jeremy151

I'm in my mid, approaching latter 40's, and have had significant change to how I think and communicate in the last couple years. I always struggled to communicate in the moment unless I was recalling rote rehearsed things, which didn't get me super far. Outside of that, I could eventually communicate something on the fly, but it was real rough, meandering, and did not instill confidence. I mostly got things done thru async methods, and stumbled through things like meetings.

In the last couple years, my skills here have vastly improved. My speaking circuit as it were, is able to run somewhat on its own now and without the direct pipe into my thinking it always required before, so my thinking is free to do other stuff, like keep a mental model of the audience, think about where the conversation is going, what questions someone might have, etc.

Reflecting, I have a couple theories on what happened. First, I have spent the last 10 years reading aloud to my kids at bedtime. That started as simple Seuss like stuff, but of course now is full-on literature. When you're reading aloud, you really have to work that muscle of speaking "behind" where your eyes actually are on the page, because you're also processing "who is this, what is their emotion I have to inflect, what voice was I using for this character, how do I pronounce this crazy word" etc. I think if you do anything daily for 10 years, you're gonna gain some proficiency.

Second, when my kids started taking music lessons, I figured I needed to set an example for practice and commitment, so I started learning piano, and practicing daily. Similar deal, it requires the same type of buffer where your thinking can work ahead of where your other thread is playing. Reading the music, processing the shapes, dynamics, tempo, emotion, remembering how you handle that difficult thing. Again, doing it daily, it builds some ability that I bet contributes across domains.

Without realizing it at first, the same patterns started to come out in meetings, and presentations, I could work ahead of what I was saying, I had way more buffer to process and deal with things that are the "nice to haves" above and beyond just getting the basic words out.

I suppose my long-winded point, is that it's way more developable a thing than I ever presumed possible. I always expected I would remain an awkward communicator, and hitting a big skill-up way into my 40's was a real unexpected development. I'm sure there are many other tracks to get there, outside of reading aloud, and learning an instrument.

I am a DIY-er by nature with construction experience, I enjoy it, so when we wanted a bit more outdoor space, we moved from a suburban cul-de-sac to a slightly more rural property on some acreage, and chose an aged luxury home, feeling comfortable generally in my ability to be able to rehab it over time. After all, we're not in any sort of rush, and wanted the kids to experience putting work into the place where they live.

I misjudged the scale. Going from .5 acre to 10 I feel like the amount of time I spent on home and property maintenance before could all be allocated to just one bucket titled "nature." Mowing, whether it's lawn, meadows, trails, tree line, all on different schedules. Trees die, they fall, hang up. The volume of brush, invasive species, pulling it, burning it. When we bought it, I made a mental note: "we'll have to replace the driveway." That driveway is asphalt, and 1000 feet long. The quotes for that alone are in price territory of a luxury vehicle. Irrigation, 12 zones, repairing, winterizing. Septic is another ticking clock. When that goes, you're in for 5 digits. Don't have a suitable secondary location? Engineered system, multiply everything by like 3.

So remove that time from my schedule, that's what I have left for home improvement work.

We're deep into it and really enjoy aspects of it. But if I could talk to my pre-purchase self, I would advise that the scale difference is huge, and consider the amount of time that goes into baseline maintenance when deciding how much of a "fixer upper" to take on, especially when acreage is involved.

So, can... can we do this too?

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I want a Winnebago. Fully equipped, big kitchen, water bed. AM-FM, CD, microwave. Burgundy interior.

These are a great way to spread something you appreciate with the world. I once bought a stack of 30 or so well-used Calvin and Hobbes books and would regularly seed a few every now and then.

Yes, I find it useful while editing regardless of the final rendering. Maybe it's a quirk of how I process information visually, or a holdover from learning to type on an avocado green Selectric.

You're absolutely right! I kid. I'm also a former avid user of the em-dash, but have mostly stopped using it. I've even started replacing em-dash usage with commas, which often results in a slightly awkward, perhaps incorrect, but quaintly artisanal sentence with a LaCroix-like spritz of authenticity.

My double-space-after-a-period though, I will keep that until the end. Even if it often doesn't even render in HTML output, I feel a nostalgic connection to my 1993 high school typing teacher's insistence that a sentence must be allowed to breathe.

My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.

I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.

All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.

In our market we see lots of the use of the word Montessori for marketing value only, when it practice it often means something like: "we have a bunch of wooden toys and a certain aesthetic in our classroom." I've heard these referred to as "Monte-sorta."

I live in an area with PFAS contaminated ground water (which I now aggressively filter.) To me giving blood just kind of makes sense, if there is a class of things that can enter your blood and never leave, and does not replicate on its own, why not perform a regular "oil change" and hopefully help some people at the same time. Some study has been done:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/

The study specifically does not look at the effect on recipients, though the donation centers do not disallow such donations. My presumption is that the donation is a net positive all around. If study comes to show the contrary, I'll certainly revise my approach.

