matrix87

> lone wolf-ism is what drags us down

with respect to what metric? economic growth? that's probably not true, lone wolfism is what drives people to develop expertise in the first place

if the metric is community or "sustainability" or something else, is pursuing that metric in the place of economic growth sustainable long term?

yeah I see the same trend, at some point I just kinda decided to mentally slot all of those people into the stupid category, tune them out, and go on living

Humility is relative. Humility in front of actual experts is good. It has to be earned

Becoming humble in front of people who suck is learning the wrong life lesson

You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."

If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?

Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron

And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity

> In this case I don’t think it’s a lack of pressure to join, but the introduction of supplementary technologies that poorly simulate aspects of community

There are two big cultural shifts I have in mind here:

the "liberalization" of American society (divorce is more common, LGBT acceptance (and in general, the freedom to have a non-hetero life)). hetero relationships come with an "escalator" that ends in having a family, etc. But as long as there's a socially accepted alternative to this lifestyle, it has to justify itself against the alternative. (Imo, this is the real reason why LGBT was stigmatized for so long)

also religion dying out, less pressure to buy into religion, that's one big third space that's gone

> Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

every community wants more engagement, resources, etc

not every community is worth the engagement

my point isn't that community in general is bad, it's that communities aren't entitled to engagement unless they actually make it worth it for the participants. if the social pressure to join goes out the window and communities have to exist via their own merits, that's not a bad thing. it's a correction

my point is, the end goal of writing this kind of article isn't increasing the net amount of happiness in the world. the happiness argument is just a bunch of anecdotal evidence that always conveniently supports the premise

put differently, if enough people were getting married, having kids, etc, you wouldn't see this kind of article. it's not about making people happier, it's about pressuring people to do shit that's not in their self interest

I don't think the choice between wife->kids->retirement->death and something else is analogous to choosing to walk or not walk. Walking is a natural thing that's intrinsic to our biology, the other thing is a product of culture, policy, time, etc. Other cultures have alternate ways of doing

if you're equating that lifestyle pipeline to walking or participating in society, it's not really a valid point

> This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

I think that this point is the underlying rationale for writing the article. "Not enough" people are making sacrifices. It isn't that they're less happy, it's that the author doesn't want them to be happy. They'd rather rewrite the definition of happiness

If all you're doing is giving, why bother? You could have a wife and kids, or you could do FIRE. If you go the wife and kids route, suddenly all of your money and time are no longer "yours"

I think, if some people look at society and institutions and say "I'm giving more than what I'm receiving here", there's nothing wrong with that. Framing it as the individual's problem is dumb and counterproductive. Religion is on the way out, people are getting sick of lying to themselves

> 25% of US university students on antidepressants.

Is it because they're emotionally worse off, or is it because pharma is advertising them more aggressively, kickbacks, etc

doesn't teaching english lead to more brain drain?

I felt the same thing in business school, I switched out after a year. The only useful thing we learned was excel (but holy fuck, excel is a rabbithole)

I mean, they were, e.g. the Twitter files. Or all of the handwavey threats around section 230

during the biden administration they were expected to shift their moderation policies to fit in with the political ideology currently in the white house

now it's been normalized and the other party is doing it. but the news outlets have waited until now to start crying wolf?

what should he have done? given her half first?

A few million is workable, but 60 million is a scarlet letter. Good luck finding someone who doesn't want their cut of it

Side question, why does anyone subscribe to the WSJ in the first place? Who's doing this? It just seems like a propaganda outlet

Every time I read something written in the WSJ, I wish I could un-read it because it deliberately tries to mislead people

I mean Europe has more of the type of policy that you describe, there's still the same drop in birthrates

(Not disagreeing with you that the WSJ is evil, but I doubt throwing money at people will make them have more kids at this point)

> when polling shows younger folks want just as many kids as their own parents but can't afford them.

it isn't just that they can't afford them, it's that the standards for "good parenting" have increased. Simultaneously, both partners have less time for raising kids because of economic pressure

But the state doesn't subsidize childcare or offer universal pre-K, so the only real solution is to keep importing people from more "trad" cultures until the whole thing blows up

Technically visa workers can join a union, but if they get retaliated against, the stakes are much higher

Also part of the appeal of having them is that they're easier to bully into overworking because of the threat of deportation. If unions standardize working expectations, that's in direct conflict with one of the primary benefits of visa workers

Given the current visa worker situation, how are unions possible?

I understand, in traditional engineering fields, they're possible. Also I'm pretty sure (correct me if wrong) European tech jobs have them. But do they have the same visa problem?

Should we all just pull a drew devault and move to Europe then?

at the time, no, but this would've been perfect :/

I recently used code-gen'd protobuf deser objects as the value type for an in-memory db and was considering flattening them into a more memory-efficient representation and using bitfields. That was for java though, not sure if they are doing the same thing there

Glad to see this change, for that use case it would've been perfect

I've done this, it only makes sense to me if you're trying to recycle some legacy code that's already using the domain types. Or else there's a bunch of extra conversion logic and unnecessary copying, feels like an antipattern

> The more I speak with fellow engineers, the more I hear that some of them are either using AI to help them code, or feed entire projects to AI and let the AI code, while they do code review and adjustments.

I don't see this trend. It just sounds like a weird thing to say, it fundamentally misunderstands what the job is

From my experience, software engineering is a lot more human than how it gets portrayed in the media. You learn the business you're working with, who the stakeholders are, who needs what, how to communicate your changes and to whom. You're solving problems for other people. In order to do that, you have to understand what their needs are

Maybe this reflects my own experience at a big company where there's more back and forth to deal with. It's not glamorous or technically impressive, but no company is perfect

If what companies really want is just some cheap way to shovel code, LLMs are more expensive and less effective than the other well known way of cheaping out

> There seems to be some unwritten rule that remaining a coder is a net negative when you start tickling the upper management ranks.

sometimes I wonder if this is a thing because managers just don't want to code, and having other managers doing it makes them look bad

> The Substack is still live

This might be a bug in substack? If you go to https://substack.com/@breloomlegacy it says "Profile not found", so they might've tried to scrub it

maybe some cache ttl hasn't run out yet or something :/

this archive link is floating around on blind and reddit. I have no idea if it's authentic. I didn't find a link to his other social media but the part about back pain lines up with this bit I found in a nymag article [0]

> Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/luigi-mangione-unite...