rvshchwl

The book opened my mind on the inter-connected nature of various religions and the overall benefits of Meditation and Yoga. The stories are fascinating and interesting, and I read some amazing quotes from the book that I'll end up quoting more often.

The Meditation and Yoga techniques are still theoretical to me though and likely require some amount of practice to believe further in their benefits, or realize their value.

The Story of my Experiments with Truth - Mahatma Gandhi.

I recently read another book (Autobiography of a Yogi) that included an excerpt from this book, and it piqued my curiosity into Gandhi’s struggles in India. So far I’ve found it different than other biographies I’ve read because the author is self-critical and reflective which helps in understanding him as a person and his actions.

It seems that this is the new primitive all AI vendors are converging onto next, first chat, then code, and now always-on Agents. I'm curious to see when or if Anthropic builds something similar to this as well, especially since the market Grok Bot, Muse and Dots is catering to is business and enterprise users, which seems to be where Anthropic is focused.

The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.

1. Continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres

2. Life at the speed of play by Mark Pincus

3. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda

I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it's been one of the best decisions I've made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn't have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I've been trying to go back to more "intentional" media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn't really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I've started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I've read 4 books this year!

These phones are getting larger each release, and it's the opposite of the trend I prefer now. I really am starting to miss the SE phone sizes and not feeling like I'm carrying a literal brick in my pocket wherever I go now. I don't think Apple is cutting back on the phone size either when their Fold comes out, and we're slowly just moving towards the point where a phone is just a mini tablet.

I realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits.

The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.

I've found Codex to be the better subscription for OpenClaw, because the limits are indeed very generous. However, I've found more and more that Claude Routines/Scheduled agents can replace all the tasks I use OpenClaw for, so I've been slowly switching over to Claude Code. Aside from OpenClaw, I don't find a lot of value in Codex as a harness on it's own.

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.

I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.

I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.

I love Cursor. As a Product Manager who's not really had coding experience, it's been very useful. I'm able to have a browser on the side and make changes easily, and click through exactly what I want to change rather than having the LLM guess which component I'm talking about. Having multiple models has also been great, as well as the MCP integration. Most times I don't need all the MCPs, but I like being able to turn them on or off based on what I'm doing, like JIRA or Grafana.

One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.

The reason I posted this link is because the announcement really irked me. I am not a fan of Facebook in any way, but it really bothers me that Microsoft is reusing the product name that Facebook announced a few days ago - Metaverse. It's as if Samsung launched a phone tomorrow called the Galaxy iPhone. What happened to trying to be unique and releasing your own products?

As someone who does a lot of work with Intellectual Property, I am amazed that this product name is not protected, and even if it's not (because of the broad applications of the concept), I am disappointed by a company like Microsoft for essentially "stealing" another company's product name and releasing it a few days later. It feel very unclassy and I lost a lot of respect from Microsoft from this announcement.

I'd like to hear everyone else's viewpoint on this. Is Microsoft breaking IP laws here, or is this just something unethical?

that's the story of every Apple product. They look great, provide good to decent functionality, but not worth their price tags.

Well, Google recently also purchased Kaggle, another major open-source repository for code. It hasn't really changed anything for now, but Microsoft's purchase will be in the same vein. I think that Microsoft's contribution to the open-source community in the last few years kind of makes sense for why they are purchasing it, just like Google purchased Kaggle because of their contribution to ML.

This is a good thing to enable, but I think that smartphones contribute exponentially more data to Facebook services than laptops and browsers do. Smartphones give easy access to location, background running services, microphone. Even if you block these permissions to the app, Facebook gets the data from their data providers that use Facebook ads.

Heard a segment on this on Pardon the Interruption on ESPN yesterday. I agree with their argument that it's not a bad thing because we are in a time of sports where games need to be more exciting. We want more home runs, and more scorings, and if lighter baseballs means that we get them, then it's just a normal progression.

Google is the first big company that I actually rejected after receiving an offer from them. I had a really bad experience, and just felt like the company was looking for things I am much more qualified from.

I was interviewed by engineers who were all just recent college grads, no managers, tech leads, or anyone I felt were probably more qualified to interview me. The environment felt toxic. Most people I talked to looked unclean, like they just got out of bed to work. Had red eyes like they were tired. And the workplace was just not as clean as I was hoping. There were a set of dirty plates in the conference room I was interviewed in, and no one bothered to remove them the entire time.

From people I have talked to, my experience was pretty unique, and most people have had good interviews there. But even as an outlier, I don't like the chance of it being exactly like my experience. Things like this really put stuff in perspective for me though. I still went through the entire process, but in the end, rejected the offer. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like Google's, it feels toxic, and engineers feel like they are overworking themselves to death.

I really like it, but it would be good to have an editable version beyond just the text, either with a Microsoft Word or HTML/CSS. It would be good to be able to tinker around with the template to personalize it more, such as adding different sections.

That is basically what happened with Hulu. The service is owned by the major content providers, such as Fox and CBS, and all of the televised content is almost completely exclusive on Hulu now, as opposed to being on Netflix. As more and more shows started to get pulled from Netflix, Netflix had to rely on original shows to make sure that they have a full catalog of streaming content. They paid over $6 billion dollars in creating new shows for 2017.

Unfortunately for music, the exclusivity has started to show up in some cases. Artists that own the Tidal service don't allow any of their music on competing services, and Apple has been signing contracts with musicians to have new content show up on their service several months in advance before it does on other services (like Jay Z and Kanye).

I just started my first job in CS this year, at 25. And after a few months of working on products, which are themselves actually quite fascinating, I don't see myself working in Software Development for more than 5-6 years.

The thing that stands out to me is how much more successful product and project managers are at my company, and they are doing much less work and have less hectic jobs. Software dev is interesting, but I plan to transition into management because I think a software development background can actually help me propel much further in the career than just sticking to programming will. And the other thing is that as a developer, I have to continue to keep up with newer technologies and make sure that I know what's new, or be at the risk of being replaced eventually.

CS is a great field, but I think that the pace at which most big companies hire and lay off employees is too significant to ensure a stable job for too long.

Doubt it. Busses are most often used by local governments than by businesses, and most cities are less likely to spend that much money on a more expensive form of transportation.

Also don't like that there aren't passenger seats, or at least they don't show in the interior pictures.

It may possibly be because the Roadster was a surprise reveal, while the Semi was expected to arrive this year anyways.

Regardless, I am really looking forward to seeing the Semi's on Highways, although I believe that a main roadblock to it will be the lack of Tesla charging stations across the country. Semi trucks drive throughout the US on all major highways, and they have to coordinate their routes according to where the Weighing stations are in each state. Having to add super-charging stations to their routes will certainly complicate their routes, so it should be a bigger priority for Tesla to address those first.

Don't completely agree with the guidelines presented in the maturity model, but I do think that a well written README goes a long way in making your project discoverable, identifiable or even presentable. I have had old projects for which I am now really glad that I took the time to write good READMEs when I did, because I can refer back to them and still know what I am reading through. It's a good practice, like commenting your code.

That is not always true. When the iPhone 6 started to "bend" unexpectedly, Apple denied the problem completely and refused replacements until they started to receive bad press for it. Even after that, they didn't acknowledge the problem at all, and claimed that only a handful of devices were affected when in-fact a substantial percentage were. Same thing kind of happened this year with the phone casings expanding.

If a significant hardware issue presents on the iPhone X, Apple will most likely try to delay or deny any fixes or replacements, especially because they are under a struggle to meet the demand as it is.