People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.

I've ended plenty of interviews early when it's clear the candidate isn't going to work out. I agree there's no point in wasting everyone's time, and hiring is time consuming enough. But there's a way to do it with kindness, and I think everyone in the interviewer's chair should have some sense of how. (That said, there are some candidates that are going to take rejection poorly no matter what - you can control how you treat a candidate but now how they react).

I have memories of experiences freezing up and losing the physical control required to speak as well, so I have empathy.

(Having such experiences as a child are what led to me joining the high school speech team doing extemporaneous and impromptu events to get over them. I eventually went on to be a regional champion and a state competitor, but I still sometimes have to fight the physical tension when speaking in certain situations).

Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.

Another company I really like is Mystery Ranch (for backpacks). They were purchased by Yeti and it remains to be seen whether their quality will drop to that of a "lifestyle brand".

I've also had success with Mountain Hardware, Outdoor Research (jackets and pants).

(I do search and rescue, so a lot of focus on outdoor stuff. It is also really hard on gear so anything cheaply made gets destroyed pretty quickly.)

The prose isn't good. It does read like AI slop.

But it invoked an insight and feeling in me that was novel and poignant and (I think) intended by the author.

That's why I called it lovely writing.

I think the shift we've seen TV is something similar. When I was a kid, TV was viewed as an antisocial medium ("the boob tube"), but I have really fond memories of sitting with my family watching Quantum Leap or Growing Pains. Now that everyone has their own screen to watch TV, it seems the studios don't even bother trying to make shows that appeal to an entire family.

We focus so much on the media (tv/internet/video games/books) when ascribing value, but, as this article indicates, the physical nature of the delivery (shared living room appliance vs portable individual screen) makes a huge difference.

I was worried about scratches because I abuse the shit out of anything I wear, and sure enough, there are scratches in the titanium bezel, but they look good in a way that scratches on my (non-pro) steel Apple Watch did not.

The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.

The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.

(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)

The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.

This is a likelier outcome than the various utopian promises (no more cancer!) that AI boosters have been making.

- OSS is valuable for decentralizing power and influence

- AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

In a real discussion, the messiness is an important signal. The mistakes that you made and _didn't_ catch, the clunky word choices, etc, give insight actually show what you are thinking and how clearly you are thinking about it. If you have edited something for clarity, that's an important signal. LLM editing destroys that signal.

And it gets worse because LLMs destroy that signal in one direction - towards homogeneity. They create the illusion of "what you were actually thinking, but better than you could express it" but what they are delivering is "generic, professional-sounding ideas phrased in a way to convince you they are your own".

I can understand why you think this is true, but it is false.

There's a confusing disconnect between "we have this magic box that can write all the software we'd ever want" and their lack of basic account management functionality.

(Not really. That disconnect is because of something mature software engineers have known for decades - the bottleneck has never been the code)