vishnugupta

It is very pervasive in certain parts of India. Google Pan Masala India.

> People generally follow them because they expect to be caught and punished.

Laws are the last line of defense. People don’t do bad things primarily because their human nature and moral compass stops them from doing so.

For my wife, who (a doctor) I'm confident is a representative of 95% of smartphone user-base, uses her iPhone for all[0] the tasks you described.

[0] At work she uses hospital provided Windows PC. Used only for patient records, nothing else.

People have different ways of dealing with overuse of technology. For some, one day a week off works for some notification off, for some using dumb phones. It is perfectly normal for people to tryout and share anything that works. And it is also perfectly normal to ignore it.

> There is A LOT of this sort of pressure and sentiment.

There’s absolutely no pressure that can’t be ignored. Just because you feel the pressure there’s no need to call everyone else’s way of dealing with overuse nonsensical.

> It's not screens that are bad, it's what you do with them and how you use them.

“Medium is the message” is a highly recommended reading.

There are two things that jump out at me being a parent of two children.

Until kids get to about 10 years old they need 24x7 supervision. Which means your time and energy is spent there. Your schedule completely revolves around them.

It’s hard to be 100% committed to anything else because you could get a call to attend to them regardless of your situation.

So yes, kids need their parents most of the time in early childhood.

However it also depends upon how much of community, relatives & governmental support you have. So take my words with a grain of salt.

Can relate. Though I was never that big into podcast/earphones etc., I had gotten into the habit of instinctively reaching out to play something while driving. However, I stopped doing that and it's so fun to be with myself again, me and my own voice in my head.

I used to take news papers and magazines and sometimes still do. So yes it’s perfectly fine.

“..for me..”, “…my version…”

Seconded. For me "doing nothing" also means "doing nothing without following any rules" as you've stated. My version of doing nothing involves either just sitting outside watching the world go by or walking & wandering around. May poke at plants here or there, pick up a stone or throw it etc., But no, I'm not consciously trying to "calm my mind"

Perhaps you could edit the submission to add this context?

And crypto.

Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!

Just checked out the Google map satellite view and no kidding! The solar panels are crazy! Highly recommend exploring it yourselves. Mind blowing.

And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

I agree 100%. I stopped watching after iPhone 15 event or maybe M2.

Absolutely everything seems scripted including hand movements, shifting of postures, smiles..the whole works.

Now I just wait for the press release and that’s that.

Looks like it was a satire? I couldn’t find any authoritative sources on it.

https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...

I think it’s about software engineers, who are supposed to be impervious about effects of caste structures and hierarchy, judging programming languages from the caste lens.

That is my interpretation, please don’t hold me against it

"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield."

Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.

+1 to Fastmail. Been their happy customer for 5+ years.

You’d be surprised how much vibe is there in VC investing.

When one is under the grip of irrational exuberance and FOMO due diligence goes out the window.

For example look at Sequoia’s investment into FTX and article about Sam that accompanied.

> I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.

Let’s make that specification Turing complete while at it.

Jokes aside, IMO it will be a good natural progression. Specify the problem statement in LLM specification, generate the code in Go/Rust whatever is the language of your choice and review the generated code to make sure it adheres to the architecture/design principles that you have set.

> $106,000 before incentives,

What's the capacity though. Either way this seems extremely high unless we are talking in terms of like 100kw or something. For reference, I recently installed hybrid/net-metered system set up at my home in India; 7kw solar with a 20kWh battery for around $10K. The biggest cost is for the batteries though. The panels themselves have become extremely low price and the prices continue to fall.

It's interesting to see Tesla's solar business getting disrupted by Chinese manufacturers after EV.

I make sure to understand the query to the fullest extent. I run explain plan to make sure no nasty things like full table scans are happening.

I guess just like any algorithm it’s easier to verify a solution than come up with one.

I’m building reporting for my company and what you said mirrors my experience nearly 100%.

I’m a backend developer so I know what it takes to build a half decent reporting system. Writing all those queries, slice and dice charts and what not takes real time and effort. All that has been outsourced to Claude Code. I now focus on ensuring that the system is sound architecturally and that useful reports are being surfaced.

> apparently published in 2005

No. It was published in late 90s. As per this copy on Archive.org 1997

https://archive.org/details/testyourcskills00yash

I am, thankfully, out of this craziness now but it was fun solving ton of such puzzles from Yashavant Kanetkar books while preparing for campus hiring interviews back in 2000. "Test Your C Skills" in particular. Fun times.

https://www.scribd.com/document/235004757/Test-Your-C-Skills...

Me and my friends collected, traded and also played a game with stone by staking match box covers. The idea is everyone stakes match box covers in a small circle drawn on an open ground. Everyone then takes turn to throw stone at the pile. Whichever match cover that’s dislodged out of the circle belongs to the thrower. Also played it with cigarette packet covers.

Fun times

I've got nothing to add to the discussion but want to take a moment to appreciate your ability to construct long sentences. It flows beautifully.

> removing people and organizational slack

You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else.

I've commented about lack of slack on several times here on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s.

Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.