lawrenci

I am logged in, but for the past few weeks, replies won't load and I get an error message on my iPhone. The whole website is much slower too. I'm sure someone will tell me to use the app, but I don't have any intention to do so.

I'm so tired of hearing business people talk about how Elon laid off 80% of engineers at Twitter and "it still works!"

It doesn't work well. X is a buggy mess, and a way worse user experience than Twitter was prior to Elon. For the past several weeks, threads have failed to load whenever I click into a Tweet.

Saying that problems are completely outside of someone's control or completely their own fault is a false dichotomy. Reality is usually somewhere in the middle, especially in studies like this one on teenagers. Everyone's situation is shaped by a mix of personal choices and the world around them. It's not just about blaming people or the system; it’s about seeing how both play a role. Voting is one way to make a difference, but it’s not the only way—people have a lot of ways to shape their lives.

Responsible actors will try to balance security with transparency. It is not surprising that a newspaper would have a different view on where the right balance lies than the government. You might disagree with the NYT editors’ judgment, but they decided it was worth harming national security to expose government lies about the Vietnam War.

Trump’s hoarding of classified documents and refusal to give them back did nothing to increase transparency, because Trump did not make any information public. So it’s not surprising that the NYT views Trump’s actions differently than Ellsberg’s.

There’s definitely a difference between leaking secret information to the public, and keeping it yourself to use for your own purposes. Without getting into which one is worse, surely you can see they’re not really comparable.

If Donald Trump had declassified the docs and shared them publicly, we would be having a totally different conversation, and he wouldn’t be under federal indictment.

My state (Oregon) has no sales tax, but does have a 20% tax on recreational cannabis, so in our case the cannabis tax revenue would be a net gain for the state.

Certainly, I completely agree that it's not always a positive. Western capitalist culture is better suited to providing freedom to non-conformists, and it's true that life can be arduous in communal cultures if one deviates from the norm.

On the other hand, there are psychological advantages to collaborating with one's community to address shared issues. In western capitalist culture, many individuals are predisposed to feeling that their problems are their own responsibility, leading them to believe that any misfortune they experience is solely due to a lack of effort or poor decision-making on their part.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a society that gets the positive parts of both approaches, or if there is a better balance to be sought between individualism and collectivism.

I used to go foraging for mushrooms with a close friend. That friend developed depression due to his perceived failures to keep up in the rat race of career advancement, and committed suicide last year. I know this because of some pretty explicit conversations I had with him about feelings of inadequacy due to money and career path. So now I don’t have a friend to forage mushrooms with. I can do it by myself, but that doesn’t really address the alienation issue.

These examples highlight the deficiencies of the Soviet economy, and it's evident that such failures caused considerable suffering among the population. Nevertheless, given more time to engage in activities akin to the first two examples, and separated from the threat of malnourishment, I believe I would experience greater happiness and a stronger connection to both my food and community. Through shared struggle, bartering, and communal work, we can create a sense of connection that is absent from the isolation brought about by specialization, which, although more economically efficient, also contributes to the social problems present in western society.

This would not only provide a break from work but also offer opportunities for personal growth and exploration.

This could reduce the career growth penalty for mothers. Companies may be hesitant to hire or promote women to leadership positions, fearing that they will take significant time off for childbirth. However, if taking sabbaticals every few years becomes normalized, women wouldn't be viewed as a special liability for taking leave around childbirth.

Furthermore, during these sabbatical periods, there could be programs created for potential career switchers to try out new jobs. These internships could provide workers with opportunities to explore different fields and find work that aligns with their skills and interests. This could ultimately benefit the economy as a whole by increasing job satisfaction and promoting a better match between workers and their jobs.

That was 7+ years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Paper

Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.

A few examples:

* My company has a very large codebase, and I am not familiar with 99% of it. I can use an AI assistant like Sourcegraph Cody to explain parts of the codebase to me at a high level, and suggest areas where I should dive in to address my specific problem.

* If I am working with a language, library, or framework I have not used before, I can ask ChatGPT to explain how a certain function works, and provide some code examples. If I write some code an get unexpected results, I can paste my code and results into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me what went wrong.

* Someone sends me a spreadsheet that specifies some business logic, and I want to transform that spreadsheet into a YAML file, and write some code to parse the YAML config and take some action based on user-supplied data. ChatGPT is pretty good at this.

In all of these cases, I have to take the AI output with a grain of salt, and may have to do some supplementary research or debugging. But that's also the case when I ask coworkers for help. Right now, I would say generative AI provides a small boost to my productivity, but I can see that boost growing larger as language models improve.

At the risk of sounding callous and uncaring, I will be blunt - I am wary of mental health advice that comes from a person who killed himself at age 26.

I admire Aaron for his technical ability, his unique perspective, his writing, his courage and passion. I sympathize with persecution he dealt with towards the end of his life, and I think that the prosecution against him was unjust. I find myself agreeing with most of his writing that I've encountered.

On the topic of following the news, I am tempted to agree with him as well. However, I wonder if keeping up with the news reinforces the idea that the world can be a scary place, and that if we stray too far outside of the bounds of normal human behavior, we might face hardship. One could argue that that idea is detrimental to human society as a whole, but I think it is generally has a net positive effect on a particular person's mental wellbeing.