nluken

The exact law is a bit more nuanced than a "tax deduction for software engineering", but I'm guessing OP put it that way because it makes for a snappier title on a SWE heavy forum like this one. I would check one of the threads that OP posted for more specific information on how the tax code changed a few years ago.

If you're getting what you want out of your reading then more power to you, but I think you'll find that devoting your full attention to what you're doing fundamentally differs from doing it in the background. Why play GTA when you could just listen and enjoy the book? What is GTA adding to that experience?

I think a lot of people, including, I presume, most who willingly choose to study literature, enjoy reading as an activity unto itself and so don't feel the need to add additional distractions. Not everybody finds sitting down and "ploughing through" (how disdainful a phrase!) a book unappealing.

> Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming

I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this would be like saying you've "watched" a movie because you had it on your second monitor while you were playing counter strike. There's a fundamental difference in hearing a book read to you and actually listening and engaging with the audio on a meaningful level. The latter requires focus, and you're not going to be able to do that if you're gaming away at the same time.

Put another way, why would someone who presumably loves reading bother studying literature if they don't actually care enough to pay attention to the books they supposedly loved?

I'm no expert typist and I can't speak to the OP's claims that a bump in typing speed translates to a corresponding increase in productivity, but I can attest to the fact that simple time spent practicing will improve your skills in almost anything, typing included. If you included a typing run at the beginning of your day and made sure you were using proper form, I think you might be surprised at how quickly and how drastically your typing speed might improve.

The key is simply sticking with it over the long term. A general rule I find rings true is that people tend to overestimate their improvement over a month, but underestimate improvement over a year.

A side note to the general point of the article, but I hate how the tech industry uses the word "democratization" to mean "lowering the barrier to entry". These concepts differ from each other but many use the former term because in doing so they justify their actions as driven by some sort of moral imperative when in reality, the development of LLMs is morally neutral, not inherently bad by any stretch, but as much a wealth and power play as any other technology of the last 25 years.

Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that lights up when you hover over a link.

Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread are claiming.

I think there's a disconnect between what you and the person you're replying to are defining as "tinkering". Your conception of it seems more focused on the end product when, to use your analogy, the original comment seems unconcerned with the size of castles.

If you derive enjoyment from actually assembling the castle, you lose out on that by using the wand that makes it happen instantly. Sure wand's castles may be larger, but you don't put a Lego castle together for the finished product.

Curricula assign these books to students so they can learn to interpret their meanings without needing it explicitly stated. Of course, the teacher will offer an interpretation after the students have tried their hand at it, but the whole point of the exercise would be defeated by printing the interpretation at the outset. We should not be further offloading critical thinking in service of entertainment value.

This scandal should be a wake up call for anyone who reads or writes comment on the internet, including folks on this site. As good as the moderators here are, there's no avoiding the deluge of bots that have rapidly proliferated across the internet. Post history, while not a silver bullet, might be a decent way of spotting the bots for now, but in time that too will be harder to detect.

When people talk of AI as a loneliness cure I always remember a quote from an essay by Laura Preston about her time at an AI conference [1]:

"I was an extraterrestrial taking notes on the problems of Earth. Finding pizza in your area was a problem. People being mean to you because you were wearing your AirPods at dinner was a problem. Going on vacation was a problem because the hotels would force you to find the light switches. Elders were a problem. (They never took their medicine.) Loneliness was a problem, but loneliness had a solution, and the solution was conversation. But don’t talk with your elders, and not with the front desk, and certainly not with the man on the corner, though he might know where the pizza is. (“Noise-canceling is great, especially if you live urban,” said the earbuds guy. “There’s a lot of world out there.”) Idle chitchat was a snag in daily living. We’d rather slip through the world as silent as a burglar, seen by no one except our devices."

[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hypera...

This interview needs to be edited a bit; just posting the transcript of the zoom call really hampers the readability and flow. What works for a podcast is not the same as what works for a written piece.

If the crypto community ever plans on being successful, it needs to show the world outside crypto why it should use cryptocurrency. Right now, people use these coins mainly for remittances and illegal trade because they allow the users to sidestep financial regulation and tracking. Beyond that a few gambling applications like Polymarket have cropped up, but these succeed not with the broader population but within the crypto social bubble because the kind of person making wildly speculative trades on virtual currency will probably also enjoy using an unregulated gambling market.

I have a hard time seeing how the market expands beyond its current demographic, many (but not all) of whom meld the worst traits of the finance and tech industries and only further alienate themselves from the mainstream in doing so.

> divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world

I understand not totally subjugating your personal identity to ideology, but I'm struggling to see how someone could practically completely separate these two things. To use a somewhat trite but personal example, I'm gay, so that aspect of my identity will necessarily affect my perspective on certain issues. Conversely if someone were to convince me rationally that homosexuality was wrong, it would necessitate a pretty dramatic change of my identity no?

Not every issue exists on that clear a spectrum, but you can imagine the views necessitated by different pieces of personal identity adding up over a lifetime.

I'm not sure if it applies to the original commenter's situation but in many places, especially in the US, you don't need an architect to build a new home beyond rubber stamping some documents on file with the town, and sometimes that's not even required.

It's one of the reasons a lot of residential development, especially suburban development of the last 40 years, looks as bad as it does. Little to no architectural thought goes into many new homes beyond what's easiest to build.

1. I find the actual typeface made for the track rather pretty. Definitely of an era, but given how in that era's graphic design is right now I'm surprised I haven't seen more of it out and about

2. Sadly the article neglects to mention Haroumi Hosono, whose vocals are also on the track. If you haven't checked out his work, either solo or with YMO, it's well worth a listen.

