mancerayder

An unfortunate aspect of modern discourse and thinking is how black and white discussions can feel. Several sides of the topic can co-exist together and all be true, so (well, in my experience and reading):

- Some people really benefit from and even need SSRIs or other psychoactive drugs to function well in society.

- Too many people are prescribed them such that there may be more harm than good. They may have side effects or were prescribed them to deal with a situational problem that could have been better managed with therapy.

- Whether justified or no, a prescription is given with no off ramp provided. It's almost as if you're defective and the drug is fixing you, and the solution are pharmaceuticals, which again may be true for some subset of those prescribed. People clearly are trying to taper and are suffering.

More controversially, psychiatry is something of an art (if you're generous) or a racket. Because there's no way the "chemical imbalance in the brain" theory can be validated empirically. In the US you meet with one for 15m, get prescribed a cocktail of drugs, a few months later you report if it worked, and if not they'll up the dose or play around with the cocktail. I don't know how we call that stuff science.

In France it's a cross between a sin, American influence, and something that will destroy your health. Hospitals and retirement homes lack AC and excess deaths occur among the elderly population.

I guess there's the unintended consequence of making the healthcare costs cheaper, if you let the older people cook under unusual weather patterns (even if they are unusual every summer now).

What's particularly weird, but also very French, is it's now a Right v Left issue, with the Left saying we should explore building design ideas for passive cooling instead of hurting the environment further (after all suffering is our own fault for hurting the environment and we should be exposed to that consequence), while the Right is pushing for AC.

Whatever it is, if you go to Paris make sure you stay in a hotel or an Airbnb with A/C.

Great. So MTA raises fares and complains about not being able to meet revenue, causing the state to have to funnel more to it.

Nevermind that the economics of your argument are completely blind to the fact that the funding sources of the MTA and the NYPD are completely different.

More crazy is the downstream effects of putting up your hands and letting crimes go.

All this for what ? Social justice? Here's my counter to that - the subway is a public good, For the People a socialist would say.

So you encourage stealing from The People.

How is that not connected to police enforcement, though? In Europe and now the US the new generations are anti-police, anti-enforcement and generally consider authority and rules to be proof of an unjust society (X group is N percent more likely to receive a criminal summons when ..).

In the US in slow motion we could see a world in which you could go to a big chain pharmacy and retrieve your own toothpaste and shampoo. Now it's considered entirely normal to put these behind plexiglass, and to hire a security guard to stand by the door, but the guard isn't legally allowed to stop anyone or engage in any physical altercation. Because homelessness, because mental illness, because drug addiction, etc are not to be 'criminalized.'

In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.

Yet here we're discussing comparisons with Asian cultures and how they are more respectful of public space.

So, my friends, is it a cultural difference, a legal enforcement difference, or an inevitable consequence of injustice? I'm dying to understand because it's at the crux of the political divide, and I'm seeing cities getting worse in front of my eyes.

A city's leadership shouldn't try to look after the city's interest? The answer to that is so obvious, you should look to explaining why it doesn't apply to the elected leadership of a nation.

It came off as suggesting another group was being mentioned, apologies for reading into the commentary.

How are BioNtech's trials doing?

Are these two companies the ones to cure cancer (for the rich, being that these therapies require custom bio engineering).

I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom.

It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.

I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.

Now maybe not so much if you're underpaid.

Is there any value in really learning gimp? As in, more than just rudimentary tasks you must do. Photoshop has the artistic aspect of doing interesting things in photography editing. I am wondering if gimp is "equally fun" here and it's just a different learning curve.

Americans and especially corporate culture America likes to do this all the time: The ask instead of request is an example. I just politely use the words I prefer when that happens.

Our new promotes for this year. etc.

I read from a linguistic source that it's a feature of English and the Brits do it as well.

Dufus is how it automatically maps when I say it out loud.

Can't I get the same thing with Brave though? I'm getting what feels like built in ad blocking.

What sorts of questions can we and can't we ask?

I've uncovered some -2x engineers recently - who cause long-term problems with their changes that more than one person has to unravel. It's usually comes as a surprise, some going back to look at who approved MRs, and loud ranting and cursing as you find a murder trail of laziness or incompetence. It's breathtaking. I'd trust some people with AI as much as I'd trust myself operating a machete - a tool best left to someone else.

I'm simultaneously frustrated and I see a business opportunity - I now know that we senior folks are very far from replaceable - and soon there might be consulting to fix big problems. No one will say it's AI's fault necessarily - you'll just be living with painful complexity that works for a startup or an individual entrepreneur but not in an enterprise environment. To wit:

>The person adding Kafka should have been able to explain exactly why it was needed.

Here it is. People who don't know what they are doing are adding infrastructure layers they don't understand, can't envisage operationally in the future, and missing scalability. I'm seeing this. In fact I'm spending hours a week fighting it. I had to set up a call with a senior developer recently to explain why his prescriptive attempt to make infrastructure changes in his project can't be done with Claude like he did it.

It's playing wack-a-mole as the "velocity" has gone up of changes, and it's promulgated by every manner of product manager and senior developer under an attempt to please the brass.

>The person who built the feature should have been able to explain where the data came from without sending a link to a Claude conversation.

