I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.

I've had several other bad interviews in my career though, and almost all of them were small companies / startups. It was also obvious, sometimes in the moment, that it was bad because the person interviewing me lacked the maturity, experience, or professionalism to be conducting interviews of anyone. Many times that person was the founder. I consider those all dodged bullets.

It's always important to remember that interviews are a two-way street, and the way someone conducts an interview can tell you a lot about them and about the organizational context they operate in. Do you want to work there?

I've worked for companies that did this, in fact I'd say this is commonplace at startups and small companies, at least till around 500 employees or so. If I ever start another company, I'd operate the same way as a founder/ceo. While Dunbar's Number probably puts an upper limit on the number of people I can truly know in my organization, I think it's incredibly important as a leader to have the possibility of putting a face to a name inside the one endeavor (company) you are wholly responsible for. That doesn't say anything about my trust or lack there-of in the people below me on the org chart.

I almost feel the opposite. I've turned down jobs because I want to understand the strategic direction and the folks I was interviewing with couldn't adequately explain it and they were unwilling to let me meet the folks high enough up the chain that they could as part of my interview process. If I can't get the time of day out of the founder during one of the most important decisions (hiring) that their company makes, they're certainly not going to give me the time of day once I'm in the door and that means I have effectively no feedback mechanism. Why would I want to work there?

While it may not be well known to many, there are mid-sized cities all across the middle of the country where you can buy houses as cheaply as $150k in this year of our lord 2026, but rent generally will be no less than $1000/mo. Private equity and software like RealPage have had a nationwide impact of driving up rental costs, but this hasn't necessarily caused housing prices to skyrocket in places in middle America where there aren't a lot of natural reasons to want to move there.

So sure, owning a home might cost more than renting on paper in California, but that's not true in a lot of parts of the country. Even then, the financial aspects aren't the only parts that matter.

> My 1983 home had been used as a rental for years, so much of the maintenance had been neglected.

The author is acknowledging a reality without acknowledging it, also. Rentals are not well cared for. Most landlords do not keep up with repairs, maintenance, and improvements, and you are going to get to deal with the poor quality of living situation as a renter as a consequence. You get to control this when you own your home, and while it is an expense, it's a fair expense you can manage yourself.

There can be two problems (or more). We can care about two things at once (or more). The fact that we all hate bad coworkers who make our lives harder and fail to pull their wait doesn't mean we can't also hate billionaires. I'm just explaining why the former gets more heat than the latter. It's human nature to feel more intensity of a problem the closer it is to you, and we are so far removed from billionaires that while we all can and should be taking actions to steer society in a better direction, it does not have the tangible immediacy of having better quality coworkers.

Not at all.

1. Someone is coming to me with the question. They're doing so because either the question is about my area of ownership and I have that authority or because I'm a subject-matter expert and I have that authority.

2. I don't know what the other person knows around the edges of the domain that the question is in, I don't know if they understand the constraints of the domain nor do I know what constraints their specific problem has.

3. Often the answers to any actually decent question at work are fairly nuanced, and to understand the nuance you need at least a level set of context.

It's a lot more dismissive and rude to answer with excessive brevity if you treat the question in good faith. For simple questions, sure I don't need to write an essay. Some questions I answer with "Got 10 minutes so we can chat about this?" because it just needs a conversation. Or I answer with questions of my own. But if the question is well-formed, answering it starts with providing the necessary context to understand my answer so we're on an even playing field and we can effectively communicate ideas.

We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.

The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).

Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.

When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.

It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.

I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.

That's somehow more bananas to me than so many other things the Trump admin has done, simply because they managed to break the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but of course only in ways which further damage the country through corruption and incompetence.

As I sometimes have to remind my own gen-z child who now unironically is blaming Millennials for the current situation. The Boomers still hold almost all of the reins of power. I want to note, in 1997 the President was born in 1946 (Bill Clinton), in 2007 the President was born in 1946 (George W. Bush), in 2017 the President was born in 1946 (Donald Trump), and in 2027 the President will have been born in 1946 (Donald Trump). I am 40, at no point in my entire life has anyone in my generation held any meaningful political or economic power in this country.

