Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: dave@robador.com

https://robador.com/daf

It still blows my mind that this is the same company.

Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.

Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.

But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.

(Interestingly, Avenue Q was renamed Quentin Road to avoid confusion with Avenue O.)

Either way, lettered or named in alphabetical order, I appreciate the lettered/numbered combination. It's a good mix of character and practicality, and it sounds good when you say it out loud ("It's at E 14th and K"). The doubly numbered intersections of Queens always drive me nuts.

A final sidenote: some real estate developers in the early 20th century decided to rename sections of E 11th through 16th from Prospect Park South down through West Midwood to fancy-sounding anglicized names like Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough (the SWARM backronym here is useful) so they could make more money selling homes on those streets. It worked. Yet another example of nefarious street naming...

However, I do not understand this comment:

For the Soto Zen and Vipassana traditions, practice is everything - not philosophy, opinion, or behavior.

Right action is an essential element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I have myself found the teachings concerning behavior to be a central element of my practice as I have gone deeper with the dhamma.

Also, what happens when we don’t need such enormous data centers anymore? How many communities in the U.S. are saddled with enormous dead malls while the developers walk away with zero liability?

Curation feels better with this implementation?

My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).

I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.

Can be used for everything from slightly skewed beat-making to generating undulating waves of sound!

I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire.

That, to me, sucks.

May we all get there & be free of suffering.

Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.