> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.
It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.
A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do, then gives up on. I wait a few months before telling people I’m doing something so I’m fairly confident it’s something I will carry on.
> A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do
IME over years, when you're talking about doing something your actually doing it is thwarted. I've noticed that that both with myself and with others.
Keeping mum and going about it privately, then sharing it when done, seems to have much higher success rates.
I've tried to reason through it in many different ways: talking about it satisfies you and you don't seek satisfaction from the actual implementation of the idea; talking about it "dissipates the energy"; and a number of other attempts at explanation.
But beyond explanations, the anecdata seems to suggest that doing much precede talking about. Even when you're developing something (say, software) in public, first you do then you talk about it in the commit message.
This seems to parallel the old dictum that ideas are easy, while working to realize them is the actually hard part. Who'd have thought.
I've worked for a few bosses/ceos like this. Far more interested in being seen as someone with a particular title or company and far less interested in what it takes to actually make that worth something.
I notice that if you get to the point you could be doing something any extra thought is probably counter productive but to talk about it might even end it.
The entrepreneurial spirit isn't visiting you to talk about things.
> It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.
From my experience, you have to do both otherwise someone else takes what you do, markets as his own and you get scraps. It keeps happening to me, since I don't generally like to talk about what I do. And I think fundamentally it's a big difference between European and American culture.
Might be more of a difference between what to do in your working (employee) life vs in your private life. In your private life, you can't get scraps because it's generally work on things you own, like a business, personal fitness, skills, etc. In your employee life, you're generally working on things that you don't own for recognition to get a promotion or raise. There the recognition is the entire point and people may not look too deeply into who did what, so you may need to be more overt about things.
I’ve been writing Go for nearly 4 years and work on a team with senior Go engineers. Concurrency is the language feature people seem to talk about most when talking about Go, and yet we use it so rarely; usually it’s just a second pass optimisation rather than something thought about from the start.
Worst case is n^2, where the chosen element is either the largest or the smallest element. Then the result is an insertion sort across the whole list. (Not sure if the order would matters, don't remember off the top of my head).
That “I’m glad I lived my life as I lived it” line (or something to that effect) you hear criminals like these say is sickening. They acknowledge what they did was bad and express no remorse for the clear destruction they caused to other people’s lives. It’s cowardly and he should serve much longer in prison.
I think that's the inability to articulate well, as opposed to a celebration of his wrongdoing. He seems to be talking about how he thinks better of himself, that he doesn't think of himself as a bad person, and pairs it with a condemnation of what he did and the group of people that enabled it. Hopefully he serves good time, grows up, and comes out a credit to his family and society.
>>> The following evening, Noah rang from jail. He said he wished he hadn’t hurt his family, or his victims, but he seemed hopeful that the friendships he made would endure. “I’m not saying what I did was a good thing, it’s a horrible community, and what I did was bad,” Noah said. “But I loved my life. I like who I am. I’m glad I was able to live life as I lived it.”
Especially if he went through a period of being suicidal or otherwise deeply struggling with his situation, those words do seem more genuine and forward-looking than saying something like "yeah I'd do more crime if I could".
You have the choice of assuming the worst in everyone, or not.
This kid was not a silver tongued charismatic con man able to dupe and swindle victims, he was taking advantage of ignorance, incompetence, and bad management. his criminal skill consisted of being able to repeatedly and shamelessly call people and repeat a plausible script. High school drama club skills - not "hacked the school server to give everyone 4.1 GPA" skills.
I can grab a clipboard and safety vest and get almost anywhere in the world, even sounding awkward and not particularly smooth, because people expect IT and technician types to show up and be given access to nearly anywhere. "Hi, I'm from IT, I need to get to the phone line/computer in back/ network cable for the display" - people are gullible and ignorant, and the "hackers" that figure out that fact get away with outrageous things based on that alone.
They farmed out these low level social engineering tasks to dozens or even hundreds of participants whose only "skill" was to learn that "one little trick" which broke the security model of all those corporations and departments. That's how law enforcement swept this guy up, because he was not technically proficient or particularly good at what he was doing, from a security standpoint.
10 years of prison is definitely going to mature this person - all I'm saying is that I wish the best for him, because ultimately, that's what best for all of us. I hope he finds a purpose and meaning in life that obliterates the superficial exploitation of people that landed him in prison, and makes the world a better place for his family and community when he gets out. If he can still think of himself as wanting to be a good person, to be better than he was, then I think there's probably hope.
If he was completely unrepentant and unwilling to be accountable, it'd be different - No credit at all to him, I'm just hoping for the best and recognizing that possibility seems to still exist for him.