I recently requested this test from my doctor. The lab technician asked if I had requested it or my doctor, and gave a very judgmental "that's what I thought" type response. Ends up I was 95%-tile and put on an aggressive statin therapy, from a risk profile that otherwise didn't determine statin use. The test was easy and (relatively speaking) inexpensive. It helped me in risk stratification in a determinative way.

I should clarify: the billing talk would come out when talking about options. “Let’s try X because insurance will need to see that we tried it before we try Y.” I don’t blame the provider. Navigating insurance still comes up with my direct primary care doc, but it’s not most of the visit. The real value I see is a willingness to take the whole picture into account (not just symptom -> med/specialist) and teach me about how things work and why. I have some complexity in my history for which this helps a lot.

Regarding the patient load discussion elsewhere, our entire family uses this doctor, we’re in for $200/mo but if we added up the interaction time even with me (a more complicated customer) it’s maybe 5 hours a year + some text communications with the MA / prescription wrangling. Their model seems to be all about effective scaling, I hope it is worth it for them, because my experience is vastly improved.

> If you want safe and really high quality medical care you should absolutely have a personal physician you have a personal relationship with, who understands your lifestyle, your risk factors for side effects, and your medical needs deeply. How many Americans have that? Maybe a few dozen?

A bit of a tangent: I have this here in the US, through a model called Direct Primary Care. I pay $50/mo for a single provider, unlimited visits / communication, and highly discounted labs. She makes house calls on occasion. This doctor is working solely in my interest, and has little concern of insurance, except to help me navigate that system should I need a specialist, prior authorization, etc.

I do worry that it's sustainable, but I think there must by a way to scale up this practice of the general practitioner working in the interest of the patient.

My previous doctor was part of a large health system, who also happens to be directly associated with the large regional insurance provider whom my employer supplied to me without another choice. Every 8 minute visit centered around insurance and billing, with my health seeming to be a distant second. It seemed every visit had to end in some kind of prescription or referral, arrived at quickly and without much discussion. It quickly became clear they were not working in my interest, and I sought other options, eventually landing on the Direct Primary Care model. Now I have full 1 hour visits, and someone who seeks to understand what is happening for me completely, not through the lens of a payer.

My previous homeowner was also a vibe maintainer! The difference that I see in this is that the LLM is reasonably at 'expert' level for many of these things. If I sit down with Stevie Wonder and ask him to help me write a song, the resulting song is probably going to be pretty good. Stevie also knows by experience lots of things to avoid, and is intuitively going to help me avoid them unless I instruct him specifically to make a poor choice.

I think there are likely opportunities too to have models or system prompts that cater or adapt to the experience level of the person it's working with. "As you interact with the user, determine their relative level of knowledge and experience. If they seem to be relatively inexperienced with software development, be much more aggressive in helping to warn them about and avoid common pitfalls, bad architectural decisions, and security issues."

I suspect it's probably going to enable a lot of poor quality stuff, but it also may to some degree raise the floor of what's being produced at the same time.

I find tools where I am manually shepherding the context into an LLM to work much better than Copilot at current. If I think thru the problem enough to articulate it and give the model a clear explanation, and choose the surrounding pieces of context (the same stuff I would open up and look at as a dev) I can be pretty sure the code generated (even larger outputs) will work and do what I wanted, and be stylistically good. I am still adding a lot in this scenario, but it's heavier on the analysis and requirements side, and less on the code creation side.

If what I give it is too open ended, doesn't have enough info, etc, I'll still get a low quality output. Though I find I can steer it by asking it to ask clarifying questions. Asking it to build unit tests can help a lot too in bolstering, a few iterations getting the unit tests created and passing can really push the quality up.

I think for me, I'm still learning how to make these tools operate effectively. But even only a few months in, it has removed most all the annoying work and lets me concentrate on the stuff that I like. At this point, I'll often give it some context, tell it what to make and it spits out something relatively close. I look it over, call out like 10 things, each time it says "you're right to question..." and we do an iteration. After we're thru that, I tell it to write a comprehensive set of unit tests, it does that, most of them fail, it fixes them, and them we usually have something pretty solid. Once we have that base pattern, I can have it pattern and extend variants after the first solid bit of code. "Using this pattern for style and approach, make one that does XYZ instead."

But what I really appreciate is, I don't have to do the plug and chug stuff. Those patterns are well defined, I'm more than happy to let the LLM do that and concentrate on steering whether it's making a wise conceptual or architectural choice. It really seems to act like a higher abstraction layer. But I think how the engineer uses the tool matters too.

I think that's a pretty good presumption. Though a Random Orbital filter could be an interesting thing to see.

I live in a city that was a hot zone for this type of contamination in the drinking water due to industrial waste from leather processing buried in the 60’s (shoe scraps treated with scotchgard.) We now have GAC filtering at the municipal supply level that is quite effective and not that expensive. The large beds of carbon last quite a while if I recall correctly. Despite regular testing, everyone I know RO filters their water regardless. For me, it’s because I have no idea what new previously “unknown” contamination will be next discovered, and would rather get out as much as is reasonable.

