rhines

Yeah it probably did vary by field and by country. Also when you bring up Udemy I think that might illustrate a difference in perspective that's relevant - I'm thinking of finding very specific info. Like searching for an exact implementation detail of something, giving exact keywords and wanting results that match what I typed. That functionality just doesn't exist anymore, at least not with mainstream search engines. Udemy however is more about teaching a general topic, and I think this is something where AI helps a lot - Udemy is essentially trusting a teacher to summarize a large topic into its key components, and AI can do that quite well for a lot of subjects.

And certainly dealing with people online can result in unpleasant interactions. I found that specialized forums were usually well managed and wouldn't tolerate abusive members, though new members were expected to learn the forum's rules and put some effort into finding existing info before they start asking questions. The downside of AI is that it can only tell you things that are already visible online, and it will take the stance of the majority. On a forum you would get people who can chime in based on their experiences where there's absolutely no prior info online, or people who could contest the majority and explain why.

Synthetic data certainly could solve this. Especially if we get AI controlled robots or AI managed physically accurate simulations of the world, such that AI can actually engage with the world and test new things. It will take a long time before we get to that point where AI is able to reach the level of being able to tell you something like "oh yeah if you take apart that DSLR lens, the screws holding the floating group in place are glued in with loctite. And for good reason, if you don't have an optical bench you're never going to be able to get those elements recalibrated if you adjust them. But it looks like your copy has a shim behind that group - try removing that and see if that lets you focus past infinity." Like AI can understand a lot of that in the abstract, and might be able to guess at some of it, but until it's actually pulled apart this lens and messed around with it it's going to be vulnerable to just making things up or simply not knowing key details. But that's why it does so well with code, since all code is accessible to it.

I do agree that AI is useful though, and I have no qualms about using it to learn things faster, build tools that help me, or do my job. And though AI has contributed to the loss of the internet I value, it's not the only contributor, and likely not even the main contributor. Search engines were already consolidating power into a smaller subset of large commercial sites rather than surfacing forums and blogs, sites naturally went offline over time and archiving efforts just weren't sufficient to make up for this, and users just prefer lower effort forms of engagement like scrolling Reddit with everything in one place and lots of entertainment rather than being a member of multiple more focused communities. So while I may malign AI for the impact it has had, you're probably right that on this topic the net impact is positive.

It reminds me of how we laugh at scam emails for being poorly written and obviously a scam, but the theory is that this filters out all but the most gullible people so the conversion rate on anyone that replies is high.

If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.

I'm not sure of this. I remember back in the day finding people's blogs, reading old forum threads, participating in said forums - there was a ton of info out there and easily found. Now those kinds of sites are rare, and those that still exist aren't surfaced by search engines like they used to be.

AI has the benefit of having trained on all that material, it's a snapshot in a sense. But as people increasingly stop creating content like that and we turn to AI instead of asking for help on forums we stop growing the knowledgebase that AI draws from.

Yeah this is the difference between personal projects or being a team lead with serious influence, versus being a typical developer employee.

The typical employee is not given the leeway to spend time building up the infrastructure needed to enforce good output from LLMs. Previously understanding the codebase was just part of doing the work you were assigned, but now it requires that side effort of creating infrastructure. And unfortunately a lot of teams won't approve letting developers spend their time on that infrastructure, they just want the deliverables they're asking for.

Yep, a family member asked for a second opinion after being recommended post-treatment medication, and her doctor dropped her.

Isn't this the default in Cassandra?

I'm using Opus 5.5 at work extensively, have also used Kimi 3 and Deepseek 4.1 for stuff outside of work, and I can't deny that the tools aren't capable. They solve problems, surface issues I wouldn't have considered, and largely do write better code than I do.

The one exception is for stuff that I care very deeply about. For a very small subset of projects where I'm willing to spend hundreds of hours ensuring that what I build is the best possible thing, AI still hasn't been able to match my work unless I micromanage it, but at that point just writing the code myself is actually faster.

For almost all jobs though AI is probably the future, most software developers never cared that much about their company's code anyway.

I'm not a big LVT fan - pushing for maximally productive use of land is going to result in displacing people, displacing small businesses, displacing artistic/cultural/environmental spaces, etc.

I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.

How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)

Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.

It just has oil. While it is nice having low taxes because of all the oil money, it can also be draining being surrounded by people who want to be annexed by Trump, or hold socially regressive views. But economically yes it's a great province.

