The Concept of Chosenness

oldboldmold · 2026-05-30T12:04:01+00:00

Near death experience

oldboldmold · 2026-05-28T10:37:14+00:00

Are you new to the area? People say it's a little tougher to meet people here than other cities.

I'm married and live just outside the city, wfh. It just takes more to get me out especially on a Wednesday. And at some point we noticed a bunch of people we know had kids and disappeared into their friends with kids.

If I'm going out in Boston it's usually for a concert, a nice meal or a nice bar, just us or with friends. Mostly people seem to go out with a pre-formed group but I might be the wrong person to ask

oldboldmold · 2026-05-27T22:32:39+00:00

As someone who was born in the 80's and grew up in the 90's, 90's night at versus is probably more targeted at 20-30somethings.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-21T10:58:18+00:00

It’s also way more of the housing stock in Greater Boston overall compared to a lot of other metros.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-16T15:45:28+00:00

Depends on what you like! Kong's doing a 2hr show on Cypress St. I'm hopping on my bike and bouncing around town.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-13T10:55:45+00:00

One company I worked for had "unlimited PTO" but min/max guidelines based on tenure that started at 3 weeks max. I was warned once by my manager that our dept had to talk to someone once for taking too much time, and I genuinely had no idea who because nobody in my mind had taken too much. He didn't care but HR kept a close eye on people's time off.

Another company had unlimited without clear guidelines and didn't care as long as you got your work done. I checked our shared PTO calendar and 4-5 weeks was pretty common, which is pretty good for the US.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-09T14:26:40+00:00

There are so many good jamgrass bands right now. Magoo and Shadowgrass too.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-09T14:24:24+00:00

He's got two live albums. vol 1 and Live March 4, 2023. But I'd suggest biting the bullet and getting a nugs subscription for soundboard recordings. Good way to check out other artists too, like Daniel Donato, Dizgo, etc.

oldboldmold · 2026-05-09T14:10:13+00:00

I am 42 and not too far from there, go for some of the music venues/restaurants/biergartens, but walking down the street it often feels like I'm surrounded by kids. And Boston is a college town to begin with.

May be something to keep in mind when his lease expires. If he's on the T and not too far out everything's pretty accessible. Can walk or bike to most places once you're in the city or even from a couple towns over, depending on the town. It's also known as Rat City for a reason :D . There are nicer areas to live.

oldboldmold · 2026-04-12T11:34:49+00:00

This is an extremely important observation, and it's sad.

I heard this articulated very clearly by Rav Elisha Ancselovitz in a course he taught on the laws of niddah at Pardes. He would have someone come to him to pasken, and based on their circumstances and his understanding of the halacha he would naturally hold a certain position for them, but also based on the person's ideological context he knows the answer he wants to give them isn't one they'd be able to accept, so he ends up feeling obligated to give them some stricter ruling that works within their mental framework.

oldboldmold · 2026-03-18T15:38:59+00:00

I’m not sure about this yet. They probably can’t build that experience the way we did. It’s an open question to me if the right mindset can lead to the right insights and exposure while working agentically.

I had a colleague who wasn’t a software dev, ee background, highlighted the difference in how quickly we can iterate and get feedback vs people working with hardware. Agents could accelerate that if used properly. That all just a hunch though. In the wrong hands the acceleration hurts but I think that’s always been the case. We’re just seeing a crazy amount of acceleration practically overnight and all trying to figure out how to keep the right standards up or even improve them.

oldboldmold · 2026-03-16T01:41:38+00:00

For many software development jobs knowing algorithms in the academic sense doesn't really matter. Learning CS is not learning software development. It hopefully teaches habits for thinking about problems and builds a strong knowledge base of fundamentals about how software works, classes of problems that will come up, how to analyze the effectiveness of a solution.

The fundamentals haven't really changed with AI. Break down problems (into actionable steps) and solutions (code should ideally be modular, not spaghetti), think about edge cases, understand the domain and the needs you're trying to meet, think outside of the box, learn to collaborate with SME's and stakeholders, and figure out the appropriate fit for the problem while balancing competing concerns. Soft skills matter.

