LapsangGuzzler

Yeah, tbh I’m more interested in that parent looked around and didn’t see any signal in their normal internet hangout spots or found it weird that they hadn’t heard of SBF and immediately came to the conclusion that it’s a government conspiracy. Maybe the average victim doesn’t hang out on Reddit? That seems just a little less out there than the alternative theory posted.

So US intelligence propped up a kid on the spectrum to take money from huge venture capital firms while playing video games during the pitch meetings and running this billion-dollar company on quickbooks, in such a successful way as to remove any trace that they were involved at all? All to launder money? If the goal was to launder money, why not just operate clandestine wallets like every other organized criminal and why wouldn’t they put some sort of guardrails in place to not let the firm blow up? If it’s a government front, wouldn’t someone on the inside be like “maybe let’s not put our name on an NBA arena and pay these huge celebrity endorsements and Super Bowl ads”? How would they be smart to pull this off without detection but dumb enough to let it all blow up?

There’s just no part of this theory that adds up to me.

Echo chambers are very, very real and it’s easy to get caught up when everyone around you is drinking the kool-aid.

I moved to a new city a couple years ago and met up with some other devs as a way to make new friends. There were 4 or 5 of us going out for beers and the discussion inevitably turned to crypto. I’ve been a skeptic for many years and when asked about my crypto holdings, I politely said that I wasn’t invested or interested.

One guy in particular kept telling me that I was going to get left behind and that I really needed to buy in before it was too late. I told him that I didn’t trust the market and he went on about how corrupt the Fed is. He was really awkward, and at times, emotional about it.

Needless to say, friends were not made that night and I’m glad that the peer pressure aspect doesn’t bother me because a lot of people would cave in that situation.

That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can.

Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.

I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.

“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this.

Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.”

Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m willing to pay for it at some point. If the answer is “no”, then sometimes I just don’t even do it.

People can’t even be bothered to think critically about the product situations they put themselves, and I’m sure these people are intelligent in many other aspects of their lives, but this is such a simple concept that I don’t understand how people, especially tech professionals, struggle with.

True. I think there’s an argument to be made that a market which seeks AI-generated content of specific people isn’t exactly looking for basic entertainment.

If traditional adult content isn’t stimulating enough that you need to seek fake video of $CELEBRITY, then that’s a pretty solid indicator that there’s a problem

That’s not how addiction tends to work, unfortunately.

I’d buy a maxed out MacBook Pro, get the reimbursement approved, then return it for a refund.

Ehhh maybe. I’m very much in favor of a 30-hour workweek situation, but hesitant about the 1-hour-per-day idea.

I sometimes provide feedback as a senior engineer that gets corrected because there was context that I wasn’t given. It’s nobody’s fault but it’s a recognition that we all have a responsibility to understand our systems deeply in order to solve hard problems and I’m not sure that 1 hour per day gets you there.

This just is not true. The amount of admin work per deal has perhaps come down, but agents work with much higher volume because deals fall through so fast now.

We looked at almost 2 dozen houses compared to my parents that looked at 2 houses in 2004.

Yeah, but a crucial part of getting those listings from him involved talking through the ways in which the house might have problems that weren’t disclosed, etc. Home listings are ads and it’s great to have someone who knows how to call BS when I don’t. There are so many tricks in home listings that can trip buyers up and that’s not an easily Googleable problem.

As far as agents you’ve worked with, that’s partially on you for choosing to work with bad people. I had several agents and I wasn’t afraid to drop them when I found the one that worked for me. Given that 87% of agents quit in the first 5 years, I definitely suspect my agent was top of his field, which is why he got my business.

I disagree with this. My agent basically had to always be on-call to send me listings that we could go see and offer to place calls at odd hours so we get everything scheduled since houses move so fast now.

My agent basically picked up all of that admin for me and I never once questioned his commission. Buying a house is basically a part-time job for the buyer now and being able to respond instantly is so important.

