I read these Starlink hope stories and get inspired now and then. But the truth is:
I've bought a mini and standard, and on my mini I've got maybe a couple of good anecdotes in it. But the rest of it? The 97%? Pure fucking hustle to work. A crying sham of a service. I cannot rely on this thing to save my life for a single zoom call at work.
Lmao I could not believe this when I read it. Had to do my due diligence in wikipedia afterwards. It's legit! [1]
[1] - Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell
This got me thinking that the smaller these local first LLMs get - the more they're gonna looking the next bread and butter of app dev. Reminds me how Electron gained a lot of traction for making it easy to package prettier apps. At the measly cost of gigabytes of RAM, give or take.
I really like the project and am eager to try and fit this into some of my workflows. However, this bothered me a bit:
"All models run locally, no private data leaves your computer. And it's spicy to offer something for free that other apps have raised $80M to build."
I’d straight up drop the comparison to big AI labs. This isn’t rebellious or subversive, it’s downstream of a ton of already-funded work. Calling it “spicy” is a bit misframed.
I can relate to the feeling - this timing tracks for when most, if not all of my friends, all my co-workers (even the few who were resisting to adopt any AI toloing) flocked to just "Claude Code". Similar to how the masses gobbled VS Code a while back.
Company started doling out Claude Code configs, everything is now cli/agentic AI harnessed and news about "90% of this company's code is now AI Generated" pop up every other day.
It seems the last frontier to breach before this was nailing agentic black boxes to not crap out during the first hour of work. After that, it's really been much smoother for those tools.
Don't you feel that sabbaticals kinda get you off the new tech wave anyway? I usually check in on news much more often when bored at slow work days.
On the side, this might not have to do at all with your case, but the reason I personally keep putting off sabbaticals is that I feel it can severely compound my routine wrecking habits and I don't think I'd be too strong-willed to give it meaningful purpose. Not to mention the first point, i.e. it would 100% make my industry pessimism worse. I'd like to not bounce away from tech forever. Rather, figure what scratches the same itch I've been seeking since the start.
I'm all about big road trips, big adventures but I think the couch potato risk is all too real for me.
I don't like it either. But what is really guaranteeing other markets from flunking similarly later on? What's to say other jobs are going to be any better? Back in college, most of my peers would say "I'm not cut out for anything else. This is it". They were, sure enough, computer and/or math people at heart from an early age.
More importantly, what's gonna be the next stable category of remote-first jobs that a person with a tech-adjacent or tech-minded skillset can tack onto? That's all I care about, to be honest.
I may hate tech with a passion at times and be overly bullish on its future, but there's no replacing my past jobs which have graced me and many others with quality time around family, friends, nature and sports while off work.
The worst part to me, by far, is having nothing more than a bunch of "smart" markdown files to show as my deliverables for the day. Sometimes this stacks for many days on end. Usually the bigger the knowledge gaps are, the more I procrastinate on real work.
And what happens when the bucket of knowledge gets too big and starts to overflow? I feel as if, by delegating that process of building knowledge too much, I end up accruing knowledge gaps of my own. Funnily enough it mirrors the LLM/agent's performance.
Maybe my recent prompts reflects how badly up to speed I am at a given time? I don't know. A slightly related note - I recently heard the term AI de-skilling, this treads close to it imo.
I've recently lazied out big time on a company project going down a similar rabbit hole. After having a burnout episode and dealing with sole caregiver woes in the family for the past year, I've had less and less energy to piece together intense, correct thought sequences at work.
As such I've taken to delegating substantial parts architecture and discovery to multiagent workflows that always refer back to a wiki-like castle of markdown files that I've built over time with them, fronted by Obsidian so I can peep efficiently often enough.
Now I'm certainly doing something wrong, but the gaps are just too many to count. If anything, this creates a weird new type of tech debt. Almost like a persistent brain gap. I miss thinking harder and I think it would get me out of this one for sure. But the wiki workflow is just too addictive to stop.
I've been a vim/nvim casual user for the past year or two, and I still feel as if I'm slightly less proficient in it for the amount of time that I put into it.
I really need to get around to playing with it more. I just hope that especially now with genAI that it's not too late for learning it further.
Cool new toys! I like it. I've recently been thinking of branching into more water sports such as rowing, ocean swimming and the like to have a better shot at surviving out at sea. Hopefully I've gotten some mountains covered by now.
I've bought a mini and standard, and on my mini I've got maybe a couple of good anecdotes in it. But the rest of it? The 97%? Pure fucking hustle to work. A crying sham of a service. I cannot rely on this thing to save my life for a single zoom call at work.