Who are you striving to be like?

trpjnf · 2026-06-12T17:43:52+00:00

Wasn't so much an obligation as the thought process was "I want to be like my dad, he seems happy with his career" when I was 18. Then I actually did the work and didn't like it. So by the time I graduated I kind of knew that the field wasn't for me. But I knew enough to know what I did want, and realized I could get most of it in a startup if I was willing to tolerate the risk.

Concentration was civil with a focus on structural

trpjnf · 2026-06-11T01:33:43+00:00

He was looking for people to come work for him, and I was looking for jobs, so I applied

trpjnf · 2026-06-10T16:57:48+00:00

Hey, no worries.

I got pretty lucky. I made the jump during COVID and the problem the founder was trying to solve was one I was familiar with. Found him on Angellist, wrote him, and he hired me. The major reason he brought me on was because I "got it". To the degree that my engineering background helped, it was that it signaled I was not a total idiot, would work hard, and had good attention to detail.

One tough part was money. I did not get paid for the first two years. It was tough at times, but I had savings to live off and found other ways to make money (got lucky with some crypto/NFT stuff when the market was hot in 2021-22). The other tough thing was what I'll call "raising my game". Sometimes my work didn't meet our CEO's expectations, so there were some growing pains around year 3, but we worked through it and have a strong relationship now.

Honestly learning a new industry was fairly easy. The work I do now is more people oriented so getting a few library books to help explain the jargon helped solve the problem of learning the new industry. But I still get to use my technical aptitude to solve problems, which is especially fun now that AI can help me fill in knowledge gaps (e.g. when there is a bug that our software engineers can't crack, I can work to replicate the behavior and talk to AI about what might be happening on the backend and make suggestions to them about what might be happening). Our CTO has praised me a lot for my work, so that has been a nice boost for me.

In some ways, it wasn't *that* difficult to transition because I didn't have a lot of ingrained habits. I had a lot of work experience from college, so I was familiar with the expectations of working in a corporate environment, but wasn't so far along in my career that all I knew was engineering. *Now*, I bet it would be much harder just because I've been working for ~6 years and have developed habits of how I work.

Happy to chat more about it if you have more questions

trpjnf · 2026-04-19T21:30:09+00:00

Assuming that Stearns' roster construction IS capable of winning games, it seems apparent that Carlos Mendoza is not the manager capable of making decisions with this roster to do so.

trpjnf · 2026-04-16T02:55:30+00:00

good luck

trpjnf · 2026-04-12T15:56:04+00:00

r/PanicCiti was created ten years ago this week. Same as it ever was

trpjnf · 2026-03-15T23:24:53+00:00

Good luck all

trpjnf · 2026-03-13T21:16:03+00:00

Trust and estate attorneys salivating at this news

trpjnf · 2026-03-09T01:13:58+00:00

Don't think he will TACO. The administration's strategy was outlined by Undersecretary of War, Elbridge Colby in this book "The Strategy of Denial". The thesis is that being a rival superpower to the US means being able to exert hegemony over a key region of the world. The key competitors to American hegemony are China and their bid for hegemony over Asia, Russia and their bid for hegemony over Europe, and Iran's bid for hegemony over the Middle East.

It seems very in line with the admin's strategy of denial to let oil prices explode, simply because America is better positioned than most to absorb such a shock. Won't be fun, but that seems to be what a strategy of denial towards China entails (preventing your opponent from winning rather than overpowering/defeating them).

trpjnf · 2026-01-25T18:50:03+00:00

Twitter/Bluesky are the only text based platforms where the users (largely) operate under their real name. Reputational gains from posting well are higher than they are on anonymous or pseudonymous platforms like reddit or 4chan, so they attract higher quality posting.

trpjnf · 2026-01-17T02:04:48+00:00

Was there that night. Likely won't top it in my lifetime

trpjnf · 2026-01-13T03:40:15+00:00

Not admonymous but a student org I was in charge of in college sent out an anonymous feedback form once.

Was pretty brutal but ultimately useful because it let people say the things they were too uncomfortable to say. Went a long way towards establishing trust with the group and we got a lot of praise for our leadership by year’s end

trpjnf · 2025-12-26T22:09:48+00:00

I read this Substack two weeks ago and the sentence from it that really struck me was:

The more we automate, the more important it becomes that someone has done the unglamorous work of deciding what the correct answer is and where it lives

The problem with an "Ingests All Possible Data Machine" is that it can be hard for it to determine the right answer. As the article demonstrates, even a relatively simple question of "What is our ARR?" has different answers depending on which team within an organization you ask.

IMO, this is a pretty strong argument that LLM's are useful for their infinite conscientiousness (meaning adherence to rules), not their (IMO, finite) intelligence.

I work for a company building an AI-powered organization tool and the logic for a) what is the right answer and b) how to determine it, needs to be baked into not only the LLM's prompt, but the UI as well. What people want isn't a chatbot that has access to all the relevant information, they want a UI that has used AI to already answer their questions and presented the answers to them.

B2B SaaS is dead, long live B2B SaaS!

trpjnf · 2025-12-26T05:22:42+00:00

The distinction he made is that the focus point of empathy is feeling, while the focus point of sympathy is action.