I point this out, because I agree with you, but I also want to point out that a big part of this problem is that Gen-X and Millennials basically never had a chance to impose their generational spirits on the world, they've been completely overshadowed by Boomers their entire lives. Gen-Z is now entering the workforce in a world controlled by a 3 generations back, rather than by the prior generation, and so that problematic attitude of selfishness that Boomers brought to every aspect of life persists because they're still in power.

I'm right there with you on breaking the cycle, but that starts with gaining the power to have a choice.

Shopping with AI is something I wish actually worked, but instead it doesn't. I've been using ChatGPT and Claude to try to help me cross-shop, solution/ideate, and figure out a path forward with various things: whole home dehumidification / HVAC updates, car mods, whole home water filtration systems, door locks, kitchen and office lighting updates, exercise equipment, et al.

As a whole, that experience has shown me that AI tools are /okay/ (but not "good") at recommending products that I can then go research more on my own. The tools are /TERRIBLE/ at confirming fitment or really doing anything that will give me the confidence to go from "this is interesting" to checking out in a shopping cart. ChatGPT has at least gotten better at bailing out, and now mostly recommends I send an email to a vendor to confirm fitment or that I hire a professional and recommends someone in my area rather than answering my questions well. As an avid DIYer and fairly handy/competent generalists, I have no desire to hire someone to do anything unless I can't help it, I'd rather figure it out on my own but the information to do so is often lacking or hidden away.

My hope was that AI tools could synthesize information from manufacturer's datasheets and install instructions which are hidden away and targeted at pros/distributors, with listing information from retail sites, to verify fitment, compatibility, and fitness for purpose, so that it could make a proper holistic recommendation. I wasn't even able to get it to give me proper torque specs for bolts on my car, but was able to find them by digging far enough in Lemon Manuals (https://lemon-manuals.la/).

On the whole, I would say AI tools are pretty shit at helping me spend my money effectively, and so are ads. It's an exceptional amount of work and time I have to invest to find the right things to buy, and I don't see any progress towards this situation getting better. I think Google is on to something with there being an addressable need, but I have no faith that Gemini and their approach will actually work and be useful. It's mostly a gimmick right now that results in poor outcomes that are only acceptable to people who lack the competence and discernment to know the difference.

Basically, I don't see any impediments to doing anything I need to do with SIP enabled at this point. I'm not sure what GP thinks the impediment is.

> Communication is a tax that you should justify before paying it.

> Every piece of information should have a single source of truth.

- Do as much as possible on a single system and minimize sharing state.

- Recognize that every system is distributed, it's just a question of how and where.

One of the biggest ills I observe with most modern software systems is that we've gone full tilt towards things like microservices which require synchronizing state across multiple interdependent parts. Regardless of how clean the abstractions or how well contracted the APIs, doing all of that copying and state synchronization is going to result in problems: performance problems, cost problems, and synchronicity problems.

It's harder to make the time for new relationships when you're older, and you frankly just have less patience for people who should know better and nearly infinite patience for those who couldn't have known better. Ironically, I'm at a point in my life where what I'd like to do the most is teach younger people useful skills that I've learned, but that's a difficult thing to do as most younger people have no interest in interacting with people significantly older than them, and the social context has changed so much now compared to the past that it's socially frowned upon unless you are directly familial related. I've guest lectured at a local college a few times, and I've actually considered doing full-time teaching after I retire from tech, but the types of things I want to teach aren't really a focus in school (think stuff you'd learn in shop, home-ec, or stuff that was never taught).

I have a young niece I teach things and there's neighborhood kids that come around when I'm doing project car stuff in the driveway, but generally it's fairly disappointing to me how most adults stop wanting to learn by the time they're just 20-25, and people are fully stuck in to their ways by 30. I'm still learning new things every day, and I have never lost my desire to learn or to self-improve. I am a different person than I was 5 years ago or 10 years ago, and I think better than I was. There's no reason I should ever stop getting better and learn new things, but just knowing things doesn't make anything better, it helps to also teach others or use your knowledge to help people. So many folks are just completely resistant to the idea of learning something or accepting help.

The moment we see standardized and batteries-included pathways to integrate search, ideally at no additional cost, in things like LM Studio combined with better tool calling in the local models, you'll quickly see local model performance catch up.