mancerayder

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?

I always get the highest end components I can find, and I try to stick with Asus and not the cheapest PSU. I've never had anything fail, and I do this every 5 years or so. I hate having to put the fan on the CPU after sticking that in the motherboard, and the cabling is always annoying (although 5x less annoying than it was in the days of IDE and SCSI ribbon cables).

Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?

That isn't true. States levy taxes and buyers brokers are a thing in some states, and in some cases they're less fully paid by seller (less than the customary 2.5-3, leaving buyer to provide 1 or 1.5). Closing costs include mortgage costs, too.

I've only ever heard of that stuff paid by seller if seller was a sponsor, and the market was a down market. Think new build in 2020 or in a depressed housing market today.

The part of compensation includes healthcare, because we have no choice, it's a lock in - there's no marketplace to choose your healthcare, unless you go ACA which is a bad idea in many states - and as a lock-in the out of pocket costs have skyrocketed. To borrow your wording, google 'out of pocket healthcare costs annual trends.'

So that compensation covers less.

Wait, he was heavy in AI while shorting software?

What happened to the word hedge in hedge fund?

Do you recommend an application in particular to make it easy to do something like that (record a video walk through that you turn into a rendering on a PC in VR)? I happen to have a Valve Index with dust on it.

And I mean for someone with no specialized architect/design skills.

Speaking of which, it seems like evolution in the headset world is slow or stalled at least commercially.

Forced sock upgrades with no backwards compatibility.

Almost all of them are salespeople, sometimes finding my phone number and calling me on my personal number, even early in the morning. Insane stuff. That's 90% of cold calls. 8% are recruiters (also salespeople) telling me they either know a genius candidate or they can get me. 2%, that's probably the topic of this thread.

There might be something to this. It does seem older models of things are better than newer models of things. So it could be the drive to lower costs and increase profits are causing this, at the appliance, car, etc. level.

It doesn't explain why every couple of years I have another four or six pairs of yet another set of socks, from the same company, but with enough variation that now I have multiple different generations of CK socks that aren't pairable.

In the US, it's an extremely dangerous place to look for a spouse. I've seen some ugly situations. Maybe it's better to look for a spouse when the job market favors employees - that way, when you need to leave after the breakup, you can find a new job.

Also, in IT there's not a very diverse group of people to search from. When it comes to women, the ratio of hetero men to hetero women is insanely not favorable.

It's not just that France isn't installing them. It's that laws prevent installing them, and laws keep offices and schools warm on purpose.

The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.

Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.

French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.

Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.

And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.

KCD2 is number 1 of a small number of updates I am excited about.

That's incredibly misleading. For a high salary, this American couple you mentioned, are probably living in California or New York or New Jersey or another high tax state.

Now redo the math.

I and most people in my peer group pay over 40 percent of income in taxes, and that's NOT including property taxes, which are much, much higher than in Europe. Some much more than that - like triple (city, state and federal).

State taxes were completely ignored from your math.

This message, and the message before it which I am at pains to rebut much of, contains a lot of misleading cherry-picking.

And you compared European universities to a two year county college degree? Healthcare costs were also greatly glossed over. I'm hoping someone else is triggered but if not I'll be forced to step in and correct this stuff.

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.

I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring.

Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/laptops are downright scary to me now. What will they add that I don't want? What more connectivity to the external world are they going to wire in?

MacOS lost everyone's trust by ruining the experience, but even before it happened that trying to resize a window makes it feel like life will be at 80 years-old, hunting a tiny invisible border, even before that there wasn't anything exciting.

What Microsoft I think did (and I can't prove it), before I moved off of Windows 11, was to bundle all changes in "required security updates." So you have no choice but to update (or go through special settings to turn it off, or just defer it), but when the machine comes back you have a new Welcome prompt to some new connectivity to something nefarious. AI features I never asked for, that's the most recent dark pattern here.

Your error here, or the missing piece if we're generous, is what people are spending money on. Health care is astronomically more expensive here. Schooling isn't free after high school. Day care isn't free. Hell, even property taxes are simply 'not a thing' in France or the UK, where the taxes and Council Tax, respectively, are a tiny fraction of what Americans pay in property taxes ---- which, of course, pay for the 'free public schools.'

Now, let's talk about insurance, that's also much higher. In states like California and Florida, home insurance is through the roof, in some states like NJ and NY, car insurance is through the roof. Both going up way above inflation (like the items in my first paragraph).

You might counter with energy costs are much higher in these European countries (and similar ones like Germany, Benelux, etc), and the purchasing power might be higher, but the wages are so so much lower.

That said, this trope of people misspending their money needs to consider this outrageous costs of things that many people around the world never need to think about. The shitty wages in France are overshadowed by so many essentials being available without a high cost or any cost in some cases.

That makes sense, and it probably should be said more. It's probably just because we invest in what we know. If you're a real estate broker, you have an interest in properties, you think about it all the time, so you'll buy your own properties, or invest perhaps in builder stocks. If you're in tech, well, I don't need to say it because that's most of us. If you work in the energy sector, I imagine you know a thing or two about transport and esoterica of speculative miners or drillers, etc.

I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.

Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?

That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.