Because your great-grandfather who hated loud noises, family gatherings, and was at his happiest tilling the fields in extremely straight rows day after day.

When he retired, he built ships in jars and organized all of his stamps in his spare time. Of course he was autistic.

We just didn't say that, we said, "ah yeah, Grandpa Joe was eccentric. Helluva farmer, though."

I was a programming lead, and this is pretty close to how I worked. We scheduled my time as 50% management and 50% programming. If I started getting over 50% management, it was usually an indication of something else significant happening. Sometimes that was fine and sometimes it wasn't, and we'd do something about it.

But doing that "individual contributor" work was the only way I could ACTUALLY manage. If I'm not reading and working on the code, I have no way to assess the programmers I'm supervising, and no way to know if as a team we're actually achieving our goals.

Management for the sake of management is honestly a bit insane to me. I understand that not everywhere has a structure like a game company (fortunately), but I firmly believe if all you do is manage, you'll always be easy to manipulate and lie to, and you'll never actually know what's going on. It makes you a worse manager.

Oh, it's because people with success, people that are demonstrably skilled at something—they start to think that their knowledge in one field means that they're smart at EVERYTHING. You see it with physicists all the time. Doctors, too.

They start believing their own hype and think they know better than actual experts. Then they end up dead, like Jobs. It's sad, but it feels like maybe it was inevitable.

Actually, drinking hot coffee or tea is really common among Asians on hot days. It makes you sweat, and that sweat cools you off. My Chinese mother was forever giving me tea to drink during the summer.

(The hot bath part is definitely true.)

Anyway, it is FOR SURE true that corporations don't want to pay us AND AI at the same time, but the reality is that they'll need programmers to oversee all this stuff. The current fantasy that AI can do it all is absurd. The summary says that 70-something percent of coding problems can be solved by AI, but that's such a low level of complexity. I'm a gameplay programmer, and yeah, I use a lot of simple programming elements composed together to make a big system, but I still have to understand the big system, and then the bigger system that it lives inside, and then the whole game. Junior programmers are often lost in the complexity, or take shortcuts that cause bugs. AI is no different.

I have a whole diatribe about natural language programming, but Dijkstra said it first, and he said it better, so I'll just leave the link here. tl;dr Natural language programming (like vibe coding) is a stupid waste of time that provides no gains at all.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD...

1 cent is just what they're buying the shares at, not what they're worth.

Yeah, their weird fixation with hydrogen isn't doing them any favours. It's a terrible fuel and the engines are complicated and underperforming.

I agree, they're not terrible—like, it's not a Cybertruck or Hummer EV—but they're not GOOD, either. You look at it and compare it to various other EVs and it's not as fast, doesn't go as far, isn't luxurious. It's just a Toyota and gives you no reason to buy it other than brand loyalty. The RAV4 is insanely popular despite also being (IMO) pretty mediocre. But it's a Toyota and it's reliable as hell and isn't more expensive than everything else in the same category.

Nah, strong disagree.

Teslas sell because they're legitimately good EVs (aside from the Cybertruck, which is good at precisely zero things) and they have first-mover advantage.
Chinese EVs are impressive because they have everything including the kitchen sink in the vehicle and you could buy 4 of them for the price of one used F150.
Hyundais sell because they're interesting and decent vehicles. They don't promise the world, but you get decent value for your money.

The problem with the Toyota/Subaru EVs is that they come from companies that have a very strong value proposition in some way, but the EVs fail to meet those values. Toyotas are supposed to be reliable, good vehicles. They do everything you want, nothing is too flashy, and you know that car will still work in 15 years whether you take care of it or not. Subarus are reliable bad-conditions vehicles that can tackle actual offroading with no modifications and still get you around town comfortably without wasting gas.

The bz4rxzbzbzbzb or whatever (terrible name, a minor but notable problem) just doesn't live up to the Toyota badge, by all accounts. You've got no reason to buy it over a Rav4 or a Prius. It's heavier, worse to drive, worse than the competition, and the range is pretty mediocre. The Solterra is a Toyota with a Subaru badge, and underperforms every other vehicle in the lineup if you buy Subarus for being rugged but practical vehicles.

