I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.

My preferred modality: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

I recommend Martin Seligman. I've read some of Kahneman's academic work. Martin Seligman changed my life with Learned Optimism.

Sounds like my next read. Thinking fast and slow was something I just started but it seems like something I want to read when I’m functioning better.

I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3 months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4 years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6 months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.

I want to know if I can use an LLM during problem solving at an interview for SDE jobs at Amazon, Google and Microsoft who have boldly claimed lot of their work is done by LLMs. I will be able to point out the algorithm and explain how it works including the time complexity, but I will need the LLM first to solve it.

Will SDE interviews change ? Are these companies gearing up to let AI engineers in ? I highly doubt this is ever going to happen.

There is a quote by buffet that I think applies to a lot of scenarios not just investing : 'to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.'

ML IoT 5G blockchain etc. so many technologies are great that had their gaussian curve moment during greed. But these things take a back seat after that.

Definitely poor branding. It needs much better 2025 branding and it’ll probably take off in this AI search era where results are really poor tbh and very inaccurate at times.

Protectli makes great hardware. But unfortunately intel runs plenty of code with things like management engine that requires Coreboot to disable during boot. It may also be possible that the cpu refuses to boot with ME disabled so maybe coreboot doesn’t always mean doesn’t run proprietary code. True opensource will maybe happen with RISC-V when it comes to routers fast enough to be installed at home or small offices.

That being said, home routers are the least supported devices when it comes to security and privacy. People are running age old firmwares that are known to have exploits. These things are literally so cheap and poorly maintained anything with openwrt is going to be better.

For offices I would not shy away from recommending protectli with openwrt or opnsense as long as there are people with enough expertise to maintain these things long term.

> True opensource will maybe happen with RISC-V

...assuming that the particular processor you're using won't have any proprietary extensions or requirements to bootstrap during power on (with a closed source blob, not unlike onboard firmware).

It's an older device, but NanoPi R4S 2-port router has blob-free Arm RK3399 with OP-TEE support.

That's nice to hear. I don't think it's impossible, but regardless of the architecture, one needs to be diligent while selecting hardware.

Your comment is also parallel to what I tried to say.

I’ve been working with a team of so called ‘junior’ devs and coding is the least of the problems. Design and architecture is by far the most difficult thing for people to understand and get a hang of. A staff engineer won’t replace 2-4 junior devs with LLM. He will focus on the design and architecture and then get 2-4 engineers to execute it with LLMs. The two might sound the same but it’s not. And that’s the difference between understanding software engineering and coding. LLMs make coding easier, not software engineering.

> A staff engineer won’t replace 2-4 junior devs with LLM. He will focus on the design and architecture and then get 2-4 engineers to execute it with LLMs.

That's already tried (not with LLMs). Especially with CASE tools, UML, and before those, the waterfall process. Building a software is like writing. Only once it's done, you can be really sure you understand the subject. The skill part is to make sure someone else can.

Doing design and architecture is like drafting plans before a war campaign. It helps with planning, but it does not help in winning the battle. There are pocket of complexity that no design can touch, because you would just be writing the software already.

In India Amazon makes little sense. Neither does kindle nor does local book store.

The reason for this is that both paper and printing here is cheap along with labor. The original author also licenses for cheap. The publishing houses however take a large cut increasing the cost of the book.

People get a hold of the epub and print them and sell them for 1/4th of the price sometimes 1/10th for new and even less for used.

The only way I see around this is digital libraries. Let people rent unlimited books (but like Netflix limited at a time) and take a monthly cut.

Paper, printing, and labour have nothing to do with the price of the book. Like college textbooks and drugs, you can sell in India if you mark your prices in accordance with what the market can afford. Otherwise, people will pirate.

That's essentially Kindle Unlimited. It's one of the key pillars to Amazon's dominance of the publishing sector. As an author, you have to give them 3 months exclusive publication rights to use it. You get paid per pages read, divided among all the other pages a customer reads that period. And if you opt out, your book's distribution on Amazon is affected.

Well yes, piracy is always going to be cheaper.

Similar to how Prime Video doesn't work in many Latin American countries that have poor internet and sneakernet of hard drive swapping with piracy.

Of course piracy is cheaper lmao

> In India Amazon makes little sense. Neither does kindle nor does local book store.

Of course! The number of books outside educational material sold in this country with huge population is insignificant. And it is not much surprise since most people can't really afford much.

But at least mobile data is really cheap and Whatsapp is free, so people get all the information they care about just from this combo.

Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.

But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.

AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.

So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.

I expect this type of stuff to be used for elevator and telephone hold music. Or even perhaps indie video games where they don’t have a budget for music.

With the kind of funds raised by AI companies there should be 10 different ones sitting next to me competing with each other.

I have enough competing voices inside my head, I don't need the ones outside of it to have their own competition as well.