Swizec

I love my Ryobi drill. Bought a set ~10 years ago and it’s still going strong. I charge the battery once every 3 to 4 years. Used it to assemble a bunch of furniture just this weekend. Some of the screw heads are getting a little worn from me being an idiot, but so far haven’t had to replace anything and never needed any more parts than came with the initial beginner set (1 hand drill for screwing, 1 strong drill for drilling, 2 boxes of screw and drill attachments)

A more expensive “proper” set would be completely wasted on me.

Services in kind is a pretty common business practice. You see this a lot at the SMB level especially outside of the US.

Small businesses are cash strapped. So you find someone who needs your services and you need their services. Instead of exchanging cash, you exchange invoices and do the work. You build them, say, a $5000 website, they perform, say, $5000 of landscaping.

At big boy levels this is often structured as “strategic partnership”.

The part that makes it not fraud is that both parties do actually do the work.

You rarely need 150wpm when typing. If you try dictation, you’ll notice that half those words are error correction and checksum bits and just turn taking filler.

I usually convey the same meaning with 80wpm typing. Makes it faster to read too

Maybe I’m just slightly adhd – listening to people talk drives my crazy. Get to the point! Much easier if they type it out

> It seems that if we ultimately want to "move at the speed of thought," it will require speech.

Except for the large majority of people who read, type, and click way faster than they can talk. Especially for visual things it’s way faster to drag a rectangle than to describe what you want.

A lot of us also aren’t linear verbal thinkers. It would take minutes to hours to verbalize concepts we can grasp visually/schematically in seconds.

Great book on the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60149558-visual-thinking

Productivity is easy to define and measure when you have a an outcome you want to achieve. A goal if you will.

Productivity is impossible to define when you don’t know where you’re going.

A lot of companies and teams are finding out real fast they have zero clue where the fuck they’re trying to go or what they want to achieve. Just a bunch of people running in random directions before the funding runs out.

Pick a direction. Then go fast.

> Like May 1st which is snubbed in favor of (non-organized?) Labor Day

Oh don’t even get me started! Labor Day was specifically set for a different day than May 1st to discourage solidarity with international labor movements. Wouldn’t want people to feel a camaraderie with the communists and socialists abroad

March 8 is international women’s day. The most ignored of all holidays by US culture. To an almost hilarious degree.

My partner frequently brags that she’s the only of her friends and coworkers, in 10+ years, who has ever gotten flowers for women’s day. Meanwhile even Uber drivers have wished her a happy women’s day in various heavy foreign accents.

> The 12-month engineering plan that I built 6 months ago - quarterly plan, hiring plan, integration roadmap - is now irrelevant

The 12-month plan was always a fantasy. Even planning 3 months out is too slow. Things change, new information comes in, plans get updated. You have to plan, of course, but never try to stick to the plan.

All hail the prioritized backlog. Toss your ideas on the board, prioritize regularly, work from top down at your preferred velocity.

> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?

As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.

The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.

And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)

I love that the very first thing it showed was wrong

> San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us

I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

> > Buy the most expensive thing you can afford.

> For everything or specific products?

I mean, it depends? You probably dont need gold laced toilet paper but a pair of shoes that lasts 10 years instead of 2 years is probably worth it.

> companies are extracting every ounce of value they can from budget offerings, usually by sacrificing quality to drive down cost

I grew up poor. Not like destitute or anything, we had food and all the necessary basics, but there were 3 of us sharing a 50m^2 apartment on a single income with a dad who wouldn’t pay child support. So it was kinda tight.

Now I’m sorta upper middle class in SFBA. There’s 2 of us sharing 1500sqft, each saving almost 2x/year than my parents salary was back when times were tough. The fear of no-money never quite leaves you.

Here’s what I learned: Buy the most expensive thing you can afford. Use that thing until it dies. Do regular maintenance.

Thought I was super clever when I figured that out, but it’s just the Vimes Economic Theory of Boots – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Also never try to keep up with the joneses or buy things just for status. Unless you can leverage that status into financial opportunities.

