taude

I don't think it matters how you define it. Engineering career growth is almost always going to be about understanding the new technologies, gaining communication skills in navigating an org. etc....

What you're calling personal growth is 100% related to career growth. And you sound like someone who does do things outside the hours of 9 to 5 that intellectually you find interesting, and likely makes you better at what you do 9 to 5...

You're going to show up at that meeting someday, there's going to be a problem to solve, and you're going to have some ideas for things to try that are answers, because you read about that new tech. And someone's going to tap you on the shoulders to lead that or what not....

I'm fascinated by all the underachievers downvoting me.

Do y'all really not read Hacker News while board sitting on the couch? Discover a new programming language that looks interesting? Play with some new database technology? Read a reddit sub related to technogoly, etc. after the hours of 9 to 5? Vibe some fun looking idea, even if you just throw it away?

I'm kind of doubtful the people who are actually spending time learning something on Hacker News fall really into the category that they're not working on their career growth outside of work hours....

Are any of you good at your job?

are you sure the demand is gone? The whole point of this article is that Apple had to double production because demand was so high.

EDIT: i just looked up how many ipads apple shipped in 2025: 60M, so yeah, no shortage of demand in iPads. Most people are consumptioners, though, so that kind of makes sense.

How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for.

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

I bought one: I was hesitant about the 8 GB of memory at first. But I'm happily running Chrome with like 20 tabs and some other apps, and performance isn't an issue.

It's mostly a couch laptop.

I run Obsidean, messaging apps, writing tools. I use some CLI toolings...

I really wanted a Framework 12, but I got $180 credit on a ipad AIR 4, and sold a 2017 Macbook Pro for $150 (US), so that effectively made this a 280 upgrade, and reduced the risk in me going for it.

I love this thing.

* love the keyboard, it’s such an improvement over the older laptops. Worth getting rid of that old Macbook Pro for this alone

* Keyboard isn’t backlit. Thought that would be annoying, but i’m good enough touch typist that in the dark, i can still navigate around no problem.

* Lack of touch sensor. I just turned off most security prompting, like passwords when filling in websites, etc. and just rely on typing my password in once when logging on. On my todo is to turn on authentication from my Apple Watch, might make not having a touchid a non-issue.

* The screen!

Did I say I love the form factor?

I still wish it was shaped like my former favorite computer: the 11" Macbook Air, with the tapered edges and such.

I'm optimistic that the next version of Framework 12 will have better screen and be a nice aluminum body...but until then.....

I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...

I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).

You're 100% supposed to grow professionally outside of work.

I'm with you on this. I think the market bubble can stay alive and well a lot longer than you can survive an open short position.

I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half.

Interesting, I do have an omarchy install already on a USB. I didn't try that one on the old Macbook pro, though. Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll give this a try, both sound and wifi will work? (I'll check it out.)

i've tried getting linux to run on a 2018 MB Pro (intel/nvidia based). Even after a ton of research and installing a couple "compatible-ish" distros, I couldn't get it to work, and gave up. And then further reading suggested I was always going to live with a semi-bricked machine. I just wanted a simple writing and couch surfing laptop. But the version of MacOs running on that old hardware is so slugish, it's painful.

it's Nevermind. ;)

I really want a Framework 12, but not in current incarnation. Hoping for an upgrade with aluminum body. I don't mind the pricepoint. But didn't want a plastic notebook at this point. Want a great couch computer for surfing the net, ssh'ing to machines, writing, etc....

What I surprisingly really miss, is my macbook air 11".

But probably won't be surprised if I end up with a Framework 13 Pro once they're caught up on delivery. I'm really hoping they have an announced 12 revision by then, though.

yeah, wild!

Yeup, no shortage of tech IPOs over the past five years that are now valued at like 5% of what they were after being dumped onto the market: ZoomInfo, Bumble, Gemini

And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase

And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...

I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.

But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.

