Viewing profile — crispyambulance

>...vocation of choice is misaligned with your personality... I also kind of sense this. The OP mentioned they were doing systems engineering. That's a very particular hellscape of…

It really depends on what the individual goal actually is. I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and …

XML was a good, well-intentioned idea. The problem, IMHO, was that rampant "xml-abuse" in the naughts. ws-* standards and over-engineered garbage like SOAP ("complex object access …

> I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn. Neither do I, but there's huge distances between "spend-an-afternoon-intro-on-it" and "learn-it-well-enough-for-occasion…

> You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon. Oh, HELL NO! It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different le…

Beautiful! I did have in mind something more like the Socratic method, asking pointed questions of your mentee, guiding them but not pushing them. I suppose that in a weird way tha…

There is plenty advice around for "how to ask" (really, it's the same if you know the person or not). It all boils down to a Calvinistic "show you're worthy" kind of exercise. But …

> ...it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal. I think the point of this is not to make "a product". It's just a fun project that you can build yourself or particip…

Motto's, slogans, mission statements... All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed …

Yes. It was good enough to communicate that news item. Did Alibaba perform "an attack" or were they taking advantage of resources and going beyond Anthropic's terms of service? Did…

The standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic. It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, …

Ferriss has been part of what I call the "self-help industrial complex" for a very long time. He also has known Thiel since at least the early naughts.

> Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers. Indeed, it has been very clear since Jan 20 2025 that our executive branch of government is not a…

> They were asking for regulation. That's what they said, but were they, really? I've heard others call it a marketing ploy that AI companies keep coming back to-- the idea that "i…

If we're talking homemade vacuum tubes... I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just use metal endplates with feedthroughs for electrical (like spark-plugs) and with v-grooves for o…

A lot of success-striving people are pretty grossed out by absurd levels of wealth inequality as well. Sure, some folks are going to be fantastically wealthy, that's OK to a large …

The thing about "compound growth", even in the most general sense, is that it ALWAYS ends, and that end is typically a crash of some sort. In biology there's the notion of a growth…

I do appreciate how helpful AI has been with troubleshooting and providing vital background info in repairing appliances. I've been doing this since before AI, as appliance repair …

I've used this pattern for ~10 years now: 1 Subscribe at some very reasonable intro rate: $4 a month for 6 months 2 The intro rate expires and goes to $25 a month. 3 I call the num…

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an emp…

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gam…

> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly... That's fine, I guess, if your idea of "success" is apple-scal…

> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?] The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's mo…

Beyond a certain amount, the actual number becomes meaningless especially for people who already have dynastic wealth not even counting this. It's just what they happened to negoti…

A lot of this is a matter of taste and judgement. In the same way that it's possible to have an xml/json/yaml/toml config that creates despair in those who have to maintain it, a p…