Like all the other commenters here, I also devised my own solution—but AFAICT, it's the only other solution that's automated!
Requirements:
* macOS
* Zoom
* Home Assistant
* A signal light/sign on a smart switch (like [0])
The Procedure:
First, create a script that checks whether you're currently on a Zoom call, and then turns your signal light on or off accordingly. Remember to chmod +x!
Then, create a LaunchAgent that monitors your Zoom Application Support directory for filesystem changes at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/local.${USER}.on-air.plist:
That reminds me of Paquerette Down the Bunburrows [1] which is a very fun pathfinding game where the bunnies will pathfind to try to run away from you. It's not exactly what you described, but it is very fun and surprisingly deep and challenging.
Our institutions and organizations are bad because they're running on bad morals, bad culture and bad people. If these institutions were not staffed with bad people with bad morals peddling bad organizational culture, they would no so readily produce bad results.
The bureaucrat cooking up the absurd rules, the academic writing the conclusion of some study to lead the bureaucrat to that conclusion, the politician doing the haranguing, the executive shipping it all overseas knowing it's not a long term solution, they all either a) believe in what they're doing b) know it's bullshit and don't care as long as the paychecks don't bounce. And these organizations adopt rules and policies that result in just about anyone who isn't one of those two types washing out or becoming one before they're senior enough to do anything about it.
The main problem that Rust tries to solve, and that functional programming (which Clojure heavily leans into) solves, is avoiding shared mutable state, which leads to data races and (potentially subtly) wrong concurrent programs. Functional programming avoids shared mutable state by avoiding mutable state. Operations are only represented as transformations instead of mutations. Other languages like Erlang / Elixir use message passing techniques like the Actor Model to avoid shared mutability. Instead of avoiding mutability, like in functional programming, in the Actor Model you avoid sharing, by instead sending messages around.
Rust is interesting because it solves the problem of shared mutable state, while allowing sharing, and allowing mutability, just not at the same time. State can be mutated until it is shared. While it is shared, it cannot be mutated. This is the goal of the ownership system in Rust.
So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.
The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.
Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.
Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
It's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.
The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.
I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B players hire C players etc. Building a team from the ground up is very much an iterative process of fighting complacency and mediocrity all day every day, and this guys pitch is just "give in, its not so bad".
IMO, there are fundamental structural barriers that preclude transformers from "superintelligence". In simple terms, I think it's far-fetched to assume that "superintelligence" can emerge from a bunch of text and images. The absurd statistical power of using every available super computer for quadratic time brute force on the entire public internet produces incredibly impressive (and useful) results, but there's only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone considering that the fidelity of reality is, far and away, inconceivably more complex than a textual substrate.
Further, I don't see strong evidence of "regular" intelligence. LLMs are like calculators for text, they have a lot of practical utility, but they don't understand anything, their output is the result of rote mechanical steps that could be executed by hand in principle. I've been using SOTA LLMs daily for years and to this day they still reliably produce nonsense and get things confidently wrong that an intelligent person generally wouldn't. Of course, intelligent people make mistakes, but if they start to hallucinate we immediately lose trust in them. Most people use LLMs in a touch and go manner, and the impressive statistical power fools us into believing we're interacting with something akin to a being, but the facade quickly breaks down the longer you try to engage with it in a manner where coherency matters.
With all that stated, I'm not saying AGI isn't possible, but I don't see language models as a path to AGI no matter how much better we can get them to model language.
Toyota calls it the gemba walk. Managers need to see how the factory is running with their own eyes. Not just live behind a desk and listen to what they hear in meetings.
A movie director can see the sets with their own eyes. But you can't see the state of a software codebase without reading and understanding the code, and the most surefire way to do that is to try to write something, even just documentation.
You don't assess the state of your software by walking around the office and looking at hands on keyboards. You look at the codebase.
Looks cool, but as I have been on this knowledge management / productivity journey like everybody. Here are my findings:
If you are reasonably comfortable with computers / Unix.
- You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and maybe markdown. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach.
- Try to sort things with universal concepts: locations, things, people, events, metrics, howtos. A bit like the 5Ws approach.
- Leverage good Unix tools: unix commands, make/justfiles, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc.
