roncesvalles

My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.

The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.

VPNs as marketed to "normies" is absolutely snake oil. It won't improve anyone's "privacy" in any meaningful way to simply proxy all their regular traffic through a VPN.

VPNs are a technical tool for technical people. You need to know exactly why you need it in order for it to be useful.

Well yeah. If you know what you're doing, why would you let the AI take control?

People confuse having fewer keywords/concepts to learn for readability, which is not really the same thing.

Someone who is equally expert at Java and Python will probably consider Java to be more readable.

Exactly. A lot of people forget that Python is just shell scripting++, taken way too far.

Productivity isn't about doing things faster as a lot of people erroneously believe (that's efficiency). Productivity isn't just efficiency * time_spent_working either.

Productivity is about how quickly you're progressing towards your high-level objective. Having a knack (or methodology) for knowing what to do is way more important than doing things fast.

My company (primarily a software company with 100k+ employees) went back to measuring lines of code.

Managers have a literal orgwide leaderboard now of how many LOCs were committed by each IC. As expected, right after they started doing this, there were a lot of frivolous refactoring projects where people moved code from one repo to another repo or consolidated stuff into a common repo, just to boost their LOCs.

That's only if you do agentic coding.

I use LLMs in the following ways:

1. Copy-pasting code into the web chat UI and asking for something (bugfix, add a feature, refactor, explain, review it etc), including entire source code files. A $20/mo Gemini subscription goes a long way (never been rate-limited). I only use the highest model. I often just copy-paste the entire source file between 3 backticks.

2. Cursor Tab. I do have hotkeys to enable and disable it; it's disabled most of the time otherwise it gets annoying.

3. Single-file changes directly from Cursor's AI sidebar. I only do this for simple, predictable stuff because even their auto-routing "Premium" setting is not as good as pasting stuff into Gemini 3.1 Pro.

That means I have only two $20/mo subscriptions: Gemini and Cursor.

I don't use Claude Code, it's really for people who don't know how to code. I don't use Plan Mode; I make and track the plan myself (if at all). I only tell the LLM granular tasks to execute. I don't use `claude.md` or `agents.md` or anything like that. If I don't like a particular output, I reset everything, modify my prompt and try again.

I believe this is the only way to fully leverage LLMs without losing any product quality. If you're trading off quality for "speed" (in quotes because over the long term, a low quality codebase is a massive drag on productivity) then there's no point.

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos.

LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation.

Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

The code codifies the intent and is the long-term source of truth for how your business actually operates.

>The leader of a product/company does not have to read code.

That's because he's paid a bunch of people 300k to read it and make sure it aligns with the company's objectives and interests. Part of the reason why devs are paid so much is because they're literal business administrators for some narrow slice of the company's operations. The devs are the leaders that you're referring to.

Even in multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies there are so many mission critical things that are owned by just 2 SWEs.

They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?

It's very conceivable that we reach a point where software is treated as a black box, i.e. no human ever reads it, only LLMs read and modify it. Isn't this essentially what vibe-coding means?

The new system is immature and hence open to exploitation. This is eventually going to destroy some companies.

This is simply a symptom that the company doesn't have good Quality Control processes in place.

AI-produced code is good but it's not so good that it can replace hand-crafted (or heavily supervised) code written by the type of engineer who works at Cloudflare.

What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI), because there's no one to tell them to stop, and in fact with a management that actively encourages this.

The "correct" way to shop at Costco is to wind through every aisle. They want you to discover what they have - what's new, what's gone, what's on sale, try some samples etc. There are some general anchors like the fridge, the alcohol, the produce section but it's otherwise pretty ephemeral.

It's not the kind of place where you go in with a shopping list, make point-to-point pickups and then checkout.

Costco is America's most important "third space". For many people including myself, it's a consistent weekly outing with friends, roommates, girlfriends, wife, the kids. I've even taken tourists there.

Notice how almost no one goes to Costco alone, and contrast it with the supermarket, where most people now go alone.

Costco is a theme park. So is Ikea.

