GitHub, Copilot and VS Code are I believe the same org. Or at least, that’s what the branding implies. Copilot / VS Code lost all headstart and barely catch up, GitHub is currently largely being seen as a leader less organization that has lost it’s direction. The recent outrage about pricing changes being an excellent example of this.
I'm currently on Elvanse and it's a far cry from being a fix or a cure, but it makes things more manageable. My concentration on work that I find stimulating has always been alright so that hasn't changed much, I'm slightly less distractible during boring work, but it's been most helpful in other areas of executive functioning like task initiation.
For example at home I usually knew which chores needed to be done, and I desperately wanted to do them but I could never get started because I didn't have enough willpower. I would procrastinate for weeks or even months while constantly beating myself up over it.
I still don't enjoy chores, nobody does, but with medication I have noticeably more willpower to get started on things that need to be done. The thought of folding laundry, a task which I always knew would take me no longer than 5 minutes, no longer overwhelms me with dread and I end up doing it in a "reasonable" amount of time (reasonable for me, plenty of people would find it unreasonable if we lived together).
As the other commenter has posted, refunds for inexistent bookings or refunds for someone else's booking are pretty frequent.
Other simple stuff is overdue payments for fictive deliveries such as soaps, toilet paper, cleaning bills or even outsourced work.
The more complex scams involve making bookings and sending packages with fees and totals paid by the recipient, they try to convince the receptionists that their package needs to be delivered, and an actual delivery of random stuff happens using a real delivery company to complete the scam. They don't always mention that there's payment required on delivery.
Other scams involve claiming lost luggage, wallets, electronics without them being the owners, and trying to convince the receptionist to send the item internationally. We're a hotel next to the airport, so international travellers are the norm, plus we have a room full of lost stuff. They make a booking with a fictional name, then cancel it or no show, and then ask for their black luggage, black wallet, tablet, gold bracelet, etc.
Hmm... well, it's of course very difficult to explain the process in a single comment, besides, there's no exact prescribed "recipe" for it, unfortunately.
I'd say the mental model for developing the 'Emacs way of thinking' lies, first and foremost, in realizing that Emacs is not "an editor that uses Lisp for configuring it," but rather a 'Lisp Machine' - calling it that would be a stretch, of course. Allow me this simplification here. Emacs is a 'Lisp REPL' that has a built-in editor. That means, instead of focusing on the features of the editor, it's better to study Emacs Lisp and the ways of using it to shape the editor's features.
The great way of developing knack for Lisp is to start with figuring out mainly two things: first, is so called "REPL-driven development". For Elisp that basically means learning the ways of evaluating symbolic-expressions: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Li...
Second thing, even though some experts would argue for being optional, I still believe is very important - structural editing commands: ways for quickly moving symbolic expressions around, expanding and transposing them, etc. - you do want to control those (seemingly pesky at first) parenthesis. There are multiple different ways of dealing with those - paredit, smartparens, parinfer, etc.
Then, learning how to effectively search through built-in help, finding the functions, commands, variables, etc. - the stock features already good, although the keybindings and navigating through them might be confusing, there are different packages that can help - consult-info, helpful, etc.
And then, one basically has to get annoyed by small inefficiencies in their workflow. Examples? Do you often have to copy&paste the url of the current tab in your browser while typing? Seemingly simple activity, still requires you to: switching to the browser, focusing on the address bar, copying the url, switching back to the editor, pasting the url, sometimes, it doesn't end there, you need to switch back to the browser, copy the description of the page, switch back to the editor, paste the description, wrap things in a markdown-type of link, etc. Most people would say: "what a nonsense, it's not a big deal, like at all...". But if you think for a minute, how often do you have to do that? Every day, during the lifetime of your computer use. These kind of small inefficiencies are not really distractions for the brain, in fact, that all is over-stimulation of neurons. You may think that you've done that so many times, it actually happens so quickly, you don't even think about it, yet, it still forces your brain "out of the zone", even though might be just for a second.
Another personal example: at some point, I got annoyed by my own typing - I make typos all the time, so I needed a quicker way of automatically fixing typos as I type. First, I wrote a command that does that, and then I bound it to a key - to a double tap of the comma. I'd be typing, and typing, then a typo gets highlighted, I'd quickly tap comma twice and it gets fixed with 90% of predictability. Sometimes it would guess a wrong word, and then if I keep pressing the comma, it would cycle through variants. It feels great beyond words, and it is so instinctive and fast, I don't get distracted at all. Imagine a guitar player with a performance so wild that strings get snapped every few seconds. Imagine that instead of having to replace the entire guitar, there's a special mechanism on it that quickly installs a new string and tunes it up immediately, so the performance goes on without any hiccups. That's what using Emacs often feels to me.