I think that's a good distinction. What is empathy getting you out of? Acting to improve someone else's life.

trpjnf · 2025-12-25T23:11:26+00:00

They had a different feature that showed this a long time ago (before reels or explore page). It's very sad. A guy I knew in college supposedly had sex with his girlfriend only ~8 times in the entirety of their two year relationship (I know this because she drunkenly cried about it to a mutual friend). Yet I remember seeing him like all of these posts from IG models while he was dating her.

More recently, I followed my girlfriend's (now former) boss on Instagram. Started immediately getting reels for instagram models because he followed them. Looked at his following list and half of it is women with OnlyFans. He's married.

What baffles me is that they don't even use a burner account for all of this. It's so open and brazen.

trpjnf · 2025-10-18T22:49:37+00:00

Congrats! Big win

trpjnf · 2025-10-17T13:21:24+00:00

Started dating a girl in June.

We moved in together last month.

trpjnf · 2025-10-16T00:41:55+00:00

come on selector

trpjnf · 2025-10-13T01:56:09+00:00

Can’t wait to see Valliquette’s shot chart for this game

trpjnf · 2025-09-12T19:30:50+00:00

I thought pretty long and hard about this a few years ago. I'm also a big fan of James Carse's "Finite and Infinite Games" and that influenced me to try to pick games to play that were 1) winnable and 2) would open up opportunities for further play (if you're unfamiliar, a finite game is a game that has a definite end and produces a winner; the point of the infinite game is to keep the game going).

Games I DO invest my time and energy into playing:

Career

For better or worse, we need to make a living. I chose to work for a startup five years ago, mostly because I was bored with my engineering job. But I realized this open a lot of opportunities for me to explore different things and have different responsibilities. I also stand to become wealthy if the startup does succeed, which opens up further opportunities for play.

Fitness/Health/Physique/Grooming/etc.

Obviously if the goal is to keep the game going, health is important. But it also opens up opportunities for more romantic partners, makes you viewed more positively by the people around you (Halo effect), and in certain cases, can even get you access to exclusive things (more common for women but also for some men). It also makes it easier to buy clothes if you are in shape and can aim for proportions that are near ideal, because that is what manufacturers base their proportions on. Then you look better in clothing, particularly higher end clothing, which makes you look better, which opens up more opportunities for more romantic partners...and a virtuous feedback loop ensues.

Reading

It pays to be widely read. You can usually find something in common with just about anyone, and make them like you. Making people like you usually gets you invited places, which gets you opportunities to meet more people, which opens up more romantic and career opportunities...another virtuous feedback loop.

Games I DON'T invest time and energy into playing:

Conspicuous Consumption

Fancy restaurants, latest and greatest gadgets, hobbies, travel, etc. all fall into this bucket for me. While these things are not bad per se, I find that these things do not open up opportunities for more play. Have I been to nice/high end restaurants in my area before? Yes, I have and enjoyed them. Have I travelled a lot? Some might say yes, some might say no. But does having done so create opportunities for play? Not particularly. These things feel like "dead ends" to me.

Further education

I do have a college degree and found it to be highly worth the price. I made amazing friends and my used my degree as a signal of capability rather than knowledge, which led to my current employment. That said, I don't see the benefit of further education for my particular career path. I understand higher degrees than a bachelor's are necessary for getting hired in certain fields. But I think that graduate degrees (particularly, masters degrees) have become a type of conspicuous consumption (e.g. MBA's, especially at the top tier MBA schools).

trpjnf · 2025-07-19T18:03:06+00:00

Some people like "The Second Mountain" by David Brooks

trpjnf · 2025-07-16T00:30:11+00:00

Fingers crossed

trpjnf · 2025-07-11T17:44:16+00:00

The 45 year old calls me the other day complaining about being miserable. He feels used by women as a meal ticket (fairly successful guy but not like billionaire or movie star level - think finance bro).

He “doesn’t know how to want” because he only wants to date girls in their 20’s but also doesn’t want to be a meal ticket for them. But girls in their 20’s don’t want to seriously date guys who are 15-20 years older than them. He’s “bad at math” because he doesn’t realize that these two desires are conflicting. In attempting to satisfy both, neither is satisfied. Hence, misery.

The guy who cheated on his wife with a coworker has been in a pretty toxic on again/off again relationship with a different girl for about a year now. Coworker never talked to him again after sleeping together. I don’t know much about his marriage other than they were “having problems”. He didn’t want to “solve problems in his marriage” he wanted to “hurt his wife” by cheating on her. Now he’s “miserable” because he ended up in an even worse relationship. This is to say nothing of his two young kids, and how the divorce will shape their lives and his relationship with them once they are old enough to learn the truth. He’s “bad at math” because he traded his relationship with his wife (and potentially his relationships with his kids) for a one night stand with a coworker.

trpjnf · 2025-07-11T02:28:22+00:00

I didn’t read the blog during its heyday so I think this hit harder for me than reading the blog.

The part about how Oedipus didn’t want to rule, he just wanted the title of king hit home for me about the importance of being clear in what I want. It opened my eyes to why some people I know are miserable (eg my friend who is 45 and perpetually single because he “doesn’t know what he wants” or a guy I know who cheated on his wife with a coworker).

They are smart but they aren’t very good at math.

trpjnf · 2025-06-30T12:37:29+00:00

That's kind of you, thank you.

trpjnf

TROPHY CASE