diob

Funny enough I find LLMs useful for fixing the "death of a program" issue. I was consulting on a project built offshore where all the knowledge / context was gone, and it basically allowed me to have an AI version of the previous team that I could ask questions of.

I could ask questions about how things were done, have it theorize about why, etc.

Obviously it's not perfect, but that's fine, humans aren't perfect either.

This feels less like a dev-specific crisis and more like a timeless human pattern. We romanticize the past and nostalgia makes us believe what we loved is “dying.” In reality it’s not gone, just changed and harder to recognize from our old vantage point because of our own bias.

Yeah, the journey to stimulants for me was long and painful, with a lot of procrastination on my part. And now even having them prescribed it is a pain dealing with the bureaucratic / expensive nightmare of USA health insurance.

Yes! I've studied Japanese for years and read numerous novels in it each year, yet I couldn't physically write to save my life.

But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).

Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.

Recognition vs recall.

Reminds me of how movies / shows these days have gotten so dark, when in the past even dark scenes were often lit in such a way as to show details.

What does that mean?

I'm not sure what you mean, do you mean resources aren't finite?

Correlation is not causation. I think the reality is infinitely more complex, given how many huge changes coincided with the launch of ChatGPT.

Sometimes I mourn not finishing my astronomy degree, but ultimately I suppose I went the right direction.

Interesting. I had to stop taking sertraline because of the bruxism. I've been debating going back though, it did wonders for my anxiety / mood.

Exactly, it's quite an enabler, as one of the biggest issues for folks is not wanting to ask questions for fear of looking inadequate. Now they have something they can ask questions of without outside judgement.

Yeah, given you bump into a different coffee shop every 100ft in Melbourne, I'd be surprised if tea was winning.

Maybe I’m just too deep into coffee at this point, but unless yaupon has different origins, processes, or varietals, I don’t really see folks in the specialty coffee world making the switch.

That said, it is interesting, and I’d definitely give it a try.

Some people do drink coffee just for the caffeine—but those folks aren’t usually worried about beans or brew methods. They’re just as likely to grab an energy drink or whatever’s convenient.

But for a lot of us, coffee’s more than that. There’s a whole culture around it, and I don’t see that going away anytime soon.

Then again, I'm deep into coffee, so I'm probably biased.

You’re missing the point. It’s not a simple ‘high taxes bad, low taxes good’ binary—it’s a spectrum. The U.S. has a tax structure that allows wealth to concentrate at the top while failing to enforce competition, which actually stifles innovation. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan—despite having higher taxes—consistently drive innovation.

Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.

The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.

People underestimate how much our regressive tax structure and lax antitrust enforcement are holding back innovation. If we didn’t allow such massive wealth concentration, we'd see more competition and breakthroughs.

This is what I did.

My parents also told me college doesn't matter, just the degree (which was their way of saving money). Not that they paid a dime anyways, they just always felt comfortable lying to me if it saved them any amount of trouble.

Trump is someone who prioritizes political convenience over ideological consistency. If it served his goals, I wouldn’t be surprised if he found a way to disarm opponents while ensuring his loyalists remained armed. This kind of selective enforcement is not unprecedented in history—authoritarian leaders often secure control by disarming opposition groups while maintaining force among their supporters.

For example, in 1933, after coming to power, the Nazi regime implemented firearm restrictions that disproportionately impacted political opponents, such as communists and Jewish citizens, while allowing pro-Nazi paramilitary groups to remain well-armed. Similarly, in modern autocratic states like Venezuela, the government has imposed strict gun control while arming loyalist militias. The pattern is clear: when a leader seeks to consolidate power, they often weaken the opposition’s access to weapons rather than banning them outright.

Even if large numbers of civilians were armed, that alone wouldn't be enough to stop an authoritarian shift. The U.S. military possesses overwhelming firepower, intelligence capabilities, and infrastructure to suppress resistance. If the military backed Trump fully, any opposition would likely be crushed. But more importantly, authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive through sudden, dramatic force—it seeps in gradually. A slow erosion of rights, institutions, and norms makes it difficult for people to recognize the turning point until it’s too late. By the time armed resistance seemed justified to most, it would be disorganized, reactionary, and likely ineffective.

It's because coding interview questions aren't so much assessing job skills as much as they are thinly veiled IQ tests.

I think if it was socially acceptable they'd just do the latter.

Yeah, a lot of folks think the USA is untouchable and "it can't happen here", but so many other countries felt the exact same way.

You're fine until one day, you aren't. There's no magical barrier making the USA immune to things other nations have experienced.

I used to think everyone got migraines everyday, then I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. Hardly a thing for me anymore now that I use cpap, but I dealt with them constantly until my senior year in college.

But it reminds me how we only really know our own reality, and it's easy to assume our experience as "normal".

Working memory being terrible is one of the biggest issues I experience with my ADHD.

I forgot why I went somewhere, or worse I do something different upon arrival.

It's absolutely willfully omitted. I guarantee 0 evidence of anything will ever come out, just shock headlines to make it seem like they're doing something.

I have a love / hate relationship with legacy projects. They're a fun puzzle, but often times the client has suddenly realized it's not possible to reach X and then I'm called in to make X possible. It can burn me out a bit.

Yeah, I appreciate the link to the source / study.

There's always money to be made from things failing or instability unfortunately. There's a reason they want to cause the economy to crash.

Wow, thanks for this. I can relate to this instability, but I'd never seen or heard of this follow on study.

This seems similar to the broken window fallacy.

Improbable is probably how a lot of citizens of countries have felt in the past before their savings lost their worth. I'd rather us not be risking it at all.

I'm honestly terrified that they'll turn my savings to some sort of nothing by fucking over our currency.

I don't know how anyone isn't.

Trump resisted handing over power after the 2020 election, and to date, he has faced no significant legal consequences for those actions.

Given that lack of accountability, is it unreasonable to suggest the stakes will be even higher in 2028? If there were no consequences last time, why wouldn’t there be an even greater effort to challenge the outcome, should the need arise?

This isn’t a binary issue of whether the president is all-powerful or powerless. It’s a spectrum, and since 2020, we’ve objectively moved further toward the "all-powerful" end. The absence of meaningful checks and consequences has set a precedent, making it harder to draw the line in the future.