E.g. when someone calls in on behalf of her spouse saying he's gone digging potatoes.

1: https://youtu.be/ZfWVV533RHE

you'll be surprised with how many people are comfortable attributing something they do not understand to Magic.

more than anything, ai let people who couldn't and wouldn't bother to learn to write simple code, to side step ones who can and build solutions to scratch their own itch. that too faster.

now human behavior kicks in, and they don't want to hand control back into the hands of people who can code to solve problems.

put this together and you have a good model to understand the AI sales pitch... Its magic

like all magic, its but a trick.

correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.

I got an open box lenovo 24 inch QHD monitor for years and it just works solid across windows, mac and various docking stations. I could imagine upgrading to a 27 or 30 inch but beyond that is just too much IMO.

Maybe taller, more square could be of more use than wider.

The fact that I can use sqlite / local sql db for all kinds of development and reliably use the same code (with minor updates) in the cloud hosted solution is such a huge benefit that it undermines anything else that any other solution has to offer. I'm excited about the sql stuff I learned over 10 years ago being of of great use to me in the coming months.

The last product I worked heavily on used a nosql database and it worked fine till you start tweak it just a little bit - split entities, convert data types or update ids. Most of the data access layer logic dealt with conversion between data coming in from the database and the guardrails to keep the data integrity in check while interacting with the application models. To me this is something so obviously solved years ago with a few lines of constraints. Moving over to sql was totally impossible. Learned my lesson, advocated hard for sql. Hoping for better outcomes.

These two are a strict no go for me too.

Another thing that worked well for me is to keep discussions very low and quick on topics like personal relationships, work, career and hot button topics like AI, weather, traffic, climate change, house prices, etc. Basically avoid anything that a newspaper would think is worthwhile for frontpage or editorial column.

I go heavy on food, travel, culture, rumors, art, movies, music, design, festivals, holidays, games. You could talk hours on stuff here, just pick an artsy cultural magazine or subreddit and keep up.

Side note, inviting views from both sexes makes for some very interesting short conversations. Both have very very different takes on the same things and therefore won't talk too long. Both being interested in very different things (think dress belts, hair supplements, birth control vs fishing, bourbon and soccer) brings some newness into the conversation.

Looking back, what would I have done differently ?

(0) mental health is the most important at this stage. Stay close to people who are with you in this difficult time. Never forget their contributions. For me it was my grandma.

(1) have unshakable belief in myself and my worth, never letting my employability be a measure of my worth and identity. Deep down you would question yourself and think its a lie. It isn't.

(2) I should have absolutely used that extra time to master the interview stuff (algorithms, data structures, OS and networking concepts, etc). Sooner or later I would interview at a FAANG which measure solely on these factors, so could have used that extra time to master interview skills. I wasted time on side projects, resume padding and niche upcoming tech stuff.

(3) tech surfing. Ride the latest wave with some side projects. Don't go deep. Just surf.

(4) All things, good and bad, will end. "This too shall pass"

As senior, if you choose, you can coast. By coast I mean you do justice to your job and the salary you are paid. Its a perfectly acceptable choice for someone to be senior for as long as they want.

The biggest bottleneck is going to be what other seniors and higher think of you.

intro... Problem... (The Bottom line... What to do about it...) Looped over and over. and then Finally...

I want to read it, but I can't get myself to.

If all they did was code all the time, write code for fun and interacted mostly with other similar people, they probably wouldn't be the first choice for these projects.

So is SQL. To me. But some otherwise rational people have an irrational dislike of sql. Almost like someone seeking to seal a small bruise with wire mesh because bandaids are hard to rip off. The consequence shows with poorly implemented schema-free nosql and bloated orm tools mixed in with sql.

But some folks just like it that way. And most reasons boil down to a combination of (1) a myopic solution to a hyper specific usecase or (2) an enterprise situation where you have a codebase written by monkeys with keyboards and you want to limit their powers for good or (3) koolaid infused resume driven development.

0 reasons to change.

my sister otoh has an apple watch that she never charges, lies in a drawer which i hear about when she's trying to find her phone. conversation ends with "eh i should charge it maybe"

if i ever buy a smart watch, will likely be the pebble

My "system" is now some google docs, some google sheets and some html hosted on my domain. I have no black box algorithm to offload to.

I'm now curious if i could try applying it to everyday things i learn and want reinforcement on along with the technical stuff i want handy. Thanks for sharing.

2. dont be what others want you to be. be what you want to be.

3. stay away from anything that can kill you or make you poor. especially those that work slowly.

4. backups are a good idea, almost everywhere in life.

5. No doesn't always mean no. Yes doesn't always mean yes. People change. Things change.

6. worst kind of failure is when you try and don't know why you failed. every failure teaches you, learn to learn.

7. copy first. be original second.

8. praise, dont flatter.

9. take risks early. before 35.

10. make someone happy.

awesome !

yeah and i figured thats fine !

I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.

I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.

i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.

You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't.

In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know.

and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption.

I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.

The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.

I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.