koliber

I can see it now. Billboards by the interstate: Attacked by AI? Call 1-800-BIG-BUXX.

I could actually root for this law firm. Their business will only grow.

I found that the time they spend with me, their dad, observing and learning how I do things, impacts them positively.

I don't know if they need it or not, but I do see that they benefit from it. And it feels good too.

> can choose to avoid seeing their children if they want to

The choice is there. It's sad how many people choose to not spend time with kids. But the fact that more people have this choice now than they did in the past makes me conclude that it is not as bleak.

He forgot to talk about hobbies :)

I had a conversation about this topic yesterday with a colleague of mine. We both found some kind of career-family balance, and are continually honing it. However, we both lamented the loss of hobbies.

I don't know if progress made it more hard to spend time with kids, on average.

In older generations, men spent relatively little time with little kids. I don't know if it was social convention or lack of time. Either way, it seems that now a lot more dads are spending time with kids than 2 generations earlier.

I agree that it is hard, but I would not paint a bleak picture.

I don't know anything about tracking your particular illness, but I have tried tracking various things in my life with varying success. Many times I've failed, but then I tried again in different ways. One thing that I noticed is that too often I would try to track too much too rigorously. It would become a burden, I would lose motivation, and I would stop.

For some things, I decided to find a way to do the minimum amount of tracking that is sustainable. One example is fitness. I tried keeping a detailed track of the kinds of exercise I do. I realized it is too much of a burden. So instead, I opted for just noting in my journal whether I did any exercise at all. And it worked. And I realized that I have capacity for more so I started marking whether I did too little, just enough, or a lot. And that was sustainable. And then I built it up some more and for one particular type of exercise, and now I track it thoroughly, while only noting the others. This is now a habit and it seems to have stuck.

So instead of starting with a thorough way of tracking something, start with a minimal way of noting and build up from there.

Most people don't exercise at all. If some of these people draw the wrong conclusion from such a study and start exercising at high intensity, it will still be better than their current couch-potato training protocol.

I watched Short Circuit yesterday. All I can think now is "need input".

Quoting the article:

> A boom in railroad construction, 33,000 miles (53,000 km) of track were laid across the country between 1868 and 1873.

> The railroad industry was the largest employer outside of agriculture and involved large amounts of money and risk. A large infusion of cash from speculators caused spectacular growth in the industry and in the construction of docks, factories, and ancillary facilities. Most capital was involved in projects offering no immediate or early returns.

Sounds like the AI bubble.

I feel that the 1mg pill bottle that I have already is my lifetime supply, given the rate at which I use it.

Appreciate your thoughts. I think if we sat down and talked we would agree on a lot of things.

re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process.

re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits.

re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.

I’ve been mulling a congruent idea.

When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.

We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.

It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.

More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.

I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.

Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?

I read a while back that our brains produce roughly 0.3 mg of melatonin when signaling us to go to sleep. When I occasionally do use melatonin I split a 1mg pill into half or thirds. I find that it works well enough to help me fall asleep. Wondering how the study would look if hwy used 1/2 mg doses.

In theory, you're right. But she talks about how it happens in practice. We can all sit around and talk about how this or that should work in theory, until one day we get a chance to do that one thing. And then most of us shut up because the real world is messy.

> What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle?

Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?

When you are judging something you are judging the whole thing. If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. Even if the rest was decent the chance of it being the best overall is small.

Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.

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It would be relatively easy to build the logic for on-call rotations, and to build the API endpoints for consuming alerts. But add to that the work of also building mobile apps, working with SMS and email infra, and this becomes a non-trivial effort. For a company like Uber it might make sense to dedicate a tiny team to build an in-house solution. For small startup, it still is not worth the hassle to maintain a service like this in house.

Bonus question - how do you alert your team that your home-build PageDuty went down?

I was trying to make a different statement. Everyone will need to become a manager, even ICs. But in the past, many engineers shied away from management, for various reasons. Now, it will need to change.

Managing people is hard because of all the things that make us human. Managing AI will be simpler as we won't need to deal with some of those things.

Separately,

> "By using AI we get all the benefits of workers but with none of the drawbacks of humans."

To be fair, I did not write that. You are projecting your thoughts on my post.

Anyone know of resources like this but for capital markets? Things that would allow engineers new to trading equities, options, FX, bonds, and commodities to learn about different flows, market structure, common architectures, and other things that normally you learn from years of experience.

Every software developer will be a manager of one or more AI agents. Managing AI agents will turn out to be surprisingly similar to managing people, except for the drama, illness, and tragedy.

No. The cost of one programmer’s hour of work compared to the increase in price of RAM is not very big. One is a variable cost one is fixed.

It’s a funny comparing commutes back then to commutes now. But it does not take a lot of imagination to see that back then people did not isolate themselves with newspapers while buying food at the grocery store, standing on the crosswalk or in a myriad of their situations where we have opportunity for micro interactions with other people. In other words, looking only at commutes is nit picking.

How much RAM did the local machine have?

I was not thinking about real $ costs, but rather the cost of the hours of the people who had to deal with this BS.

Over the past 9 months I've been advising one small client of mine on AI adoption, and engineering maturity in general. They have a team of 5 engineers. One very capable lead and 4 ICs. They did not use AI at all before.

It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable.

One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade.

We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset.

One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs.

If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI.

In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.

I'm being a little facetious when I write this, but bear with me:

Let's say I have daily backups, and get 10x done each day by being reckless and risking an "rm -rf", and let's say there's a 1% chance of an "rm -rf". I break even after 2 days of being reckless even if I get unlucky and on day 2 it wipes my drive. I spend day 3 and 4 recovering, and am still 6 days ahead based on the 10x work I got done on day 1.

What if I have a 50 day streak of not hitting an "rm -rf"? Early retirement?

I guess the work on day 1 should be to build a proper sandbox and drop the chance of an "rm -rf or worse" even down to 0.001%.

I wonder how much money this agent wasted on the DN42 side? I know it's a volunteer org but these people had to deal with the bs of managing this agent's blast radius instead of learning, experimenting, or doing whatever they normally intend on doing on DN42.

Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.

The problems with inheritance tax is that they can be avoided through trust structures and insurance schemes. In theory it's a good tax, but in practice many wealthy people figured out how not to pay it.

I own a domain and have a catch all email. I routinely get emails from Microsoft and Google's official email addresses telling me that some account will be closed, or some other account notifications. I never created these accounts, and when I try to log into them or do a password reset, it does not go anywhere. It's been a minor mystery why I keep getting these emails for a while.

The Microsoft emails are coming from microsoft-noreply@microsoft.com so it's a bit different than in this article.

Supporting is a word that means many different things.

It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.

It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.

It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.

Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.