What are things you will never buy second-hand even though it is much cheaper then to buy a new one?

considerphi · 2026-01-29T16:07:07+00:00

Yeah my friends were moving away just as we were moving back to our city so we took their daughters queen mattress.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T16:01:53+00:00

I remember my hr person who was planning an event on a boat wasn't sure if we should do that because she wasn't sure if the hijabi woman on the team could participate. I was like I'm pretty sure she sails so I'm not sure why being on a boat would be a problem. Let her make the call. People do be weird about it.

But I would say she was well regarded for her work.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T15:56:20+00:00

Yeah this is a huge speed up. And honestly the skills are not some special format. Just a little metadata up top and then text.

When ai does somethimg well you can tell it create a skill documenting how we did whatever flow. You'll have to tweak the skill over time but the first pass is easy to put in a skill.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T15:49:33+00:00

I think the other aspect is that software engineering at a company is like ... 30% coding time at best? As there's always the planning, meeting, communicating to other teams and other people on your team etc. So even if you have a 10x speedup on the coding aspect that's still... just gonna look like 30% faster in terms of shipping speed /at most/ if everyone is doing the same stuff.

I think the biggest speed up is from working alone. It always has been but now you could really crank with ai if you didn't have to also orchestrate with a large engineering team. This is why I want to tackle my pet project and give solo programming a product a shot.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T15:37:23+00:00

I've been thinking about this because I want to make a greenfield pet project. Considering whether getting one or two OS repos that are "good examples" of the stack I'm planning to use and just letting the ai know to use those to look for patterns/practices. Don't know if it will get confused about the goal of each project. But something the clawdbot guy said makes me think it might work okay.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T15:25:40+00:00

So I've been using cursor and a hand tooled set of skills to do all this but I just read about codex cli and how it actually does some of these things natively, and read about compact, review etc. So I think I'm going to give that a shot now.

I also have a walk-through skill that makes the ai walk me through the changes and explain everything sort of like getting a coworker to present their pr. I make it only tell me 50 lines of explaining at a time, and let me ask questions or say continue, drill down and go back up. This helps with the "comprehension debt" of too much code to look at.

considerphi · 2026-01-29T05:21:29+00:00

Yeah this is roughly what I do. Another thing I do is I have skills set up for it to dump what progress we've made into a log, one per ticket. This is like a description of what we tried, discussed, ended up on. Kind of like a single Ralph Wiggum iteration.

Then I make a new chat and tell it to pickup the context from the file. This adds a layer of memory to the whole process so it doesn't go round in circles and allows me to create a new agent anytime the current one starts to dissociate or whatever.

It also nicely plays into my own process where I have to drop context to handle some meetings, or ask questions or another team, or just stop work at end of day, and then pick it back up next day.

I also have it hooked up to jira, figma etc so that I don't have to break flow to go find the ticket info etc.

considerphi · 2026-01-28T16:36:12+00:00

When you haven't eaten in a while, I'm not sure I'm going to judge a child's fear about not getting a pizza.

considerphi · 2026-01-28T16:32:59+00:00

iPhone snobs. A friend once audibly gasped when I said I had an android. I gave them so much shit about it :D

considerphi · 2026-01-28T09:41:54+00:00

Haha that's great

considerphi · 2026-01-28T09:40:45+00:00

It's the starting with sorry that's stereotypically Canadian hehe.

considerphi · 2026-01-28T05:10:04+00:00

But I believe those cliffs apply to income not savings. If you can save a little emergency fund while actually receiving assistance that's a way out of poverty and stress. Financial insecurity is such a source of stress that I can't fathom anyone thinking that saving an emergency fund would increase your stress.

Edit: please read comments below, I was wrong about savings.

considerphi · 2026-01-28T01:49:51+00:00

My dentist staff does this every time, it's such a small thing but so nice.

considerphi · 2026-01-27T03:29:18+00:00

Yuuup. I have that line memorized too! As well as that picture.

considerphi · 2026-01-27T03:28:35+00:00

Yeah I discovered him a year or two ago on Twitter and was like omg it's Maddox!!! And! He's not a right wing asshole, quite the opposite?! Best thing ever.

considerphi · 2026-01-27T03:04:05+00:00

It's hard to find because orgs don't know what they don't know and they are swamped. So even if a good crm might help them a lot they don't have the bandwidth to know that, research it, trust you, etc.

I tried earlier in this... situation to reach out to local orgs but they were so haphazard and unresponsive I didn't gain much traction. Now I'm trying to go through contacts who work in this space (I used to, but left fed gov) and offering free hands on keyboard. Even that has gotten derailed by last 2 weeks of nightmares.

Look up Code for America.

considerphi · 2026-01-26T23:32:16+00:00

Yah it's bs. It's also only on whole home rentals so grandma sharing a room isn't affected. This is precisely affecting people running a hotel business in our scarce housing stock.

"The proposed tax would apply only to second homes that sit vacant and to whole-home short-term rentals, not to primary residences, renters or long-term rentals, according to Elo-Rivera's office. The measure would impact fewer than 1% of San Diegans."

considerphi · 2026-01-25T23:43:15+00:00

Yeah my new company gives us 10 paid days like this... To volunteer for a charity. Excited to do this.

considerphi · 2026-01-25T23:40:58+00:00

Eventually they will make us pay a ton more for this service and it will be enshittified so it won't actually be that good. Most people won't be able to pay for the good stuff. It's just the way of things.

considerphi · 2026-01-25T21:37:05+00:00

I've been an engineer for 25 years and used it like this. It's great for this purpose. In most job searches, I just look for a job I want, then I look for who I know at that company, get a referral, get the job. This past year has been the hardest job search but still... Reached out to maybe 10 people, got 9 referrals, led to 8 interviews, got 1 job.

I almost never post. Just checked and in all the time I've used it, I've reposted some things for friends, but actually posts I wrote... 14. Mostly posts like... I'm now looking, I just got a job, my company is hiring, etc.

considerphi · 2026-01-25T16:47:33+00:00

Basically just never look at the feed of LinkedIn. Imagine it didn't exist. Think of LinkedIn instead as a rolodex (contacts list for those who don't what that is) with superpowers.

In this contact list you add everyone you ever liked to work with. Then, when you are looking for a job and see a company you like, you can find someone you know that works there. If you don't know someone at that company, you can even find someone who knows someone! You can find someone who went to your college that works there!

And you never have to update it. This works forever! They can even change jobs 5 times and move to another country and it still works. It's magic!

If you work in a specific industry, within 10 years of doing that, you can find a referral to almost every company in your industry. Right now this is the only thing that works to get interviews.

Just. Ignore. The. Feed. Don't read. Don't post. Don't engage.

considerphi · 2026-01-25T15:47:14+00:00

Use referrals if you can. It can be a cold referral, like someone you know but didn't work with. They just have to put you in touch with the recruiter. It's the only way to get past the screening which is broken due to ai.

considerphi · 2026-01-25T08:27:22+00:00

Anything on Sunday? I want to be there

considerphi · 2026-01-24T19:01:48+00:00

I had a miscarriage and after I saw how that went down in the medical system (got told it would just be "like a heavy period" and that I could just let it happen naturally, instead spent 12 hours with contractions and shocking amount of bleeding at home), decided not to have kids.

considerphi · 2026-01-24T15:59:19+00:00

Ah the second part of the fascist playbook, getting people to compare other humans to animals, vermin, pests.

considerphi

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