There are more consequences to your actions as you age, but you will never feel like are are the person your parents were when you were a kid.
Because it was a projection. Seeing my coworkers interacting with their kids and seeing them interact with other adults made it abundantly clear: there are no adults in the room, we are all just muddeling through life and sometimes we do it more or less successful than others.
you will never feel like are are the person your parents were when you were a kid
nope, i realized i was becoming my dad when i noticed that i was copying his behavior towards my own kids. for good and for bad. fortunately that was early enough that i could course correct and keep the good and throw out most of the bad.
Your comment is shocking to me. AI coding works. I have seen it with my own eyes last week and today.
I can therefore only assume that you have not coded with the latest models. If you experiences are with GPT 4o or earlier all you have only used the mini or light models, then I can totally understand where you’re coming from. Those models can do a lot, but they aren’t good enough to run on their own.
The latest models absolutely are I have seen it with my own eyes. Ai moves fast.
I hope I don't suffer from early onset Alzheimer's, but I seem to recall the joke pre the pandemic was that Google would constantly make new chat apps.
Google Dou, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google this, Google that. Seemingly because someone needed a promotion and the way to do that was to create a new chat app or lead the effort for the same.
You don't, it was egregious. Don't forget that Gmail chat and google chat were also different and merged but not, I don't even remember very well but it was confusing.
Wave was fine, I liked it for the short time it lived and I am happy that google docs carry some of its collaboration legacy.
Off the top of my head, I have used it to put links together — for example, a Stack Overflow description of some bug, the official documentation, and maybe copying in the exception or the error message.
Then I've sometimes done the same thing when I'm doing ops on a broken system.
Other times it's copying in a specific query or a link to a query in Application Insights.
Other times it's the ticket I was working on, a comment from a coworker, and maybe a few references to either tickets or files. Very rarely is this professional or looks nice. It's just that I need one place where I can put multiple things that fit together.
I find that retrieval does drop off very quickly. But that's just to say most of the value is front loaded. And we should not underestimate the value of being able to answer 'da fuck was I doing yesterday'. Context switching is expensive. But in many ways it is also unavoidable. If you context dump at the end of a workday, it's that much easier to return to it later.
The other thing I do is because the note system I use can I can drop in Hashtags. Yeah, I know. Not exactly HN friendly. What that means is I can find all the times I ran into the same issue, sort of weaving a meta thread through my work. It's really hard to explain, but it's one way of treating notes as not just segments of text.
>My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."
This puzzles me. If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down? And if you're not sure you wrote the exact right steps down, how are you going to use the notebook for that purpose?
What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
> If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down?
Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.
Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.
> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.
I think you're missing one element. It works. The culture in Germany in 1600 compared with the culture in Germany in 2026 is very, very different, even though the geography hasn't changed. That's because in the modern world nearly none of the culture of the old Germany works.
This is not unique to Germany, of course. We long ago gave up on the four humours theory. We long ago gave up on burning women who wear pants. We long ago gave up of many things that used to be European culture.
The culture of queuing in Japan works because you are looked down upon if you don't participate and because it is better than the random stuff we do in the West. However, it would probably disappear pretty soon if it wasn't also a good solution.
While I tend to agree with your general example, there are lots of products that people don't talk about because they are icky, personal, or embarrassing but also really useful. Period cups fall into this category. Ting or whatever needs to advertise because nobody talks with their friends about phone subs.
Plenty of people make LLMs make text longer, but writing a short accurate text with the essential points is much harder.
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