Many aluminum cans have residual aluminum shavings inside and outside. The manufacturing process isn't perfect.

I've personally noticed shavings multiple times on the lip (especially with cheaper non KO/PEP products). La Croix cans are notorious for this.

If you stay late it looks like a) you're struggling, b) you're a try-hard, c) you don't have a life after work.

One of the most actionable low-hanging career advices I could give is be among the first ones to pack up and leave for the day. You can always continue working at home if you're not done.

One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career.

Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company), or being the right gender (again, depends on your company). Grooming and personal fitness are easy wins. I've never seen an obese or unkempt executive or middle manager.

Even the way you move makes a difference. If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever. Leadership-track people leave the office early even if it means taking work home, because it shows that you have your shit together. Leadership-track people eat lunch alone, not at the gossipy "worker's table". And of course, the way you dress matters (men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite). It's all about keeping up appearances.

Eating canned stuff seems to be going out of fashion as people realize about the Alzheimer's risk. There are basically no "new" canned food brands. People prefer frozen fruit to canned fruit, especially since frozen has gotten a lot of positive PR lately, e.g. "it's fresher than fresh produce at the supermarket!

>The government would step in and take over operations.

No. A government shouldn't do this unless canned peaches are especially important for national security or something like that.

Even as late as 2014, I didn't think it was ever possible to hit six figures with a CS degree (without climbing the ranks in management).

And yet, by most development and wellbeing metrics, America is doing better than ever before.

My theory is this:

People are just more aware of wealth disparity now. People in the 90s and 00s knew that multi-millionaires and billionaires existed, but they were faraway mystical gargoyles in Connecticut or Monaco.

What's more transparent now is that you might be making $50k and your neighbor might be making $500k. Or the kid you grew up with moved to Dubai after making a small fortune on crypto or drop-shipping, or became a YouTube/TikTok celebrity.

People didn't even know surgeons hit 7 figures, not low 6 figures, until recently. People knew Wall St suits made good money but they assumed it was $200k, not $2m or even $20m.

I remember when levels.fyi first came out and lots of people on social media were like "these numbers are completely made-up". A lot of SWEs themselves didn't even believe FAANG IC SWEs made $200-500k.

Not to mention, social media video lets you experience their lives through their literal point-of-view now.

In a way, the democratization of wealth and fame, and the transparency of information around it, has made people more anxious. We basically live in an era of epidemic FOMO.

Yeah it's pretty clear that he's well-intentioned. There are plenty of ports of open source projects literally named "port of <trademarked name>" and generally the original authors don't mind. what even is the point of open source if you can't do that?

If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?

In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.

It's well-understood in the Tesla owner's community that the battery is going to outlast the rest of the car. I think a lot of the "batteries go bad" beliefs started when hybrids first came out, and then it just got stuck in the public doxa.

Because it's nonsense. It's from some YouTube video that went viral a few years ago.

"Bored" as the reason that a student is underperforming is almost always bs. If you're so smart then just perfect the material and ace your tests. It should be exciting not boring.

I went to a magnet high school. The very smart kids have a lot of fun running circles around everybody else.

That "smart kids are bored in class" thing is bs unless your kid has savant intelligence (Terence Tao level).

If your kid is very bright, it's better for him/her to be among general peers and experience what it's like to be top of the class. In my opinion the confidence that this instills is more important than "not being bored". All the serious learning happens in high school anyway.

Some parents who rabidly pursue gifted programs deep down know that their kid is not special, but are hoping that the giftedness of other kids in class will rub off on their kid, or that the higher level of education will push their kid from average to above-average. That's also where the "smart kids are bored in class (and hence not doing great)" comes from.

Usually pre-high-school gifted programs are humbug. For one, very few kids who test high-IQ at a young age remain high-IQ when they grow up (remember IQ measures where you stand relative to peers your age; often precocious intelligence is just a growth spurt).

The end of Grade 8 is the perfect point to start streaming children into specialized/magnet high schools.

And the hockeystick trend of new code being written. There is literally no better time to be studying CS than today, yet the average person believes the exact opposite.