dkh

How has your experience with Helix been?

I love that War and Peace is still the canonical “lots and lots of text” sample for testing these sorts of things

It’s a shame! I’m probably the least of a gamer of anyone I know (a bit of FIFA on PS4 is the only game I’ve played all year), but I played the shit out of RTS games back in the day. There was something wonderful about opening up StarCraft, jumping into a really fun and intense game, and then being finished 45min or so later. I just couldn’t get as into games you had to play for significantly longer or with more nebulous objectives. Endless unwinnable games like WoW were my absolute nightmare.

Finally, someone looking to challenge Neom.

Disney thought so, it was the original plan for Epcot prior to his death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)

At all? Like, anywhere? Or do you just have data living on cloud services instead of locally?

Interestingly, despite the burden of uninsured/unpaid medical costs, many in America view universal health coverage as antithetical to "forcing people to take responsibility." Given how many people are provided insurance by having (or being married to someone who has) a full-time job (half the population), there are many who feel that not being covered means you don't have a proper job, and perhaps you should, and why should I pay into a system so that you can get coverage easier? This is, of course, completely absurd, but you'll have no trouble finding people who think this way.

In case you're wondering why having to foot the bill for all those uninsured hospital visits doesn't make the "taking responsibility" thing super obvious, it's because most people aren't aware of how much they are paying for it. Like many things here, uncompensated medical care is ultimately paid out of a combination of many different local, state, and federal sources. While we are all paying for it somehow, it is not obvious to an individual how many of their dollars went to it. Therefore, while unfortunate, many believe that an increase in monthly healthcare premiums (they know exactly how many of their dollars go to that) means they will be paying more overall, not the same or less, because they are either unclear on how much of their money is going to the uncompensated costs now, or they don't trust that their tax bills will actually decrease.

We're once again at a place where most Americans believe healthcare coverage should be guaranteed, but are miles apart on who they trust to actually handle it. [1]

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...

I've seen and experienced this as well, but not to the point where calling the same doctor for an appointment would get me in earlier or later. More typically I have access to different doctors altogether, or need approval for certain doctors, or have different out-of-pocket costs.

In my view, a big part of problem the here is how individuals view the costs/quality relative only to themselves and not to those of a different socioeconomic status.

I wish there were a quick/easy answer here (we all prefer would to read those) but the truth is that it's not that simple. Even among the nations with excellent universal healthcare systems, most differ from each other in pretty significant ways. This is in part because no two countries are the same, and every detail can have a big effect on what system would work best for them. There are certainly stats-friendly ones about population, economics, and politics. But there are also equally-important ones that are cultural and harder to quantify--for instance, in some countries the people have a distrust of doctors, or a cultural aversion to visiting the doctor unless absolutely necessary, and that factors into the best design for that country, based on how it would be used.

What I can recommend is a great book that compares all the systems, through the lens of an American with the same question you have, called The Healing of America by T.R. Reid. Highly recommended.

This. You see this effect to some extent in Switzerland as well. Switzerland, many seem to feel, is "similar enough" to the United States that the existence of its universal healthcare system "seems" like a goal should be similarly within our reach. But this is to discount cultural differences, among other things, and the mindset of the average Swiss is I think quite different than that of the average American.

Some time ago I read 2 different books on healthcare systems, both very detailed, the authors having compared in-depth the many styles of healthcare systems in existence in addition to having relocated for some time to some of the locations to get a personal look. And despite all the complexities involved in such comparisons, both came to the same very basic conclusion: Healthcare systems are a reflection of the mindset of the country's citizens; Americans won't get universal healthcare until the average American believes that other Americans deserve it.

How is this? All other things equal, certain companies simply get to jump the line over others?

There’s a lot of people who want to make the jump but haven’t yet because the configuration seems complicated/unapproachable and they’ll lose too much productivity trying to figure it out or using it with a blank slate. These are great in such cases, I think.

Yeah but the demand for talent was such that, for at least a long time, the benefits and perks at startups usually exceeded those of the bigger companies. This may not be the case now, but I still think what you describe is not true often enough to be considered a general truism

I was diagnosed and treated young (around 12-13). I was not very well controlled at all at the time, and wouldn't be until my 20s, but I at least was aware of the problem and seeing a doctor regularly from that point on.

Everyone is different, but the key things for me were 1) never settling medication-wise until I found something that truly worked well for me (a process that took years but well-worth it) and 2) utilizing my newfound focus to put systems in place to help me be productive while working around my particular weaknesses. (By this I mean how I handle todos, calendars, notes, workflow processes, etc.) #1 was absolutely crucial and is when I started "feeling good" but #2 is what took me from "feeling good" to "reaching goals".

Regarding the medication, I had a very good doctor. In the beginning, medication would either not work for me, or it would, but for a limited period of time. I was very used to switching things frequently. So later when I would land on something that was okay-ish but not great (a point where many people consider themselves lucky and stop experimenting) I would note that it was helpful in case I wanted to return to it later, but we would move on and try something else, hoping for something better than "okay". And eventually we landed on something lesser-prescribed but that worked quite well for me and continues to work to this day. #2 was still a multi-year battle that I haven't fully won, but I've made enormous strides and I so badly wish I had gotten myself to this point a decade earlier.

Way, way earlier. I definitely had different dopamine delivery systems during those years when I wasn't reading a lot. I was doing a lot of things differently n general during that time. But it was surprising and disappointing that I never seemed to regain quite the same reading "abilities" (for lack of a better word) even after years of regular reading again.

