Swizec

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 …

> This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.

Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely.

On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.

> May I ask where you are riding?

San Francisco Bay Area. I never got into motorcycling back in Europe although the roads are lovely, the short riding season felt like a deterrent. Also the extremely long process to get a license.

Here in CA it was almost scary easy to get M certified.

> I high-beamed her and honked. She put her hands in front of her face and came to a dead stop in my lane directly in front of me.

Personally I skip the honking and high beams. Just perform evasive action assuming driver will continue on their current path at roughly their current speed. Swerving behind their path of travel usually works great.

Spooked drivers behave erratically. Very dangerous.

So far I've had 0 serious incidents in ~8 years of riding. A couple close calls when I was being an idiot. So I think my approach is working :)

> or even shocked (as if I appeared from thin air)

Motorcyclists are invisible. Never rely on others seeing you, ride as if they're an obstacle you have to navigate.

You can hide a whole truck behind the A-pillar of modern cars, let alone a motorcycle. At certain angles, human eyes have complete blind spots that we're not aware of because our brain filters them out. Motorcycles fit perfectly into those.

Never hover in people's blind spots. Pass quickly or stay back. Do not drive parallel with another vehicle. Goes for cars too.

When approaching another car perpendicularly (like an intersection), remember that humans lose depth perception because their nose covers one of the eyes. A driver literally cannot tell how far you are. Our usual proxy is the distance between headlights. Motorcyles have 1 headlight so this heuristic doesn't work, but we don't realize that it doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94PGgYKHQ0

> something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service

Sometimes that feeling is the value. Sure my plants don’t care if they live in a cheap plastic pot off Amazon or a nice pot from the overpriced gardening store selling at a 200% markup, but I care. Sitting in my balcony surrounded by cheap disposable clutter feels different than enjoying the outdoors amidst quality vibes.

> Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.

You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.

The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.

Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.

> Profit is the money showing your business is sustainable.

Notice I said you should have nominal profits.

> Ah yes. Shareholders like money. And not, you know, basic accounting like "we need money to actually pay salaries, pay for equipment and offices etc. without perpetually relying on seeming endless investor money".

All of these are costs that reduce your profits.

A maximally profitable business fires all employees except shareholders, closes every office, stops all RnD, and leases IP or real estate to others on long-term deals that never need to be renegotiated.

> Wheras only profit should matter

Profit is money you couldn’t figure out how to spend. During growth, you want positive operating margins with nominal profits. When the company/market matures, you want pure profits because shareholders like money. If you can find a way to invest those profits in new areas of growth, that’s better.

> I 'm currently of the opinion that humans should be laser focused on the data model

yes. good programmers talk about data structures, bad programmers talk about code

> The people who typically have the most negative things to say about AI fall into camp #2 where AI is automating a large part of what they considered their art while enabling people in group #1 to iterate on their product faster.

I am in both camps. Always have been.

Code janitors about to be in high demand. We’ve always been pretty popular with leadership and it’s gonna get even more important.

Treat code design and architecture as the thing that lets your slop canons (90% of engineers even pre-ai) move fast without breaking things

My output is org velocity.

> That's it. He's a colleague. Not a mentor

You're missing a very important aspect of how managers impact your career: Opportunities.

The manager's job is to find you impactful work that a) gets you promoted and b) challenges you in the ways you want or need to grow.

> under the Predictive Processing model there is a comprehensive explanation of human cognition as hierarchical predictors

It’s plausible!

But keep in mind humans have been explaining ourselves in terms of the current most advanced technology for centuries. We used to be kinda like clockwork, then a bit like a steam engine, then a lot like computers, and now we’re just like AI.

That’s why you blow a gasket or fuse, release some steam, reboot your life, do brain dump, feel like a cog in the machine, get your wires crossed, etc

> I'm not convinced that "actual logic and thought" aren't just about inferring what comes next statistically based on experience.

