fatnoah

> "Who will take care of you when you're old?" Well, myself, presumably.

I'm sure nearly every person who ended up needed their kids to take care of them probably felt the same way right up until they needed help.

Regardless, "future help" is definitely a terrible reason to have kids. As you noted, it's a complete change in life, lifestyle, and priorities. One needs to be ready for this (or as ready as one can be, anyway) before taking it on, and be willing to commit 100% to a journey that will be unpredictable and that has no guarantees of success or happiness.

As a parent that was previously in a "no way am I having kids" state, yet wouldn't trade in being a parent for anything else in the world, I have 100% respect for those who do and those who don't want to have kids.

In 2007, I did a loop of Boston -> Chicago -> Sacramento -> LA -> San Antonio -> Chicago -> Boston, and the total cost for an all-sleeper trip was < $2000. It was a great experience and one that I'd totally do again.

Time passed so much faster than flying. Being able to take in the scenery, get up and walk around, have a mean w/some wine, etc. couldn't be beat.

I love this. As a formerly car-free resident of Boston, I cobbled together something far cruder to handle the cases of there being many ways for me to get from point A to point B, but the "best" way depended on time and any stops I'd make along the way.

For example, I walked my son to school before heading to work, and sometimes I got breakfast after dropoff. Having the "next departure" view let me have a more fluid experience that handled the non-deterministic nature of walking with a 4 year old in a very interesting place, or deciding whether to hustle to get the train because missing it hit a schedule gap, etc.

> I and many friends have experienced Aetna routinely denying things that are explicitly covered by their plans and

My dad passed away from cancer over 20 years ago, and this was Aetna's plan even then. Each claim followed the exact same process of deny, approve but pay only pay a fraction, and then finally pay the correct amount. Literally every single claim. My mom built an automation in Excel to track the calls for each claim and to prompt her at the various time intervals required to follow up at each phase.

Personally, I experienced this went I went to the ER with acute abdominal pain and ended up having emergency surgery within a few hours. Naturally, Aetna tried to deny that my ER visit was an actual emergency. On the phone with the rep, I asked them if they new of any non-emergency situations where someone was able to have a surgery scheduled only 4 hours in advance. They agreed that it was an emergency and promptly paid $8k of the $16k bill. After another call several months later, they paid all but $800.

> Cut your commute. Sacrifice space to relocate around work

I've actually done this. It was a massive financial stretch, but probably the best thing I've ever done for my own and my family's wellbeing...and it's not a thing that just anyone can do.

I've also done the opposite, as circumstances and life changed.

Even later in life, I've gone completely the other way. I commute once a week to spend Tuesday through Thursday near my job in another city.

Every person, situation, and dynamic is unique. There's no one-size solution that applies all of the time. The real key, IMHO, is reflecting on and knowing what you want, and then optimizing for that.

Fully agree. Over 20 years ago, I did the same job as the Patent Engineer (I had a slightly different title, but same role) at a big law firm. Half of the patents I filed were BS software patents for a name brand tech company, and the other half were for actually novel and cool inventions for things like super-efficient distillation/chilling systems for coffee and satellite antennas for moving vehicles.

Getting that job was almost as easy as getting a software job in 2019. I had a masters in EE and a few years of SWE experience. I sent out 5 applications to top local law firms, got 3 interviews, and one offer over the course of a month. Apparently, the bulk of people in that role were post-docs in bio/chem who weren't excited about managing student loan debt while being underpaid lab people. (The EE/CS contingent was 5 out of 30 in the role, and I was the only one with actual SWE experience, so it gave the me and the firm creditability with inventors)

My salary matched my SWE salary, I had my own office + secretary, and the firm paid overtime and law school tuition. They also charged $250/hour for my time. I also only lasted about year in that role since it was very isolating and not collaborative.

The coolest part of that whole experience came a couple years later when I went to dinner with my wife, her close friend, and the friend's serious boyfriend. In the "what do you do" chit chat, he mentioned working with someone on a new way to brew and chill coffee quickly that they were close to bringing to market.

When I asked if it works like [describes invention exactly] his mind was absolutely blown away. As it turns out, I wrote their patent.

> It's a game changer. I asked the one neighbor, who'd said previously "the only snowblower I'd buy is a Honda" [1]

My brother in law's family business is small engine sales and maintenance. This is his position as well (and now mine, after having a Honda snowblower for a few years).

Tom Cruise is dangerous and irresponsible, and those who take medical advice from non-professionals are just as bad.

Don't forget the federal government itself. I've still got 1 year remaining from the 10 years of monitoring I got from the OPM breach wayyy back when.

Related, any company offering monitoring should be required to pay for a serialized version. The 10-20 or so settlements that require monitoring in my lifetime have been useless because I already have it for a longer period.

TBH, I don't remember the name as it was one of those crazy generic beezelebubatab type of generic names.

> Part of the harm is in people no longer trusting drugs.

I'm not sure how trust would be eroded by the failure of an experimental drug to treat a terminal case where no other drugs are working.

I've experienced this from both sides. First with my father who was dying of cancer and was informed that while some promising treatments were in trials, he was not eligible. Balancing potential harm from unapproved drugs vs. certain death within 12 months feels like an easy task.

On the other side, my wife worked for a mid-sized pharma in the past. After several rounds of trials that each cost tens of millions of dollars, the FDA couldn't be convinced to approve the drug, despite hearings full of people who were either alive because the drug saved their lives or were hoping to have it approved for future use. After a couple more trials, the company ended up cutting losses and moving on to something else. Again, it feels like there should be some pathway here. Such a drug shouldn't be the first option if others are available, but if there's nothing else or other treatments haven't worked, what's the real harm in letting someone who's going to die anyway give it a shot.

