phil21 · HackerLangs

hace 2 horasdiscuss

> The key advantage to an ambulance ride is bypassing the Triage Nurse.

This is going to depend on where you live/the particular hospital. A lot of "frequent fliers" figured out this loophole and started abusing it where I previously lived, so there was no way around the triage nurse.

phil21

anteayerdiscuss

Yep. When I need to get back into reading again I usually start with some easy to read pulp.

My go-to is “trash” military sci-fi. Usually from authors who pump out a book or two a year in the genre.

Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is my general go-to, although these days I’m caught up so I’ve started a few others like it.

phil21

anteayerdiscuss

Yeah, reading for me is hot and cold streaks. I’ll read for 3-9mo straight, then go about the same not reading at all. Tends to coincide with life stress and work schedule for the most part, but also just picking up other interests that soak up time!

phil21

anteayerdiscuss

Fair, work was the wrong word to use.

I meant - create useful work product. For most companies software is a means to an end. The programmer writing code isn’t useful, it’s the end result. A lot of small to midsize companies employ a couple software guys out of necessity, and the results are usually middling at best. It’s a problem IT in general has really failed to solve very well.

I say this as someone who has picked up and put down “programming” as I needed it. It’s never been something I’ve gotten any satisfaction out of by doing, but I get huge satisfaction out of the resulting product or workflow automation or whatnot.

For my uses, if I could replace my programming and IT time with a robot I would - since me being in that role just slows down delivery to the end user. One of my first hires as a small startup was a programmer - specifically because I knew I rather sucked at it and what a pro could get done in a day took me a week. This is why AI for the low value/less complicated automation tasks is extremely compelling to me.

I’d immediately have 20 other things to work on to soak up the time savings!

phil21

hace 3 díasdiscuss

> So what do you / your team do?

This is so funny to me, because I know it's asked in earnest but seems so obvious to me:

They get actual work done.

Programming isn't work. That's just a means to an end. A tool to get the actual job done.

At least in most orgs. Obviously there are exceptions - but the vast economy is not a bunch of software companies. It's companies doing things to build a physical product, and software is a relatively new annoying side quest/cost center.

phil21

hace 3 díasdiscuss

Walmart and Target also do the marketplace stuff.

Costco is great for curation, but only for the items they carry.

A combo of Amazon for the random junk I don’t care much about and Costco for consumer staples works out well.

And no online vendor gets remotely close to Amazon for speed of shipping, ease of returns, and product selection. Usually matches the best price I can find on most things too - outside of stuff I buy direct from China.

Lots of the random crap I buy on Amazon I want the marketplace for. Like I needed a dozen plant domes this spring. I wanted them tomorrow, not next week and I didn’t need qty 100. So having the option for that vs. a gardening warehouse that targets large growers is quite handy and exactly what they excel at for me. I could care less which random brand sells the thing to me since they are all the same.

phil21

hace 7 díasdiscuss

You know how Costco constantly moves some of the usual “staples” they have around the store randomly?

And how Costco can never be relied on having the same item outside of those core products every time you go to the store? Better buy it now since next month they may no longer have it and you need to wait 6mo before you see it again - if ever.

That’s on purpose to induce you to wander the store more and “discover” items for impulse purchasing.

Costco absolutely optimizes as much as it can to induce impulse buys. Pretending they don’t is a weird take. Amazon might make it more frictionless, but every retailer out there is doing this sort of thing. I kind of prefer amazons way of doing it since it doesn’t introduce friction to my buying experience and waste my time.

Costco is also world renowned as a meme for peak American style consumerism. I say this as an executive member who also buys a lot off Amazon. They are just yin and yang of the retailer experience. I don’t really see one as more evil or better than the other - just totally opposite business models.

phil21

hace 8 díasdiscuss

What’s weird is the big market is pegged to the small market?

What is the point of signing a direct supply contract if you are just gonna be paying spot prices anyways? I suppose guaranteed supply priority?

phil21

hace 9 díasdiscuss

Tune out of the useless meeting and do something useful with your time. Read the 5 bullet point summary afterwards.