Toyota has even SAID that they don't really think much about EVs, they think everyone should have a hybrid. So when they built an EV, their hearts weren't really into it. Subaru just wanted something--ANYTHING--to fill the gap in their lineup, and they threw in with Toyota because that seemed like a safe bet. Wrong.

I'm sure the model will get better over time. Toyota likes making money, so they'll figure it out. But these cars don't sell well right now because they're bad.

I suspect he was ignored. Adobe hasn't just made buggier products, they've also just made worse products, where nobody with any design sense or empathy for a user would allow it to be released. They've always been terrible, but their products are nearly intolerable now. They have the best tech and the worst everything else.

Less experience means you don't have to pay that person as much. You don't get the same quality of work out of them—and crucially, you never will. Unless you're using an LLM to help you learn as a specific goal, you won't learn much from prompting it to solve your problems for you.

So basically you have a workforce that never gets better, no matter how many hours they put into the work, so you can continue to pay them poorly FOREVER. They're just prompt-generating meat-sacks. I've argued for years that there's no such thing as 'unskilled' labour; fast-food workers, farm workers, manual laborers all learn skills and are meaningfully better at their jobs as time goes on. But AI workers? It's getting pretty close to being unskilled. If there's any differentiation between the results one person gets vs. another, AI companies will roll those into the model to homogenize the results.

That said, I don't think this future is going to happen. I don't think we can underestimate the value of human work just yet.

Your statistics are terrible.

Single women raising kids have a higher chance of raising a criminal because there are so many more of them, and women are generally paid less than men, so they have fewer resources to aid raising those kids. Men are less likely to even TRY to get full custody of children, so there's a massive selection bias here—single dads are the ones that actually have the resources AND the desire to raise children.

I wasn't able to find any credible evidence that the problem is specifically with single mothers, though it does seem that single PARENT households are more likely to raise criminal children. But again, this almost certainly has to do with the fact that regardless of gender, one person wasn't meant to raise a child—it takes a village, as the saying goes. People without support will have a hard time doing a sufficient parenting job, through no real fault of their own.

Moreover, in study after study, single women are HAPPIER than married women. Married women are miserable because the men are SO BAD. Women have looked at their options and decided that between living with a couple of cats alone in an apartment or taking care of a douchbag that never does the dishes, the cats win every time, and I DON'T BLAME THEM.
https://www.theguardian.com/li...

Single women with kids do LESS housework than MARRIED women with kids; men are a net negative in their lives.
https://www.psychologytoday.co...

1. I am now BEGGING to get into chats with actual humans because the AI agents suck SO HARD
2. I interviewed with a company and asked about their AI policy and the policy is: we don't use it for any of our code. The guy said that if it were up to him, he MIGHT allow it a bit, but only at the senior level and above. Otherwise, you have to do your time and learn your lessons. I respect this.
3. I'm surprised at how well people actually DO recognize AI slop and resent it.

So yeah, it's changed my opinion about jobs and interacting with people. I'm literally never going to go to a cafe with automated baristas. I want to talk to people about coffee and what's good and what THEY like. I want to know their dumb little coffee making rituals and what grinder they like and the best cafe THEY'VE ever been to. All AI has done is cement in that I don't like computers as much as I thought I did.

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

That's definitely the case with things like dinner etiquette. Nobody REALLY cares about which spoon is which.

But politeness, being kind in your interactions, thanking people, etc., that's all there to help interactions with people that aren't your friends or family. I say please and thank-you to the folks at the farmer's market. I don't know them well enough to do anything else. There's a little bit of social lubricant there that gives me a framework of how to act with someone that's mostly a stranger.

I get that sometimes the niceties are annoying—don't ask me how I'm doing if you don't actually care; I'll TELL you and then what are you going to do?—but lots of them are just a way to make life a little easier.