I haven't smoked in about 13 years, but I did from the time I was 13 until 29 or so.
It's disgusting and I couldn't be more glad that I quit, but it does sound good sometimes. I also quit drinking and had to give up caffeine, so I have like zero vices now besides napping and ice cream.
I take comfort in the fact that my wife and I have a few decent bookshelves of good novels many of which we have not read yet. I've been hoarding e-books as well.
that's probably true, but if they are anywhere in the realm of leetcode, there are so many example in the training set that they can regurgitate, debug and explain them perfectly. I assembled an entire book of leetcode solutions, explanations, common pitballs etc using claude and send it to my kindle, and so far, it's bang on.
It's certainly a lot more satisfying than asking Reddit most of the time, whether you are getting the truth or not. I don't know how many times I've posted a question on reddit, not necessarily about something psychological or relationship related, even about things like mortgages or landscaping, come back to check the comments and ya, have my day totally de-railed by trolling strangers with an ax to grind.
This is a fun article. As a current Principal at MSFT I've never seen these type of questions being asked in interviews. I don't think it's fair or accurate to say "If you’re an experienced programmer, you already know how to do all of them". So many of the SWEs and candidates at Microsoft are just studying leetcode using python, joining the company and writing managed C# code.
I feel all of these things too. I'm 42 and started working right out of high school. Unfortunately I was dumb, didn't save money or pursue high earnings until 6 years ago when I joined big tech. I live in HCOL area, and realistically have 10 or maybe even 20 years left before I can even start thinking about retirement.
Trying to figure out how to make this sustainable.
Don't you need to spend 5-10 thousand USD to run these models that are "as good" as frontier models from 6-12 months ago? I haven't seen a convincing breakdown for ROI of running your own coding models. Especially against a $20 or even $200 plan
It's also really nice to just do some work outside instead of staring at a screen . I really enjoy mowing my huge lawn, doing some light landscaping stuff. My wife and daughter pick weeds for hours and it really centers them.
This might be an unpopular thing to do, but lately I've been literally having claude/chatgpt write books for my personal consumption: things to brush up interview skills, python, system design, and even agentic coding. I've also had it aggregate substack posts for me, etc.
I have it generate an ePub file, and drag and drop it to my kindle.
It's a great way to take information with me, out for a long walk where I can focus on it and absorb it.
wow, they had to OCR it back in from paper printouts
> This source code is old enough that it hadn’t been stored digitally. “A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini,” calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group,” painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout.
It's disgusting and I couldn't be more glad that I quit, but it does sound good sometimes. I also quit drinking and had to give up caffeine, so I have like zero vices now besides napping and ice cream.