phil21

Hard and very vehement disagree from me.

So long as it is safe, a kid even at 1 years old should be tagging along with the adults doing things. Like building, working out in the yard, helping friends with projects, whatever.

It is very settled science that brain connections happen rapidly in these years. Bubble wrapping your children is not the way to go in my opinion.

Everyone is going to have a different take on this, but for me the choice is immediately obvious. Kids should fit into your life (within reason), not have you change to revolve around theirs.

That said - I highly doubt a 1 year old did much more than watch and have short visits while being cared for by someone not doing the construction work. It’s a great bonding experience even with limited direct involvement.

People are incredibly irrational about gas prices and have been since I've been alive.

I remember listening to AM talk radio back in the late 90's and a common trope was you'd get someone calling in ranting about gas prices and how they couldn't afford to take their kid on vacation due to current $president in the white house.

Even back in my early teens I'd pencil out the math and it'd be like a $20 price difference for 6 tanks of gas on their 800 mile round trip with the worst fuel efficiency you could imagine. I thought then - as I do now - that if $20 made a difference in you taking a vacation or not you couldn't afford it to begin with.

For most folks it's just an easy topic for people to rant about.

There is (usually) a logo on the pump. It's a standard that is vetted by an industry standards body[0].

If a gas station brand advertises Top Tier(tm) gasoline at all, every location must supply it. Diesel is location dependent and warrants more consideration.

All fuel sold at Costco is Top Tier.

[0] https://www.toptiergas.com/

Weird. Costco is never the cheapest price for Coke in my area. Or the previous state I lived in. At least if you bought during sales at competing Supermarkets.

Where they win my Diet Coke business is that they are consistently a "good deal" - never the cheapest, but never the most expensive. And I don't need to wait for a sale to stock up.

I still buy soda from the local grocery stores when I happen by a deal when shopping for other things. But I don't go out of my way. The specials are usually much better than Costco though. By 25% or more per can.

Honestly this goes for most things I buy at Costco. Even in bulk, their per-unit costs beat the standard pricing at competitors - but never the sale prices. It just removes mental overhead. And the bulk prices are always better at a restaurant supply store. Where Costco wins in this area is curation so I can reduce mental load, but then again Costco does the bullshit where they stock something for 6mo out of the year and you spend an extra 20 minutes searching the store for it the next time you need it only realizing they stopped selling it. Then it appears randomly a month later.

They are a decent middle ground for me. I can buy 10lbs of chicken breast of decent quality for $2.99/lb I can toss directly into the freezer pre-packaged into meal-sized portions. Or I can buy 40lb boxes of bulk chicken breast for $1.39/lb from the supply store and spend a couple hours vacuum packaging it myself.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the place! I see Costco as the upper middle class consumerism version of nerd sniping.

For most people, I'd reckon they are never at work.

There is a reason we know that remote learning is horrible for most people compared to in-classroom. We proved this decisively during COVID.

There is zero reason to believe that most folks magically change overnight from being incapable of remote learning to being highly capable remote workers. It's just not believable.

I hired remote workers in the 90's. It was a small fraction of the total candidate base that could successfully self-motivate and have the discipline to become high performers in such an environment over the long haul. Most of my interviewing and candidate vetting had to do with the remote aspect vs. technical skillset. Luckily around that time is when open source became a huge thing, so those projects presented a pool of pre-vetted candidates to hire out of. The rest of the candidate pool was a total crapshoot.

Remote working has become easier and the tooling and technology much better. But from where I'm standing - many folks do not take it seriously. Simple stuff like having backup Internet is a filtering question for me even today.

> way ahead

This is overselling it. You can come out 2% ahead or so. 4-5% if you are an extremely high spender who enjoys mentally managing 5 or 6 credit cards to max out category bonuses and other benefits and all that.

You come out marginally ahead at the expense of mental overhead. Good tradeoff for some, not for others.

I use a credit card, I dropped from 3-4 different cards trying to max out those 4-5% spending categories and just have a straight 2% cashback on everything card now. Plus one backup on a different payment network in case one goes down. It got to be exhausting trying to remember to manage so many cards plus remember to use the points, make sure to use the right card for the right thing, and all the other BS.

For some of my friends it's a hobby which is great for you if you enjoy such things! For me, it's just adding another chore to my life. Not worth the 1-2% or so marginal gain against my spending.

The super easy stuff is long gone these days too. You get far larger discounts paying via ACH for utility bills/cell phone bills/etc. vs. what credit card rewards give you so all the "autopilot" stuff is largely gone.

I do remember the days where we paid our Equinix bill via the company Amex. That was pretty fun while the party lasted!