So, my personal advice - simply be annoyed by small things. Then, put them on your TODO list. At some point, you'll get annoyed again and again. Note it each time. And then, try to find a better way to do that thing. The rate of getting more productive is proportional to the level of accrued annoyance.
Buffet isn’t a passive investor. Berkshire Hathaway have often taken a very active role in the running of their acquisitions - appointing managers, setting strategy, merging/splitting off subsidiaries, etc. This is as much managing as investing. If Buffet was a pure stock picker, then he would be an interesting case in the active vs passive investment debate.
When you own one billionth of a company you are just along for the ride. When you buy a 10% or more stake you can influence the running of the company. Another aspect is he has offered liquidity to distressed companies like GE and got richly rewarded for it with favorable terms.
Yeah, I have tried to simulate this several times under different conditions. Given zero sum game and random odds, there is always going to be small percentage who have a lot and most will have below what they started with. It is easy to explain as well, if you for example start with $1000 and you have 50% odds of winning 10% every time. If you win and lose 50% you are going to be below what you started.
If you always win after lose and lose after win, then it would go like this:
1. $1000
2. $1100
3. $990
4. $1089
And so on... After 100 turns you would have only around 600 - 700.
But it's a zero sum right. Where does the 300 - 400 go? It goes exponentially to select few who by random chance have more wins than losses.
In fact the longer it goes on, the higher odds of there being outlier with a lot - you might expect that everyone would converge around $1000, but that is not the case.
I did an example run with 10 000 investors, each doing 1000 trades, each trade they bet 10% of their portfolio, with 50% odds of winning.
First investor had 562 wins and 438 losses, with $1,666,061.
Median investor had only $7 left with 500 wins and 500 losses.
Top 10th percentile investor had $364 with 520 wins and 480 losses.
So interestingly even an investor that had 40 wins more than losses, lost 2/3 of portfolio.
> How does that explain Warren Buffet’s spectacular success?
Buffett buys “cheap, safe, high-quality stocks” with leveraged “financed partly using insurance float with a low financing rate” [1]. TL; DR He’s doing private equity with discipline.
For most people who are saving for retirement between the ages of (say) 30 to 65, that's most of their investing lifetime, and such underperform could radically effect the life they can live once they start working. Do you want risk your proverbial Golden Years simply because you chose not to take the market average returns?
2. While Buffett is a better-than-average investor (and certainly better than me), the main reason why we know him is because he's so rich, but as Morgan Housel notes, the vast majority of that wealth has come from compounding:
> As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.[16] What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest—at least not when measured by average annual returns.
We should find new ways to fund essential services like journalism and the arts, rather than artificially crimping the possibilities of new technology in order to get a half-assed solution under the current paradigm.
No, my way of dealing with it is to whine on HN/twitter occasionally and otherwise don't say anything publicly. Feel free to reach out at jpohhhh@gmail, excuse the overly familiar invitation, paying it forward because I would have found talking about that sort of thing f a s c i n a t i n g.
in general id recommend Ian Hickson's blog post on leaving. I can't remember the exact quote that hit hard, something like decisions moved from being X to Y to Z to being for peoples own benefit.
I'd also add there was some odd corrupting effects from CS turning into something an aimless Ivy Leaguer would do if they didn't feel like finance.
This is a great example of goalposts shifting. Even having a model that can engage in coherent conversation and synthesize new information on the fly is revolutionary compared to just a few years ago. Now the bar has moved up to creativity without human intervention.
But isn't this goalpost shifting actually reasonable?
We discovered this nearly-magical technology. But now the novelty is wearing off, and the question is no longer "how awesome is this?". It's "what can I do with it for today?".
And frustratingly, the apparent list of uses is shrinking, mostly because many serious applications come with a footnote of "yeah, it can do that, but unreliably and with failure modes that are hard for most users to spot and correct".
So yes, adding "...but without making up dangerous nonsense" is moving the goalposts, but is it wrong?
There are a lot of things where being reliable isn’t as important (or it’s easier to be reliable).
For example, we are using it to do meeting summaries and it is remarkably good at it. In fact, in comparison to humans we did A/B testing with - usually better.
Another thing is new employee ramp. It is able to answer questions and guide new employees much faster than we’ve ever seen before.
Another thing I’ve started toying with it with, but have gotten incredible results so far is email prioritization. Basically letting me know which emails I should read most urgently.
Again, these were all things where the state of the art was basically useless 3 years ago.
IMO it’s not wrong to want the next improvement (“…but without making up dangerous nonsense”), but it is disingenuous to pretend as if there hasn’t already been a huge leap in capabilities. It’s like being unimpressed with the Wright brothers’ flight because nobody has figured out commercial air travel yet.
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