posix86

Hustle-culture optimizes for work input because it's sexy. It's easy to post the inputs. It's hard to face the output.

Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.

My ChatGPT simply says:

Yes. The current year is 2025, so 2026 is next year.

Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.

You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.

Missing!! They should've translated `let` to `le` and `la`.

Depends on the scope. Simple things might be docstrings or sections in READMEs, bigger things issues/tickets or a page on Notion/Google Docs or whatever you use; overview there or in your head.

The crucial mindset imo is that you're trying to do something that's already useful. At the time you write these things, you're probably more familiar with the topic at hand than anyone else in the company; try to leverage that into writing a document that someone else (or yourself in the future) can save time once they actually execute what you write by getting faster to the point where you're at right now. E.g. from the article, rewriting a js package structure in vite; think through implications and potential hurdles you already have a solution for.

They're useful in almost all outcomes. If they won't be executed, at least you know why (e.g. too complicated/effortful), and if they're executed, best case you can improve the company's offerings substantially.

The biggest political capital that you can build up is your technical understanding & skills. But they are only useful insofar as you put them into the context of the broader company strategy. Giving appropriate advice, and delivering, in the interest of the company, will give you capital, i.e., people listening to you & relying on you, trusting you, which gives you power to steer. Preparing contingency plans & pitching then, then executing them, is the best way.

Cursor does this for me already all the time though, give that another shot maybe. For refactoring tasks in particular; it uses regex to find interesting locations , and the other day after maybe 10 of slow "ok now let me update this file... ok now let me update this file..." it suddenly paused, looked at the pattern so far, and then decided to write a python script to do the refactoring & executed it. For some reason it considered its work done even though the files didn't even pass linters but thats' polish.

What is "understanding code", mental model of the problem? These are terms for which we all have developed a strong & clear picture of what they mean. But may I remind us all that used to not be the case before we entered this industry - we developed it over time. And we developed it based on a variety of highly interconnected factors, some of which are e.g.: what is a program, what is a programming language, what languages are there, what is a computer, what software is there, what editors are there, what problems are there.

And as we mapped put this landscape, hadn't there been countless situations where things felt dumb and annoying, and then situation in sometimes they became useful, and sometimes they remained dumb? Something you thought is making you actively loosing brain cells as you're doing them, because you're doing them wrong?

Or are you to claim that every hurdle you cross, every roadblock you encounter, every annoyance you overcome has pedagogical value to your career? There are so many dumb things out there. And what's more, there's so many things that appear dumb at first and then, when used right, become very powerful. AI is that: Something that you can use to shoot yourself in the foot, if used wrong, but if used right, it can be incredibly powerful. Just like C++, Linux, CORS, npm, tcp, whatever, everything basically.

It would be possible if you had a matrix of speakers covering all walls & ceiling. In that scenario you could control the entire sound landscape across the board, and cancel out or simulate arbitrary sound sources in the room.

This already exists. Look at cursor with Linear, you can just reply with @cursor & some instructions and it starts working in a vm. You can watch it work on cursor.com/agents or using the cursor editor. Result is a PR. Also github has copilot getting integrated in the github ui, but not that great in my experience

Awesome question!

You can tell chatgpt to notify you when something changes about something, and tell it how often it should check. It currently sends you a notif even if nothing changes, but that's easily swiped away. So in your case you could say: Tell me if this blog <link> releases part 3. Check once a week.

Basically yes, but I do hear nuance, idk if it's right - "try and" feels more daring, like "I think you can't", while "try to" feels more neutral, just a command.

Meanwhile, Safari asks you if you want to close Netflix, while you're watching Netflix, because it uses too much power.

this is an ad

There's studies showing that LLM makes experienced devs slower in their work. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for self study.

However consider the extent to which LLMs make the learning process more enjoyable. More students will keep pushing because they have someone to ask. Also, having fun & being motivated is such a massive factor when it comes to learning. And, finally, keeping at it at 50% the speed for 100% the material always beats working at 100% the speed for 50% the material. Who cares if you're slower - we're slower & faster without LLMs too! Those that persevere aren't the fastest; they're the ones with the most grit & discipline, and LLMs make that more accesible.

I'm second language too, so I checked the article, and it seems fine otherwise apart from the title; I'd expect the title to get extra care. Anyway it's flagged anyway.

Why so many articles have grammatically incorrect headlines?

I quickly worked at a company like that, that had large parts of their core business logic running on an AS400, and they were asking what they need to do to migrate to something newer - was surreal. A few hundred employees all interacting with the system - in building A, a deliver arrives, they scan it like this, press this button. Building B, a guys job was to oversee the conversion of tables from As400 to a csv format suitable for some other outsourced software. Data goes into system C and shows to employees working on conveyor belts this and that. Hundreds of kilometers away, truck drivers get a notification for this and that.b

And, nobody knew how the whole worked. Everyone has their niche of interaction with the system. They would be able to shave off an insane percentage off expenses (in the form of employees whose job exists for no real reason), but the switching costs would also be immense.