If it gets things wrong, oh well. Not much of value was lost.

This describes the vast majority of meetings held in the corporate world.

phil21

hace 9 díasdiscuss

It's way less about the time of doing the thing, and much more about the mental overhead of having to remember to do the thing. And needing to do the thing at very inconvenient times because I forgot to do the thing or lacked motivation when I should have done the thing.

This goes for any recurring chore in my life. I love to garden, but watering plants is hell to me after the novelty wears off. I fixed this by installing an automated irrigation system. I get to do the fun bits mostly on my schedule to wind down when I feel like it (pruning, harvesting, staring at plants) and didn't sign myself up for yet another daily chore to do.

My wife is the opposite. She thrives on "chores" or routine simple items like this. She absolutely loves doing laundry to an absurd degree - kind of a zen moment in the middle of her day she can quickly spend 10 minutes here and there to get done. Same goes for cooking. I enjoy planning and creating elaborate meals I've dialed into "perfection" but take me an entire Saturday to accomplish a few times a year. She loves spending 30 minutes in the kitchen most nights to wind down after work - but really hates "big" projects of any type.

I imagine it has a lot to do with executive function. I enjoy large one-off projects (e.g. designing and installing an over the top totally overkill irrigation system) that are eventually "done" but fall apart on repetitive simple things that never end and just reset to be done X hours all over again. I like to have my "mental slate" clean when I wake up for the day, and I find I accomplish far more when I can configure my life in such a way.

As such, this robot as-is would be somewhat useless to me as I'd have to remember to hang up the clothes or walk them up the stairs to put away or whatever even with it. I'd get very little advantage for the spend.

phil21

hace 9 díasdiscuss

I'd pay $8k tomorrow for a bot that would 100% do my laundry. That means collecting it from the various dirty clothes hampers throughout the house, bringing it to the washer and dryer, operating the washer/dryer, folding and putting clothes on hangers, and putting them back into the dresser and hung up in closets.

For a bot that just automates an in-house laundry service that washes and folds? Not very interesting since it might save maybe 60% of the time, but practically zero percent of the mental overhead.

This seems like a step towards that I suppose. My house isn't configured to make it an option even if it was a fully-baked product, but if these ever get to the point of actually working without remote teleoperation I'd certainly be in the market.

phil21

hace 10 díasdiscuss

Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.

The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.

Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.

To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.

phil21

hace 11 díasdiscuss

YMMV on the annual x-ray thing. I used to mostly think the same as you. Expensive and unnecessary risk for no real benefit.

I skipped my x-rays for 3-4 years due to dropping my long term dentist for unrelated reasons.

I recently went to a new dentist due to a previous filling cracking and had the regular x-ray done as part of routine new patient intake.

The x-ray caught the problem in another tooth done at the same time - rot behind a filling that was not visible just by looking. The same thing happened on the tooth that cracked, and had I caught it earlier I wouldn’t have had to have a crown done on it. It’s only a matter of time now until it needs a root canal due to how much material had rotted during those few years between x-rays. Most likely it was shoddy work on the two fillings be previous dentist, but in general fillings have a limited lifetime, they will generally fail at some point and need redoing. A small gap can let bacteria in and starting growing where you can’t see it and a brush won’t reach.

The annual x-ray likely saved me from another crown since the material loss was less due to being caught relatively early. $70 to remove the old filling and refill it vs a $2200 crown.

Xray also caught a pretty serious bone infection issue due to a birth defect combining in an unfortunate way with a sports injury from my teens. Although that one probably would have been done in time due to my two front teeth starting to wiggle I guess. Would have been a couple more years of bone loss though, and and even longer recovery time after the bone graft. And likely more than one implant needed vs the single one I have now.

