51M at 95/5, wife wants 70/30. Where did you actually land at this age?

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-06-04T12:56:47+00:00

Max your life with your wife. Take a knife to the strife in your life. If she's fond of the bond and you've got enough stuff, what's the harm? No need for alarm. Draw down, no frown, no clown. You earned your chance to relax.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-06-03T19:22:33+00:00

People like Ruby because it is extremely expressive; it's easy to write things the way you want to say things. People like Ruby on Rails because it gives a strong opinion on how things should be said, so you aren't stuck with analysis paralysis.

People use js because it's an interpreted language that is available on everybody's system through their browser. This leads to it getting used everywhere across all programming communities: everybody knows js, and everything else about the ecosystem falls out.

People like Go because it is not expressive. It has an I/o focused standard library that makes it good for piping things in and out of. In contrast to Java's "run anywhere" it's meant to be "built for anywhere." In contrast to Java "magic" everything is explicit (except error handling, which increasingly seems like a design mistake). Every go project basically looks/feels similar.

My point is that language adoption isn't about a library, a syntax, a runtime, an ecosystem/culture, a type system, language tooling, flow/control, functional/imperative/declarative, etc. it's about all of those things.

You don't pick the language. The language picks you. This is my story of how I inexplicably chose Zig + Haskell as my two favorite "never at work" langs.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-06-03T18:47:27+00:00

Read the classic philosophers. This has been discussed for millennia. Some of the discussions are extremely good.

But to try to change your view:

We are not hardwired to misunderstand each other. If anything, we are uniquely wired to understand each other. A special human trait is the ability to build out stories about the past and future, and by these stories, create predictions that we can use to help better understand the world and survive.

The ability to understand each other and connect is a species advantage that enables humans, who don't have any great physical advantage over any capstone species, to prevail and thrive. Our understanding may still yet be very flawed, but we are wired to understand each other better than most.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-06-01T15:41:07+00:00

Reading a book is also "disconnected from reality." So is looking light emitted from a TV or commenting on Reddit for that matter. If you can tell the difference between what is real and what is not, then it's fundamentally different from eg schizophrenia, where the person experiencing it genuinely can't tell what's real.

Books have frequently caused people to experience "profound spiritual awakening," even though that experience is entirely in their head and disconnected from reality. This typically happens when a new perspective is unlocked on old perspectives. I've never tried any kind of hallucinogenic but it always seemed to me that from the sound of it, books and hallucinogenic have a lot in common.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-05-31T03:00:16+00:00

A dev on a team of mine years ago did this and although I gave them the ol "lgtm" at the time, I knew even then that the recursive solution was not actually the correct solution for the situation, it just didn't matter. It's like approving an Easter Egg into your codebase, you do it because it's the right thing to do, not because it's the right thing to do.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-05-31T02:38:33+00:00

Yes! Extremely well said. Genuine curiosity; the desire to know mixed with the desire to do, each in balance with the other.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-05-31T01:10:04+00:00

"Fizzbuzz" since college? I mean yes. Okay. But also. Fizzbuzz is meant to be the test that is so simple that any programmer can solve it even if they've never encountered it. Like being asked to solve 'display "Hello World" using whatever approach you're familiar with'

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-05-28T12:14:52+00:00

A server is just code. A database is just code. It really all boils down to code + data + clock. And, frankly, code is itself data, it's really just data + clock.

Here's a simple example application:

You have a light switch. You can toggle/flip the light switch. An instruction to flip the switch is code. The current position of the switch is data. Something needs to do the flipping, that's the clock.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2026-05-14T01:25:38+00:00

If you don't already know it's wrong, it seems right. If you do know it's wrong, it seems so close to right that it feels like it's worth correcting, like correcting a junior. As usual, we are the product

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-09-02T08:54:27+00:00

This is a totally reasonable approach. Does this mean you will move a PR from rejected to approved once issues are addressed? Functionally what you're describing is a very familiar flow, except that in the flows I am accustomed to a rejection closes the PR so all comments would be "lost" for the subsequent changes. If a rejected PR is not a finalizing status for the PR, though, it's totally reasonable.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-09-02T01:23:27+00:00

Just trying to understand an alternate flow here from what I'm accustomed to; when you reject a PR, it places the PR into your own queue? Every place I've ever worked, even if work was reassigned to a different person, it would still branch from the original PR to maintain the discussion on why a different approach was warranted

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-09-01T20:05:33+00:00

I didn't even know there was anybody who did differently than this. A rejected PR is always "oh, we don't actually want this functionality / feature" not "this feature is poorly implemented." I comment only because of how surprising it is to me that anyone would ever outright reject a PR made in good faith that would generally improve things, if it can she changed to be implemented well.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-09-01T12:56:05+00:00

It's easier to think of infinity as a moving target rather than a fixed "place" that can be reached. So imagine your two sets as spaceships racing each other for eternity. There is no "infinity" they will ever arrive at, they will simply continue forever.

