Regardless, we're all needing to learn that we weren't as special as we thought we were.

We were the bane of everything's existence for like 20 years, despite having the highest test scores, the best educations, working more hours than everyone, and making less.

Come on in, the avocado toast is delish...

A lot of people are upset because they used to be special, their identities were tied to them being smarter, or having more niche domain knowledge than anyone else. Ai has changed that.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR WORK! My god people! The meaning you get from life shouldn’t be reduced entirely to the job you do. Mathematician, or programmer, or pilot, or ship captain, or janitor or otherwise.

I already had to learn this, but the sooner you decouple your professional life from “what makes you… you” the better.

Personally I’m perfectly happy with having like several good companies ideally in different industries that I can do a good job for. I mean, we will see what happens but so far it’s quite fun.

I’m on vacation right now, but my main customer is constantly adding new feature requests, etc. and until I went on vacation their work was as good as 2 or 3 customers per month, “oh can you do this? What about this?” I honestly am looking forward for them to throttle back a little because I could use another similar volume customer, but I hardly have enough time to really invest to make that happen until they get all the things they want and while they’re paying me I ain’t going to stop.

It was also pretty cool, because there’s a young engineer working there in a non-engineer role as a human forklift. I said, “hey, I need help implementing all this stuff” now he has a raise, and he is kind of like an embedded customer support person, and I don’t have to stress about it so much.

Regardless, just build.

The phone call automation for their front desk saves something like 40 hours of work a month just of people looking up customers to call about their schedule etc. And that’s just one tool and I deployed it in like 4 days. It’s really not that hard, just go out and make people’s lives easier and stop trying to scale or whatever.

Good lord guys…

When a software suite costs a company $70-100k per year that does a bunch of stuff they don’t want, they’ll definitely pay you to build bespoke tools for $24k per year.

Literally doing this now.

You’re not going to be a billionaire, just be happy doing a good job making niche things for companies. You don’t need 800,000 users. You need 8 small businesses that are paying you $2000/mo.

You might be persecuted for it - but that right to say, “F-you I’m not talking” is always an option, it’s just that it tends to be more pain than most are willing to endure. Myself included, to be fair, but the right to “STFU” is pretty hard for them actually to force you to comply with if you decide not to talk.

An explicit return 0 is a lot more obvious than just having a 0.

Also, I’ll agree that a ‘ or a , in the wrong place is very easy to visually miss, then you can read a totally different meaning out of the code.

But at least here in the states I think a lot of people dgaf. And yes, I do gaf.

What I can’t figure out is why you’re so upset about this - my intuition is that “the lady doth protest too much.” Maybe you know, deep down inside of you, that people aren’t caring as much. Maybe you feel it too - the impulse to not care. Maybe you feel attacked.

If you’re a parent, then my reply would be “good!” People should be doing a better job pushing their kids to excel to the limits of their capabilities and passions.

People should actually make their kids do stuff that’s intellectually challenging and push them to succeed. The test scores are in part (in my opinion) because people can’t be bothered to give a damn. Get off your collective asses and make your kids read a book, do their homework, and turn the f-ing iPad off.

But “oh no… I was bummed because I couldn’t go to the mall!” You have no idea.

Not to mention, I literally got sick that winter with something else and had a self-imposed lockdown because I was immunocompromised for like a year. It wasn’t great but it was fine.

This heartburn about this like it was some big task to stay home while there were people out there literally in the thick of it, watching people get sick and die, or dying themselves? Miss me with that. I think my kids did zoom school for something like a year? It wasn’t great but it was fine. Grow up.

I’m not saying it’s the kids’ fault that they’re not doing as well, but the parents definitely have a responsibility to try harder.

Meanwhile my wife was on the front lines watching people die on vents, and I was literally medevac-ing people out of camp in the arctic with totally inadequate PPE (but we had to do what we had to do, if it got into the camp there was no way to treat people). Seriously one of the most stressful times of my life and I see these people trying to reimagine the history of this. I remember this, I was there...