Dark is so, so, so good. Just wow.
1,121 karma · joined July 5, 2017
Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.
It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.
Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.
That said, agreed that this is weird. Python makes some really unintuitive choices regarding scope.
It's no coincidence that the clueless MBA who takes pride in knowing nothing about the business they're apart of proliferated during economic "spring time" -- low interest rates, genuine technological breakthroughs to capitalize on, early mover advantage, etc. When everyone is swimming in money, it's easier to get a slice without adequately proving why you deserve it.
Now we're in "winter." Interest rates are high, innovation is debatably slowing, and the previous early movers are having to prove their staying power.
All that to say: the bright side, I hope, of this pretty shitty time is that hopefully we don't _need_ to "put all this nerd talk into terms that someone in the average C-suite could understand," because hopefully the kinds of executives who are simultaneously building and running _tech companies_ and who are allergic to "nerd talk" will very simply fail to compete.
That's the free market (myth as it may often be in practice) at work -- those who are totally uninterested in the subject matter of their own companies aren't rewarded for their ignorance.
This right here is the root of the problem.
I've worked with many people like this. Personally, I've always landed with curt, minimal responses, such as:
- Them: says mean/passive-aggressive thing
- Me: "Noted, thanks." And then I move onto the next thing.
It's only exhausting if you let it be. I know that might feel dismissive to you, but really: it's all about how you frame it. Be no more angry with this guy for being a dick than you would with a dog for barking (it's in its nature) or a baby for crying (it's in its nature) or for the sky raining (it's in its nature).
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly...[I] have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind...and so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” - Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
I just down-voted you, so I contributed to that.
OP bent over backwards to make it clear that he didn't mean any offense, and you opened with "you sound like a problem employee."
I arrived at the OnePlus thing not by reading any speculation threads or anything. I was just thinking about it, just 'cuz. Thinking for the love of the game, for enjoyment. I wasn't searching for an answer -- obviously there _isn't_ one, it's all just speculation. So, already, the idea of searching the internet for other people's speculation seems pointless and antithetical the point, which is to think about it for myself.
I _certainly_ didn't think about it from the perspective of "spending actual brain cycles." As far as I know, "brain cycles" is a pretty reductive way of looking at the brain, and is fundamentally wrong in the same way that Trump was when he said that "exercise uses up the body's finite energy:" it's overly protective in a way that results in the exact opposite of what you think you're achieving. To put it more simply: "use it or lose it." I'm not worried about "spending brain cycles" (to the extent that "brain cycles" is an accurate model at all), because thinkin' 'bout stuff is precisely how I get _more_ "brain cycles," not _less_.
Which is all to say: do you seriously engage with all your potential thought avenues from this perspective? Weighing which ones are "low priority," etc? For work/programming/etc, I can understand that to a degree, but for something that can only be classified as "recreational thinking," I just do not get this _at all_.
You said in another comment in this thread that while ChatGPT does something, it frees you up to do something else. What did it free you up for?
However, one place where LLMs have proved to be incredibly helpful is with build tools, dependency hell, etc. Lately I've been trying to update a decade-old Node/Electron project to modern packages and best-practices, and holy hell I simply was not making any meaningful progress until I turned to Claude.
The JS world simply moves too fast (especially back when this project was written) to make updating a project like that even remotely possible in any reasonable amount of time. I was tearing my hair out for days, but yesterday I was finally able to achieve what I was wanting in a few hours with Claude. I still had to work slowly and methodically, and Claude made more than a few stupid errors along the way, but dealing with the delicate version balancing that coincided with API and import/export style changes, all the changes in the bundler world, etc simply could not have been done without it. It's the first time that I was 100% glad I relied on an LLM and felt that it was precisely the right tool for the job at hand.
Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.
Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
I hope you find who you're looking for!
Testing and iterating on code does not require making exceptions to the kernel development schedule.