I think people will stop caring about quality as the layoff culture keep chugging along. Maybe many will say “who cares I won’t be here in 6 months anyway” and just YOLO the code base.

Maybe I don’t understand this stuff because I live in a small SF apartment and not a McMansion. But this stuff just feels like it would over complicate my life for no real gain.

I think some of this stuff helps even without a big house..

My current top use cases:

1. Smart locks that let you remotely unlock and automatically close and lock the door - you never have to worry about the keys/security of your home.

2. Automatically turning off devices when not needed. (Eg. When no one is at home, turn off all the lights and fans. Automatically turn off the water heater 10 minutes after anyone turning it on). This really cut our power bill because people just forget these devices after turning them on.

3. Scheduled actions and reminders - automatically water the plants daily for a minute in the morning, automatically turn on the water heater at 8 am during weekdays etc . The plant watering thing is very useful when going on vacation etc...

The worry I might get from questioning if I left the front door of my home unlocked is equal to the worry I would have that my smart lock or the app linked to it is malfunctioning and giving a false positive.

My solution has been to do a little dance when locking the front door so the moment stands out a bit more in my memory, personally.

Yeah and all the window lights etc. They are on when you wake up, they turn off when its bright outside etc.

Also seeing if you left windows open at a glance etc.

Surely there is a ycombinator startup around the corner that will fix this problem.

Marxism-as-a-service?

Sadly the people behind ycombinator think helping this administration crush woke youth, and spying on us with flock cameras, is more important that preventing fascism or corporotocracy.

There is something to be said about being surrounded by people also devoting their full energy to learning something.

It’s more inspiring and fulfilling than being alone with a YouTube video. Also you might make life long friends or meet the love of your life.

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

The better analogy would be "Tools should be paid for by the mechanic". Experienced ones tend to have $10K+ worth of tools that they paid for.

Your mechanic is an independent entrepreneur. If they work in a shop with other mechanics, they for sure don't each have duplicate $10k sets of tools.

Well, I am my own mechanic, and worked for multiple shops before I started doing this. Everyone owns their own tools.

Media is so expensive now that it inspired me to take up sailing instead. It’s nice to get outside.

Did you buy a boat with the money not being spent on media, or using that money to pay for renting? Either way, it made me think of the old saying, "the two happiest day's in a man's life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells that boat".

Can’t they just get away with this by claiming they were doing AI research and their agent broke out of their sandbox?

It’s not a breach. It’s a load-bearing resilience exercise

Provenance.

I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?

Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.

Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.

I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.

I just use garmin watches to track health stuff. I would literally jump for joy if there were a free alternative software and hardware stack to replace this watch or at the very least a cycling computer.

The market is pretty bad, they will get someone who lives in a low cost of living state who will take it.