rustyboy

as a consumate obsidian note taker i've found that as asking questions to a quick model and have it challenge me with leading questions has helped me refine my writing to be more useful and driven. when my note is done, i'll pass it through to see if any jargon is a crutch with my prompts are about forcing me to explain it "as simple as possible and no more".

in other situations feed it notes, bookmarked articles, generate syllabuses for something you want to learn more about, and generate create html/css "interactive textbooks". the ability to have an infinitely deep tutor always around feels revolutionary.

That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.

What about it has burnt you out? That should direct where you go next

At my very large enterprise, a managers job is not to "promote and demote" it's to "get you where you want to be". That requires you to know your direction (to the article) but importantly, when they say "based on our company policies, you need to demonstrate an outsized inpact" you're going to have to work with the manager to define that, execute, and get the data to equip them to do that.

These takes feel like a failure compared to my daily usage, which is literally non-stop for ten hours a day. Want to construct a niche jq, curl, or find linux command? Can't remember the parameters for a function? Don't want to leave your terminal to search for something? ctrl+I and type in readable english.

Amen - As a SWE and i've come to realize that no one pays for me to treat code as craftman quality so I don't. The whole agile mindset is get something out that demonstrates value and fix it things while you go. And in ten years i've also realized that my ability to sit down and make something really special the first time through is - shit. This is the first time i've been able to meet timelines while still producing a better product.

can I get a ELI10 on this - If I host a mastodon server, would I need to run this software along side it then and then everyone on my server could see these other platforms posts and such?

i find tech hobbies fun because so may of the hard skills are transferable so i'm never starting from scratch, aka the hardest parts of a new hobby.

however, this is the trap i always fall into - i have these vague targets like "learn vue" and spend the whole weekend trying to figure out how to install node on a windows machine and run a basic test

do you find that the side projects are for: fun, learning, or some external pressure like the parent suggested?

what I find is that picking up a new hobby causes me a lot of mental anguish. there's a lot of very basic elementary blocks to learn. however with tech, i always have this hard skill in my back pocket that avoids those initial difficulties. if I want to learn a new language or framework, i'm not starting from scratch but a vast web of other learnings (and I slightly like the stuff so that helps.)

this is really insightful, i am nearing ten years as SWE - i've always loved passion projects and learning outside of work. This has historically got me really far in my career. However I just started a new role as a team lead on k8s platform. I rushed out got a few NICs and started setting up a homelab to learn but havn't spent more than a few hours working on it in weeks.

for the first time in my life i'm starting to think that my hobbies outside work (and the majority of my identity) has very little to do with software.

i had never thought about how much my work was tied to my identity and it's extremely jarring.

I completely agree with the sentiment. The catch here is that, unlike software in the past, there's (at least in America) ALOT of money on the line with software these days that attracts strategic and outgoing people which are "playing the game" more than they are actually interested in the technical details. I've noticed more and more peers interested in giving shallow talks, nice docs with easy diagrams, and those one page blog posts. I'm sure every industry is seeing the same thing as popularity becomes king.

Do you have any tips for practicing this? I feel like I often "take the oxygen out of the room" when I offer suggestions or get talking. Conversely when I bite my tongue (or just unplug my mic) most people don't talk or offer very weak tacit agreement with the last thing that was said.

edit: I wish I had more skill at building coalitions and/or pushing an organization in a direction without saying "we need to do X".

as someone who spent a few years really addicted to stims but eventually got clean, when I started having problems at work with focus and attention, I decided that I didn't want to get diagnosed because - at some fundamental level - stims honestly feel like everyone should be on them. Like everything is better: studying, talking, moving...

I've spent a lot of time trying to avoid things that challenge my attention span, mediating and journally, and trying really hard to use organizational tools/apps. With some pretty decent success.

I really struggle with knowing when disorder is just code for anti-human (or anti-your personality) work.

Out of curiosity, given it is a spectrum, what's at the other end of "really" autisitc (if that's even the right word) or does that just go from 0 being "normal" to 1 being that "really"?

Curious at how people are using vectordbs at an enterprise level.

Let's say you have a team of 5 data scientists/developers who are working on a collection of GenAI features/tooling. Does it make sense to have one single vectordb where all documentation is embedded and powers all the apps, or do you make a bunch of niche databases that are tailored to the service?

Also, one of the things i've noticed is that these databases seem less optimized for update operations so when user #1 embeds and saves 100 documents then user #2 does the same, with 10 overlapping - I'd guess that doubling of the similiarity space would exclude new documents. How are people handling that?

I notice a lot of XY problems with GenAI if you're not careful. Thus I can picture more senior engineers writing (with GenAI) really specific business requirements as unit tests with intermediate and junior engineers (with GenAI) writing the actual code.

A lot more work on building these internally (ex: Azure OpenAI & huggingface) and business analysts or others vetting the outputs or sentiment of output.