> Don't you get dinged as a slow performer?

No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning.

Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem.

Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.

> I basically write what I think/speak

Me too. Try speech to text one day, you may find that you'll use 2x the words than you do with a typed vomit draft. I was surprised

I write a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time.

Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.

Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)

Then write it down.

You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”

It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.

> Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output.

My high school professors had a really good solution to this:

Minimum word lengths but you have to write the essay in class by hand. You have 2 periods.

Some of us still write a lot but having limited time and space (4 pages) really put a hard limit without saying so. In higher classes they started saying “I’m gonna stop reading after 3 pages so make sure you get to the point”

> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.

Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace.

Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal.

> The Stasi would be the obvious cultural context.

There is also the rather famous example of how earlier census data was used in the 40’s.

Once the government has your data, they have it. The next generation of representatives may not follow all the same rules and norms

> You're wasting a ton of tokens doing that though.

My time is worth more than tokens. I’m thinking of maybe creating some .md files to save me time in code review. If I do it right, it’s going to cost more in tokens because the robots will do more.

> How do you collect these stats?

Cursor dashboard. I know they're incentivized to over-estimate but feels directionally accurate when I look at recent PRs.

> Are you mostly using the Composer model?

Don’t really think about it. I think when I talk to it through Slack, cursor users codex, in my ide looks like it’s whatever highest claude. In Github comments, who even knows

> I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations.

I looked at some stats yesterday and was surprised to learn Cursor AI now writes 97% of my code at work. Mostly through cloud agents (watching it work is too distracting for me)

My approach is very simple: Just Talk To It

People way overthink this stuff. It works pretty good. Sharing .md files and hyperfocusing on various orchestrations and prompt hacks of the week feels as interesting as going deep on vim shortcuts and IDE skins.

Just ask for what you want, be clear, give good feedback. That’s it

Yes I even used to do lucid dreaming. These days best I can do is wake up and stop dreams on command.

I also regularly experience sleep paralysis. That took a lot of work to get used to.

> NDEs happening under monitored conditions (operating tables)

I had general anesthesia 10 days ago. There was no NDE, felt like they flicked an off switch then turned me back on a few hours later.

They wheeled me from the prep room towards the OR, opened the big door, and then I was in a different room waking up from anesthesia. That’s it.

> let's be real, undergraduate class sizes numbers in the hundreds, for almost every first year class. I don't think it's possible to administer that

Our first year class was about 250 people. It was fine.

By the 4th year, class sizes were a much more manageable 30 to 50.

You get maybe 10 to 15 minutes with the professor (usually more in later years), they ask 3 questions with some followup. That’s 1 work week for the professor. And less than half the students even make it that far for every exam season (3 per school year) so you’re looking at something like 3 days of work. It’s fine.

It does! That’s why you can ask to be evaluated by a commission of professors.

If you don’t pass after 3 tries, commission is mandatory.

You also have a paper trail of written exams and midterms to back you up. If you keep getting good grades and failing the oral, people will find that obviously suspicious.

Honestly the only times I had any trouble in the orals were the exams where I baaaaarely passed the written. Usually oral feels like the chill easy part compared to written because you can have a back-n-forth with the professor.

When I was in college, your grade fully depended on the oral exam/debate with the professor. Everything else was but the entry ticket.

Not sure anyone even attempted to cheat in that scenario. And the conversations were usually great, although very stressful for us cramming types

> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?

Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.

Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.

Screenshot in that tweet says 13 months FYI

Gonna echo that I love my Peak Design backpack. Only backpack I’ve ever owned that delighted me so much I told others and showed it off.

The design is a little dorky, especially now that every techbro in SF has one, but my god that thing has pockets and little details in all the right places. Been using mine for years and looks almost new.

One downside of high quality gear: Velomacchi (motorcycle bags/backpacks) seems to have gone out of business. Been using their stuff for almost 10 years. Feels indestructible, works great, but I’m never getting a replacement and I guess any warranty lasts only as long as the company …