legerdemain

Notably:

  > here in Switzerland

legerdemain

지난달discuss

This is ostensibly a think piece by the CEO of a software startup building a product for human-AI collaboration, ostensibly describing that same process. And it starts out pretty focused, but then it just goes on... and on... without really developing a point or making rhetorical progress. Fruit-by-the-foot writing. Is the future of writing full of essays so mind-numbing and interminable that humans will need computers to preprocess them?

legerdemain

지난달discuss

This... doesn't explain anything about the song. Not its writing, not its production, not the music video. It's just a list of platitudes. Even the Atlas Obscura article has more content.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...

legerdemain

지난달discuss

Bay Area, but not SF. Mostly dead. Multiple organizers I've talked to pointed to companies no longer wanting to host. There are a few exceptions, but the number of events is much, much lower than it was before 2020.

Lots and lots of well-sponsored AI meetups, especially in SF, but every single one I've been to has been 100% fluff.

legerdemain

2개월 전discuss

From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

  > I work on Bun and this is my branch
  >
  > This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
  >
  > I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.

legerdemain

2개월 전discuss

Go back to school for what? In the last few decades, schooling has been one of two things.

The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.

The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.

A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.

legerdemain

2개월 전discuss

This author assumes that workforce development is a first-order priority for businesses, or at least for the health of the industry.

Why make this assumption so confidently?

The arrival of the electronic computer did not turn human computers into programmers, it simply eliminated them en masse.

legerdemain

2개월 전discuss

This is absurd. The author misrepresents the type of "abstraction" that people mean. This abstraction ladder goes as follows:

  - contributing individually
  - contributing as a tech lead
  - contributing as a technical manager
  - leaving the occupation to open a vanity business, such as a gastropub or horse shoeing service

legerdemain

3개월 전discuss

"SF" = science fiction?

legerdemain

4개월 전discuss

I have seen this perspective a lot and I don't understand it at all. When I meet a stranger, I don't wonder if they exercise enough for me to befriend them. Same for their clothes-shopping habits, past some very basic threshold. Same for whether they pay for me.

A lot of this advice for how to improve yourself so that other people like you comes off so incredibly vain, neurotic, and juvenile.

legerdemain

4개월 전discuss

I'm at Paris Baguette, a Korean lower-end coffee shop chain common in the Bay Area. The guy next to me has headphones on and his laptop on a stand. Or it's four middle-aged Latino women celebrating a birthday. Or it's a bunch of local high-school kids.

Do I lean over and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? Really good coffee they have here, huh?"

I'm at the gym. It's a big-box gym. It's full of dudes wearing Airpods Max, a few couples in skintight athletic outfits, a few teens with phones on tripods filming themselves for Tiktok.

Do I come over, gesture for them to take off their headphones, and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? That's really good form, on that lift, really good form. Keep it up!"

I'm waiting to cross a road. On the other side of the road is a Caltrain crossing. The traffic light cycle takes forever, and then the train comes and preempts it. And then preempts it again when people finish getting on. A crowd of parents with strollers are waiting to cross. People are returning from the farmer's market with bags of vegetables. People on bikes.

Do I lean over and say, "Hey, how are you guys all doing? It sure takes a while to cross. Wow!"

legerdemain

5개월 전discuss

There's a reason they call them Caucasian.

legerdemain

5개월 전discuss

From deep within the essay, another restatement of praise for East Asian street food culture.

  > That is because there is an abundance of inexpensive and delightful street food/casual dining establishments (carts, izakayas, takeaways, food courts, night markets, etc.), that make it a rational, and healthy, choice.

I can easily imagine that a world of unregulated food stalls can deliver food that is cheaper, more ubiquitous, and more convenient. I grew up in a version of such a world!

Is street food ever healthy, by any reasonable definition? What does a steady diet of street food do to a body?

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

The author shows a tendency to give colorful, but opaque names like "gutterballing" to things that can themselves be explained in a short phrase ("working on something that is similar to, but not exactly what you actually want, and getting predictably frustrated").

Where does this tendency come from? My first guess is self-help literature. Or maybe this is a personality trait to write this way? Or a kind of marketing, becasue only your writing has these colorful fun terms?

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

With posts like these, I always wonder how much comes from statistical observation and how much is regurgitated cliches.

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

Yes, WeWork sold Meetup to a series of increasingly awful holding companies.

I've never been to a meetup hosted at a WeWork office in the bay area, and I used to go to quite a few. Most were at company offices.

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

A $10 pizza from Costco a hundred times is a thousand dollars. Coworking space fees for a couple of years is a sum of money. Meetup organizer fees add up.

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

I'm surprised Yemeni cafes have already built a reputation. We have several in the area, and they are indeed open very late, although they attract a customer base that seems less open to interacting with strangers.

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.

legerdemain

6개월 전discuss

This is backwards. You have the privilege of curating who's not there, by not inviting them. The fascinating people you do invite aren't obligated to show up.

legerdemain

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