When the information began to surface I found it interesting the letters on public record going back to the 60’s with people warning that allowing this kind of dumping was a bad idea. Of course being the primary employer to the entire city, the economics won at the time. Since, the cost of cleanup and lawsuits to that company have been massive.

I use a very inexpensive standalone screen that works flawlessly with CarPlay. Under a hundred bucks, works great in my older vehicle.

I think I am exactly the target user for this, it looks great; looking forward to using it. In my case, I only generally work for one client at a time, those clients always pay immediately, and the invoice is generally a formality / record. Being able to generate one, and save/send the resulting file is really all that I need. Nice work.

Maybe start donating blood regularly? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Ahh, interesting, good to know, thank you. I've been outside of that world for a while.

Pantone, a division of X-Rite, is owned by Danaher. Fluke is also owned by Danaher. I have no particular point, other than I found it interesting that the two brands of shared parentage collided spontaneously in conversation.

I use a Sennheiser HME 26-II. I like it because the quality is very good (headphones and microphone), it's comfortable to wear for long periods of time, and the second ear cup can be flipped back off the ear. Sennheiser makes a number of models designed for day-long wear, the models made for air traffic controllers are in my opinion also good in this regard.

Yes, exactly that. I was in live production for some years, that's where I grew to like the simplicity / bullet proof nature of that style. It would be nice if a manufacturer would release a USB headset that allowed monitoring of ones own voice, and a hardware talk switch.

I took this to a bit of an extreme, using a Sennheiser broadcast headset into a USB sound card. I also added a hardware mute button inline, with a big clicky button with which you can easily tell the mute status (and mute/unmute) regardless of which window is up front. It also lets you pipe your own voice back into your ear, which can be a bit more comfortable listening wise. It really takes the guesswork out of quality and makes it much easier to use, especially when you might have to use 4 different conference applications in a day, and can't quickly recall where the mute button is in a particular one.

An aside: I'd be curious to see some statistics on the number of software developers who have an interest in woodworking. I was once in a project meeting that involved two external vendors, and the topic of woodworking came up in casual conversation. It turned out that every technically oriented role in the room was not only interested, but had a wood shop in their home. Something like 8-10 people. There seem to be a number of parallels between development and woodworking, but anecdotally the number of people I've met with an interest in both is very high.

I live in one of the industrial "hot zones" for these chemicals. In the 1960's a local tannery was the main employer in the area, and commanded a great deal of local clout. As a result, they obtained permits to dump industrial waste in various (30+) small dump sites around the area. This waste contained a variety of industrial chemicals, not the least of which was the 3M product Scotchgard, which was used in large quantity to waterproof leather, contains PFAS, and was buried feet from the surface, generally in nondescript forest areas.

A few years ago, when our local water authority began testing for PFAS, they found unusually high numbers specifically around one well-head used to supply municipal water to the area. Instead of disclosing the issue, the authority chose to use that well head only when the demand was high, which excluded times in which the water was tested. If they timed their testing to times of low demand, the numbers were under the EPA recommendation.

With significant grass-roots pressure in the area, many pending lawsuits, and lots of reporting and investigation, the municipality is taking the issue somewhat seriously. GAC filters were installed on the municipal supply, the company considered largely at fault has agreed to pay for the extension of municipal water to some (not all) affected areas that are still served by well water, in which the danger is particularly high. Some cleanups are occurring, while other sites exist under what are now housing developments.

There's story after story here, of people (especially those located in areas served by well water) with a history of cancer after cancer after cancer affecting their entire families. These are folks who after having their water tested, confirmed some of the highest levels ever measured in a water supply.

In all, the whole ordeal has been a wake up call for me, regarding the level of cover-up that happened and in some cases continues to happen surrounding waste disposal, especially for large companies that are considered the "economic life blood" of a given area. Looking over records, people have found strong objections to the practice dating back to the time it happened (some of the warnings eerily prescient) multiple cleanups that were funded but never occurred in the decades that followed, and a continual failure to acknowledge any risk surrounding the practice and dump sites for decades. There was a constant drum beat of "very smart people say that everything is fine."

As for me, my (municipal) water is GAC and RO filtered. I pay close attention to things I would not have considered before, like air quality. It's made me reconsider the source of the foods that I eat. It takes little work to take these precautions, the potential upside is pretty big, and the downside small.

I wonder if in the years to come, we're going to find significant causal links between aspects of our environment and maladies we previously considered a mystery.

The complication is that long term weight loss is functionally a behavioral challenge, and getting human beings to make long term behavioral change is not easy. Sure, maintain calorie balance or deficit and you'll be fine, but it's exceedingly rare that someone will track calories for their entire life. So we're left with either retraining their ability to intuit what they should be eating on a daily basis, and/or eating the types of foods that tend to make this job easier. That's where you start to end up with all the varied advice—it's an attempt to overcome behavior. If everyone had a perfect willpower, obesity would be an easy solve.