Yes but at least in places like Venezuela and Philippines it can be bought cheap enough the common man might be able to access it.
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
I don't know why this is down voted. It's a very valid point.
In countries where the police and government officials can be bought for pocket change by the middle class, the masses have relatively more power vs the elite who control the central government.
It’s a stupid point that ignores how corruption actually works, particularly when someone thinks being able to bribe the local police means an ordinary person in Venezuela has more power than an average American.
> I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was. Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
When I lived in London, I once came across a criminal operation that was producing fake documents, in what looked like substantial quantities. British & foreign driving licences, National Insurance cards, passports, ID cards etc. Not especially high-quality, but still.
Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)
In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)
I had a camera stolen on a Zürich streetcar and when I reported it to the police they acted like it was the first crime that had ever been reported in the canton, a very serious matter indeed.
yeah this should be the standard, same here in Australia unfortunately the police will just pretend to care by taking more information and then does nothing.
Interesting. I was renting H100 and they always produced different results than running on M1 or 5080.
In the end I was not able to train anything on H100, as my models were collapsing quickly, whereas on M1 or 5080 exact same models with the same params trained just fine. For instance on H100 model would be dead at epoch 100, whereas same model would train fine 50000 epochs and beyond on M1 or 5080.
"Here are login details to my hosting and billing provider. Create me a SaaS app where customers could rent virtual pets. Ensure it's AI and blockchain and looks inviting and employ addictive UX. I've attached company details for T&C and stuff. Ensure I start earning serious money by next week. I'll bump my subscription then if you deliver, and if not I will delete my account. Go!"
This is a good start. I write prompts as if I was instructing junior developer to do stuff I need. I make it as detailed and clear as I can.
I actually don't like _writing_ code, but enjoy reading it. So sessions with LLM are very entertaining, especially when I want to push boundaries (I am not liking this, the code seems a little bit bloated. I am sure you could simplify X and Y. Also think of any alternative way that you reckon will be more performant that maybe I don't know about). Etc.
This doesn't save me time, but makes work so much more enjoyable.
> I actually don't like _writing_ code, but enjoy reading it.
I think this is one of the divides between people who like AI and people who don't. I don't mind writing code per se, but I really don't like text editing — and I've used Vim (Evil mode) and then Emacs (vanilla keybindings) for years, so it's not like I'm using bad tools; it's just too fiddly. I don't like moving text around; munging control structures from one shape to another; I don't like the busy work of copying and pasting code that isn't worth DRYing, or isn't capable of being DRY'd effectively; I hate going around and fixing all the little compiler and linter errors produced by a refactor manually; and I really hate the process of filling out the skeleton of an type/class/whatever architecture in a new file before getting to the meat.
However, reading code is pretty easy for me, and I'm very good at quickly putting algorithms and architectures I have in my head into words — and, to be honest, I often find this clarifies the high level idea more than writing the code for it, because I don't get lost in the forest — and I also really enjoy taking something that isn't quite good enough, that's maybe 80% of the way there, and doing the careful polishing and refactoring necessary to get it to 100%.
I don't want to be "that guy", but I'll indulge myself.
> I think this is one of the divides between people who like AI and people who don't. I don't mind writing code per se, but I really don't like text editing — and I've used Vim (Evil mode) and then Emacs (vanilla keybindings) for years, so it's not like I'm using bad tools; it's just too fiddly.
I feel the same way (to at least some extent) about every language I've used other than Lisp. Lisp + Paredit in Emacs is the most pleasant code-wrangling experience I've ever had, because rather having to think in terms of characters or words, I'm able to think in terms of expressions. This is possible with other languages thanks to technologies like Tree-sitter, but I've found that it's only possible to do reliably in Lisp. When I do it in any other language I don't have an unshakable confidence that the wrangling commands will do exactly what I intend.
When I code, I mostly go by two perspectives: The software as a process and the code as a communication medium.
With the software as a process, I'm mostly thinking about the semantics of each expressions. Either there's a final output (transient, but important) or there's a mutation to some state. So the code I'm writing is for making either one possible and the process is very pleasing, like building a lego. The symbols are the bricks and other items which I'm using to create things that does what I want.
With the code as communication, I mostly take the above and make it readable. Like organizing files, renaming variables and functions, modularising pieces of code. The intent is for other people (including future me) to be able to understand and modify what I created in the easiest way possible.
So the first is me communicating with the machine, the second is me communicating with the humans. The first is very easy, you only need to know the semantics of the building blocks of the machine. The second is where the craft comes in.