Doesn’t matter at all for my local Costco. It’s busy open to close with very little variance.

The only times I’ve seen it relatively empty were during bad storms.

That said, it’s not an hour wait. Around 20 minutes is average, but I rarely fill up there since I value my time much more than that.

> I think if a real human doctor completely fabricated a drug usage history for one of their patients, that would also be news.

This happens every single day and is effectively never reported. For far more nefarious reasons than a simple scribing error.

Drug seeking behavior enters notes all the time without much evidence and based entirely on a random doctor's (or even a triage nurse) hunch. A significant portion of those notes are outright false and incorrect. Once that is on your file and in a given medical system, you are marked for life.

> Everything should be reviewed for correctness.

Have you ever actually read your notes on file?

This is basically living in a fantasy world. Errors are routine.

One of my notes in my current medical file states I injured my shoulder playing for a NFL team. I have never played football, and certainly not at a professional level. Fixing it is sort of like trying to fix your credit report - you supposedly get it done, and then 6mo later the same error pops back up again.

Ironically the reason this note exists is very similar to a way an AI scribe would misinterpret a conversation.

> I am a software developer and if I write some piece of medical software with bugs that are so blatant in it, I'd see hell up to potentially being sued into oblivion

Based on watching the medical software field as a consumer (patient) and friends who are doctors, this is a fantasy. The quality of software in this field is abysmal and there seems to be almost no repercussions to those who develop or sell it.

Which is precisely why this sort of thing can be rolled out without much fear by those pushing it.

I've worked remote most of my career. Starting in the late 90's if you squint hard enough.

I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.

And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.

I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.

My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.

It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.

Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.

Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.

I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.

We can definitely agree there!

For stuff like calendar work, meetings, expense reports, and other busywork? Sure. Hence I have an assistant for that overhead at my job.

Not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. Who wants to interrupt focus time to tab over to find an open meeting slot coordinated between 4 parties for some low value junk that most meetings are in the corporate world? It’s annoying and even if it only takes a minute or two it means a good 15m or so of lost productivity for me due to context switching. A few of those a day and I’m either working an extra hour to catch up, or down an hour of productivity for the day.

Work output is work. Doing stuff like adding contacts to my phone or scheduling meetings is not work. That’s overhead that should be avoided or automated whenever possible. Having the robots do this for me so I can focus on actual valuable tasks is a net win for me and humanity as a whole. It’s ridiculous this sort of thing hasn’t already been mostly automated out of existence even without AI.

My wife is different sort of brain type. This sort of thing is trivial for her and it’s not a major source of mental overhead for her. Everyone is different.

They typically are made by the same OEMs and I would say at par or better quality in general. I’ve had (percentage wise) more consumer grade PSUs fail on me over the past 20 years, and I don’t buy cheap stuff. Although the sample size of failure is low single digits vs thousands on the datacenter end.

I’d say on average DC PSUs are vastly overspeced for most machines. Most machines we work with are not sitting at peak load 24x7, and might be drawing half or so of their max rated power draw. Plus every server is redundant - so the modules themselves are operating at around 20-40% of full rated capacity most of their life. The only time they ever spin up past 50% is during power maintenance or a power failure of some sort that brings one of the redundant power sides down.

They do probably operate in slightly hotter conditions on average, but in much more stabilized temperature environments. Plus of course 24x7x365. But that goes for all components.

I’d say other than fans, failure rates in the PC world vs datacenter world are relatively comparable it terms of what fails most. Dust and temp swings are the large variables the average PC needs to contend with vs the datacenter.

Storage of course is the one that stands out the most - everything else is kind of a rounding error. Here though, datacenter work really does beat on the hardware more than most consumer gear so that’s expected. For every 100 disk swaps we do, I figure we do about 2 or 3 power supply modules. And maybe 1 fan swap.

I despise small tasks like this, so I never really do them until forced.

Having a full time human personal assistant would be best, but this sort of thing is an alright middle ground for me until I make my first billion.

Good point re: the privacy concerns though. Ideally this sort of basic virtual assistant stuff will be on-device at some point.

I really do hope we get to the point of Star Trek style “computer, do task X” and it mostly Just Works. As I get older the less and less I want to futz around with building things computers should just be good at already. AI has already given me new interest in home sensor networks and such since I don’t need to spend so long doing the IT drudge work I’ve done 2 dozen times before in my life and gain no intellectual stimulation from.

> Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?

Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.

And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.

Power supplies - regardless of quality - die pretty regularly at scale. Only disks fail more often. They are the #2 component we replace in the datacenter.

