waldohatesyou

+1 to this, I’ve never heard of someone actually doing that. I was hopeful the Vision Pro would become that device but Apple seems to have decided they don’t care about the future.

Oh wow, thank you for sharing

Do elevators not solve this?

The scaling challenge here comes from scaling across the various types of life situations and personality types out there. Some people work too much to be able to live a balance lifestyle. Other people just can’t summon the motivation.

Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.

I don’t agree with this take, we’re overly simplifying the nature of housing here. It depends on the housing mix as well. If the vast majority of the pro-housing prices crowd is heavily invested in single family residential then they should favour widespread upzoning and deregulation of apartments because that would increase the value of their SFHs through two mechanisms: 1) presumably single family homes will be destroyed so any remaining single family homes become more valuable and 2) every single family home is now a potential townhouse or high density building which increases the value a developer would pay for it.

Are there any serious objections to that line of reasoning?

How is it not? In the grand scheme of human history, energy usage constantly goes up. What other measure could you possibly use to measure progress?

I don't think they're actually the same thing, I definitely feel like Claude is much better with code than ChatGPT is so there are clearly differences in the capabilities of these models. One analogy that I find helpful here is the idea that these AIs are like animals. Just like there are animals of the same family (meaning they're genetically related to some degree) they still adapt to different niches. I see all these AI companies ultimately creating models analogous to that.

Some AIs will be good at coding (perhaps in a particular language or ecosystem), some at analyzing information and churning out a report for you, and some will be better at operating in physical spaces.

They have sufficient control over their model that they can presumably tailor it to their needs. Perhaps if you acquired analogous control, you’d have more success.

What do you think the top 10 worst companies are? How likely do you think it is that your list matches mine or anyone else’s?

Wait isn’t it the opposite? Manitoba was founded as a French Canadian province wasn’t it?

I'm not sure about that, there haven't been too many large European tech companies growing up in the aftermath of GDPR. While it's probably a small factor, I do think this general climate of regulation hurts smaller companies more than is generally acknowledged.

This is a very silly idea, Canada's population isn't even that large. Why would we build new cities that have no economic basis when we could just scale up our existing cities? Toronto could be a megacity but it isn't currently.

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well.

At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?

I think the catch here is that we need to know what makes admin work increase. While I can’t comment on education, at least for housing in Canada this is all a result of NIMBYism and government intervention. In other words, we could have slouched towards utopia much further than we have if it were not for NIMBYs.

I disagree with this, AI makes making art easier and by doing so, if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art. As an example, my drawing skills are so bad that I couldn’t express myself visually before but now Midjourney enables me to express myself. I don’t see how that could be a bad thing.

Does it harm existing creators? Probably, in the sense that it enables new entrants to the market and creates more competition but that should be acceptable. We live in a market society (since every other economic form has been a failure) and we need to acknowledge that sometimes that means people get their livelihoods destroyed. If we start picking and choosing, who deserves to keep their livelihoods we fall into political traps which aren’t ideal (why do we care about artists but not coal miners?).

Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling. I don’t know about you but one thing I find a bit frustrating about Anglophone art is that too often it follows the same tropes and happens in the same locations. A world of abundant art can solve that.

I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind.

I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.

It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.

But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)

How confident are you that the government could accurately assess the risk of any technology? Why couldn't I just write the same risks for any given social networking site and copy-paste it every single time I was faced with a compliance form like the one you described. This all just sounds like an exercise in pointless box ticking but that just might be my deep skepticism of governments talking.

I have to admit I'm deeply impressed by the move the provincial government is making here. I'm used to incompetence from Doug Ford but this is an incredibly forward-thinking policy.

The name of the site is pitchfork

I've been writing a library to help me forecast my personal finances accounting for taxes, various expenditures, income, and unexpected windfalls. I started because I noticed that whenever I tried to forecast my future, I kept repeating a lot of code and thought it would be better to just build out a library I could re-use. Plus, it's been a cool opportunity to learn Rust :)

Library if anyone's interested: https://github.com/RestitutorOrbis/finsim

I'm not female but I was in a similar situation. I would never have negotiated if it weren't for the fact that I knew how much others were paid.

This has nothing to do with his point

With regard to the GDS:Is the GDS available to Canadian citizens? I know that we're classified as Commonwealth citizens but I saw that Commonwealth citizens only have access to non-reserved posts and I'm not sure if the GDS is reserved or not.

With regard to cybersec:Yeah, that's more or less in line with other folks have said to me. I think with this I'll just keep reading books until I get a sense of what my niche is.

Thanks for your advice!

I see. At the moment, I'm not super sure hence why I'm hesitant to say that I'm going full throttle on anything but in terms of domains I'm interested in exploring further:

1) "Civic tech" which I hesitate to define since it's so nebulous that I imagine my definition differs from that of other folks but the way I think about it is that it either involves government modernization (a la the Canadian Digital Service), companies that provide services to the government (a quick Google search brings up https://home.promise-pay.com/ as an example), or companies that help communities/cities function better (this one is probably the most controversial criteria but when I include it I'm thinking of Sidewalk Labs). I suppose the secondary "specialty" would have to do with public policy but from perusing the careers pages, it seems that in general experience is all they're ultimately interested in (at least for the software engineer positions I would be gunning for) but I would suspect some domain knowledge is what they would prefer in addition to that. So far, I've just been exploring this domain via involvement with open-source projects within this space.

2) Cybersecurity: I'm not sure if this qualifies as a secondary domain since it's still very "computer sciencey" and is quite broad in and of itself but I suspect that it's a much wider space than civic tech which is why I find myself torn between which one is worthy of further exploration. Within this space, I would probably be either be interested in application security positions (https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/123558231663498/ as an example) or "secure software development" positions which I understand are positions that involve building software that operates in the context of improving the security posture of a company (ex. software that conducts static analysis of source code to find potential vulnerabilities). To determine whether I am interested in this domain, I've just been going through application security resources (currently, the Crypto 1 course from Stanford but I'll be following that up with other resources from https://github.com/paragonie/awesome-appsec). With regard to next steps after that, I've been thinking of https://www.edx.org/masters/online-master-science-cybersecur... but I'm a bit conflicted given that I've received conflicting opinions on the usefulness of a masters within the field of cybersecurity.

TL;DR: "Civic tech" and cybersecurity are the 2 I'm considering. I'm unsure which domain is worthy of my entire attention but I've been immersing myself in each to a varying degree via related activities.

As someone who more or less did a generic CS degree in their undergrad, how would I go about correcting for the lack of a secondary specialty? Would I have to get a masters later on? Focus on taking jobs at companies in specific domains?

This is so true and yet so difficult to control for.

Yikes, I missed this! I would say that sponsored ads would be a turn-off, I would personally prefer to pay a subscription in a manner akin to write.as.

Thanks for the note! Looking back on it, I probably would have use levels.fyi and tried to construct an analysis that would account for how salary grows over time in different regions but c'est la vie.