A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.

With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.

It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.

You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.

It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.

I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.

I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.

Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)

Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.

And “define the spec concretely“ (and how to exploit emerging behaviors) becomes the new definition of what programming is.

In my own experience you quickly run into jarring tangents or “ghosts” of unrelated ideas that start to shape the main thread of consciousness and resist steering attempts.

There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.

Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).

Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.

The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.

Can you elaborate on this part? I would say one of the strengths of JS is that you can get it to run consistently just about anywhere.

Game theory only works when you have skin in the game. You think the other nations’ machines are just going to wreck your machines and then go home?

It would be more interesting to map flight carriers/numbers to handlers (e.g. Menzies) and regions to give a more reasonable blame/availability overview.

I was similarly absorbed with those annual “bumper collection of cheats for video games” books that used to come with tech magazines, endlessly rereading them and memorizing them for games I never owned.

I wonder:

A) How much this is endemic to the Hacker News demographic. I’ve always been absorbed in the pursuit of useless knowledge (later in life this manifests in unnecessary PC watercooling and Haskell addiction).

B) If we all had genius parents that realized you can spend £3.50 (much less than the cost of an A list game) and keep a child occupied for an entire year, while also encouraging them to read (!!).

> let the prompt create HTTP requests

is batteries-included because every language model worth their salt is already able to create markdown and it’s very tempting to utilize this in order to provide layout and break up the wall-of-text output.

That’s simple:

Ordering-in takeaway is something you do at home with the expectation that it is delivered.

Ordering-out is getting something “to go” when you are already at an establishment where you don’t wish to stay and sit to eat.

Personally, I believe that those with the capability to do so are obliged to make ecological purchasing decisions (I hold myself to this standard) so I’m not trying to pass the buck either.