4.2K likes.

Maybe I should be generating generic AI made videos. LOL.

This isn't true at the moment, though. So far there hasn't been the negotiating power. What happens is you end up capping usage for employees at a fixed amount. I think eventually, prices will come down and there will be discounts, but for enterprise accounts at least of our size (<5000), we're paying almost 100% retail, which kind of sucks, because it's expensive, and pretty easy to burn $50 to $100+ in a day, if you're not careful. In fact we got pushed off the former plan to the token-utility one at the last contract negotiation.

Going to be interesting to determing the metrics we give to engineers for determining whether the spend on this is worth it. Measuring PRs, lines of code committed, commits fully generated by agentic workflows, etc.....

What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.

I’ve experienced the opposite. I get good summaries with links for original sources when something seeems off, which it almost never does. I also like that I can glance to see where the data came from.

Several months ago, I was getting hallucinations and silly answers, like Jaco Pastoreous being the bass player for Metallica.

but lately it’s been great. Especially for technical syntax stuff, like asking for syntax on a jq command, or sal syntax, or something trivial like movie casts members….

Edit: I also assume there’s now some pre-processing filter to retrieve answers from a cache or something, because I’m getting pretty long answers very quickly….

i always found it funny when people complaied about white board coding tests. Back in school, I had to write C code in those little blue books. :)

EDIT: I meant writing in blue books before this era of copying words out of the claude app on your phone

Not speaking for the OP. But my biggest constraint is time. Now with agentic coding, I can work in 5 to 15 minute bursts a few times/day, and make meaningful progress on projects, where as before I would have never been able to context shift from my day job long enough on a personal project.

My android phone was so much better for voice-to-everything. Whether it was transcribing my voice for text messages, or doing looks on the internet. Siri is just so bad.

Still love not having google's paws all over my data, though, so not going back.

100%, bringback the macbook air, but in a new form factor.

feels more like 8, living in times of mass-fraud.

We should do more of this, hacker news, surface 17 year old articles and then debate like they were written yesterday!

Emacs. ;)

No animations for quickly switching to displaying apps in the foreground

I do use alt-tab, to switch between the multiple windows of the same app. (Something's happened with my AltTab config, not sure if it's due to corp background system software or a Tahoe update, but I no longer see the mini screen shots of the different window states.)

Similar I just use RayCast Hotkeys to bring mostly full-sized apps of my choice to the forefront and not worry about much. I'm also just optimizing around a small single screen setup these days for focusing on stuff.

option-cmd-o BOOM, outlook opt-cmd-g Bang, Ghostty opt-cmd-v POW, VSCode opt-cmd-s Boff, Slack etc etc...

ALSO: I learned this from some prior thread on something similar.

Both a) to help a friend out and b) to help non-technical founders I've meet at some Meetups/AI events to launch their product. My short-term goal is to put together a checklist/cheatsheet for all the technical things someone needs to do to launch a business because it's not just having a webapp running on Vercel with Supabase. And if they do have an app, is it a complete mess or not.

I think the solo-founder hype is an overplayed unless the person has the right skills, and even worked at a tech company, and knows what they're getting into. Alerting and monitoring for example is one of like 30 things they should be aware of.

I feel like you're pretty strongly agreeing that taste is important: " I'm finding that you have to have an extremely clear product vision...""

Clear production vision that you're building the right thing in the right way -- this involves a lot of taste to get right. Good PMs have this. Good enginers have this. Visionary leaders have this....

The execution of using AI to generate the code and other artifacts, is a matter of skill. But without the taste that you're building the right thing, with the right features, in a revolutionary way that will be delightful to use....

I've looked at three non-engineer vibe-coded businesses in the past month, and can tell that without taste, they're building a pretty mediocre product at best. The founders don't see it yet. And like the article says, they're just setting themselves up for mediocrity. I think any really good PM would be able to improve all these apps I looked at almost immediately.