense depending on your priorities. =D

Truth lies somewhere in between. It's also a generalization to think everything related to the “evil-nation” postulation is nothing beyond a conspiracy theory. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Edit: quoted evil-nation since it’s a debatable term usually applied to any country not politically or culturally aligned with some intelligence activity presence.

Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.

Cost isn’t always the most important metric. If that was the case, people would always buy the cheapest option of everything.

Hah, plus one on this one. Once I went as far as buying a French car famous for the suspension problems due to the terrible quality of pavement in my country, mainly to prove everyone was wrong about the unreliability claims (and it was unreliable btw). I guess I was often feeling I was outsmarting the dumb crowd... got me screwed so many times.

I love Home Assistant but I now have a pretty strict minimum effort rule after years of configuring integrations and building dashboards that I would forget about after 2 months:

I only do automations (no dashboards at all), and try to keep them as simple as possible. Once I feel I’m reaching diminishing returns territory, I stop.

Only use HA if I need to mix different vendors (e.g. turn on the hue lights if the tuya sensor switches to on) or if the vendor app/service has a limitation that doesn’t allow me to do what I want. For instance, I have some automations for my Mitsubishi airco units cause their app sucks. Otherwise I’ll just use the default app or service.

Only configure an integration if I’m going to use it in an automation; I have a bunch of integrations detected that I don’t configure.

I decided to follow these rules a couple of years back, and since then I could address all my needs with almost 0 maintenance.

You can buy only a replacement mug (without coaster/charger). Also, get in contact with customer support mentioning the battery, they usually offer a discount code.

There’s this theory that systems often thrive at the expense of its individual parts… I guess this is one of such examples.

Ways I found that helped me the most dealing with this kind of situation:

- Refine your definition of what’s “meaningful”: anything that helps you, your colleagues, helps you to learn a new thing or simply allows you to create something beautiful can be meaningful; there’s a lot of meaning in giving a meal to someone starving, even though you’re not solving any big societal issue or being applauded by many for that single act.

- Don’t take people like the OP’s first manager too personally: with time you realize they’re generally not evil or terrible human beings, they’re just in a different mission. Usually they are also as lost as we are, trying to find meaning and recognition. Just lower the importance you give to them (if you’re really incompatible with their personalities) and focus on your work. If even then it becomes toxic, then move.

- Most importantly: reshape your relationship with work. Who you are and what you do are not necessarily the same thing. I don't like the advice of "slacking and collecting your pay check" (been there, you also feel shit after a while), but I think that going a bit to that direction helps to find balance.

This is pretty useful IMO, discourages me from spending now money that I'll only have in two weeks.

I’ve been using ad blockers for years now, mainly on DNS level. Last week I decided to test Apple’s private relay and for 5 minutes I had to deal with internet with ads. Disgusting experience.

Not much, at least according to this book[1].

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58642436-the-status-game

Not true in analytics.

Thank you for this comment. I feel that I have been operating in the same mode of your former manager and never considered how this could be as harmful as being too direct.

I might be completely wrong, but these days I believe everyone is insecure to some degree and just create this “best” facade because don’t want to look worse than the rest that are bragging to be at least aiming for the best.

What is sad to me is that a lot of times I perceive that society lauds the bragging ones and overlooks who sincerely (and bravely) admit their “weaknesses”.

I only had cravings while doing the 36 hours fasting, which I don’t do regularly anymore. It was usually during dinner time (rest of the family was having dinner normally) and what I tried to do was to distract myself with something else (work, book, movie, etc.). I never really had problems during other periods of the day.

What I’d suggest is to experiment a bit, perhaps in your case skipping dinner is easier than skipping breakfast. Or try to start by simply not having snacks and gradually increase the intervals between meals.

I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for 2 years. Did a bunch of different protocols and eventually settled on ~18:6. Lost around 15kgs (from 105 to 90) and as a nice “side effect” got rid of all skin problems that I’d had during the previous 10 years or so. Today I don’t preach it anymore cause I got tired of debating whether it was healthy or not but I definitely recommend to everyone that’s truly interested in giving it a try.

Well, isn't this already part of pushing back?

The Stoics tell us that the only thing that matters is virtue, we should be indifferent when loved ones die, and that the universe works providentially, so ultimately nothing in it is bad.

No, they don’t. What they tell is to not overreact about these things since they’re all part of life.

That’s why I think people should avoid reading contemporary authors writing about ancient philosophy without having read the originals first.