The job has changed, just like all jobs have, but good agents get shit done because the market is so competitive. Real estate is a very high-turnover industry with little long-term stability for those that don’t absolutely kill it.

This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will.

It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.

True, but you always have opportunity to refinance once rates come back down.

I’ve been seeing Crystal pop up more and more lately, I want to dive back into that again.

> I'll just keep renting, I guess, since it makes no difference.

There’s no way that the tax burden offsets the equity you would build by owning property vs renting.

95% of my mortgage payment goes toward paying down principal on the loan, which is essentially value I get to keep. Not to mention that my housing costs are much more fixed compared to rent.

Paying rent provides zero value retention in the long run, its only real benefit is flexibility.

Voters ultimately have to pay those taxes and politicians want to get reelected, so there’s a definite check there.

The Strong Towns YouTube channel makes many similar points. Suburban construction in the US is terribly inefficient and wasteful in the long run by maximizing the convenience auto accessibility at the expense of everything else. If infrastructure had a technical debt equivalent, it would be suburban planning.

> Folks were sharing what they thought worth sharing, mostly to gain more attention.

This is what influencer culture does. There’s very little value actually shared on LI nowadays, most valuable content for me comes from tech-specific groups and a lot of that is just aggregated from newsletters.

> But the divisiveness they employ makes them a political distraction. We need workers’ rights in law for everyone. Not just those who are in a union.

And how do you propose we align around such things? It seems like you’d need to organize your labor pool and possibly position yourself to bargain collectively, perhaps?

Technology suffers from the same dogmatic, performative rhetoric that we see in modern politics. By hyping or rejecting the tech du jour, we are ostensibly participating in a political discussion around how we think or want the future to play out. This is true for languages, frameworks, companies, etc. This happens because when something big like AI comes out, there’s a whole group of people rushing to cash in on the change.

It’s honestly not that dissimilar to conspiracy theory culture in this respect, and it can be hard to have a nuanced and thoughtful conversation around things we don’t really when there are a lot of people invested in one particular outcome.

6-7 years is a pretty reasonable amount to get out of a consumer electronic device. Hardware still makes large gains over that period of time and Apple doesn’t brick those old devices , you can still run them for years on out-of-service OS versions.

That’s just not equivalent to a Microsoft subscription fee, which presumably bricks the device as soon as you stop paying. Not to mention that I’m lucky if I get 3 years out of a stock windows machine that has whatever Lenovo surveillance tool running on it.

> Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds

There’s no guarantee of this happening whatsoever. We’ve already seen private companies gut internal training programs in favor of increased hiring of experienced people and this is only going to continue.

Economies have to provide work in order to facilitate consumption. If there are a handful of people making all of the money and gutting pay and job security to the core (i.e. improving efficiency), people are going to start rejecting the system wholesale and it’s not going to be pretty.

The French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum, once people lost all hope of having a semblance of a decent standard of living, they didn’t just let rich keep on living, did they?

There’s nothing wrong with calling out a company for putting out shoddy work during a contentious labor strike.

Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.

Nobody aspires to peak as a junior software engineer even though they mostly just do small, easily automated tasks. Is that a valid reason to completely gut a set opportunities that provide a foot in the door to something bigger?

It’s an inevitable outcome of a culture so focused on age. I watch twitch streamers in their 20’s talking about how they’re old already. Narcissism isn’t just a social phenomenon spread online, I think it actively contributes to many public health concerns we’re seeing today.

> Things are rarely binary.

Things are remarkably binary in capitalism. Try pitching a VC on a startup concept that’s about more than money and see how far it gets you.

Or hit up just a few of hundreds of thousands laid off in the industry over the last year and ask them how important money is to them.

People who talk about wishing they hadn’t focused so much on the money are the ones who have it. Such tone-deaf takes are only possible once you’ve secured yourself against the system. The rest of us dream to one day be in a place to say such stupid things.