Having familiarity with all 3, as soon as I read this sentence I knew it was all down hill for me.

RubyLLM dev literally had to take time to provide code samples and doc links.

No issue with listing legit limitations, but be a bro and fact check claims before wasting a volunteer’s time - and potentially leading other developers on a public board astray.

It’s a classic move.

Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.

I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.

Worth it, nicely done

But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.

Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.

It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.

> But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.

The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.

The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).

It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.

Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.

That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.

It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.

AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.

That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.

I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.

1. You can't judge the person, you can judge the behavior

2. To judge the person requires the ability to quantify the unquantifiable (circumstance, sequence of events leading to the outcome, going back to the literal beginning of time).

3. To judge the person implies a superiority to that person

Sure, one can take/justify simplistic shortcuts for practical reasons. But some forget that's what they are - shortcuts that bypass the nuances/reality of the situation.

> If everyone would make the same choice, then free will doesn't exist. It's only one step away from what you said.

I didn't say anything about free will. "One step away" is where you went, not me.

If you believe free will and determinism are logically incompatible, that's your own theory to prove.

I'm simply saying that everyone would make the same choice given the exact same circumstances and starting conditions.

To believe anything otherwise is magical thinking, and basically implies a moral superiority to someone else.

No, there are choices. It states that given the exact same starting parameters and sequence of events, you would make the same choice.

If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.

The act itself is bad.

The human performing the act was misguided.

I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.

Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.

Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.

So the act and the person are separate.

Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.

But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.

An unexpected windfall will amplify the psychology of the recipients. For people who have lived without, the mindset is frequently “live today like it’s your last” or “enjoy it while it lasts” and blow it or self destruct.

Some will be obviously be more mature about it though.

The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.

It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.

Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.

All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.

Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.

https://katzgrau.github.io/jerry-picker/