I largely agree, but I also think you might want to consider how the existence of LLMs affects our education system. I think this is one of the places they really have the most potential to cause harm, but also perhaps some incredible (humanity-changing) good.
I suspect countries, and even individual local schools, who effectively adapt their curricula to account for LLMs will see an enormous difference in student outcomes in the next couple of decades.
If you can self-host or publish a demo of your work that is open-sourced, I find that that really opens the door for a lot of web dev positions, regardless of what particular languages you know and/or what’s in vogue.
(Mine would be https://jonline.io/jon, part of a larger project that does federated social media, but just a “hello world” portfolio server app that you open source would be quite effective, I think. This is all based on recruiters’, hiring managers’, and other devs’ responses when I link them to it.)
At least on iOS, I've found ScreenZen (https://www.screenzen.co) to be pretty ideal. I'll definitely try SpeedBump if they add me to the beta, though.
Like SpeedBump, ScreenZen also has a "wait before using addictive apps" function (though, it doesn't have the "wait a bit longer to get 15mins vs. 2mins" - that would be really nice).
ScreenZen also keeps track of "streaks" of days not going over your overall limit in addictive apps. Unfortunately, that limit is counted by number of sessions, not the actual overall app screen time (by default, if you set your limit to 1 hour, it gives you 6 sessions of 10 minutes per app). It would be nice to combine this with SpeedBump's different-time-limit feature: if I want to quickly check a post or show a friend something on Instagram, I could use only 2mins out of my overall hour limit, instead of 10mins.
I just got a RAV4 Prime (a “plugin hybrid” or PHEV).
In EV mode, it has 40 or so miles of range. That’s high enough that I never need to use gas during the week, unless I go to the next city over. It’s also low enough that it can always fully charge overnight without a special circuit.
If I need to go further, it just becomes a RAV4 Hybrid (with better performance - aka HV mode). No long waits or searching for chargers needed.
Generally I put in maybe a half tank of gas ($15) once a month. Especially in the US, I really think PHEVs make much more sense than EVs. BYD seems to make some really nice ones, but we’re sadly hostile to them.
I’m also a DigitalOcean user, but I prefer managed K8s and don’t think there will ever be a reason to go back to having to deal with host OS things again. I’d rather just pay for my CPU/RAM, and give it Docker images to run, than worry about all that. And DOKS (DigitalOcean K8s) doesn’t cost any more than bare DigitalOcean boxes.
Cert-Manager is a CertBot-compatible K8s service that “just works” with deployed services. Nginx ingresses are a pretty standard thing there too. Monitoring is built-in. And with a few API keys, it’s easy to do things like deploy from GitHub actions when you push a commit to main, after running tests.
And perhaps most importantly, managed Kubernetes services let you attach storage for DB and clusters with standard K8s APIs (the only thing provider-/DigitalOcean-specific is the names of the storage service tiers). Also the same price as standard DigitalOcean storage with all their standard backups… but again, easier to set up, and standardized so that if DigitalOcean ever gets predatory, it’s easy enough to migrate to any of a dozen other managed K8s services.
Various ways in various companies, but in my last few companies pretty much always “CI runs tests and builds/uploads a Docker image, CD deploys it onto a K8s cluster somewhere.”
Here, I do a canary deploy to a dev server (jonline.io), then cut a GitHub release and deploy to production servers (bullcity.social, oakcity.social). (All really live on the same single-box dinky K8s cluster.)
When you were remote, did you ever work from coffee shops or coworking spaces? In your hybrid role, are you actively working with others in-person?
I’ve definitely found that having other people around during some of my work week has a positive psychological impact for me, and solve it this way. At the coffee shops and spaces I frequent, I often see and cowork with folks I know from my various hobbies and clubs in town.
I remember that, even when I was in-office full-time (pre-2020), sitting in the same cube/desk area as my teammates… we mostly communicated over Slack about work. Only very occasionally would we come look at one another’s screens - less than I screen share over Zoom or Slack Huddle with them these days. (Slack Huddles are especially more efficient than anything that could be done in-person, as you can both view one another’s screens.)
I definitely did enjoy hanging with my colleagues in those days - really, socialization was the majority of our in-person interaction (well, and meetings, which I might argue are better conducted over Zoom, as some people being physically imposing, reducing helpful input from others, was always a thing).