- Do not try to solve the problem through the Web. Because you will end up trying to solve web problems instead of basic knowledge management and productivity issues.
- The smartphone/touchscreen is a major problem, but as with the Web do not try to solve it. Use your file manager or even fzf in termux can be adapted to be reasonably usable on a touchscreen.
Something I have been wondering about is the "backlink" feature. It would be cool to link items/notes together through references.
What I would be looking for is a Unix tools that can scan my text files for references to other files in the hierarchy.
If you're looking for something with an addressable LED matrix in a clock style form factor, the Ulanzi TC001 [0] for ~$50 is worth having a look at.
Doesn't quite have the same aesthetic but inside it's just an ESP32 (flashed via the USB-C port) and there's various mature open source firmware replacements. I use awtrix[1] on mine and it's very easy to tie in HomeAssistant for doorbell notifications and that sort of thing. I did also knock up a Pomodoro app for it.
It’s been obvious for a very long time that London is a self-perpetuating black hole for money and talent in the UK, and it’s going to be tough to break that up.
What’s missing is the social analysis here - ambitious people in the UK go to London where they can make more money, and ambitious companies that want ambitious people go to London because that’s where the staff are. London and the SE don’t just fund the rest of the country, they also drain the talent and workers from those areas.
London does not have that great economy in isolation from its regions, it has it at least in part by feeding on them.
Growing the northern economy (and really anywhere outside the London dormitory belt) is also going to require finding a way to break the low-pay, low-productivity, low-expectations trap that exists across most of the British economy. And doing that will to some extent limit London’s talent pool.
I'm a bit "spectrumish." It's definitely way better, this late in life, than it was, when I was younger, but it's still there, if you know what to look for (my wife knows what to look for).
One aspect of it, that has always been a part of the package, is that folks Just. Don't. Like. Me.
Most, if questioned about their dislike, may come up with a couple of things, like "He's abrupt," or "He's arrogant," but these are also exactly the traits present in many folks that they do like. They are just trying to justify this "feeling" that they have about me.
As anyone in my shoes can tell you, we're "bully magnets." Most of us were recipients of multiple atomic wedgies, in school. My grade school days were a living hell. Again, there's no real "reason" for the hate. There's just something about us that pisses them off. I suspect that the "resting bitch face," prevalent amongst us may have something to do with it. It often looks as if we're being hostile, when we're not. I spent many years, training my "resting" face to be one that's basically "harmless dork," as opposed to "angry bastard." Doesn't win me a lot of respect, but, at least, I'm not being attacked out of the starting gate, anymore.
I've gotten used to it. It doesn't even really bother me too much, these days, and it happens a lot less. Feeling sorry for myself is a waste of time. I used to get all butthurt about it, but that was just stupid of me. Others have far worse crosses to bear. In the aggregate, it's been a good thing. I'm fairly decent at my software development.
The folks that matter, stick around. I do have a fairly large circle of close friends and associates that don't let my "oddness" get in the way, and enough folks have respected me, that I was able to make a decent living.
But many of us don't have those "soft" skills, that can be important, when working in a team, or trying to establish relationships with other people.
The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
I noticed that the author is using ZFS-native encryption, which in my experience is not particularly stable. I've even managed to corrupt an entire pool with ZFS send/receives when trying to make backups. I'd strongly recommend using ZFS-on-LUKS instead if encryption is required.
For most of my career I opportunistically cleaned up tech debt without being asked, because I wanted to. I felt ownership. Now that I'm in a Jira-based job with micromanagement and no autonomy I don't do a single thing I don't have to do.
Discretionary effort used to be the bread and butter of my career. Now the bureaucratic and social project management overhead required for any change makes things too annoying to be worth doing if I don't have to. I don't care if the product works long term, I don't care if the company succeeds long term, I just do my tickets until I find the next job.
Requirements:
The Procedure:First, create a script that checks whether you're currently on a Zoom call, and then turns your signal light on or off accordingly. Remember to chmod +x!
Then, create a LaunchAgent that monitors your Zoom Application Support directory for filesystem changes at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/local.${USER}.on-air.plist: Finally, load 'er up: [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NJ8ZCHF