adamhi

> Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

I remember when this article came out, my mom called me and said "you'll be okay, you're east of I-5, right?"

"Yeah mom."

About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.

I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.

One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".

There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".

There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.

It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.

But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.

If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

Over COVID I wrote a novel-length... thing. I hesitate to call it a text adventure, or a game, even though that's what it looks like on the surface. I'm not sure what to call it.

The joke at the beginning was that it's a "travel simulator" for a period in time when you couldn't travel. I worked on it every day for about eight months, and I think I showed it to maybe six people. It was mostly a writing exercise, and an excuse to do research.

It's "abandoned" in the sense that I'm not driven to do more work on it, but it is "content complete" at about 300 pages, and it can be played.

Not Leetcode, but I did do Codewars for quite a while just for fun. This was after I'd switched tracks away from development to design, and, for the first time in about 12 years, was not burned out on programming, and wanted to just do more of it in my spare time. I didn't have a side project to work on at the time, just wanted to scratch an itch.

I learned a lot, and found it really enjoyable. Don't know why I eventually stopped; just kinda wandered away and did something else.

I know two different engineers who quit their engineering jobs to be professional woodworkers (or finish carpenters, is that close enough?). The first one started taking classes in traditional woodworking, then those classes turned into 2-week retreats, then finally he just quit and started making fine furniture and little pieces he sold online. He said he liked it for more or less the same reasons listed in this article: planning, execution, control, satisfaction.

I told the second engineer about the first one, after he told me he'd started getting into woodworking. I was laughing, like: "be careful, you're next!" and sure enough he was.

Keep in mind that they're really measuring pageviews to Stackoverflow, not actual data about movement. My intuition is that it's probably right, but this is suggestive at best.

As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement.

With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone.

Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.

This is good advice. You should almost always be talking more slowly and taking more breaks than you want to, if you're nervous. Pause between sentences, and even just try to pronounce words more slowly. You'll seem less nervous, and you'll be less nervous, and as a result of this you will think more clearly as well as have more time to consider what you're saying.

I bought a smartphone pretty late, only 5-6 years ago. Mainly I wanted an easier way to subscribe to podcasts (I'd been using an MP3 player for this for 10 years, and just using a feature phone for calls). I never actually got hooked on social media stuff or phone games. I'm not on any social media except Letterboxd, and that app is easy not to use because it's pretty terrible. The only game I've ever played on my phone is 80 Days. I mention this so that you can decide whether I am the exact wrong person to give you advice or not.

Anyway, here's what I use:

* Banking and investment apps

* Media apps (Pocket Casts, Audible, Spotify)

* My local library's app (KCLS represent)

* Nature / hiking apps (PeakFinder, AllTrails, iNaturalist, TrailRouter)

* Notion as a todo list / note taking app

* Librarything

* Lyft / Doordash

* Venmo

* Redfin at the moment, because I'm buying a house.

That's all the non 1st-party apps I have. I just don't download anything else.

I think that instead of browsing social media, my equivalent focus-drain is probably listening to podcasts and audiobooks. If you think that's healthier, switch to that. It may be, or I may be fooling myself.

If you have time to kill and want to use an app, how about Duolingo?