My issue is my digital hoarding. I've always said it I "collect" things digitally vs. physical, so I can scratch that itch without causing a disaster for my life. A half rack of JBODs is a lot cleaner and overall less expensive to operate than deciding I need to collect every single Lego Technic set ever produced or something.

The problem is I also operated under the prior "storage always gets cheaper over time" and was right at about 80% full when all this insanity hit. I'm now at 90% on my largest ZFS array (~280TB) of spinners... and I get to decide if I want to drop a few paychecks on the next vdev upgrade, or start deleting things.

Not to mention I've been holding off replacing a bunch of old 1TB SATA drives (19 years old now!!) as my scratch partition, as I was going to wait until 8TB SSD got really cheap and just buy two of them for a RAID1 for the use. And now I need those drive slots to upgrade the mass storage pool.

Talk about backing oneself into a corner at the wrong time!

> There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.

Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.

I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.

Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.

It's not really a "Well, OK?" situation.

The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.

They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.

This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.

With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Libraries I volunteered for would coordinate throwing away books late night under dark right before the dumpster was picked up and emptied.

Because people are irrational when it comes to this topic. They say stuff like “book burning” when they see books being destroyed. Doing it in relative secret kept the crazies away.

If you are passionate about this topic, lobby for more funding to store archives in the public good. Expecting private parties to do it for free because it gives you the ick to see books destroyed is not useful.

More books get destroyed each year during estate cleanouts than any AI companies could ever hope to accomplish. Most books donated to goodwill or other thrift shops go straight to the dumpster and might not even have a set of human eyes put on them at all. These places act as sin eaters for folks to leave their trash with.

> I know there are testing companies that will test certain sources but it’s not like they’ve tested the vial you get.

It's why you order a decent amount of it (e.g. 2 years supply, it lasts forever in a freezer) and pay for your own randomized testing of the batch you got. You go direct to the source, not via the middle men selling it for 10x markup on a per-vial basis.

Certainly not perfect, and it adds significant cost - but still way cheaper than the regular sources via pharmacy for Zepbound.

I'm not convinced reta really shows that greater of results than tirz though. YMMV significantly here. Tirz is already so effective you are chasing marginal gains for the most part.

> For example — are cheeseburgers and French fries junk food? What about when you make them at home, or at a fancy restaurant without artificial ingredients? Is it certain additives? If McDonalds makes a happy meal without additives, is it no longer junk food?

Yes, this is all junk food. It's not that difficult.

Eaten in moderation these things are fine. But they are highly palatable calorie dense meals that are not great for you over time and in huge quantity. A burger is generally speaking a burger, regardless of how fancy. Deep fried stuff is deep fried, regardless of the cut of the vegetable or how organically it was grown.

Your latter question is far more interesting to me. I don't have a solution for that really. Society gets what society demands. I don't know how you'd fix those incentives without seriously horrible second and third order effects.

> I'm sure I could find an unethical doctor to prescribe it if I looked hard enough

I'd say the only unethical doctors here would be the ones not prescribing it for you based on your description of your life and needs.

Guidelines are guidelines, not strict rules for a reason. BMI is not the end-all measurement to decide if you are a candidate for these drugs.

Find a competent doctor who understands GLP-1s and you might be surprised.

I am entirely unconvinced that a 5% difference in fructose vs. glucose is a meaningful difference.

They carry the same health risks if eaten in the same amounts. The only thing that corn syrup could be blamed for here is being too cheap so it shows up in greater quantity and in more products than cane sugar might otherwise.

HFCS is just one of those fashionable things to be "concerned" about so we can all miss the forest through the trees.

Wear a blood glucose monitor for a month or two. Don't make any changes whatsoever to diet or activity levels for the first 2 weeks.

Then change it up so you are taking a mile or two walk after every meal. Don't change your diet.

Note the difference in blood sugar levels. It won't happen for everyone but the difference just an extremely moderate level of activity makes - especially directly after meals - was actually one of my larger surprises doing exactly the above.

If I am diligent about my 10k steps/day, I find it difficult to put on weight unless I'm eating like total crap. Combine an effort to try to never eat simple carbs with the above walking regimine and most folks are going to drop weight faster than they would ever expect. Quadruple (or more!) true if you also add a GLP-1 to the mix.

You are describing time, not cost. I can assure you my family worked pretty demanding jobs with long hours. And spent hours preparing food on top of it.

The average American spends 4-5 hours a day on personal screen time, and this skews higher the poorer you get based on a few studies. I've found from talking with folks on the subject many of them are the ones glued to social media and/or the TV.