I sometimes wonder what came of their company. The system was so far beyond the complexity that anyone could grasp, they had no inhouse devs, they'd need people with the competency to judge which competency they need.

I would go so far as to say that the reason people feel LLMs have stagnated is precisely because they feel like they're only progressing a few percentage points between iteration - despite the fact that these points are the hardest.

But that's how progress works! To me it makes sense that llms first manage to do 80% of the task, then 90, then 95, then 98, then 99, then 99.5, and so on. The last part IS the hardest, and each iteration of LLMs will get a bit further.

Just because it didn't reach 100% just yet doesn't mean that LLMs as a whole are doomed. In fact, the fact that they are slowly approaching 100% shows promise that there IS a future for LLMs, and that they still have the potential to change things fundamentally, more so than they did already.

Talented people don't have to go through as much embarrassment as others because they learn faster than normal & will impress through that, even if they're worse at what they're doing. Also, once you are truly good at something, it's easier to be bad at something else. But not disagreeing with her.

Not sure what you mean, cursor has agents, that run in feedback cycles, checking e.g syntax errors before continuing, reflecting, working for minutes if need be, can execute commands in your terminal, check any file it wants. What can cc do that cursor can't, at least in theory?

I wish they'd port the windows terminal to linux. It somehow allows to use ctrl + c for both cancelling processes and copying text. I'm still sometimes opening dev tools in chrome bcs of the annoying ctrl + shift + c.

Not sure if that transfers to compressed music in general. If even the non-compressed guinea pigs had hearing loss, that suggest the level of 102dB, though below the legal safety level, is harmful to their ears. Total harm done if you listen to music that's too loud is proportional to <loudness>*<time>. Since compression makes quiet parts louder, that amount would increase, explaining the increased hearing loss for guinea pigs that listen to the compressed amount. But if the overall level is below the harmful threshold, does that also happen?

Claude is my go to llm for everything, sounds corny but it's literally expanding the circle of what I can reasonably learn, manyfold. Right now I'm attempting to read old philosophical texts (without any background in similar disciplines), and without claude's help to explain the dense language in simpler terms & discuss its ideas, give me historical contexts, explaining why it was written this or that way, compare it against newer ideas - I would've given up many times.

At work I used it many times daily in development. It's concise mode is a breath of fresh air compared to any other llm I've tried. It has helped me find bugs in foreign code bases, explain me the techstack, written bash scripts, saving me dozens of hours of work & many nerves. It generally makes me reach places I wouldn't without due to time constraints & nerves.

The only nitpick is that the service reliability is a bit worse than others, forcing me sometimes to switch to others. This is probably a hard to answer question, but are there plans to improve that?

One thing that sounds very nice about Github are merge queues: Once your PR is ready, rather than merging, you submit it to the merge queue, which will rebase it on the last PR also on the merge queue. It then runs the CI on each PR, and finally merges them automatically once successful. If CI fails, doesn't get merged, and the next PR skips yours on the chain.

Still a lot of computation & some wait time, but you can just click & forget. You can also parallelize it; since branches are rebased on each other, you can run CI in advance and, assuming your predecessor is also successful, reuse the result from yours.

Only available for enterprise orgs though.

Tog's paradox is the main reason why I suspect that generative AI will never destroy art, it will enhance it. It allows you to create artworks within minutes that until recently required hours to create and years to master. This will cause new art to emerge that pushes these new tools to the limit, again with years of study and mastery, and they will look like nothing we've been able to produce so far.

Can someone tell me what ideas of Wolfram have had an impact on mathematics & physics as a discipline? Every time I read his posts, without understanding them deeply, his accomplishments seem insane, to the point that I would expect everyone to talk about them - yet I have never heard anyone other than himself talk about them.

Nice!!

If you're looking for alternatives, here's something we've built (hope I'm not hijacking this): https://github.com/audiotool/pasta

It's called "pasta" for copy pasta. It was built with exactly the same motivation aa yours, also has a yaml config file, and is also implemented in go, kinda interesting. If yours takes off and we can drop ours, that'd be awesome!

For some feedback in features we have which we thinkg we'd be missing:

- we have the ability to copy individual files and specific subdirectories of other repos, not the entire repos

- mechanics to "clear" the target directory, in case a file gets deleted upstream, to keep the directories in sync

- we've modelled it with a plugin API, so you can implement new "copiers" for bitbucket, google drive, subversion, ...

- the github plugin we have uses the Github API for better performance, and you can add auth by setting an env var GITHUB_TOKEN

We also create a "result" file of every copy, noting the exact commit that was copied, which might or might not be a useful... Were thinking of posting it here at some point but never got around to it. Again, if yours takes off, that'd be the best option :)

We're using it mostly to copy .proto definitions from one repo to another.