locusofself

I have such a love/hate with this band. They have some great songs. Great musicians. John Frusciante is one of my favorite guitarists. But they are such cheeseballs, and in the case of Anthony Kiedes, pretty creepy.

I took the last week and a half off work. I've been reading a great book - "Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz.

After six years at the same company, I started realizing I might be ready for a move, but I'm not interview-ready, so I started brushing up on system design, python/leetcode stuff, and other stuff.

It's been interesting to use claude to generate study guides, and even "books" related to technical topics, and send them to my kindle for reading while out for a nice long walk.

Walking at a regular pace helps slow my brain down so that I can think more effectively. My favorite hobby right now is hour-long walks with my kindle (I walk in places where there are very long uninterrupted stretches).

When I read at home, I fall asleep in 2 pages. I have to be moving around. I have a bunch of "flashcard" like stuff on my kindle related to coding, interview prep, etc. The only chance I have is doing this while walking.

I've created a number of apps for myself using just html or, simple node+sqlite running locally. Great for learning apps, personalized todo/priority tracking, etc.

This last week was one of my most challenging weeks in my ~20 year work life. I work in big tech, but am a relative latecomer to it (6 years). I'm a manager, and someone who was a very senior IC, a mentor, and work friend of mine, became my manager 6 months ago. It was a "boiling frog" situation that blew up spectacularly last week. I had to talk to my skip-level manager about it and the only viable solution was me leaving my team behind to go manage another team. I'm still bummed about it and taking some time off before starting the new role.

Do I want to be fired? No, because the job market sucks, I make good money, and I live in a HCOL area with a mortgage, a wife and a young kid. I need to sustain (and grow) this for another 10+ years minimum before having any kind of financial independence.

what are the odds that this won't fail spectacularly?

Instagram has something like this where it shows you "least interacted with". It seems broken to me though, as it showed me people who I do interact with.

Are there local models that are anywhere near as good at coding as opus 4.6?

I've had excellent luck using Claude Code to generate "mermaid diagrams" for me, and convert them to .png format headlessly using mmdc/puppeteer. Really helped me out with an engineering proposal I just finished. In past years I would have fumbled around with Visio forever and the result would have been worse.

Agreed. Unless this really helps people somehow make better trading decisions than existing tools, the vast majority of them are probably still better off index investing.

Yeah, it’s not a great name. But it originates from the government. When somebody without a security clearance needs to go to a secure area, they must be escorted by somebody.

You also make it sound like getting a JIT approved is getting keys to the kingdom. It's not -- every team has it's own JIT policies for their resources. Should there be far less manual touches? Ideally. But JIT is better than persistent access at least, and JIT policies should be scoped according to principle of least privilege. If that is not happening, it's a failure at the level of that specific org.

I'm only commenting on parent comment's understanding of what digital escort process is specifically. Escort is used by all kinds of teams that are just doing day-to-day crap for various resource providers across azure. I've never worked anywhere close to Azure Core so I don't know about these more low-level concerns. Overall I agree and sympathize with your assessment of the engineering culture.

That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to.

And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.

source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.

I had an interesting experience the other day. I've been struggling with some lyrics to a song I am writing. I asked Claude to review them, and it did an amazing job of finding the weak lines and best lines, and nearly perfectly articulating to my why they were weak or strong. It was strange because the output of the analysis almost perfectly mirrored my own thoughts.

When I asked it for alternatives/edits, they were not good however.

one of them I clicked on was totally covered in flies (the cat food). eww

I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees :)

I did this once and was scolded by my date:

!!! (Serious) To stand chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. This is taboo, as it is the way rice is presented as a Buddhist funeral offering.

right, must be nice. I live in a HCOL area and have a mortgage and family to support. If big tech lays me off, it's going to be stressful and probably mean me selling my house and moving to LCOL.

BSP?

I love these vegetables. Especially Broccolini and Brussel Sprouts. YUM

I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.

Definitely nice to see native, non-bloated apps :0

It really is a terrible piece of software. I usually find that when I do weird things with my mouse, like assign workspaces switching to extra buttons or whatever, I end up un-doing it.

I've switched all my mice to a ~$25, super ergonomically shaped, corded mouse[1], and I prefer to to my logitech mice.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FPAVUHC?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...

There is something magical about hearing an orchestra all tune up to eachother

Innacarute, jumpy, slow response.

The most popular tuner of all time is the BOSS pedal, and the LED lights are too far part from eachother, it's simply not granular enough to really get in tune to my ears.

Stroboscopic tuners are the way to go

For $49 it's very, very good

If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?

I love it.

But in all seriousness, if you are looking for a good guitar tuner, a lot of the ones on the market are actually not very good.

I highly recommend TC Electronic for clip-on tuner, or Sonic Research or Peterson for pedal tuners.

source: playing guitar for 32 years

I seem to hear often that Meta is perhaps the most egregious offender of "hire to fire". Seems really wasteful. But man, they pay their employees a lot.