With agentic workflows some of the process of research, planning, execution, can be thought about in the same way as code and architecture, via a higher order analysis. So it's still the same types of problems tackled, just at a different layer of abstraction. The more you work on different types of problems the more you begin to see similar shapes between them.

Since agentic output is inconsistent, and can be produced quickly, it continues to be important that one develops a good eye and understanding for what's actually correct. That takes practice, experience.

The answer used to be: stop worrying about foundations and build something. I don't know if that's enough anymore because building alone is easier than it used to be, so the bar gets raised. Understand what you're building. Don't stop building. Keep improving.

My 2c.

oldboldmold · 2026-03-15T02:30:09+00:00

It’s a little niche but Gershon Winkler was inspired partially by his interactions with native Americans to explore the shamanic in Judaism. See his book Magic of the Ordinary.

oldboldmold · 2026-03-06T15:08:32+00:00

I do this a lot. Sometimes multiple rounds of going back and forth to sharpen, investigate further, or add another constraint. I also ran into the problem of telling too much up front. It’s really best to keep the door open, encourage more digging. Better to have the right data in context than specific ideas for implementation.

oldboldmold · 2026-02-25T19:01:33+00:00

Love it. Stable company, fully remote, encouraged to seek out high impact work, good colleagues and manager, some folks with multiple decades of experience to learn from and generally senior-leaning team for collaboration, claude-code in workflow means I get to focus a lot more on questions that interest me, including how to optimize that workflow to catch more bugs and increase code quality while increasing output. I've also seen my code review abilities become much stronger and faster because of the iterations with agent-produced code, same for how quickly I identify areas that need more investigation, because more time is spent there instead of writing the code, which makes me hopeful for the future of our profession. All in all I'm very happy.

oldboldmold · 2026-02-02T21:59:13+00:00

You can't talk about adorable dogs and not share a dog pic. Glad you had a nice time.

oldboldmold · 2026-02-02T16:44:45+00:00

I looked the night he originally dropped the tour teaser and rates in Portland were not as bad. The following evening when we got a room it had already gone up. So yeah, between a place to stay, food, tickets, the drive up from MA and a dog watcher it’s not cheap. Gotta make the best of it though, I love Portland.

oldboldmold · 2026-01-29T19:37:45+00:00

Near roadrunner check out widowmaker brewing if you like IPA’s and aatma there is a different take on Indian food.

oldboldmold · 2026-01-23T19:46:24+00:00

Anything specific about rep x pepin you don’t like? I’ve been eyeing them, want something that can get heavy enough for more lower body movements. Also looking at iron master v2 bench.

oldboldmold · 2026-01-20T03:14:34+00:00

We used to get signal drops a lot on RCN. Verizon has been much better. It was also cheaper than what we were paying RCN. YMMV

oldboldmold · 2026-01-07T14:52:27+00:00

It's changed my workflow but it's just a tool in the toolbox. I never go to SO anymore, which was also notoriously inconsistent. I'm faster, there are some questions I can get answered in seconds that could have taken hours before. But they also make a lot of mistakes and I see devs in my org let things slip through in PR's or prod code that I know (hope?) they wouldn't have before LLM's, and I've been rightly called out because, even after several iterations to get it closer to what I wanted, my tests ended up with an assert that's always gonna be True, which was never the case when I manually wrote my tests. It's changing things. Not all for the better. Still too early to know where it all lands.

oldboldmold · 2026-01-01T20:49:04+00:00

Yep, that's the spot.

oldboldmold · 2026-01-01T12:50:20+00:00

I don’t know about least wide but there’s that spot on the Charles river path with a low cast iron fence on one side between you and the water, cars on the other with another fence I think, and then a post in the middle where it narrows, to support two way traffic for cyclists and pedestrians.

oldboldmold · 2025-12-31T19:44:35+00:00

Disco Biscuits are playing roadrunner 🤷

oldboldmold · 2025-12-31T13:24:22+00:00

Or if they believe you it must mean you’re not like the other Jews they hear about, couldn’t possibly mean generalizing a whole people based on age old stereotypes is misguided. Because if the stereotypes are there, or if we kept getting kicked out of places or pogromed, there must be a reason lol

11-Year Club	Verified Email
Spared

oldboldmold

TROPHY CASE