I’d also say all our in-person hanging made us more of a monoculture - half my team would hit the gym downstairs and be spotting each other on bench press during lunch breaks. Whereas in my current remote role, I work with folks who never go to the gym, but are into dance, cooking, theater - all sorts of more varied things! I think the variety of life perspectives may make us more productive as well, though obviously there are too many variables at play to really compare these work scenarios with any sort of objective metric.
It seems like something like medical/legal professionals’ annual/otherwise periodic credential exams might make sense in fields where AI is very usable.
Basically, we might need to standardize 10-20% of work time being used to “keep up” automatable skills that once took up 80+% of work time in fields where AI-based automation is making things more efficient.
This could even be done within automation platforms themselves, and sold to their customers as an additional feature. I suspect/hope that most employers do not want to see these automatable skills atrophy in their employees, for the sake of long-term efficiency, even if that means a small reduction in short-term efficiency gains from automation.
> suspect/hope that most employers do not want to see these automatable skills atrophy in their employees, for the sake of long-term efficiency, even if that means a small reduction in short-term efficiency gains from automation.
I wish you were right, but I don't think any industry is realistically trending towards thinking about long term efficiency or sustainability.
Maybe it's just me, but I see the opposite, constantly. Everything is focused on the next quarter, always. Companies want massive short term gains and will trade almost anything for that.
And the whole system is set up to support this behavior, because if you can squeeze enough money to retire out of a company in as short a time as possible, you can be long gone before it implodes
The thing about being “poor” in Europe is, you can be “poor” your entire life by American standards of income/assets, but still never take on medical debt, travel more than a month out of the year, have a couple kids and educate them in good schools, and retire.
You have no idea what you’re talking about and there is no statistical basis to the claims you are making. The only two metrics Europeans win out on is life expectancy (by around 4 years) and (narrowly) on home ownership rate (around 5 percentage points higher in Europe). Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier than Europeans by every other metric.
there is no statistical basis to the claims you are making
Are you really arguing that Americans (and especially Americans below the median) don't have higher levels of medical debt, higher rates of medical bankruptcy, and get/take less vacation than Europeans.
Those were not the claims being made. The claim was that:
> Most Americans cannot: Never take on medical debt, travel more than a month out of the year, have a couple kids and educate them in good schools, and retire.
Most Americans do these things, with the possible exception of month-long vacations.
> Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier than Europeans by every other metric.
$1.21 trillion in credit card debt, $1.66 trillion in car loans and $1.6 trillion in federal student loans - yes, Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier.
Yes, they are. The largest of those three figures involves the purchase of a hard asset that provides utility to the purchaser over time. If you buy a $30,000 van, you’re not out $30,000, because you’ve received the van in exchange.
I note that you didn’t provide equivalent figures for the EU, however, so I imagine you’re less interested in making an actual argument than you are in looking clever.
> Do you know why it's hard to get national student debt figures for Europe
If you’re implying that student debt doesn’t exist in Europe because schooling is “free” for everyone you are wrong. Plenty of European countries don’t provide free schooling and even the ones that do such as Germany often have a parallel private system for those who fail to get into the more exclusive public schools. Europeans who do graduate are then faced with substantially higher tax rates - education, like healthcare, doesn’t just fall out of the sky for free.
Europeans also own credit cards; they probably have lower levels of debt than Americans (who have a fairly unique culture of credit-financed consumer spending), but they also aren’t capable of servicing the debt that an American can service, for the simple reason that they earn less than Americans.
> PS: if you buy 30k van you are down more than that as you need to get an insurance, gas, parking lot, pay tax, etc.
This is a red herring. When you eat dinner you not only have to pay for the food but also spend time purchasing, preparing, and eating it. This doesn’t prevent people from eating because they derive utility from eating which exceeds the opportunity costs associated with purchasing, preparing, and eating it.
It's certainly true that Europeans take more vacations and spend more time abroad. They also win on spending less time at work and more time with their loved ones.
Those weren’t the claims the grandparent made. Europeans do work less and vacation more often, but even when you account for this, they still earn less per hour worked.
Vacation time itself might be a good metric for quality of life (which I am not disputing is probably comparable if not better in Europe if you discount the importance of material wealth), but time abroad is not since Americans have access to a lot more variety within America than a European would have within their own country; it’s the same reason more Europeans have passports.
I suspect countries, and even individual local schools, who effectively adapt their curricula to account for LLMs will see an enormous difference in student outcomes in the next couple of decades.
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