I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critically than they might a book or written piece. I think this dichotomy derives from the different levels of focus we apply to different activities. Reading, even for leisure, demands a level of effort that forces you to focus and, in a way, analyze the information you're ingesting. By removing that barrier, you might fail to fully grasp the ideas that the primary source expressed.

In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact.

Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.

I subscribe to a similar sentiment about the best way of getting good at something, simply doing it every day as consistently as possible, because of my experience in sport. I ran competitively for many years and my working model of growth and improvement largely mirrors my experiences doing that. Obviously there are differences between becoming a faster runner and becoming a better developer, but the structure of "getting good at running", as my teammates would often joke, applies more than one might think to unrelated tasks. I would note that for this framework to be effective, you do, of course, have to enjoy the task you're practicing so much. Not at every possible moment, but generally if you don't like what you're doing, you're not going to stick to your commitment.

I do struggle sometimes to let hobbies be hobbies as a result of having such a clear path for general improvement, but just like you express in your writing here, the daily practice/routine is immensely useful. Congrats on a great year!

I'm a still relatively early career back end developer, and github basically acts as a portfolio for anything that potential companies would want to see.

Think about what a portfolio site demonstrates. For a front end developer, these sites provide an opportunity to flex your design intuition and raw development skills by putting something flashy together. Your site could make a difference because it's demonstrating that you can do the day-to-day tasks you're being hired to do.

For a back end developer, the results of our work are less immediately obvious for someone who isn't already technically inclined, and by the time you talk to someone like that, you've already cleared the initial screening bar that a portfolio site would get a front end dev past. There's no real visual component to the work I do, so a site doesn't demonstrate anything related to my job. I still maintain a personal site with some rough details, but I don't think it's really helpful for my career.

I would also consider that front end devs generally enjoy working on the front end, while back end devs generally enjoy their work on the back end. So I'm way less likely to do web dev in my spare time, especially since 90% of portfolio sites have no back end whatsoever.

Nice breakdown. Cheers!

Given the structured nature of the data, how does this compare to running a specialized classification model that looks for specific words in a review and uses those to assign Chefs to Restaurants? With some fine tuning, you might get more consistent results than feeding the reviews into a generative model.

A PhD isn't like a MBA which is meant mostly for the credential and associated pay bump. It's a research degree that you get if you want to work in academia or in a private research lab. If you're evaluating it purely by its economic value, of course it's not going to make sense, but that assessment misses why people pursue these degrees in the first place.

I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own.

Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not.

EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.

Many people overlook how spaces are lit from an aesthetic perspective as well as a from the functional perspective this article is written from. Lamps and other eye-level lighting sources do more than just help eye strain as the article suggests; they also work wonders from an interior design perspective, and make spaces feel way more livable. I always find homes overly reliant on overhead lighting struggle to shake the more sterile feel of offices, where overhead dominates.

The point of that comment wasn't to suggest that you couldn't also silence notifications on an Apple Watch, it was to illustrate that the ability to receive these notifications isn't as relevant to Garmin's watches' target market as it is to the Apple Watch's.

Judging from the author's other assertions, this suggestion probably comes from a place of not limiting yourself to system fonts given that they're so prevalent. I can't say I agree either, and would add that some of the "free fonts that inundate the internet" are professionally designed by well-respected foundries.

That said, perhaps we should view these "rules" as laying a foundation for people who know nothing. I see the equivalent in fashion all the time, where breaking the standard set of fashion "rules" without knowing them in the first place can lead to disaster. Only by internalizing the rules can you then subvert them successfully.

The way I read it, the author says not that the creator as persona is synthesized by metrics, but rather that Jimmy himself is subsumed by MrBeast. He is being authentic, but that's true only because the platform inculcated those desires over a years long "information diet".

It's a view I sympathize with, even though I'm reticent to apply it to specific cases like this. Rather, when we look at these systems, we should treat their demands as prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Spotify is an excellent example. Say the recommendation algorithm starts recommending a genre, but not for any aesthetic reason. Over time other musicians that internalize the aesthetics associated with that genre and will succeed because they also get picked up by the algorithm. These artists are succeeding by making algorithm bait, but they're also being authentic because the algorithm they're courting shaped their sensibilities as artists and as people.

The article isn't making a novel observation that people are shaped by the systems around them but applying that idea to the creator economy.

I can't speak to your experiences with others from my alma mater but pretty much all of these things are covered in the core CS curriculum at NU (at least the pre-redesigned one). Systems, PL, Algorithms, Algorithmic proofs, automata, ALU design were all part of required courses, and that's before I include the elective CS courses I took.

One area where NU does fall down IMO is that they offer "combined majors" with CS and other subjects that eschew some of these courses to make room for the other half of the major, which will be an unrelated subject. This offering is a mistake because you do miss out on some key concepts. If you're working with a pure CS major, however, they were required to learn all these concepts.

It seems like this kind of thing could be technically feasible but the idea that people would use it to block the world out over a few inconveniences seems kind of depressing to me. Sometimes you end up making a friend simply because you found the conversation next you interesting.

Like others in this thread are saying, though, it would be an incredible boon for people who use hearing aids.

A calendar with good art or photography can be worth it as a wall decoration alone. I find them especially nice for the kitchen because it isn't the end of the world if a $20 calendar gets wet or dirty.

Apologies on misunderstanding your role here, most of the speculation on this thread has been related to finances and staffing so I made an assumption there when I shouldn’t have.

> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all

n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.

> they sure like to sell their companies to them

I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)