I agree it's much more convenient to toss a couple pizzas in the oven. I do not agree it's less expensive. I don't know where you're buying your rice or chicken, but even at $4/pizza I can't pencil that out. Chicken comes with free chicken stock if you're buying $5 rotisserie chickens (or whole chickens) and keeping the bones and vegetable ends/etc. around for stock making. This is the level of poor I was talking about. Even at $2.69/lb (the price I paid ~3 weeks ago) for chicken breast, it's going to be cheaper to feed two people than split a whole pizza. Rice is less than 30 cents a serving bought in bulk 50lb bags from a local ethnic store. $1 of rice and a $5 chicken is going to feed around 3-5 people, or give 1 person a lot of leftovers.

I agree one cannot live on just chicken and rice, but one cannot live on just the cheapest frozen pizzas either. I've kinda done both during my life. I lived probably a decade on junk food because I was either too busy or too lazy to do my own cooking like I did growing up. But this was after I started making IT money and could afford it.

> But then there's the sort of 'generational passing on' where we now have multiple generations raised on carry out, fast food, or microwaved meals. Sometimes where they were never given the teaching or responsibility of cooking because (for reasons similar to above, including more affluent cases) the general concept of 'a home cooked meal' becomes the exception case rather than the norm

I definitely agree with this one. Habits and skills are passed down generationally. Someone may not even know where to start looking at youtube for how-to videos to make their own chicken stock for close to free with a $5 crock-pot from the local thrift store these days. And that's probably intermediate level cooking skills, much less beginner level. My wife and I joke about our "depression era cooking" hobby.

I agree there are exceptions, nuance, etc. to this topic. But I get so tired of folks pretending eating home cooked meals is somehow more expensive than an equivalent quality prepared meal. Yes, you can spend as much as you want cooking at home. But the same is true eating out or buying pre-made stuff.

The time factor is certainly very true though. You get much better at it as you practice over the years, but it's always going to be easier and faster to just toss some chicken nuggets into the microwave and be done with it.

This is not moralizing or anything like that. I have lived well over half of my adult life eating junk, and only since getting married to a partner who loves cooking have I turned this back around to my childhood experiences. And we certainly do not optimize very hard for cost - just smart choices by buying stuff on sale, in-season, and in bulk when it makes sense to. I just really cannot square the claim to reality that it's cheaper to eat junk food than it is to eat moderately healthy at home. It's one of those Internet social media memes that just becomes truth by repeating it so much.

> despite in many ways being as genetic as getting breast cancer.

This claim is utterly silly on its face. Look at pictures of folks in the US 60 years ago compared to today. The population did not randomly mutate a genetic condition towards the propensity of obesity. Folks who come from societies that are not all that overweight did not magically develop a genetic condition upon immigrating to the US. This claim is entirely non-credulous and most folks claiming such are doing so in bad faith.

Environmental is by far and away the largest factor. Meaning most everyone lives surrounded by highly palatable horrible-for-you food and lives extremely sedentary lifestyles entirely optimized for convenience.

It's really not something that needs ANY more examination than that. Fixing it is the hard bit. Everything else on top of this is a rounding error and not something that needs to even be discussed until the first order factor is fixed. Then we can start discussing nuance, outliers, and details. It's a waste of time otherwise.

GLP-1s are the only thing that has turned the tide even a little bit. Because people eat less. Any other benefit from that is again - secondary and perhaps interesting, but not the primary mode of action. GLP-1s proved it is the American diet that is the problem.

I don’t consider that since it’s simply not true.

When I grew up relatively poor we never ate out or ate junk food because it is ridiculously expensive in comparison. We made our food from cheap ingredients. To save money.

Yes it takes more time and is far more work and is less convenient. US society has valued convenience over everything else for a few generations now. Cheaper it is not.

And it holds true today with my own grocery shopping. Cooking meals and being smart about grocery shopping is far cheaper per meal than buying premade junk. The few times I do have a cart full of products from the middle aisles I am astounded at how expensive it is.

Most of these books were destined for the landfill or recycling plant eventually.

They are being bought by the pound and/or container.

It’s really a totally made up thing to be upset about, since it’s at least giving these books a chance at being archived somewhere and one last productive use.

Apparently many are surprised that libraries, thrift shops, used book stores, etc. destroy books by the ton every year. There is a small boutique industry that buys them in bulk, sorts through them to find books that still might have value, and discards the rest.

Yeah, a few rare and/or valuable titles will get mixed in. Just the law of large numbers. But no one actually wants to read that Programming Perl 1.0 book from the 90s anymore. They just like the idea of someone else paying for it to exist on a shelf somewhere. And someone else doing the curation to sort that 1 rare gem out of 15,000 titles just dropped off by the truckload from the local library system.

Yeah people (including me) tend to hoard books they buy and never toss them. All that does is force your estate to buy a larger dumpster when you die.