Loss of contact with reality can be a great starting point for committing heinous, inhuman acts. Psychopathy spans a wide range of functional levels and characteristics.

I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?

Some of these are under threat too. There are online lawyer and doctor offerings now. Maybe not plumbers, but there are certainly tech companies trying to own the plumbing referral business (like Thumbtack) and they suck a great deal of the profit margin out of it. Nothing is safe.

Some local retail makes sense, and some does not. For example, my life would really suffer if the hardware store down the street closed up. I like being able to get a paint match home in under 30 minutes. And sometimes I spend half an hour looking for the exact bolt I need, checking it against the other part it’s going to screw into: you just can’t do all that on Amazon and the big box motherfuckers are further away and far less convenient.

Once I messed up and superglued a wrench into my palm. I couldn’t wait for fucking Prime Overnight. I went down to the hardware store and asked if they stocked ca glue debonder. They didn’t, but the store manager got out some acetone and sat there with me, slowly pouring it on as I peeled the wrench out. He wouldn’t even take my money at the end. You just cannot get that kind of service from Lowe’s or Amazon. I now buy every single thing I possibly can there, to help ensure they stay around. I drag my kids anytime I need to go there, and they’re allowed to raid the candy rack at the checkout.

My local hardware store stands apart as an indispensable local retail utility and I buy everything I possibly can there, because I like having a local hardware store and occasionally really need one. I buy all the household cleaning products I can there, for example, because they sell them, I need them, and I’m incredibly happy to pay whatever extra 40 cents they cost over having Amazon pack up a box of dish pods into its own cardboard box and truck it out to my house,

Yeah I actually never expected to have an LCD billboard up inside my home.

I would merely hate this and curse the manufacturer. But I know that if it were in my house, my kids, with their raw, unhardened minds, would find it irresistible. The slogans would worm their way into their everyday speech. They would talk about new ads over breakfast. They just don’t have the filters we adults have. So I’m so fucking glad I don’t have anything like this. It’s beyond mildly infuriating to truly insidious.

A lot of people in the world only have one kind of HVAC, heat or cooling, but not both.

Why do you even visit them? I’d say if you use them for product discovery but then give all your sales to online merchants, you are an absolute enemy of small businesses, whatever you think you feel about them.

Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin

I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.

It will come with an optional $400 fork that does nothing.

The concept of a global language is compatible with linguistic diversity. The Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves all have their own languages, but they also speak the same Common Tongue.

Our world just doesn’t have a common tongue. It has a handful of very colonially dominant languages.

That’s the utilitarian point of view. Even though I often take this POV on many subjects, it would be totalitarian to apply it to cultural matters. Should we adopt one world cuisine that is the easiest to work with? Should we settle everyone on one musical scale and religion, too? It would be a lot more efficient and would facilitate global interaction better.

Only problem: it would erase who we are.

I’m just guessing what they meant but I took it as the difference between:

1. saving = getting enough people to keep speaking it that it remains a living language

2. preserving = documenting it for posterity so that it is not utterly forgotten for all time

The US military is highly distributed throughout the world. Other countries can stop allowing us to have bases on their soil and it will significantly weaken our military posture. They dont need to invade the US to do this.

I can only imagine with his audience size what his team looks like right now. I’m sure they aren’t content with standard YT revenue and are always looking for ways to turn his massive fame into more dollars. They cover a lot of silly expensive high end shit like Rivians and Apple Vision. It’s not crazy to think that they could milk the rich fools for a buck. Believe it or not there are people who think to themselves “Hm, interesting. $50? Okay, that’s nothing, I’ll check it out.”

We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.

From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.

Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.

Not as a rule, no.