LeftHandPath

Claude with Jira is the first time I've applied AI and felt like it was truly saving me time. The UI and search tools are so clunky, it feels much better to say "Find jira tickets like xyz" and read through their titles/summaries in the command prompt.

I am not sure if that's a good thing for Claude, or an indictment of Jira.

One of the rare articles that distills a lot of abstract experience into something clear and actionable. Reminds me of Spolsky's more famous blog posts on software engineering.

Moved to NYC. Have a good team at my new job. Satisfied with my income. Have enough free time. Made a lot of good friends really fast, and now I see a rotating cast of them 3-7 days a week. Happy with my apartment. Have an east facing window so I don't have to set an alarm to wake up in the morning, I wake with the sunrise. Getting plenty of exercise and walking a 8-12k steps a day.

For the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.

This tracks very well with my experience... Too much time in a cubicle away from windows -- say, just for a week -- and my vision gets noticeably worse. A few days away from the screen, like a week on the lake, and it gets much sharper.

I'd be inclined to agree with him that it can be prevented and maybe even reversed.

If the books are set in 55 BC, how would the characters know it was 55 BC?

Agreed.

Hiking is my go-to when I need to figure something out. I think walking also helps chew on complex problems, more so than more intense exercise like strength training and running (though that's also beneficial).

This is a flawed idea. It presumes, in the abstract and conclusion, that changing admissions preferences to artificially increase diversity would result in a more diverse group of leaders in the country, because elite colleges tend to produce leaders and high-income earners.

Fundamentally altering the admissions process will also fundamentally alter the institution and what graduates of it look like. If we alter selection for Navy SEALs -- because SEAL school graduates are known to be athletic, motivated, and team-oriented, and we want more people like that -- I have a feeling that we'd simply destroy the image of the SEALs rather than increasing the number of people with those personality traits.

Back to my point: It always starts with the notion of focusing on merit, but devolves into checkboxes and quotas and arbitrary preferences, because those are easier to measure than actual merit. The end result is an institution that still fails to reward merit, and no longer creates the generous benefits it did at the start of the exercise. It also creates a group of bitter, resentful people who feel wronged by the changes that will significantly reduce any prior public goodwill towards the institution.

To be even more explicit, a lot of the reason that these colleges are so strongly correlated with high incomes and high achievement is that they allow attendees to network with people whose parents and family members have already reached the upper echelon. Refactoring admissions to replace that will shred that benefit altogether. Colleges are not a totally isolated system; the value of a degree does not derive solely from the lectures the individual receives there, nor perhaps from the name-prestige of the university, but largely from the networking people are able to do there and the companies that visit and recruit from the school because of that network.

Great list. I remember being called in to look at software my company was thinking of buying, once... Only our finance/accounting people had looked at it so far. The thing barely worked. The desktop window kept flashing. Special characters were accepted and then broke the output. Extreme lack of features needed for the supposed goal.

I was able to find us an open-source / self-hosted solution that worked far better (bookstack). But I was amazed at how far the company selling the software got with us -- seems like most never get pushback, they just make sales by labeling themselves as fit-for-purpose regardless of whether or not they generally work.

The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.

Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.

Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

> Pricing is good, but profits may continue to be elusive; still no clear technical moat.

It's quite ironic that the technology that is displacing so many people from so many industries, has yet to make a profit. I fear the "creative" part of their destruction will take longer to achieve than they advertise.

Really, really love the interface and the way you have the calendar, FIA docs, etc available too. Shout out for the delay feature -- I was able to sync it perfectly with my TV stream!

The big problem I had was desync. Every 5-10 minutes, random parts of the interface would stop updating. Sometimes the whole page would blank out. I was able to fix it once by loading one of the other panels (like the FIA docs) and then going back to the live data. Eventually it broke and I wasn't able to fix it (around lap 18 or so). Thinking maybe sockets aren't reconnecting when their connection drops from the client side? And it seemed like there was some issue that prevented it from fixing with a simple refresh.