[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS#HolyC

In general, I think (or at least hope) your experience is the more common one. But fwiw I do have a Jewish friend who was personally cussed at and threatened by his own coworker explicitly for being Jewish (well, and probably because they were from Florida if I'm being honest, but there aren't as many slurs for that). The guy who did it was fired (whole thing was recorded iirc), nobody sided with him, he was clearly off his rocker in some way - but it doesn't take much to get shaken up - it sticks with you. And my friend was understandably, shaken up.

I know that because I used to live in Seattle, and unfortunately I had a really scary experience of being threatened (he yelled "I'm going to kill you b****") and chased down by a homeless man for nothing other than being a woman on the same street as him. So I saw my own perspective shift when it happened first hand. I was no longer excited about living downtown in a big city after that experience.

So what I'm saying is, neither me nor my friend took the experience and made it a defining thing. He still lives where he does, didn't blame the community or anything. And I'm back to taking public transit, talking to strangers on the sidewalk, and all the other stuff that comes with spending time downtown in a big city. But this time the city is Charlotte, my home city. It's probably not any safer than Seattle (maybe worse), but experiences shape perception, and I've always had really good experiences on Charlotte, including with homeless people. I could say it's because Charlotte has more police presence lately, or because there's not visible tent camps or open drug usage. But deep down, I know, crazy people are always gonna be out there, and the most trivial thing can make you a target.

So I really get the pull by people who have experienced victimization like that to talk about it. You feel kinda crazy if you don't, because you are surrounded by people who say it never happens because they've never seen it. That was such a big part I think of the Floyd protests - a lot of white people lived in a bubble and didn't know how pervasive overly violent interactions with the police can be (though the ironic part is that a lot of white people still don't realize that they can also be targeted by police with just as much malice). Most American black people already knew first or second-hand that police brutality was real and not uncommon - but until it was undeniable on video, it was treated by others as if it never happened.

So there's some honest middle ground somewhere, but the extremists are the one who have the most to gain from convincing people to believe otherwise.

Personally, I am not comfortable with cross-account access from a stranger, even if it's read only. I feel like I should be able to run something locally on my side to gather the data so I can pick and choose what actually needs diagrams

Sounds fun though!

About 20 years ago, I remember getting my hands on an answer key for the personality screener used to work at Target. This was just for a $7/hr cashier position, but it had a very low pass rate. To them, the ideal candidate for them was: always positive and optimistic, preferred being around people than being alone, never complained, frequently sought approval from peers and authorities, always followed every rule no matter what.

So it wasn't explicitly designed against people with disabilities, the rule-following aspect may be more present in autistic people - but for a lot of these, I can't see many people passing if they answered honestly.

She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.

In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.

Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.

The part about existing outside of work - that's just reality though. A lot of coders are just doing it to support their families, and a lot of them aren't doing a side hustle or side projects when they're off the 9-5. That stuff gets normalized and glamorized in the highly-compensated-engineering-for-cool-tech-company scene, but there really are working coders who don't do any of that and get by fine all the same. They just tend to live in uncool cities and work in uncool industries.

Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.

One thing I noticed though, is that even if I set up the VM as a tagged device with limited access rules, if my host machine (the laptop) is connected as my user (which has less limited permissions), the vm uses my host's user permissions, which isn't really what I want. If I disconnect tailscale on the mac and leave the vm tailscale connected it works as intended though - so that's something to look out for.

Also, if you're using orbstack as an agent sandbox, just be aware that they only recently added an option for true filesystem isolation, the default setup doesn't really sandbox effectively.

For me though, it's not having to worry about DB uptime, performance, or version updates that keeps me reaching for DDB even for small hobbyist stuff. But I'm also comfortable architecting for it, probably more comfortable than I am for traditional dbs, so that's a huge part of it.

They've always struggled to hire for those roles. The people who are best at Engineering Support also tend to be the people who move on to other roles after a year or two.

I'm tired of people acting like complex infrastructure tooling is adversarial because it's not completely intuitive. Infrastructure is hard. AWS can give you tooling and docs with patterns to follow, but they can't read your mind. Neither can the PaaS providers - they just make choices on your behalf and hope it won't matter to you.

Nobody wants to hear this, but as things stand, there's no escaping risk for vibe coders right now. Personally, I think AWS is still a good choice for the long run, but don't make the mistake of thinking current LLMs will actually be able to manage the environment on par with a decent infra engineer. That's one of their weaker areas right now. Good news is there are million managed service providers and AWS-competent humans still in existence. Also Premium Support is a good resource.

Whatever you do, make a lot of backups and store them on a different service somewhere. Then if you get to a situation where you need to do something with sensitive data, or need to raise money, engage with someone who can do a proper review.

Determinism is a different matter. Scripts and hooks are really the main levers you can pull there, but yeah - a a decent script and a cron job will handle certain things much better (and for a fraction of the cost)

Even skills are not a catch-all, because besides the supply chain risk from using skills you pull from someone else, a lot of tasks require an assortment of skills.

I've accommodated this with my agent team (mostly sonnets fwiw) by developing what we call "operational reflexes". Basically common tasks that require multiple domains of expertise are given a lockfile defining which of the skills are most relevant (even which fragment of a skill) and how in-depth / verbose each element needs to be to accomplish the same task the same way, with minimal hallucinations or external sources.

A coordinator agent assigns the tasks and selects the relevant lockfile and sends it along or passes it along to another agent with a different specified lockfile geared towards reviewing.

It's a bit, but this workflow dramatically increased the quality of output for technical work I get from my agents and I don't really need to write many prompts myself like this.