8,344 karma · joined October 13, 2010
https://michael.chisari.us
Remote: Yes (open to frequent travel, PST preferred) or NYC hybrid.
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: SQL, Go, React/Typescript (plus AWS, Figma, and plenty more)
Resume/CV: https://michael.chisari.us/resume.pdf
Email: michael@chisari.us
--
Software Engineer / Founding Engineer
Not actively looking but always open to explore opportunities. Prefer startups, greenfield projects and true innovation. Generalist with deep experience that learns and moves quickly.
But good enough for pennies in an instant is very useful.
It had a charm the full game was missing. It reminded me of a puppet show and how large something so low fidelity can feel when filled out by imagination.
If we don't want to be writers, then we have to be editors. And editing is an entirely different job and it's not an easy one. In many ways it's harder.
Especially when LLMs love writing novels when all we need is a short story or less.
Works but not quite good enough to make the case against commoditization.
If open source or on-device AI gets good enough for 80% of consumers, then this stops being a consumer product and the only real market is people who need the high-end models. If those models are slow and expensive, certain tasks like scientific and math research can tolerate slowness, but they run up against the costs. If they're expensive, the tech industry can afford them but runs up against their inefficiencies.
We need to talk about how well these improving models work in multiple dimensions: Accuracy, performance and cost. All three have to improve considerably before the debate dies down.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/View_Transi...
https://view-transitions.chrome.dev
Best part about it is how gracefully it degrades.
On the other hand, Go code from 2012 and Go code from 2026 looks virtually the same. Conventions are respected, go fmt is the one single formatter, "use the stdlib" is a popular mantra and the code is readable by design.
If I were to codegen a project I wouldn't use anything but Go at this point.
Remote: Yes (open to frequent travel, PST preferred) or NYC hybrid.
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: SQL, Go, React/Typescript (plus AWS, Figma, and plenty more)
Resume/CV: https://michael.chisari.us/resume.pdf
Email: michael@chisari.us
--
Software Engineer / Founding Engineer
Not actively looking but always open to explore opportunities. Prefer startups, greenfield projects and true innovation. Generalist with deep experience that learns and moves quickly.
Skills will have to be built through artificial constraints. Pen & paper, reading books, not using AI, etc.
I can use AI for coding after decades of coding. I can't use it for theoretical physics because I can't evaluate the responses.
"Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"
- On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges
That doesn't mean that simulated reasoning isn't useful, it's wildly useful. But a thing is not its simulation.
That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.
Which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in
> I actually can't stand you people.
Unnecessary. People who want a basic middle class existence are not greedy and should not receive disdain. Many have responsibilities to their elders or others, have kids or want them, etc. so avowed poverty is not realistic.
Especially when bohemian poverty is an increasingly vanishing option on a practical level.
Joking (sort of).
I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.
There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.
I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.
The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.
Important to note that fast never meant much to open source and for good reason.
I write code myself and use the LLM to find mistakes then fix them manually. I recommend inverting the conventional wisdom on LLMs:
1. Don't use it to write code. It's a terrible
programmer. But it's an intelligent rubber duck
and a solid analysis tool.
2. Write the code yourself. It'll go faster than
figuring it out as you go along. It's just typing
if you have a plan.
3. Use an LLM to sanity check what you wrote.
It can find potential design issues or future
problems or breaks from convention. Decide based on
your experience how much you want to address these
issues before moving on.
Plus you don't lose any of your skills in the process.
You're still doing the gruntwork necessary to keep your skillset.
And the token cost is a small fraction of what it takes to get LLMs to write good code.
But that's because I never got on the "run three dozen agents in a ralph loop" trend or other high-token usage methods. The way I use AI is discrete and targeted and it seems that's how it will be for everyone once the economics settle.