My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
The truth today is that almost all consumer products produced today is crap we don’t need. It’s almost literally manufactured landfill, since that’s where most of it will end up.
> long-term leases as debt, because they are obligations to the business
I don’t think this is how your average reader of this would interpret debt.
When I and most people think of debt they think a negative equity account balance that you pay off to a bank or lender like a mortgage or credit card. Not a 24 month apt lease because no equity is being exchanged.
In part because of the reason OP said which was severability which isn’t something you can do with owed debt.
Graebers debt demonstrates that this is the most common way to think about it.
I have one collecting dust that I stopped using years ago just because I got bored with it so if you wanna work together, I’m happy to. I’d love to see it get more use.
I think the new one might be better as you can run an agent or server on it and get llm to use it. With the old one you had to push buttons as I understand it?
I just finished a $23k engineering job in 3 months, entirely solo, that would have taken a year without these tools. That’s real money to feed my kids and working tech that made a client happy.
That’s one job and I have several in the pipe.
The “financial payoff” for no more than a few 100 a month at absolute most is there and it’s real. If you aren’t seeing it then you’re doing it wrong.
I usually don’t even spend more than $20 a month each for chpt and claude, deepseek free is solid. I am about to switch fully local too so that should drop to basically cost of watts.
I stopped thinking about Apple as a technology company when I realized they ACTIVELY fast follow instead of being pioneers in fundamental technology.
I don’t think that’s an insult or bad, if anything it makes them more reliable as a company because they ride the wave of technological advancement rather than on the leading edge.
That’s a really great position as long as you have no ego about being the first - and they repeat over and and over that are THE BEST not the first.
Being third for 100 years beats being first for 40 years and Apple has the Middle Kingdom strategy
Agreed. After a long time in tech the first movers almost always get killed
In fact most people aren’t even aware of most first movers cause they shut down or get acquired and their tech get absorbed into some giant conglomerate
I consider myself a Heavy cgpt user since 2022. To the extent where I’ve made over 30k ish in solo dev side-projects since 2024 that wouldn’t have been possible without hiring a team.
I have not once gotten a over limit notice from openai.
Alternatively, I used to max out my claude tokens very quickly even on fairly small projects.
The only difference I can tell from how I see other people utilizing these tools is that I never once “fire and forget.”
My project flow is: 1000 rounds of text back-and-forth on architecture, data structures, competitive analysis, tool use and calling, etc… and then the last 10% is code writing test development and then usually about five rounds of CI/CD iteration until I get to a MVP or something shippable.
Are the majority of people attempting to one shot and then when they fail they just keep trying to one shot?
In my experience, you can get 90% of the way to the technical solution before generating any code whatsoever.
That’s been true before LLM’s continues to be true now.
Most human societies claim dominance over “everything else” aka “nature” and in order to do that you need a reason “humans” are different from “nature”
There are other bolder things I've seen recently that are somewhat interesting.
Michael Levin and a few other biologists are wondering if certain combinations of matter are tapping into platonic maths that they use for 'intelligence compute'.
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
> I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
> If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
Some modern recording laws are not made with a machine component in mind, even if that machine is a local first-party system and does not actually store anything long-term or propagate information any further. A cyborg-identifying person with a wearable speech processor may rightfully argue such laws are unfairly preventing their functioning, as they’re lacking an important distinction.
The Civil Rights Act which created the EEOC does not require or permit an employer to break the law to accommodate a request, even if it is reasonable and with no burden.
I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.
The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy
The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
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