I've seen it go both ways.

I once worked at a large (> $100B market cap) tech company and had the opposite experience. I had several interactions with C-Suite and the level below and my main takeaway was that "holy cow, they get it!". Now, the layers between me and them were another story. It was amazing to have the experience of my manager talking about our tech/product strategy, and then to hear it from someone several levels higher in the org chart. The explanations from the former typically made little sense, but from the latter it made much, much, more sense.

> a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition

Granted, it was nowhere near this scale, but I've gone through this process as the head of Engineering for the company being acquired. At that point, the business had already decided to acquire, so the process felt more about finding any red flags and/or identifying reasons to adjust the price.

For the process itself, the company looked at nearly everything over the course of a few months. Every detail of finances, sales, tech, operations, etc. was scrutinized, culminating with 16 hours (4 for business and 12 for tech/ops) over two days of standing in front of a room with 30 people.

I run both Plex and Roon on my Synology NAS. The former is used for videos/photos and to share with the in-laws, while the latter is mostly for my own owned & streamed music. Roon's not cheap, but it works for my various use cases for it.

Yes, and there are multiple levels of aggregators. For example, in a past life, I built SMS APIs and back-ends, including ones used by smaller telecoms to enable their subscribers to send/receive SMS. (We were pretty small, and only accounted for something like 0.5% if US SMS traffic)

We connected to multiple aggregators. It's been a few years, but the big players in the US (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) were split between different aggregators. It was a similar situation in Europe.

A big part of working with a new aggregator was a full review of security and privacy, and that became even more important as we began the process of being acquired by an F100 company.

I'm still trying to figure out why messages were stored in S3 buckets to begin with. That's an architecture choice that makes little sense to me, especially since the limited size of SMS makes them pretty space efficient.

> Refrigators now have "software" so you can order Uber and doordash...

I don't plan to buy any new refrigerator until it has full AI capabilities to generate recipes (including visuals) and guidance based on an inspection of the ingredients it contains.

> This is why blameless postmortems are such good thing.

100%. I'm very much a fan of asking _what_ happened and then figuring out how to prevent it from happening ahead. Look back to inform the future, not to find blame. Ultimately, if 1 person can blow things up, it's a bigger issue at play.

> "Trust, but verify"

Even though my entire career has been software, I was an Electrical Engineering major, so I have taken VLSI design (and even designed an 8-bit ALU). My first job was writing embedded software, and would frequently "trust, but verify" the hardware through the use of a logic analyzer.

When I pulled out printouts from the analyzer to show the hardware team that the hardware had a bug, the surprised and incredulous look on their faces was priceless. The blow was somewhat softened by the fact that I'd also found a software bug.

The constant blame shifting between SW and HW teams is one reason I left that job after less than a year.

I have to imagine that Meta, and other big companies are in a similar situation. Meta, in particular, gives beefy grants and anyone that joined 4-5 years ago has seen the stock go up 7X. For a senior Engineer that held on to the initial grant and refreshers, that stock would be worth $5-10+ million now.

In the late 2010's, my startup built a messaging app with millions of daily users sending and receiving >1B messages a month, (somewhere north of 300 messages/sec, IIRC) with a trailing 12 month average uptime of our systems of 99.995%

When we were going through due diligence as part of being acquired by a large tech company, I had to answer a lot of questions about our infrastructure and to "prove" that our boring tech stack could actually achieve this.

That "stack" was 3 pods (2 in one AWS region, 1 in another) comprised of 4 Linux boxes and 3 Windows boxes.

In a stack, Linux boxes were 2 monitoring servers and 2 app servers running an OSS SW package, while the Windows boxes were two app servers running our .NET APIs, and a SQL server.

Fail over was handled by SQL cluster at DB level and ELB at the app level.

While the stack and code were boring, a lot of work went into performance, reliability, and observability.

After we were acquired, my new infra budget was based on their own modeling for scale, resulting in a monthly AWS budget that was 10X my previous annual budget.

For me, it was Turkey TV on Nickelodeon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Television

> Everyone at university not doing an Imposter degree should have had it taught.

My grad school had "seminar" classes, which were only 1 hour per week over the semester, but the "back of the envelope estimation" seminar was one of the more interesting ones that I took.

As a parent that experienced this two years ago, I can confirm. Hearing about a threat at school, followed by shota.fired, and receiving a call from my fleeing child are those "life in slow motion" moments burned into my memory. It didn't alter the outcome, but it was very beneficial to everyone's mental state.

As a parent that experienced such an event, my son having his phone let him message me that he and his class were literally running away into the woods and escaping the situation.

Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.

Still a niche case

> I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!

As a resident of the northeast, I've only owned 2 homes in the suburbs of a city. For those, the value of the land comprised 63% and 57% of the overall value of the property. I imagine that ratio changes as one moves away from the city.

Meanwhile, there's me. I discovered cast iron last year and have been loving it for all sorts of things. Of course, my yearly blood test showed high iron levels in my blood so I need to tone it down a little bit.

> The act of doing something is usually what creates motivation to continue.

This is one of the techniques I use when feeling burnout or overwhelmed by an insurmountable task list. I set a goal to just get one thing done. Sometimes that snowballs into getting more things done and sometime it doesn't, but at least one important thing got done, which greatly helps my mental state.

As a wearer of glasses, I'm ok with this additional level of evolution. :)

Yes, same here. I don't notice it until I do.