honestly, I want to be rich. I do make a decent living, but not enough to quit my job. At this rate I'll have to work until I'm 50 or 60, which is same as everyone else, so cry me a river, but even so, it would be nice to dedicate more time to hobby which at this rate I can at most dedicate a weekend to, but in practice it's a bit less because I have to go out with the wife and I have visit my family, etc. Most weeks I have a full day at most to pursue anything.
From what i understand my life is very similar as yours. One out of 7 seems not too shabby though.
Maybe a cliché but... my advice would be to try to get most out of each simple experience. Today my spouse and kid went for a long walk together with me... while I could have been doing woodworking. I _tried_ to teach the kid the joy of walking without having too much on his mind. I also started conversations with strangers while waiting in the ice cream queue. There's always something to learn from that. I guess you by now understand my advocating for contentment.
this afternoon i couldn't have been doing woodworking because i don't have woodworking tools. that's not just because i can't afford them; my apartment is not really big enough for a woodworking shop, and i worry that the wiring might catch fire if i tried to plug in a high-powered saw. i'm having a hard time being content, despite going on a walk with my wife this morning and having lots of lovely conversations with strangers over the last three days, because the rent is due in two weeks and i'm nervous about whether i'll have enough. ever since i got covid for the third time in april, at which point i couldn't get paxlovid, i don't remember things like i used to. (i suspect that with enough money i could have gotten paxlovid.) also, my aunt is going to die soon, and i don't have the money to visit her before that
i really wish i'd spent more effort on making, and saving, money 20 years ago. i wouldn't want to spend my life on it, and no amount of money will keep me from dying, but right now i'm spending a lot of my life coping with the consequences of not having it
It's not just LLMs. Older phones also have the 'remove object' feature on the Photos app disabled, and they also won't receive the OpenAI integration either.
Locally running LLM is one thing. An iPhone 14 is perfectly capable of removing an object and talking to ChatGPT. Yet these are disabled on 14 and earlier phones.
TSMC is governed by the Taiwanese ruling class. If the Chinese launches a widespread attack on Taiwanese soil tomorrow, nothing would happen to any of these people. These people are not your random neighbors harboring nationalistic views.
You don't have to be a rabid nationalist to not wish for your country to be invaded and annexed by others. You don't even have to live there. I'm sure a large percentage of Taiwanese living in countries outside of Taiwan would not wish for it to be invaded.
I'm not even Taiwanese, don't know anyone of Taiwanese descent well, and I don't want Taiwan invaded.
The suggestion that there's some kind of weird oligarchy class of TSMC-controlling Taiwanese who couldn't give a toss if Taiwan was invaded is a mustache-twirling level of caricature.
I use a cheap Chinese one. I've used multiple since all my relatives have one of these, though the brand is always different. They never last more than 2-4 years, either the leg or some mechanism breaks, or the best case, they are battery operated devices so that becomes the issue. The cost to repair tends to be, likely intentionally, expensive enough you are better off buying a new one.
So that's what I do.
It is the only device I'm annoyed with, at the same time, I'd rather have it do it's work than cleaning the house myself.
There are two sides to the story. Look at the unemployment rates or recent layoffs, a 2% difference is enough to disrupt a lot of things. You don't need a lot.
AI tools has made a significant impact already. But that significant number isn't '100%'.
On the main topic, of course you can't replace a team of 8 compromised of seniors, mids, and juniors with just 2 seniors. Nowhere near that.
Which is, honestly, good. Facebook couldn't capture it, so giving it away is far better than the earlier 'keep-it-only-for-us' approach of Google. I don't mean to say Facebook/Meta has anyone's best in their hearts, though.
I agree. Zuck is cutthroat. He knew this was the best play to win. I'm ok with that because I like the outcome. But also I feel like it will create a good precedent and further a good culture that benefits everyone, that is, free and open source software.
Having worked in modern PHP I have to disagree. Modern PHP is much better than it used to be but it is still much worse than any of the common alternatives (JS, Ruby, Python, Java, ...).
It's hard defending php in 2024 when you've used the alternatives that exist...
It took two major versions to add types to both function arguments and return values and there's still no type-restricted data structures. Think "array of foo".
Just overall, other than with bash, I've never shot myself in the foot more often than with php
The standard library of PHP is still the same old crappy standard library that it used to have with only some minor fixes. The language itself is not that bad (still worse than Python, JS or Ruby) but the standard library is awful. One thing I have to give modern PHP is that Composer is pretty neat, better than NPM and the packaging mess of Python and roughly on par with Rubygems/Bundler.
The PHP standard library has issues for sure (shout-out to real_escape_string), but so do Python and JS (I can't speak for Ruby as I've never used it). JS's "hide everything behind a few magical objects" (Math, window, document, etc.) approach isn't much better in my opinion. Python is a bit better, but mostly because Python 3 was a clean break from Python 2.
I find the biggest argument for or against PHP in the context of these languages to be "I find dollar signs aestethically (dis)pleasing". It's a perfectly valid preference to have, but people talk about PHP like they're still porting Wordpress plugins to PHP 4.
I do not care at all about the dollar sign, but I have worked both in PHP 4 and in modern PHP and I do not think the language has improved much. Other than Composer the dev experince was basically the same. It is still not up to par with Ruby or Python.
That's like staffing a single-manager team on a bad project for a year. Which I assure you happens all the time in big companies, and yet they survive.
I think there might be a disagreement about what "big" means. Google can easily afford to sink millions each year into pointless endeavours without going out of business and they probably have. Alphabet's annual revenue has been growing a good 10% each year since 2021[0]. That's in the range of $20-$30 billion dollars with a B.
To put that into perspective, Alphabet's revenue has increased 13.38% year-over-year as of June 30, arriving at $328.284 billion dollars - i.e. it has increased by $38.74 billion in that time. A $10 million dollar mistake translates to losing 0.0258% of that number.
A $10 million dollar mistake costs Alphabet 0.0258% of the amount their revenue increased year-over-year as of last month. Alphabet could have afforded to make 40 such $10 million dollar mistakes in that period and it would have only represented a loss of 1% of the year-over-year increase in revenue. Taking the year-over-year increase down by 1% (from 13.38% to 12.38%) would have required making 290 such $10 million dollar mistakes within one year.
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasizing: over the past years, every year Google could have easily afforded an additional 200 such $10 million dollar mistakes without significantly impacting their increase in revenue - and even in 2022 when inflation was almost double what it was in the other year they would have still come out ahead of inflation.
So in terms of numbers this is demonstrably false. Of course the existence of repeated $10 million dollar mistakes may suggest the existence of structural issues that will result in $1, $10 or $100 billion dollar problems eventually and sink the company. But that's conjecture at this point.
The point the parent made is not to not make mistakes, but to learn from them. Which they probably did not from all of them, as indicated by the sheer amount of messenger apps on this list, but there's definitely a lot to learn from this list.
To be clear: what I mean by "not learning the right lessons" is a company deciding that the issue with wasting $10M in six months is that they didn't do it 100x in parallel in three months. Then when that goes wrong they must need to do it 100x wider in parallel again in three weeks.
I'm not really certain that's true at Google's size. Their annual revenue is something like a quarter trillion dollars. 25,000x larger than a $10m mistake.
The equivalent wastage for a self-employed person would be allowing a few cups of Starbucks coffee per year to go cold.