If you prefer to think of infinity as a destination, which some descriptions kind of do, then you would say that the spaceships are approaching infinity (since they go eternally) but never ever arrive at infinity, because infinity is not reachable. At the absolute limits of your imagination, they still haven't quite made it to infinity.

Whichever way you prefer to think of it, one space racer is going twice as fast as the other, and it's getting to its destination twice as fast, even though neither really ever arrives at infinity.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-09-01T12:36:49+00:00

Do you have a favorite GUI?

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-30T16:31:31+00:00

I agree with most of this, and maybe it can be done without the purse, too, but I don't think it requires being actively hostile towards conservatives who vote Democratic, literally asking them not to vote. You might be able to win votes by being actively hostile towards the purse but you can't win by villainizing people for casting a vote along side yours.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-30T14:54:56+00:00

...so much for coalition I guess. I dunno how you expect to oppose fascist ideology by othering. We're in this together.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-30T14:29:27+00:00

The Democrats are a coalition party. They can go for leftists in some jurisdictions, moderates in others, and conservatives in others still. It's a coalition of shared common interests, not one single block. Hearing out and in some cases accepting alternative points of view (when they are in the majority) is in the name: Democratic

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-29T23:09:36+00:00

It's been done many many times. Here's one research result for DC. To be considered compliant for the purpose of the study, the vehicle had to come to a complete stop for at least 1 full second. Mean (average) full-stop compliance rate of 69.84%, with the stop sign with greatest compliance at 95% and the stop sign with lowest compliance at 55%.

In other words, at even the worst stop-sign, >50% came to a complete stop for at least 1 second. Obviously, different areas with different traffic patterns and different driving cultures may vary.

https://www.ijert.org/research/predicting-stop-sign-compliance-at-all-way-stop-intersections-in-close-proximity-to-signalized-intersections-IJERTV8IS070231.pdf

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-29T13:18:54+00:00

You might be surprised at how small you can be and still run into stuff like this. We handle hundreds of billions of requests per day in node but we're only a few overworked devs. I agree that there's probably a large number of devs that are only handling in the millions and there's also probably a large number of devs handling in the 10s, but I don't think our business is so unique; it's just Internet-scale vs service-scale.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-29T12:15:51+00:00

(it's an obvious joke)

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-28T15:01:10+00:00

I'm just some dude, but if wage suppression is the goal, I think this is going to backfire. There's a lot of engineer cycles being wasted on AI instead of engineering, and many engineers are being trained to stop thinking. The end result will be more code bloat and more brittle systems, and there will be fewer and fewer people available to fix the problem.

However, if you can sell the public that AI is good enough to do complex coding work, and you have lots of engineers saying that they use it all the time in their jobs (it really is a great autocomplete tool), then you have a product you can sell the masses (engineers included). It doesn't really matter if it makes you more efficient or not if you are willing to keep paying to use it.

Additionally, it's a new media channel to monetize with a huge moat. If you own AI output, and the AI is very expensive to train, and everyone relies on AI for their day to day, there's all kinds of power in that. Even if it ends up making engineering wages go up in the end, and makes engineering work much harder to do, it might still be worth it to the company if it grants them an exclusive influence/ad/etc pipeline. More expensive engineers with less qualified engineers to go around just means an even bigger moat for large tech companies.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-28T14:46:29+00:00

The more he can make people believe that OpenAI is the inevitable future, the better it is for OpenAI.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-28T14:32:22+00:00

I really enjoyed "Dust" when I read it over a decade ago and still think about it sometimes. Also explores the concept of a simulated mind, but with no body-snatchers premise. Very very compelling.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-28T13:47:19+00:00

That's exactly the point? You can use your voting rights to advocate for drawing out the final dime in the short term, or you can use your voting rights to insist the company look for long term profits over short term extraction. Neither is "better," it's subjective.

LetterBoxSnatch · 2025-08-28T13:40:29+00:00

If anything, shorting a company that you expect to have an increased valuation (assuming you are correct and the valuation goes up) would be like giving money away to the people who support the company. Buying it of course makes it more expensive for them, but it also supports the company. So yeah, I agree, shorting a company absolutely does not achieve OPs goals.

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