PleasureBot

All of these articles about setting up the perfect agent environments with skills, plugins, MCP servers, markdown files, etc. etc. reminds me so much of the culture around setting up the perfect "productivity stack". You need the perfect note-tacking app, ticketing app, calendar integrations, yada yada before you can really do anything meaningful. The reality is that you're going to get beat by someone with a few things written down on a piece of paper who is just getting stuff done.

There's been metabolic studies that show that this isn't true. Comparisons of total caloric usage of completely sedentary people and people who have high exercise load are indistinguishable. There is a large difference among individuals, but not correlated to exercise levels. Sedentary people who start training hard will have a spike in caloric usage for a few months, but their body adapts and calorie burn returns to the same level that it was when they were sedentary. This was new research, so there wasn't an explanation for it. The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses, when it is adapted to high exercise levels/ They did note that some extremely elite athletes can temporarily increase their caloric burn (think Michael Phelps eating 10k calories per at some points when training for the Olympics) but its not something most people can achieve or sustain.

If software engineer productivity basically doubled as is being claimed in this thread, I think you'd see companies scrambling to lay off everyone else in an effort to hire even more software engineers. They'd be by far the most valuable and productive employees at every tech company and you'd be foolish not to have as many as you can. I'm being a bit facetious but throughout history when a resource or profession takes a dramatic leap in efficiency, the demand for that thing rather than decreasing as is predicted here, only increases since it has become far more valuable & effective.

Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.

Half of the USA, or at least half of its voting population, now supports the idea that the role of government is simply to be an extension of the personality of the Chief Executive. Essentially, whatever Trump feels is the policy of the government and therefor is the law.

My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.

Half the country will just grumble something about Nancy Pelosi and how everyone is corrupt in response to points about the current administration being corrupt. I feel like people have just lost all sense of scale when it comes to political matters. Yes, Nancy Pelosi making a series of improbably fortuitous trades while in office is bad and she should probably go to jail for insider trading. Is that the same thing as the Trump accepting many hundreds of millions, likely billions, in direct cryptocurrency bribes from foreign and domestic agents? Obviously not, the latter has a much, much larger in scale and has direct negative effect on the American people. Half the country is willing to equate the two and, throw their hands up, and say its all the same.

I think this is pretty terrible advice actually. Verbal confrontations like this are a huge dice roll and have a tendency to make not-perfect-but-tolerable relationships totally fall apart. Its one thing to bring these kinds of things up with your partner, but not with a colleague or acquaintance.

Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.

I can also say from personal experience this verbal confrontation like the author is suggesting can make innocuous situations devolve quickly. There was one guy in a friend group I had who I felt like I couldn't really connect with. He always seemed very awkward and only willing to engage in surface-level conversations with me compared to everybody else. I tried to (gently) ask him about it, basically like the author would suggest doing, and it turns out he did not feel like he was being awkward, surface-level, or failing to connect at all. He thought we had a real genuine, deep friendship. What I said really hurt him and there was a lot of hard feelings on his end. Needless to say we did not go back to being friends after that, and I ruined what could have been a good friendship if I had taken the time to reflect that maybe my interpretation of awkwardness or lack of connection was coming from me and not experienced by him.

It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.

That's not what I said. I said the movie creates a false sense of urgency when the decision-making window is measured in hours or days, not 18 minutes.

The premise of the movie doesn't make any sense. There is no pressure to retaliate to a single nuclear missile launched at Chicago within the 18 minute flight of the missile. The only scenario that introduces a minutes-long decision window is if the US nuclear capability is in imminent danger, which it obviously is not from a single missile headed for Chicago. What any person not following a Hollywood script would do is wait few hours for credible intelligence, coordinate with other nuclear powers to avoid escalation, and wipe out whoever conducted the attack. Its a movie that only works if you don't think about it, which is a major problem because it is trying to be thought provoking.

I believe the list encompasses both genres. The very first entry in the list "Book of the New Sun" is a sci-fi series.

I said it above but the thieves don't usually sell these types of items. They were probably paid by some organized crime group do it. That crime organization now has a very valuable bargaining chip to have charges dropped by returning the stolen items. Basically its probably going to be used as insurance for organized crime.

Usually these items are used as bargaining chips by organized crime. The state agrees to drop the multiple homicides and RICO charges (or whatever the French equivalent of that is), they return the Crown Jewels.

As an alternative I've paid a mechanic I trust (not a cousin or uncle) to inspect a car I was looking to buy. Cost like $75 and I had the peace of mind that I wasn't buying a lemon.