Your personal risk tolerance and how you weigh things of course is very individualistic and only you can set it. Just tossing one random datapoint out there.

phil21

hace 12 díasdiscuss

The sony earbuds are about the best I’ve had for sound quality and noise cancellation. Much better than AirPods, but not nearly as nice integration with the Apple ecosystem.

I find AirPods Pro 2 to be “good enough” where I gave away my set of XMs to someone who will actually use them.

Call (mic) quality in AirPods is better as well, if that matters at all to you. At least that’s what folks on the remote end of calls told me.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

> I can't be the only one out there that's happy to pay a little extra if they know they're not getting garbage.

Not the only one, but there is just not a large market for it. And it likely would not be a “little” extra either.

I’ve tried to find local contractors who will just take pride in their work and get it done right (or overkill I suppose by my standards) the first time. Even old mainstays that are regularly double the cost of everyone else have been slipping lately. Companies I used to single bid for jobs knowing I was overpaying but didn’t care since I didn’t have to come behind them to audit or fix anything. They have all devolved.

There is a market at the very high end for ultra wealthy folks at something like 4-8x regular contractor rates. I’ve seen a few friends engage such folks. Most of that is in overpaying for a GC to manage their network of above average contractors and have the budget to make things right if one messes up.

Such companies seem to have zero interest in jobs not in the low 7 figures.

I would pay at least double “market” rate if I could find an electric contractor willing to take on my “crazy” home solar and battery backup project. The problem is the market for people willing to overpay for commercial quality work that will never have a dream of paying their costs back in solar savings is effectively zero. So goes for everything these days.

That said I just had my floors refinished and the contractors we lucked into finding for that 2 week job went above and beyond even my level of attention to detail. They were not any more expensive than competing bids. So who knows. It’s a crapshoot.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

> one downside is obvious from the comments here - some people will stop exercising.

Is there any source on this? The precise opposite has happened in my experience. I was an early evangelist for these drugs, and have many dozens of people who I talk to regularly who have since taken them over the years. I cannot think of a single person who went from regular exercise to reducing or eliminating it after taking the drug. Exactly zero.

I can think of well over a dozen folks who started regular exercise for the first time in their lives after losing 50 or more pounds.

Certainly many who did not change their habits either way. But overall this matches with what the trainers in my gym report. They were initially worried GLP-1s would reduce their client base, but the exact opposite has happened for them. It's brought an entirely new demographic into play and business is booming.

> which I'd argue are more important than the weight loss,

You would be making an argument contrary to most established science on the topic. Exercise is important and quite beneficial to health. Obesity is far worse. Not many obese people working out regularly to start with though, so I don't think this point holds much water to begin with. We are not a nation full of obese gym rats.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

Like all weight loss, you will lose lean muscle mass and bone density as part of it if you do not take corrective measures. And even with such measures, you will likely lose some either way for the medium term. It's very difficult to lose only fat during a long term calorie deficit.

The answer is getting into a regular schedule with resistance weight training. Obviously not all that many people will pull it off, but if you can pull it off you can stave off the worst of the side effects in many cases.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

That would be black market, almost assuredly if you are talking about "injury repair" peptides. Exceedingly few prescribers in the US are writing for those.

Grey market references stuff like HIMS where you are getting a real doctor to write you a prescription and a shady compounding pharmacy takes those Chinese black market peptides, compounds them, and ships them to your door.

Black market is just going direct to the source in China and getting them for yourself without a prescription.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

> These things are on par with statins in terms of potential societal impacts.

I put them just under antibiotics. In terms of quality of life years given back at a population scale.

phil21

hace 13 díasdiscuss

> being less sedentary and leaning about maintenance calories and how calorie surplus and deficit works?

Because it's useless advice that doesn't work in practice. As witnessed by decades of failure, with the only thing turning the tide on the obesity epidemic on a population scale being GLP-1 drugs.

> if there is no resistance, simply prescribing GLPs to average person may become a new normal.

Probably not ideal, but until Western society decides to change from the ground up it's better than the alternative which showed literally nothing but failure. One is something that works, the other is something that will take multiple generations to correct.