cushychicken

"You put more value on every minute. You do. I mean I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself, but it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute of playing with the guys and being with the kids and everything."

I have a t shirt with a photo portrait of Warren with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" on it. I almost always get a comment from a fellow Zevon fan when I wear it.

Plenty of people would have come away from this interaction without the level of introspection the author had, and thought, “Man, that SVP is a jerk.” This can add up into frustration and, given time, turnover.

My claim wasn’t that SVP was ineffective - the point was clearly made and understood.

My claim is that it would have taken slightly more words to get that point across without any reputational downside to the SVP.

Whether that cost is worth paying is a question of culture and style.

You're inferring a lot of emotion into this writing that I simply did not read.

I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.

www.onions.com

I’m not usually about hereditary succession, but this is an exception I could get behind.

YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".

Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.

The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?

YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?

I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.

I’m with Tom on a lot of what he says. This is a nice reminder to take another shot at this.

https://cushychicken.github.io/python-guis-for-heretics/

People tend to forget that the US government will pay out the wazoo to achieve things that are one-time successes.

Consider things like Operation IVY BELLS, or Project Azorian.

Now consider that same mindset applied to a long term investment. The possibilities are pretty limitless.

Facts.

Source: me - TS/SCI, several interesting SAPs, contractually bound to not say a word about the details til death.

I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.

I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.

I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.

The work I did absolutely had positive impact on the world.

People rush to criticize and write off working in the defense sector, but it can be a very rewarding place to work. There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)

It’s hard to judge accurately from the outside. That’s the nature of classified work: by definition, you can’t know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve jumped with both feet.

This is equally true of successes as well as challenges.

I did some cool, very impactful stuff in that job. I will go to jail for a long, long time if I ever go into detail about it.

Writeup here: https://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/

We had a ton of fun doing it. I loved it. A lot of why I loved it was because it reaffirmed how much I love my work.

I want to do something similar in my late 30s / early 40s, now that my girlfriend is now my wife, and we're starting a family together.

Most people don’t behave this way or have these kinds of problems.

A reminder: tech jobs are their own kind of filter bubble. It’s worth taking a step out of this space every now and again to see what other people are thinking and worrying about.

It’s one of the things I love about my rec hockey games. People there have much more tangible worries: when they’re gonna fix the dock at their vacation homes, if the girl they texted will text back, when will their kid grow out of their threenager phase, etc.

Most of the world is not nearly as preoccupied with AI as this community is. It’s refreshing to see when you can access it.

I suspect that part of it is that people don’t have enough time to mentally incorporate the fix.

Is it weird to submit the MR later, after people have had a chance to digest the issues?

This is a good principle to maintain, I think.

I'm not a professor, but I manage a team of about a dozen people. The maxim I have is: "You're responsible for anything that hits git."

Don't care if the LLM generated it, or the LLM told you if it's a good idea. If you commit it, you are endorsing it as a good idea - so you're the one I'm going to ask about it. I see the same principle at work in your pedagogy.

> I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students.

This hits. Especially this part:

> and really, what could I do if I were?

My completely unsolicited opinion: you're doing a responsible thing by teaching these students how to use AI as a reference, and keeping them honest about not using it as a substitute for their own critical thinking.

“AI is too expensive right now” is an accurate title. Plenty of things could change in the future to change that. Off the top of my head:

* end user pricing

* breakthroughs in model efficiency

* better chips to run models

Any one of these things is easily possible in the next three years. Probably sooner.

This, I think, is the LLM/vibe coded app’s current place to shine.

Most internal systems don’t need massive concurrency or redundancy. It’s a webapp that reduces coordination cost between 20ish people. That’s something you can typically vibe code and deploy for ten bucks a month, and create real value.

It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.

My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!

”…for Shai-Hulud!!!”

https://www.sauron.systems/

POC generally means “you can demonstrate unintentional behavior”.

“Exploit” means you can gain access or do something malicious.

It’s a fine line. Author’s point is that the LLM was able to demonstrate some malfeasance, not just unintended consequence. That’s a big deal considering that actual malicious intent generally requires more knowhow than raw POC.

...and look how nice it sounds it live in Russia.