There's something strong to be said about it, and not in a mean way
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
You have control over how the connections work and what they do, rather than just relying on the VPN exit server routing to get you to the right place.
With things like a fly machine or whatever, you might even be able to run it for free
My benchmark is ripping tailwind out of a few year old elixir Phoenix liveview app, and replacing it with component level scoped styles
It's a good and complex task, that requires touching the build system, most components, the stylesheets, and more. Opus 4.6 could barely do it. Sonnet 4 cannot (haven't tried 5 yet). MiniMax actually did fairly well
Grok aced it, rather quickly and cheaply, surprisingly
I run each through Oh my pi, with dexter providing the LSP for elixir
This is one reason I really like the ttsr feature of oh-my-pi. You can set up rules that watch output, and when the ai does something you don't want, they immediately fire and interrupt it and tell it not to do that
A great example, and one that ships with omp, is "don't use any in typescript"
Except when it comes to image models. Imagine is extremely good and extremely cheap. I've been using it to generate book covers for ebooks (old novel short stories that never had a cover, for example) and it's phenomenal. Each cover is about 6 cents
In my experience it spends a lot more tokens to do things. I wrote a tiny extension for omp that counts the number of "Actually" in the response, and if it exceeds a threshold stops execution and waits for me to tell it what to do. Even then it frequently just ignores basic instructions like "only write boilerplate, I will fill in the functionality"
Imo MiniMax and MiMo are a lot more reliable (and cheap)
Not opus level, but close enough and cheap enough to get the job done
I've been talking to a few companies lately, and one just keeps stringing it along, having me talk to manager after manager. It's been 6 weeks, and still no end in sight
My favorite was a job posting through a company called ladders
Saw it in the soup of other job posting, went to apply, it took me to some other job portal, ok whatever, this is normal, filled out all the forms as one does, and then reached the end and the site told me they'd submitted my application, and here were some other jobs I could apply to with the same application. Useful, right?
Click any of them, or anywhere else on the page, and a full screen modal takeover comes up, demanding you pay $50/application.
I closed the tab, but watched the email they sent me from the first job app. It went nowhere. Eventually applied to the company directly, on their job portal, and when I got to a real recruiter later, they said they never received my first app. My guess is ladders never even sent it and wouldn't until I paid up
Best part was ladders continued to spam my email inbox with job application invitations, each one wanting the same $50, until I blocked the fastmail throw away
I also had a "recruiter" reach out to me about a "role I'd be a good fit in". Made the meeting, and immediately some red flags. Audio and video were about 2 seconds out of sync. Guy then proceeded to try and pitch me on a similar job board, with the same $50/application cost, only this one had a 10 weeks salary cost on placement as well
I told him I wasn't interested.
Maybe these are just more traditional scams or whatever, not the malware type the op is about, but they still piss me off
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping