- Had similar experiences:
Running late, took a webex call from the back of my minivan on my MacBook Pro. Except I had enough screen real estate with the virtual monitor to do work during the boring parts. The best part was going full immersion and hearing the rain falling on a high mountain lake in between people speaking.
I also usually wake up overnight and want to work, but can’t because my office is located in the master bedroom. Now I can sit on my couch and not have to hunch over.
Finally, I took my dog to the dog park and worked with no screen glare and big virtual display
Also, watching movies on the moon is pretty cool.
- Took the family back to the place where my wife and I met as ski bums (small town in the mountains)
We went to a weekly music event and noticed that people were talking, dancing, laughing while the kids were playing in the grass/dirt and climbing trees. Not a single person was filming.
Felt nice. Not saying it’s not ok to be on your phone, but it does seem to act as “social armor” allowing people an easy way to avoid full immersion in situations.
- Im not trolling here either.
Genuinely wondering who your heroes are?
Could be a case of mismatched focuses. If someone is focused on tech, they might idealize Musk or Jobs. If someone has roots in the financial realm, they might thing Buffet is their hero.
That’s why I’m asking. Is it possible you can’t understand why Munger is a hero to some because you don’t live in that world?
For the record my heroes are Steve Irwin and my Aunt Patty, so it’s also completely subjective and highly contextual.
- Same here. I find it lowers the barrier to entry for me starting something, it also sends me down roads I would not have travelled before, which expand my range of solutions to problems.
It does all this in sub 10% of the time I would have spent “googling” things.
I don’t want it to write the whole thing for me anyway :)
- I think either way, your leadership has an impact. Clearly there’s been some internal strife for a minute, but the amount of innovation coming out of this company in the last year or two has been staggering.
Altman now doubt played a role in that, objectively this means change. Just not sure in which direction yet.
- The real take away is that he’s out front shaping regulation before it impacts him.
In the US he knows it’s easy to manipulate our policy with a little song and dance because our policy makers don’t understand what they are looking at.
It’s a different story in the EU where you have competent leaders.
That seems to be the reason for the inverse approach.
US: “let me help you write the regulations ;)”
EU: “you’re gonna be behind it you regulate me :0”
- Yeah it’s tough to tell.
I could see a world where if you create the right architecture then complex tasks can be broken into smaller individual tasks where your only concern is the outcome and not the underlying code. Very deterministic
Essentially all the things we developers care about might not matter. Who cares if the LLM repeats itself? DRY won’t apply anymore because there might not be a reason to share code!
LLM go brrrr until it gets the right output and the code turns into more “machine learning black box” stuff
- To some extent I agree.
As a parent of two children under 4, I am exhausted.
Given my current obligations though, I’m compelled to keep going.
It’s 3:30am, I have a stomach bug and I’m about to give up on sleep for now and get some work done.
I’ll do this because it’s necessary to maintain a competitive productivity level with my peers.
Burnout is a luxury I can’t afford right now.
- If you look at what the prompter had to know in order to get a useful output you can see how far away we are from replacing that individual with a business stakeholder.
That’s why I view these tools as “productivity enhancements” rather than a straight replacement of a job. In some cases maybe, but not for coders just yet…
I think the most underrated and useful parts of this process is the ability to get going.
For me the starting energy of a project is the thing that blocks me. With chatgpt, it’s a simple prompt to get the conversation going. Once in motion I can put the puzzle pieces together while chatgpt can help me keep momentum
- I’m kind of excited now.
I used to build random weird things all the time (mostly centered around connecting physical devices up to the internet to accomplish something silly) - but lost my mojo once I had kids and didn’t the ability to pull all nighters to “hack” something together.
Now I feel like the barrier might be low enough that I could create again. Will have to try this out and see how it goes.
- Used it live with my team to write an inspirational speech then I read back to the team. We all had a good laugh.
It’s just not contextual enough yet to understand how to sound genuine to a team that has had enough connection and time together to have developed our own norms.
