This passage from Trading Bases by Joe Peta chokes me up everytime.
> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.
> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.
Wait, my job is not cushy. I think hard all day long, I endure levels of frustration that would cripple most, and I do it because I have no choice, I must build the thing I see or be tormented by its possibility. Cushy? Right.
How is that 1st world, there are plenty of people that "think hard" and deal with really hard problems in the "3rd World"
Give compiler engineering for medical devices a whirl for 14 hours a day for a month or so and let me know if you think it's "cushy". Not everything is making apps and games, sometimes your mistakes can mean life or death. Lots of SWE isn't cushy at all, or necessarily well paid.
Go get a bachelors and masters in EE while being eating just two bowls of rice and lentils everyday for 5 years and let me know if that's cushy.
As compared to risking life and limbs every day in a mine, breathing in cancerous powders, finding yourself with most of your joints fucked at 45, likely carrying PTSD from accidents happened to you or your colleagues... Yes, "hard thinking" looks pretty cushy in comparison.
Have you any idea how many people die every day on their workplace in manufacturing, construction, or mining; or how many develop chronic issues from agriculture...? And all for salaries that are a tenth of the average developer (in the developed world; elsewhere, more like a hundredth). Come on now.
Everyone has problems and everyone is entitled to feel aggrieved by their condition, but one should maintain a reasonable degree of perspective at all times.
Yes! I have struggled with this concern for a while now.
I think that humans are the ultimate arbiters of quality for humans.
Nothing that is non-human can make that determination because anything that is not human (an LLM) is at best just a really good model. Since all models are necessarily wrong by definition, they can never get it right all the time. When determining what’s good for humans, it is only us that can figure that out.
I also came back to ZAMM when wrestling this question. There must be something there if we have all independently coming to similar conclusions.
My Massachusetts home has both radiant floor heating (water pipes in floor) and baseboard water pipe heating (separate part of the house). My son’s New York home has radiators driven by hot water. I can’t recall a home where heating was vented air and not circulating hot water in North East USA.
At the risk of being labeled a kook or an idiot, I photographed drones flying over my suburb of Boston neighborhood a few weeks ago. This was about 6am, definitely drones not regular aircraft. I assumed it was something flying out of Hanscom or the city mapping streets. And yes I took photos not video, sorry.
It was an odd sight at that hour of the day. I wanted pictures as something to talk about with friends. I really wish I had been astute enough to take video.
yah did better than I'd have, friend. I'm sure I'd have just been all like "oh lookie here, a drone flying around at 6am, unusual and cool!" and then gotten on with my day, ha!
> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.
> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.