Don't get me wrong, I read all the time now, but I can't burn through books like I did back then, I don't read faster than I can subvocalize, and it can be challenging to stay focused or retain what I read.

A few years ago, I spent about nine months reading a single book about Napoleon. It was pretty long, detailed, and complex, so it wasn't intended to be an easy/quick read, but it still took me a pretty long time to get through it while giving it the proper focus. But the annoying part is that a couple years later, I struggle to remember details about Napoleon. I know, memory needs to be practiced and reinforced and such, but I had hoped the length of my immersion in the subject would've done a bit more in this area on its own.

What you describe is how I was when I was younger, too. I read everything, I read pretty fast, and I could read for hours on end. That is no longer the case at all, and I'm uncertain when or why it changed so drastically. (The "when" is tough to pinpoint because for much of my early 20s I wasn't doing much reading, and it's possible that the "why" is related to some change my brain underwent during/because of that.)

I am famous for "ratholing" for hours on some specific thing that caught my interest, usually with little sense of the time that has passed, and almost exclusively on problems that aren't at all what I'm supposed to be focused on at the time

I live in Southern California where there was no shortage (until recently, at least) of very early-stage startups, and for years I exclusively used startup-focused sites like AngelList (now Wellfound) when jobhunting. The largest startup had 12 people when I joined. I worked for a company of 40ish once, but they weren't primarily a tech company and engineering consisted of only 3 people.

I should perhaps disclaim that while this worked perfectly for me for close to a decade and I was never without work for more than a couple weeks at a time, I have currently been unemployed for a few months and have had a considerably more difficult time than at any point in the past.

This is true for me as well, but the amount of time/effort it takes to get to that point can vary wildly, sometimes being a bit prohibitive, other times never fully getting there for the duration of the job. If I wrote the code, or was present for most of its growth, or have spent whatever time it took in this instance, I am pretty damn efficient with it indefinitely, as long as I don't for whatever reason take a huge break from working with that codebase. (As a ZFS fan, the silly analogy for my brain that I half-jokingly give people here is that I have a high amount of L2ARC)

I did have this weird lightbulb moment a few weeks ago where for a moment I felt like an LLM was the perfect parallel to describe how my brain worked

Relative to my peers I have often found myself to have lower tolerances in these areas. It sometimes surprised people when I felt something was complex (to work with, not conceptually) when they did not, or at the length of time it could sometimes take me to fix something that involved digging through a lot of code.

The existence of colored syntax is too broad for a conclusion here. It's the specific highlights/colors/contrast ratios/etc. that determine whether a particular theme is working for or against you individually. Still haven't found my "perfect" scheme, but I bounce around between a small handful based on my mood at the time--sometimes the less-loud ones remove unwanted stimuli, but other times I need the louder ones in order to see/focus on the code.

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer" where while I can understand (and design and implement) very complex things, it is easy for me to flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once. This is especially true if the code isn't mine.

It is for this reason that I try to write what I feel is very obvious or self-explanatory code, why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible), and why I almost exclusively join small/new teams who don't yet have an enormous codebase that I'll have to wrap my head around. I am never done tweaking the UIs of the editors I use to maximize my ability to work around these things.

One of the most fundamental elements of a movie or show is that characters will be thrown into conflict that will challenge them and will come out on the other side (or not) changed in one way or another. That's at the macro level -- at the micro level, you may need to portray a wide range of emotion in a single scene. Nobody is just "one personality" throughout a show. Or a scene.

If they can successfully map a thousand different emotions to the same A.I. model believably, then okay, but we are some distance from that yet, and it will be fought heavily when we get there, because a couple hundred thousand people aren't going to roll over and accept that their jobs don't exist anymore

People have been continuingly trying to say "content is garbage, the writers on strike weren't any good anyway" and such throughout this whole ordeal. But there's a lot of content for a reason--we each have our preferences. What one person loves, someone else thinks is shit. Most content will not be for everyone. This is fine.

But are you actually saying that there is nothing out there that you really enjoy? That 100% of it across the board is terrible? And are you willing to say that most other people feel the same way? There is nothing out there for anyone?

If there is anything you do like, then you want to support the workers because it gets made the same way as the stuff you don't like, and this is by design.

Unless, of course, you're expecting everything to be Game of Thrones or some other huge show that most people seemed to enjoy simultaneously. In that case, you should be even more on board, because those are hard to come by, they are expensive, risky, and require all the talent available to them.

Sure, it's both sides trying to survive a little longer than the other, but the studios are also better positioned to create or run this hypothetical app.

Throughout the years, the one thing that has remained unchanged is that the power ultimately lies in controlling distribution.

I find it interesting that the Director's Guild agreement (which was agreed to by the studios in about five minutes) included the acknowledgement that A.I. is not a person and cannot/will not be used in place of humans for any jobs covered by the DGA (directors, production managers, stage managers, etc.).

The studios had no trouble agreeing to that very quickly, yet seem determined to negotiate the ability to replace actors as they see fit, using human actors to do it. They acknowledge that some jobs are too important for A.I. to be allowed anywhere near, just that acting is not among them.

No actors will be able to do this unless SAG-AFTRA negotiates it. SAG-AFTRA does not just represent household names, it's all actors, 160,000 people whether you're the star of feature films or the guy with one line in one episode of a streaming series nobody knows about. This is the point of a union and collective bargaining. Actors aren't able to work outside the bounds of the agreements even if they were willing to.

They are a union. They negotiate as a collective. And its members voted to the tune of 98% in favor of the strike.