Emacs (also Vim) makes both easy. Code has a very rigid structure and both have tools that let you manipulate these structure either for adding new actions or refine the shape for understanding.
With AI, it feels like painting with a brick. Or transmitting critical information through a telephone game. Control and Intent are lost.
Yes! Don't worry about it, I very much agree. However, I do think that even if/when I'm using Lisp and have all the best structural editing capabilities at my disposal, I'd still prefer to have an agent do my editing for me; I'd just be 30% more likely to jump in and write code myself on occasion — because ultimately, even with structural editing, you're still thinking about how to apply this constrained set of operations to manipulate a tree of code to get it to where you want, and then having to go through the grunt work of actually doing that, instead of thinking about what state you want the code to be in directly.
Vehement agreeing below:
S-expressions are a massive boon for text editing, because they allow such incredible structural transformations and motions. The problem is that, personally, I don't actually find Lisp to be the best tool for the job for any of the things I want to do. While I find Common Lisp and to a lesser degree Scheme to be fascinating languages, the state of the library ecosystem, documentation, toolchain, and IDEs around them just aren't satisfactory to me, and they don't seem really well adapted to the things I want to do. And yeah, I could spend my time optimizing Common Lisp with `declare`s and doing C-FFI with it, massaging it to do what I want, that's not what I want to spend my time doing. I want to actually finish writing tools that are useful to me.
Moreover, while I used to have hope for tree-sitter to provide a similar level of structural editing for other languages, at least in most editors I've just not found that to be the case. There seem really to be two ways to use tree-sitter to add structural editing to languages: one, to write custom queries for every language, in order to get Vim style syntax objects, and two, to try to directly move/select/manipulate all nodes in the concrete syntax tree as if they're the same, essentially trying to treat tree-sitter's CSTs like S-expressions.
The problem with the first approach is that you end up with really limited, often buggy or incomplete, language support, and structural editing that requires a lot more cognitive overhead: instead of navigating a tree fluidly, you're having to "think before you act," deciding ahead of time what the specific name, in this language, is for the part of the tree you want to manipulate. Additionally, this approach makes it much more difficult to do more high level, interesting transformations; even simple ones like slurp and barf become a bit problematic when you're dealing with such a typed tree, and more advanced ones like convolute? Forget about it.
The problem with the second approach is that, if you're trying to do generalized tree navigation, where you're not up-front naming the specific thing you're talking about, but instead navigating the concrete syntax tree as if it's S-expressions, you run into the problem the author of Combobulate and Mastering Emacs talks about[1]: CSTs are actually really different from S-expressions in practice, because they don't map uniquely onto source code text; instead, they're something overlaid on top of the source code text, which is not one to one with it (in terms of CST nodes to text token), but many to one, because the CST is very granular. Which means that there's a lot of ambiguity in trying to understand where the user is in the tree, where they think they are, and where they intend to go.
There's also the fact that tree-sitter CSTs contain a lot of unnamed nodes (what I call "stop tokens"), where the delimiters for a node of a tree and its children are themselves children of that node, siblings with the actual siblings. And to add insult to injury, most language syntaces just... don't really lend themselves to tree navigation and transformation very well.
I actually tried to bring structural editing to a level equivalent to the S-exp commands in Emacs recently[2], but ran into all of the above problems. I recently moved to Zed, and while its implementation of structural editing and movement is better than mine, and pretty close to 1:1 with the commands available in Emacs (especially if they accept my PR[3]), and also takes the second, language-agnostic, route, it's still not as intuitive and reliable as I'd like.
If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.
If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.
You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.
Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF). Don't sell investments when the market crashes, just ride it out (assuming you bought diversified fund). Don't stock pick, it's largely gambling and 99% of people can't beat the market doing it. If you must stock pick, do at most, 5% of your investments.
Avoid actively managed/high fee mutual funds/ETFs. Research clearly shows, long term they do worse then the market. (And if there is an active fund that does end up beating the market long term, you have no way of knowing which fund that would be ahead of time)
The Millionaire Next Door is a great book, and gives a good perspective on money.
If anyone here is interested, Google the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
Even just doing the first 2 letters, Financial Independence, would be huge, and give you way more flexibility.
When/if you retire early, keep doing things to keep your mind and body active. Most people who retire stop doing the things that kept them healthy, and there body deteriorates quickly (with xyz illnesses).
