justonceokay

It doesn’t confuse me at all. But maybe that’s just because I come from a family where people disagree and try to undermine each other as sport

It doesn’t confuse me at all. But maybe that’s just because I come from a family where people disagree as sport

Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships

Many people in life are underutilized and ready to step up to challenges if given the opportunity.

Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way

When the risk is the benefit things get weird

Yes, things are infinitely clearer. I think I underestimated just how much space in my brain I needed to keep up with my own company’s software, let alone keep up with the state of the art in AI, source control, IAAS, AWS services, Linux patches, etc.

My brain is full of knowledge about technical things still, but all the know-how I have about what caulking to use in which scenarios is going to be useful 30 years from now. The know-how I used to have about my teams proprietary sorting algorithm used to be invalidated almost daily. That is a lot of mental overhead to keep all those diffs

It’s not really a story with a beginning and an end, but I guess I just got so fed up with how anxious the industry was making me. I put up a good fight for over 10 years at different companies and in different roles, but just couldn’t find the right place.

So I quit and became a bartender for about a year. Fun, but the hours are horrible. Then while doing that I got my massage licence, mostly just on a lark. Then I worked at a candle factory for some years, and found I enjoy that kind of work. Apartment maintenance was mostly a compromise I made, because apartments are a much more stable career than manufacturing in Seattle.

So now I’ve got my toolkit and I debug and maintain all day just like I used to, but in meatspace instead of virtually. I like being a part of my local community and work with a great team. Some days I touch poop, but I never feel like my brain is being taken over by useless facts about software that just makes people’s lives worse.

I went through this and ended up becoming (through a long and twisted path) a maintenance super for an apartment building near my house. Maybe an overreaction but every day is a blessing compared to the mental anguish I experienced making corporate software

That sounds nice but in practice it’s probably not super helpful. Yes you could make a special case for reducing “+” over integers. But in python you can generally not promise that all the inputs are strictly integers, and you can’t even promise that your “+” function has no side effects.

That’s very nice but that isn’t the price you would sell it for, especially if you were trying to make it your livelihood

If you watch The Price is Right episodes from the 80s, it is clear that household items have only had mild inflation. Many items are prices a little lower than today but not outrageously so.

On the other hand, the quality of the items is often much nicer. So someone might win a $500 desk, but that desk is hand-made out of hardwood. Today you can still buy a $500 desk but it will be IKEA quality. A product of comparable quality would cost many $k

Airline tickets are a very clear-cut example of this. Tickets are cheaper than they were in the ‘90s (even with inflation) but you get a lot less for that ticket than you did 30 years ago

When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head

When I was in school 15 years ago, BGP was described to me as a sketchy game of telephone.

“Oh yeah you want to route to a 129.37.x.x address? I know a guy who knows a guy. Said he’s the owner of the whole 129./ block. In fact, he’s my personal friend. I mean friend’s friend… Why don’t I just take those pesky packets off your hands and we walk away”

Has anything fundamentally changed?

I think you overestimate the number of people that can work from home. For society to function the majority of us have to actually go to a physical place and do something real with our hands and our time.

So did you take them and have a bad time? Because they definitely work for me and I doubt a placebo could have such a large effect on the 48 hour stomach pains I used to get alongside my frequent panic attacks.

I find it funny that people complain about emotional blunting when that is the entire purpose of the drug. I would prefer not to live on the razors edge ever again. I’ve had chronic anxiety and depression ever since I was a child, though.

You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“

The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision

Classic xkcd on this topic https://xkcd.com/882/

To quote Billy Joel: “you can get what you want or you can just get old”

There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.

Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to

Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.

Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.

Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.

It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.

Tends to look strange, though spiraling around the edge twice before doing the usual lines will make your life easier, as you mentioned.

There’s the cost of supplies used during transport. Also the cost of maintaining potential supplies like blood even if they go unused. EMTs may make $23 but they are also getting benefits and have other overhead, making their real hourly cost probably closer to $50/hr minimum. There’s insurance, which I bet is out the wazoo expensive for ambulance. Ambulances have to be maintained and I would guess have much more regular service than your car at home. Ambulances have to be stored somewhere and secured-access parking isn’t cheap. Many ambulance rounds-trips can be well over an hour considering so many of us live far away from urban centers.

Is it $2600? Probably not. But I think you are low-balling pretty significantly.

Put another way, just getting a plumber to vibe to your house is gonna cost you $200 easy. It’s within reason that an ambulance ride might cost much more than that.

Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era

Where are you that the average person wants to go back to farming?

Anecdotally I know of an engineer in the Excel team. They would keep around a list of low priority security bugs. When they wanted to do improvements on the system they would attach it to one of the security bugs “nearby“ because the change would become approved much more easily than just fixing the problem itself.

How do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?

One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.

Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.