I also tried to use it to limit the string length of a type in typescript and it hallucinated an answer that probably should be how they implement that feature’s ergonomic. Threw me for a loop because it looked so legit, but alas the feature doesn’t actually exist.
GPT does shine bright if you are exploring/brainstorming a new topic at 2am and there’s no one else to run your ideas past.
I also have successfully used it to round out my thoughts about high level topics and think of things I would not have when developing plans.
For the time being, I view it less as a competitor to my brain and more of a compliment.
In relationships we tend to develop dependencies on our partners where our deficiencies are their strengths. I guess I’m still learning about the strengths of GPT.
It’s striking that I already view this technology as a potential “partner” of sorts, different than a simple “resource” like google or stack overflow.
- To some extent I agree with the sentiment.
COVID seemed to create an awareness amongst employees that they could have better living conditions. There was a capitulation on the part of employers (especially in the tech industry).
Now it seems employers are firing a warning shot across the bow, reminding employees where the power truly lies.
Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function probably begs questions at other companies about how many folks are “essential”.
The macroeconomic situation is probably a factor but one could make the argument that it’s only creating a window of convenience for a little house cleaning.
- I think it’s a little naive to equate “on-demand learning” with essentially learning frameworks or tools.
I remember early in my career when I got a request to make a graphic slowly start to circle around a user’s mouse as they hovered over an area of the page.
I couldn’t use a tool to solve this problem. I used on demand learning to go back to high school trig and figure out how to animate something in a circular motion.
My point here is that often on demand learning and conceptual preparation merge into the same thing and aren’t mutually exclusive.
- Agreed on the boot camp thing.
I’ve interviewed more than a few folks who got their start with boot camps but couldn’t answer some basic questions about web development.
Not knocking those who are motivated to go through a boot camp, just saying you can’t stop there. The content covered in a boot camp is just a single slice of a much larger pizza.
- Everyone has opinions on this so take mine worth the price charged.
You could go to a talent / recruiting program, there are usually some university affiliated programs that have ties to major tech companies or advertising firms.
Of course there are internships as well.
All of that is fine, but anecdotally I found it was far easier to just start doing weird / fantastic things with the internet. Experiment, have fun, create wacky things and blog / YouTube / TikTok about it (full disclosure there was no TikTok in my day). Get the word out that you do this stuff and funnel everything back to a portfolio page that says your available for contract or hire.
Additionally, start attending events where there are other “famous” devs doing what you want to do. Get to know the people and participate. Might take a few years, but if you’re motivated you can network your way into something.
Yeah it’s a ton of work - but that’s a barrier to entry also potentially highly lucrative.
- Your great-granddaddy sounds like a very smart man.
I think this phrase speaks volumes about the value of these folks (and not just in the startup world).
Even in large companies there are opportunities for improvement everywhere. Once we identify something of interest, wildcards are the folks I can rely on to help prove things out. They are versatile, autonomous and comfortable with ambiguity.
Once the system is up and rolling, it’s time to put in the maintainers and move on. That’s pretty much the game.
The trick, in a big company, is the opportunities usually lie in someone else’s “territory”. Relationships become hugely important, something I’m sure your great-granddaddy had no trouble with :)
- I can’t confirm “befriending” crows, but I can confirm that you can make them your enemy.
A while back I had found what I thought was an injured bird. I captured it and brought it to a rehabilitation center for wild birds.
Turns out I had just capture a baby crow that hadn’t learned to fly yet, which explains why there were two other crows (parents) barking at me from trees as I tried to capture their chick.
After the rehab center verified I had not injured the chick during capture they let me return it where I found it.
Let me just say the parents were not happy with me when I let that chick out of the box they started divebombing me.
I had my own baby about a month later and as I was carrying my kid in from the parking lot I got dive Bombed by a crow.
I’ve always thought it was one of the parents retaliating.
From that point on every time they saw me they would start barking at me
Now I can sit on my couch in a much more comfortable and ergonomic? position with 4k screen size virtual display.
Plus I can watch movies with the sound on and not wake anyone up.