gaoshan

If you want to do anything beyond getting a small single-core speed bump the M5 Pro is a better, more capable purchase. At least until the M7 comes out.

Not weighing in on the privacy issue but using Ollama you can run a smaller agent like Qwen 3.6 35b a3b on a sufficiently potent laptop. Pair it with something like Hermes for a nice interface and you have more than you might need for diary like usage.

My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.

Rationality is the key point. A lot of devs approach their work in ways that are not rational or practical. Like the dev who wants to build a gold filigree decorated elevator that can handle ten thousand pounds of cargo and moves with the smoothness of a magnetic levitation rail in order to reach the second floor when all you really need is a ladder for the 2 people that will need access.

One line that got me wondering: "...and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it"

I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.

You joke but...

Deprive who of capital? The folks behind Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen, etc. or only the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI? You can wipe out the mosquitos around your house but if you don't get the entire neighborhood you may as well not bother.

If you can't name it you can still describe it.

But then by describing it you are committing it to a set of conditions this unnameable thing satisfies.

But then if you go beyond a narrow interpretation of that paradox and accept that naming and describing are both accomplishing the same fundamental thing, that being committing a thing to a condition (like a name) or set of conditions (like a description), you do run into the same problem.

Hmm, interesting. Now back to this E2E testing stuff I've been avoiding.

I can tell you that in my case, at least, the real areas of opportunity for something like this come from the masses of people that flood the manager up to senior VP level in a mega-corp. When I'm sitting in a meeting with 8 people and myself and 1 other person are doing most of the work while the rest are vaguely accountable for some metric being reported (we two talk about what's going on, plans, maybe present something completed while the others say "I don't have anything" and the meeting ends, repeat ad nauseum) I start dreaming of what a setup like the one posted here could do. Feels like we could cut at least 50% of our people at those higher levels and stay perfectly efficient and make progress.

Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.

My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.

You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.

There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.

I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.

It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.

Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.

All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.