I can also picture a lot of work on designing more complex LLMs architectures. Like if you have the money, could you have a rough loop that reviews issues, roadmaps, and/or todos and proposes changes to the code itself? If so - see the importance of writing good tests and solid devops practices.

Conversely, integrate GenAI into PRs. Think "making AI" a team member. And even more so if you think about mythical man month problems. Software engineering makes you a manager for AIs.

I've really been playing with the idea of getting into trying to mod Valheim.

do you have any reading material on that? I just finished a two month deep dive into kubernetes for work and i'm really curious on what's next.

my disillusionment with work, deteriorating relationships and steady decline in my ability to carry out daily tasks weren’t signs of a personal lack of interest or effort, but an inevitability resulting from the position I had put myself in.

Wow this is exactly what i'm suffering from right now... I recently thought about applying to a more serious tech team at my company given i've slowly slipped into a basic DBA/PM roll.

But i'm worried it's only going to make it worse. What does the science or your peers say is the key to getting help?

So... I should buy a house now despite how "terrible" the market is? 8% interest rates seem like a terrible time to buy. But it sounds like they're going to keep increasing.

imagine all the time you'd spend working on your craft in your own free time to better yourself and learn new skills now imagine using that time to do all those things and learn all those things but being able to get paid for it while working on jobs/tasks for a client.

CAn you explain this more? Maybe your work doesn't align a lot with your interests but when i'm working I feel like i'm learning and when i'm not working, setting aside learning as a hobby, that studying eventually gets rolled back into my work (which I get paid for)?

This is sarcasm right?

Someone already pointed out the obvious, meat tastes good, but has some ethical baggage. Ala - fake meat.

But I think as you're pointing out, people around the world have made amazing dishes for centuries that are completely vegetarian why not eat those instead? And why there's no satisfying answer is because - It's not an either or. Do both is a perfectly valid answer.

I've been vegan for 13 years and my partner of 7 years is an omnivore. When I make dishes they like, we both eat vegan for the night. When we want a burger (and we're to lazy to make black bean patties) we use the fake meat. It's just another option to keep around that's incredibly convenient.

In my experience, these tend to be the "middle-ground", between vegan/vegetarians and omnivores. When Thanksgiving comes around it stresses my family to no end that there's no "core" (aka meat) for me. It is unfathomable to them that eating 5 veggie sides is enough. Conversely for those who choose not to eat meat without many vegetarian friends/restaurants tend to use these to bridge the gap. But you're right, once you're comfortable with stocking veggie alternatives ahead of time, knowing what dishes exist, and used to plant-centric thinking, all of which takes a lot of time, these don't make as much sense.

Because data "is the new oil" and those titles are considered cost jobs not revenue jobs.

source: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

DE's at my company actually spend all their time making easy to use interfaces ontop of these tools (Github workflows, IaC/CI-CD solutions, Dev/SecOps features, etc.) so that DW/BI/DS Developers, or even analysts in some cases, can create new pipelines quite easily.

This is a pretty bad comparison. Not only are doctors trained for years through a mentorship process, go on to teach others, and are tested against standards; every surgery they perform for the rest of their lives is subject to review which might result in an independent board of other doctors recommending changes to the process.

This is one of the things we're missing in software development (although retros are supposed to solve it), and the author points this out. Often, we get stuck in a bad framework or organizational structure that leaves us so we're forced to get use complex CS ideas to solve the problem when a better approach would allow for simpler solutions.

Team A are those who work with metal utensils, team B work with wooden utensils, C use electrical appliances and D are in charge of all food heating. Trying to make sense of how one creates a crème brûlée with a worker grouping like that requires a lot of intelligence.

Big corp jobs, especially at non-software companies will tend to treat people as isolated cogs in the big machine, a machine you're told by everyone is "someone else's job" to understand and steer.

In my experience at a massive company this is spot on, as a mentor it feels like I spend more time on teaching new hires to realize that we're not a "technology company that does X". We are, in fact, a boring X company that uses technology when it's needed. Not everything has a complex technical solution. Sometimes the best thing you can do, even as a software engineer, involves changing processes, organizational structure, or bad habits.

When I read these "software" articles and books it feels like a radically different world than what I do.

as an RVer I use my hotspot for working, and 5G CHUGS through my limits in a week or two so not ideal

I've worked remote for 2 years in an travel trailer with a 250w solar panel and 200kwh battery and have never needed shore power. I use my phone for hotspotting and use a mac book, they both charge in about 2 hours so I run for 2-3 hours, charge it, run 2-3 hours, and then charge it before logging off.

That said, yea - no second monitor, I close a lot of apps when i'm not using them (looking at you docker and chrome), and have a setup where I ssh onto a machine or use ci-cd agents to do a lot of my work.

edit: that said, this is a lot easier in sunnier places (you don't need to use electricity for heat) which I tend to prefer. I got close to needing a campground after a week or two in WY/MT near winter.

I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success.

Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.

We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.