Often they are the exact opposite. Entire fields of math and science talk about this. Causation vs correlation, confirmation bias, base rate fallacy, bayesian reasoning, sharp shooter fallacy, etc.

All of those were developed because “inferring from experience” leads you to the wrong conclusion.

> Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations

If you want to be remembered, live a life worth remembering.

> At some point, I think its okay to just use account age instead of even asking

Bet you there’s already a thriving grey market for old accounts with organic history.

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.

But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.

Make sure you fit the rocks first.

Great now you have a strategy (one less MBA to hire). You still need to do the strategy.

The doing is where most of the time goes. Strategy docs are cheap, my intern can give you 5 of those by tomorrow.

It wasn’t thanks for highlighting. Can be hard to tell online because there’s a lot of people genuinely suggesting everyone should build their own software on the fly

> Well, now it'll take them 5 minutes to rewrite their code to work around your change

You misunderstand. It will take them 2 years to retrain 5000 people on the new process across hundreds of locations. In some fields, whole new college-level certifications courses will have to be created.

In my specific experience it’s just a few dozen (maybe 100) people doing the manual process on top of our software and it takes weeks for everyone to get used to any significant change.

We still have people using pages that we deprecated a year ago. Nobody can figure out who they are or what they’re missing on the new pages we built

> including totally trashing the old implementation and creating an entirely new one from scratch that matches all the requirements

Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?

When your software supports 8, 9, 10 or more zeroes of revenue, "trash the old and create new" are just about the scariest words you can say. There's people relying on this code that you've never even heard of.

Really good post about why AI is a poor fit in software environments where nobody even knows the full requirements: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-telemetry-spec-sur...

> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH

“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”

2 years pass

“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”

narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.

> Does it? Reverting a bad deploy is not only about running the previous version.

It does. We’ve tried. No it’s not as easy as running the previous version.

I have written about this: https://swizec.com/blog/why-software-only-moves-forward/

> Expect to pay me for the availability outside work hours.

We pay people enough to care about the software they ship.

Don’t want to be called outside of work hours? Make sure your code works. Simple.

> You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write

I tell every hire new and old “Hey do your thing, we trust you. Btw we have your phone number. Thanks”

Works like a charm. People even go out of their way to write tests for things that are hard to verify manually. And they verify manually what’s hard to write tests for.

The other side of this is building safety nets. Takes ~10min to revert a bad deploy.

> New features and better UX is more useful for the users of many systems than fixing tail frequency bugs

If nobody notices a bug, does it matter?

There's whole classes of technically bugs that simply never happen under the real world operating constraints of a software system. The infamous example is that memory leak story from the Microsoft blog[1] – you don't need to fix memory leaks on a rocket that goes boom (or runs out of fuel) after 5 minutes of flight time. Just add the extra memory chip and move on.

Engineering is all about building to real world constraints. Don't build a suspension bridge where a sturdy plank will do.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...

> 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. > $86 dollars. > Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.

We almost never go to regular theaters anymore. IMAX feels worth it for something like F1 or Top Gun where it’s all about the visual spectacle, otherwise meh.

We go to Alamo Drafthouse a lot tho. A little pricey but the experience of watching a movie in comfy seats over a fairly decent restaurant dinner is fantastic for certain kinds of movies. Peaky Blinders was the most recent. Tommy Shelby paired with a good cocktail or two, fantastic.

Also I don’t know how Alamo achieves this, but people there are really good about noise and other bullshit. I think it’s because they do in fact kick people out for being annoying.

Because the operator told the computer not to do something so the computer decided to do it. This is a huge security flaw in these newfangled AI-driven systems.

Imagine if this was a "launch nukes" agent instead of a "write code" agent.

> And worth noting that in a sane world, a broad 10% productivity improvement across industry would be a once-in-a-lifetime, headline-making story, not a disappointment

The biggest risk in software development is building the wrong thing. Digging yourself into a hole 10% faster is _worse_. You now have more backtracking to do!