I cannot relate to this at all. Even just Valparaiso and Venice (two towns) are so different from each other. Even if you make weather dreary it’s a different feeling.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
Very cool. As a super newbie who's only made it to Pimsleur 15 and only for the speaking, it would be cool to have a pinyin text entry and so on. In the end, I just type into ChatGPT what I want and paste it in your box so it's not a big deal.
Journey-level would just be 'senior', no? I'm not familiar with the terminology but it seems akin to journeyman (i.e. competent executor of a skillset). A junior would be apprentice in that universe, I imagine.
I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It didn't take me that long. The value in the thing is that I could see what she wanted and make it like she wanted. And on the receiving side, a friend of ours knitted our daughter, Astra, a quilt with her name on it and with this lovely star motif. It must have taken her and her mother, a seamstress, ages. But if she had done it instantaneously, I think I still would have loved it.
As for the other side of things, there is one thing that gives me a mild twinge of envy: I grew up on the command-line and when I write on it, I can knock out a full bash pipeline literally at the command-line super-fast. Many of my friends are far better engineers, but this one thing makes me great at any sort of debugging and all that. Now everyone has that! I'm USELESS.
Well, not really, but it's funny that this unique skill is meaningless. Overall, I've found that AI stuff has let me do more and more things. Instead of thinking, at the end of the week, "Oh man, I wish I'd made progress on my side project" I think "Damn, that wasn't such a good idea after all" which is honestly far more satisfying!
I considered going into this direction but decided not to. You're right that we can sometimes to very meaningful things for others that are easy for us. A couple of years ago, I broke my ankle. While I was trying to figure out what surgery was best, I had a conversation with my cousin's husband to who happens to be an orthopedic surgeon. That conversation took nothing but twenty minutes of his time, but was very helpful and meaningful to me.
However, the reason he was able to have that easy conversation is because of all of time he already spent training to become an ortho.
Likewise, in your case, you were able to easily set up a custom GPT because of the experience you already have in software engineering.
The effort is still there, it's just sort of amortized out over time.
My wife and I bought a Bambu P1S and I think the machine has had a duty cycle of 30% (excluding when we weren’t in town). It’s great fun. The majority of the models are ones we get from the Internet, it’s true.
But my wife used some base open source components to design a block that goes into the bits of a playpen that we used to have and transform it into something that docks with the wall instead of only with itself[0].
And I have designed with Claude a few small things like card holders for the board game power grid[1].
I wish there were better AI tools for interacting with modeling software. As it stands I use OpenSCAD with Claude and that seems as good as it can be. There are Solidworks AI startups but they’re like for professionals.
The Bambu P1S I have is quite low friction to set up. And I have an AMS2 Pro on top of it that feeds different kinds of filament (material and color) into the printer. I have just the one but now I wish I had more AMS hooked up.
Everyone has their own objectives for life, but I actually don't think that the purpose of a state is to provide the instantaneous highest quality of life, safety and health to its citizens. Some might argue that it is to provide those things not at a sampled time but over a duration, but if so which generation should experience that? And if optimized over generations then surely some people must lose so that future others must gain, or the future others must lose to that the present ones may gain.
Personally, I think a higher goal for the state is to provide a substrate of sufficient physical safety, law and order, and infrastructure so that its citizens may have the ability to pursue their aspirations. I think human thriving is very important. And I want the ability to try at a ridiculous thing and achieve commensurate reward. In many ways, I don't even want that for me. I want that for others. When I see someone take a crack at something that most thought impossible and make it happen, I love it.
It isn't that those of us who have this opinion are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. It's that we like that someone took a crack at something absurd and became billionaires for it. People who don't get it always say these things out of misunderstanding: "Why do the poor in the US vote so often against their own interests?". The obvious answer is "because they are principled and not purely self-interested".
Selecting the precise threshold where a marginal point kicks in is pretty funny, though I'm sure you didn't intend it. Above a million there's also the MHSA tax. Marginal at over a million is 50% or more unless you optimize.
I would imagine it's less a product to use and more documentation of the various techniques that are involved. It seems pretty reasonable to share that with others.
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
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