And they won't - because it's too embarrassing when you see what Claude responded with and someone failed to question.

We're in a new era, that's for sure.

There are people in the replies below going back and forth about whether the US or the UK started the surveillance state first. I think as undemocratic as the US can behave in practice, it's hard not to argue that the UK won the CCTV surveillance race. London is heavily surveilled. And it doesn't help that someone just posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255496

But then they do maintenance on weekends. No one works or uses the trains on the weekends, right? It's at 3 am weekdays that it should be running. Nevermind at that those hours it's infrequent and essentially a homeless shelter.

Where's Google's hotline?

which you get on mobile browsers by just highlighting and long pressing the word.

You have to tell it to not use LLMisms and stupid metaphors. The serious-but-empathetic-sounding fluffy metaphors get on my nerves, and sometimes can overlap with something technical you are learning such that you can't tell if it's a new term or not.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the right way to use LLMs for code generation is asking it to solve specific problems, giving it existing code and asking it how it would propose changing something or other, or if it has an alternative to an existing logic flow that's problematic and asking it what it thinks the problem is and how it would suggest it be written.

I'm coming from the perspective of infra management so that's my bias, and a very complex code base may make my perspective off mark.

But nowhere does it seem it to be a good idea for the whole thing to be LLM generated. It seems to view a big holistic problem in steps in isolation, causing it to add complexity on top of complexity as it's going through it's later stages. For example it'll create infrastructure designs that add layers of unnecessary and redundant tooling and business logic, when a human would have re evaluated step 1's path when it realized step 3 was doing the same thing again in a more complex way.

I use it by telling it my background, giving it a rough timeline and asking it to create a learning timeline, save progress along the way, and git push / pull periodically so I can use the same thing on both Linux and Mac. I tell it for each phase in the learning timeline, present me information, then challenge me on it. If it's code, it challenges me with a coding challenge, where I use it in an IDE plugin. If I'm learning something that isn't strictly code, then I ask it to give me info, then challenge me with questions and grill til I get it right. I ask it to save what it think I struggled with, so that later we can drill it again and I can also review it in an .md file.

Does anyone else use Claude like this?

It's sped up my learning by 10x. I struggled with 'just reading a book.' Take kubernetes. I hemmed and hawed and spent years periodically reading some dry book or blog or official doc, falling asleep, and forgetting while I got busy. Now I'm aggressively working with it, almost like I'm addicted to a gamification, of getting through our learning timeline, and I'm excited to move forward as quickly as possible and pass its tests.

It's like a fake teacher, because I can also ask it to drill into a topic or re-explain itself if it made no sense.

The only thing that worries me is, sometimes I'll say something like, "Um, are you sure about that?", and it'll apologize and correct itself. I barely challenged it!

I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.

I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.

On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?

So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:

1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.

2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).

If you pay for YouTube, there are no ads. [edit] except for those ones that podcasters add in the middle. "[15 minutes in] Alright, now is a great time to tell you about my sponsor tell you about my sponsor!", and you skip ahead, and it shows the product nonetheless.

>I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.

Excuse me. I take it you don't read any mainstream news (NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ, WSP, etc etc).

Sent to MS is one thing - OneDrive/sync/etc. Used by MS and processed for nefarious purposes is another. Does it say that it 'may' be used for telemetry purposes?

Please don't bite me -- question for this group, where "Firefox" is going back and forth as a topic.

Isn't Brave okay?

There's something toxic about Brave I'm not getting; I can tell you it's incredibly effective as a tool to block ads, scripts, and tracking. What am I missing? It's tracking me? The project owners are mean? There's something nefarious in the codebase? I have firefox and Brave, and both are 'OK', and better than Chrome or Edge which I only use for work. In the past I was told after being downvoted for mentioning Brave that the founder is controversial. Is that it?

Hold on a second. You can get up between meetings, go for a jog, use a home gym, lay down and read, sit in your yard in the sun with your eyes closed, pet your dog, call your significant other or sit with them, shop for new shoes, study for a new job, take a video call from a recruiter, do your laundry, clean your bathroom, the list goes on.

Discipline is a personal problem not an office policy issue.

Any finance tech workers? I spoke to someone from a Mag 7 recently, and he said, isn't it true that you guys are treated like second class citizens?

Yes, it's true. It's been true for a long time.

It's a bifurcated world where the people that made it big in finance /tech ended up climbing the corporate hierarchy. Even a "distinguished engineer" in an investment bank is a politically savvy project manager who goes home after work to code.

How people have lives outside of work, when work is meetings, is a mystery to me.

Are the rest of you joining the misery since 2023? We've been in this boat for a decade already.

I and my cohorts are forced back in the office four days a week.

It's a miserable grind. Routine includes alarm, after a poor night of sleep, getting ready, commuting in, loud, bright offices where while you enjoy the convivial nature of joking and commiserating with colleagues, it's so distracting and noisy and visually distracting that you can't be productive technically.

Next you go home at 6, 630, sleepy, go to the gym or do your shopping, home, sleep, rinse repeat.

Suddenly six months has gone by. Then a year.

I cannot sympathize with the work from home complainers. You folks are like people who came across a lot of money, retired early and are depressed due to boredom.

If WFH is misery, is it possible it's the town you live in that's causing the misery?