Didn't know Tailscale was Canadian, happy to hear it. Them and Signal are big ones. Signal just because the same bill would threaten their ability to operate in the country.
6,481 karma · joined May 21, 2017
Sure, automating away things that would otherwise just be basically copy/pasted anyway have always been fine, but this is a very different scale.
It is interesting how people can differ in terms of disposition though.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that one disposition is better or worse than another objectively, but rather that I subjectively find impatient, superficial, consumption-driven people extremely dull, which I also tend to associate with people who mostly care about the result. Additionally, I believe that this focus on the production of more and faster is a non-trivial contribution to producing things that have no longevity or are otherwise enshittified. The less we're involved in the intimate details of a thing, the less we're inclined to care, and the less it's even acceptable to care about quality.
Most of my interactions with people who don't have ADHD assume it's a sort of scatterbrained constant switching no matter what, and that if I just got a calendar and a to-do list it would fix all my problems. Those people normally can't imagine not being dopamine rewarded by their boring-ass office work or being on time or earning money. I need something that isn't an artificial abtract construct in order to not be bored to the point where I'll lose my job.
But I absolutely accept that everyone's somewhere diferent on the spectrum.
For me, I need something more deeply stimulating and long-form. A good weekend outing for me is a 14 hour hike with a sketchy scramble. I don't get any value out of constant context switching, constant bright flashing lights like rythym games or any of that, and I'm way more comfortable than most literally just sitting quietly and thinking.
I think the big divergence between how I respond to my environment and how normal people respond to their environment is that normal people tend to be problematically attracted to artificial gamified stimulated experiences, like academics, slot machine style social media, scary movies, sports, stuff like that. My biggest difficulty is that I just don't really care about arbitrary competition, benign social threats, existential danger etc.. I'd much rather be in a position where I'm actually in real danger if I mess up, or if I write some program incorrectly and risk leaking sensitive data. That's where my brain works at its best.
Right now I'm hesitating to go back to school because I have no idea if I—as a man in his mid-thirties—will be able to trick my brain into being stressed appropriately when exams come around, at least enough to show up and complete them.
Unless you get quite lucky, it can be extremely difficult to hold down long-term employment, build stable relationships, or get anything done, and in some places it's very difficult to get treatment.
It makes life more difficult than it needs to be unless it doesn't.
Web development, as much as some would like to think, is and has always been, complex.
I haven't tried learning Rust yet, and I'm sure as hell not going to lean on an LLM at all when I do.
To be fair, if owning a place or renting with more space was the most important thing to us, we could hypothetically move to a lower CoL area, but we ultimately find that a rather poor tradeoff that would only save a marginal amount on net anyway. We're thankful to have those close friends that have the space and enjoy hosting.
Canada fwiw.
> And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
Fair enough, and I did just try Siri on the mac to find them which was... sort of convenient, but ultimately took longer than simply opening Calendar, CMD+F typing "flight" into the text field.
Ambition combined with curiosity drive such a person to learn and do things that feel out of reach, but when everything feel within reach (at least to start), then nothing feels very compelling. Getting past that and continuing or bailing and moving away is proving to be tricky.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
I think the difference between transit methods within a city that has built-in alternative options has been interesting to examine now that I have a motor vehicle myself (that I got for free, but costs a lot to actually drive). I went without one for 8 years before someone offered it to me, and I do value the flexibility to occasionally get out of town wherever I want, but the tires alone will cost $2000 when I need to replace them, and the gas is crazy, so it's perfect in the sense that it sits there taking up street parking until I really need to get someone that a bike, scooter, bus, train, or walking doesn't work as well for. I'm not encouraged to use it for anything that it's really not needed for, and if it died tomorrow I wouldn't replace it with anything.
Relying on only the bus, even if the transit system is well-funded, has never been a particularly ideal situation, but the advantage is that I get that time back instead of being singularly occupied by driving. If there's traffic, I'd wildly rather be on the bus, but the train is always better.
This seems like the opposite of what I wrote
I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.
One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.
This is incidental, but in an honest discussion, if someone throws 10 examples at me, I'll just say "great, congrats" and let them believe whatever the hell they want about their own argument. An honest discussion—as opposed to a debate—isn't served well by having one unyielding relentless participant. Even if it's important instead of friendly, the conclusion of that specific conversation is rarely so important that it can't be paused in order to validate the claims being made.
When I was in my early twenties, I was the type to argue with people that I thought were wildly wrong, but now I know that I may not have enough information to be certain, or I simply don't care, or I care but I know it doesn't matter. People who have 10 examples in their back pocket, or literally search up answers in real time because they're afraid of being vulnerable, imo are overvaluing answers and facts over discussion for discussion's sake. Now in my thirties, I'm much more interested in curiosity, wonder, and speculation over what the answer to anything actually is. Speaking of which, I wonder if this is why I'm kind of not that interested in using LLMs for much; I'm usually so much more interested in the journey than the result, that if I can get the result quickly with little work, I probably won't care to do anything with it.
In the city where the author is based, there's plenty of derision of "luxury" places, but it's just Nimby code for "don't build anything, I want to keep renting my basement at $2k/m". Actual luxury places are the ones they live in, paid for presumably by borrowing against their land value.
Even at $1.4m, new builds have a veneer of what amounts to AirBnBification, as far as I've seen from the few I've actually visited. They're expensive and poor quality with relatively little space, fake wood finishes, vinyl flooring like anything else, and a standard package of appliances
The way I've been framing this is that it costs basically $2m CAD in this city to paint your house, if you wanted to be able to. You can buy something below that, but you don't have the same amount of agency over it that you would with a detached house.
Point is though that I find it's rare for any rented place or condo to be fancy by any stretch, it's all pretty ordinary stuff you'd expect but dressed up like it's expensive. The kitchen is still in the living room and has 4 sq ft of space to move around in, the cupboards are usually still particleboard, where there might have been a closet 20 yrs ago there's now machinery or venting, and the doorknobs are crunchy.
We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.