It is interesting to consider what will make AI generated works great, if we reach a point where they're seen as such.

For painting, realism was really what made works great for a long time. Then photography came along and realistic depictions of things were no longer novel, so painting became about representing things in a more surreal way, and novel representations of perspective and emotion became great. Meanwhile with photography initially just capturing a clear image was impressive but now you need to capture something truly rare to have a great photo.

With AI I'm struggling to imagine what will be hard enough to achieve that it remains novel.

Interesting. I'm 29 and hate downloading apps on phone or pc, if I can use a website I'll choose that every time. Unless performance matters like a game or media editor.

That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.

The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.

If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...

I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.

The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.

Stuff where all the info isn't available online.

For example, I used to do integrations for sports betting sites. AI is going to help with the basics, like understanding the default puck line is 1.5 in hockey. AI is not going to realize that Bet365 changes their API endpoints for each season, so you need to be ready to fetch the updated ones before the new season starts, whereas most other sportbooks have consistent endpoints that you don't need to keep updating.

How much domain knowledge is actually unavailable to AI is going to vary by domain, as will the value of that. Chess is probably one extreme, where all knowledge is public, whereas something like military R&D might be the other extreme where domain knowledge is tightly guarded.

I think you're largely right - but there are some challenges.

Talking requires that the interviewer be competent and care. Which seems like a low bar, but it easily degrades. When an engineer is burned out, or is interviewing for a project they have less stake in, or has business requirements forcing them to hire someone fast, the bar lowers. Those engineers now are the gatekeepers, and they let in even weaker engineers.

Even worse, any utility from this is predicated on the founder making good hiring decisions. If they don't understand how to hire a competent engineer and make them care about the company, then it's dead from the start. And a lot of founders or execs in general are awful at this.

Companies that maintain an excellent work culture such that engineers deeply care about the team and have stake in any project they conduct interviews for will do well with this model. I hope we see it used by them.

Good points, I definitely generalized and you raise important distinctions. I think in general the unconditionality of familial love extends more towards your dependents rather than your parents/siblings - if you dislike your child, it's really your responsibility to raise them better, rather than just abandoning them. But if you have abusive parents or a toxic sibling, you should prioritize your health and happiness.

And it's also true that certain sub-cultures will judge you differently. Like if you're all beefed up and dressed in a suit, you're probably not getting an invite to Dungeons and Dragons club. I would say in general following your country's norms for attractiveness will result in more social success but if you present yourself inauthentically you certainly can end up attracting people you actually don't want to associate with.

There is the potential to use homomorphic encryption so that encrypted text can support operations like string search while encrypted, so unencrypted indexes would never need to be stored on user devices. It is a huge hassle though - it requires a ton of compute and is still very slow and limited, it's much more complex, and research is still ongoing regarding security. However if you want to truly minimize the amount of unencrypted data on your device this could one day be an option.

There's some truth to this, and I'm sorry it's been your experience, but I'd like to gently expand on this a bit as I don't think muscles are the only thing that matter - I know plenty of skinny and fat people with friends.

Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.

So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.

Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.

Yeah sorry I was thinking about value as more about quality of life and society. If you define it as shareholder value and producing stuff, then by definition corporations and their executives are of course contributing the most.

Ah if you look at it from the perspective of doing research or other deep intellectual work by 22, I can see your point. Certainly if that is the peak of human mental capability (not something I can argue for or against but I'll take it as true) you ideally would pursue a focused education up to that point that allows you to dive deep into a challenging problem. IMO this is different from wisdom however, and in fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.

Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.

I'm not sure. There's value from teachings, but there's a certain type of wisdom that only comes from lived experience. Kind of like in software development - a new grad can read Designing Data Intensive Systems and memorize all the answers for "design Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc." interview questions, but someone who actually built a platform with millions of users is going to have a different level of understanding. In my life, I can say that no amount of learning from others prepared me for what I learned about myself during my first relationship.

I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.

The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.

At my workplace, HR addressed RTO and said that even when people aren't working together, just seeing people around invigorates them. Kind of demeaning to think that part of my pay comes from HR enjoying seeing the back of my head while I'm hunched over my laptop.

You convey tone through word choice and sentence structure - trying to convey tone through casing or other means is unnecessary and often just jarring.

Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.

Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.