#1 (processing notes) got me through a big chunk of college. After classes, I'd go through and rewrite, organize, and otherwise reprocess the notes to make them more readable, understandable, studyable, etc.
3,986 karma · joined September 20, 2017
I guess the bright side is that when I finally have some capital gains to report when I retire, I'll have something to offset them as the amount is large enough that the capital loss deduction allowed for ordinary income won't even be close to depleting it when I hit retirement age.
That's the multi-billion dollar question. From grades K-3, my son got straight A's and was a typical "boy" in the classroom. Occasionally not the best at paying attention, but no big deal.
Fourth grade was another story. He'd come home exhausted, and cry himself into a nap nearly every day. Not coincidentally, that's what the academics shifted from pure memory, associative reasoning, and recall to tasks that also required planning and executive function. That, plus the expectations of better ability to sit still and pay attention were just too much.
We eventually paid the big $$$ for a full, two-day neuro-psych evaluation. It was eye-opening for both my wife and I. For me, it showed how differently my son's brain was working, and for my wife it shined a light on her undiagnosed ADHD.
We did resist giving our son medication, and waited until he decided that he wanted to try it (16 years). It made an amazing difference in his ability to study and stay on task, but it did come with the weight loss and a serious 4-6pm crash every day, though those effects seemed to mitigate over time.
Over time, it would start to suggest larger and larger blocks of code based on what I was writing. It got to the point where it would auto-suggest entire functions based on my code comments. e.g. I'd type: "//Update a user" and it would then suggest complete code for doing just that, while managing to match the style of previous methods, use the correct ORM objects, etc. In general, it seemed to be 90-95% "correct".
However, it did like to remind me that it was just really good at putting words together. For the Update user, it suggested a function that exactly matched how I'd write it, except for this:
//Persist changes to Show object to the database
user.Save()
Just a nice reminder that the GenAI is not "thinking" about what it's doing.
Next time, we took the train, and had a few hours (intentionally) to kill in DC, so we checked out the Smithsonian. We then went to bed somewhere in Virginia, and woke up in FL. It does take a long time, but a fair amount of that was devoted to meals and sleeping. I was also surprised at how many stops the train made, and how many people got on or off at those stops. For many places, it is the most convenient way to go.
EDIT: I also knew we were on to something when it was my teenage son, who's by no means a train buff, suggested taking the train for our next trip to FL as well. I think there's something about our very busy and hurried lives that a train addresses.
- Unusual visitors to the office (or even having visitors at all!)
- Sudden shifts in roadmap priorities
- Sudden changes in interest or emphasis on reliabilityREST as defined in Roy's dissertation is pure and beautiful, but the work of programmatically navigating such an API adds burden for no gain in the vast majority of use cases.
Of course, that market looked nothing like this one.
For simple cases where entitlements are limited and the billing is generic, I think it's fine to built it yourself as long as you're aware of the time and cost of doing so vs. buying it. As others have said, time spent on building billing is time NOT spent on building products.
This was one I could never get my head around, so I simply listed all the possible scenarios, and counted the number of car vs. goat results. Sure enough, it worked out to 2/3 and my mind was blown.
I'm also someone that needs good visual organization to really study and learn things, so a habit I built in college was to write all of my notes, and then later transcribe them to computer. That helped it flow through my brain twice, organize the notes, and also do so when my sole task was working with the notes rather than capturing notes AND listening at the same time.
As the parent of a teen, I see a massive difference from what I saw as a teen in the late 1980's. At my school, there were very clear and visual identifiers for whatever group kids were in. Crossing these lines was effectively leaving one's comfort zone, and was awkward and difficult.
For my own kid and those that I see at his school, it's much more about common interests, and that feels like more of a matrix than the coveted & siloed subculture worshipped by the author. Kids seem to be more united by what they do than what group they identify with. There are still peer pressures, elements of shared culture (especially in clothing), but it doesn't feel as rigid as in the days of my youth. The old cliquey tropes seem very, very diminished.
Cases like this always fascinate me. I've led a "move from Data Center to AWS" effort twice, and both times it was at > 50% cost savings. However, I think both were probably small infra footprints compared to many cases like many others.
>"How much money do you have in your bank account?"
These scammers were good and had finesse, and the incremental approach is 100% effective. This one also plays on the "know your customer" horror stories that people have likely heard about accounts being frozen.
One has to stop every now and then to find the big picture and ask questions like why money in a bank account has to come into play, or to note that getting more detailed and in-depth are often signs of spinning a tale vs. telling the truth. That's also hard to do when you're probably in panic mode.
The callback from the spoofed phone number is very good, but also revealing. The fact that they called the victim and not vice versa, or that the call came from the main number are all clues that something is amiss.
> “It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.”
This is something that should be taught. I only know how easy this is because I worked on messaging/telephony apps and an occasional misconfiguration while testing resulted in me sending texts or initiating calls that appeared to be from a completely different number than the one I was trying to use.