The sad true is that, for many, work forces them to do the basics to keep your body running ok.
But what's the point of it being long-term? I want fuck-off money right now. What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house and everyone and everything I cared about is long gone?
Why do I want to have a million in the bank by age 70 if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?
How old are you ? I used to espouse similar view but now that I am past 40, I regret not starting investing in my 20 and see myself living well into my 80's.
That punk-ish no future mentality usually dampen past 30-35!
I wonder if you'll view things differently again once you start deteriorating mentally and physically. Fact is that the median person does not live well into their 80s and many of those that do will be severely limited in what they can do during those final years.
This is true. On the other hand, I've found myself lately starting to wane a little bit the other way. Let me explain. I'm doing ok, because I got involvednin the FIRE movement early and invested early. Now about to be 40, and having a couple kids, I've realized that so long as I have no debt and good security (enough to see my kids into adulthood) then what is the money for??? To be clear, I haven't started spending my retirement money yet, but I already know I'm never going to quit working. So.... I don't know, you know?
Maybe you will. But probably whatever stopped you from doing it today and made you push it away for years will feel the same tomorrow, the same next year and at age 30 and 35, saying "if I'm going to kill myself by 40-45" and then "by 50-55".
Not always and not everyone, people do suicide, but consider there's 37 million people in poverty in the USA, 18 million with cancer, and a lot more with shit lives in various ways - chronic diseases, disabilities, lost loves, hopeless futures, victims of horrors - and out of that vast amount of misery the USA has "only" 50,000 suicides annually. Much less than I might guess from the numbers. Bodies are 4 billion years of survival machines and they don't quit easily and that includes mental trickery as well as physical resilience[1].
I thought I would commit suicide as a teen. I planned it and tried in my teens and twenties. I thought I would force it in my thirties. Did "it get better"? No not really, mildly worse in several ways. Is the world better for me staying around? No, not really. Did I discover a hope for a brighter future? Maybe[2] but not a strong one. Maybe I'm discovering a bit more selfishness and less obligation to do what other people demand.
The years are going by faster now and "the rest of my life" doesn't seem so long. Interesting ideas are still interesting, books are still readable, work is still available, death is coming whether we hurry it or fight it.
> "What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house"
Pay for your healthcare so you can still leave the house, or pay for home help if you can't.
In that 5 years your industry would have left you behind :( unfortunately. Unless you do the type of job that allows this style of living but afaik, it's not tech.
I don't know. I just had a break for approx 3 years with very limited access to the internet. Absolutely nothing has changed. AI is now useful, but it doesn't operate differently than before.
My very good colleague who was absolutely brilliant statistician shared his wisdom: Max the now, min the future.
He focused on the present but hated work, it was utterly boring to him, even if objectively the work benefited humanity. One day he quit and never came back. He spent his time learning to dance salsa. He was in his mid to late twenties.
Of course he was an extreme case. But his zen is important to take and balance together with future planning.
I think you can do both, aim for fuck off money but put aside a little bit for the future.
Edit: if youre wondering what happend to him - he's studying electrical engineering because I suspect he's aiming to not be behind a desk.
> Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money
This is great advice anyway, even if you were born poor/working class. With the added proviso that you should be paying down your debt, highest interest rate first, since that will have far higher returns than your average investment. Also make sure that you have enough liquid cash set aside that you'll be able to deal quickly and completely with any issues that might come up; this makes a significant difference to your ability to live and work stress-free.
> Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF).
i despise stock markets, investments etc., so i just kind of have accepted that i'll probably never grow my money passively. from time to time i stumble across advice like yours, talking about ETFs, and feel a bit left out again.
money just sits in my bank account with close to 0% interest. i know that ETFs would slowly generate more money, but i also know that my money would then be invested in a ton of companies i absolutely don't want to be a part of, even when considering that my sums would be a drop in an ocean.
There are ETFs that specifically exclude companies with lots of negative externalities (no Exxon, etc.). The term to look for is "socially responsible".
a bit ironic to recommend a "socially responsible" ETF, managed by the one and only UBS.
but you're right, i forgot that my socially responsible bank claims to have socially responsible ETFs. i just hope that they are actually socially responsible, and not "socially responsible".
lots of things claim to be socially, ecologically or otherwise responsible, but that's exactly my issue. they're claims, most of the time just [insert color]washing.
It's been legal in Australia since 2018 and frustratingly nobody seems to give a shit except for yanks trying to point out any government's injustices other than their own.
reply