> You have the choice of assuming the worst in everyone, or not.
I'm not assuming the worst...that would be assuming he intends to find a way to continue managing an online gang from jail...
> the superficial exploitation of people
It wasn't superficial. He had a huge negative impact on a lot of everyday people and profited from it enormously.
> I'm just hoping for the best and recognizing that possibility seems to still exist for him.
I also hope he turns his life around and do believe there is a chance, but statements like the one quoted don't give me much hope. He pays lip service to saying what ge did was wrong and calls the community horrible, but he still wants to be friends with all the people with whom he became friends by engaging in criminal conspiracy with them.
The judge decided to throw the book at him and I think the judge was probably right. Maybe the extra years will give him time to understand the damage he caused.
I think there's a very large segment of criminals that express remorse at sentencing as pure theatre, the courts know but they give brownie points for humbling yourself before the court.
Honestly it's refreshing to hear the truth. I thought something similar at sentencing when Weev told the judge he hoped she'd give him the maximum so people would "storm the docks" and that he not only didn't regret it but wouldn't be so nice next time, which only made it all the more sweeter when the bitch's sentence got totally vacated.
weev over-estimated his popularity. he was a deeply unpleasant person, and he didn't have a movement or any fans of him in a personal way
in addition, his whole shtick was being as annoying and confrontational as possible. "weev belongs in jail but not like that" was the general sentiment i heard
so no, it wasn't "sweet". he could have rotted in jail and nobody would have cared other than the awful precedent that ruling would have set. and that'd be the most fitting end tbqh lol
> he not only didn't regret it but wouldn't be so nice next time
despite all of his hard chatting, he immediately fled the country after he was released. last i heard he's living in some eastern european shithole pretending he's huwhite and running the stormfront servers (im not joking). loser behavior
Not a bitch for not admiring a Nazi, a bitch for sentencing someone to an alleged crime that didn't even happen in her jurisdiction and with no legal conviction. She should have known better, and the appeal was so strong and with so many problems with that case that my most likely conclusion is she was an insane tyrant who's goal is to override the rule of law by virtue of wearing a funny looking robe.
> and express no remorse for the clear destruction they caused to other people’s lives.
They obviously do multiple times in the article, including the same paragraph you referenced in your comment.
"He said he wished he hadn’t hurt his family, or his victims, but he seemed hopeful that the friendships he made would endure. “I’m not saying what I did was a good thing, it’s a horrible community, and what I did was bad,” Noah said. “But I loved my life. I like who I am. I’m glad I was able to live life as I lived it.”"
he's not even pretending he has regrets. All that around is just PR, he's a serial manipulator and there's no reason to believe that he's suddenly changed after such a short period of time.
> He said he wished he hadn’t hurt his family, or his victims
He literally says he has regrets in the first sentence of the paragraph.
> All that around is just PR, he's a serial manipulator and there's no reason to believe that he's suddenly changed after such a short period of time.
Maybe. That's you opinion. I'm not a mind reader, and I don't really care. Plenty of white-collar criminals get much lighter sentences for stealing much more money.
He also says multiple times that "this felt like me" and "I loved living this life" and the FBI agent says, based on their experience, he had no remorse.
When I request 1 random byte, the library fetches 512 bytes (for example) of random data from the OS, and then returns the first byte to me. When I request another 1 random byte, it just gives me the next byte that it already fetched without needing to make another syscall.
Many of the highly upvoted posts of the last ~month have been about "vibe engineering" and "context engineering". The comments on these posts suggest an air of enthusiasm one doesn't see on posts about programming.
> consider a more nuanced question
As a long-time poster here I simply do not agree.
> I disagree with you on both
Your rationale?
By using AI to automate things you once did manually, you are:
- Helping a model do something better you were once able to do (and get someone to pay you to do). Such a time may arise when your input is no longer required.
- Propagating the idea that such things no longer require the skill they once did.
- Propagating the idea that it doesn't take you as long to do something you once did, begging the question why employers would pay you as much as they once did.
- Failing to continue to learn as you once did (that numerous studies have since confirmed; people who use generative AI don't exhibit the same critical thinking as those who don't).
I use high-level tools to automate things all the time, such as scripts to avoid error-prone manual tasks, and high-level languages rather than writing low-level assembly code byte-by-byte ... usually, when they the right things to do.
However, given that my life now is mostly working on trying to reduce global warming, and I have fairly high standards for my output I think, I don't by default want to use tools which (a) cause large amounts of needless carbon emissions one way or another and (b) inject random lies/nonsense into their output which is hard to track down and may in fact slow me down overall.
I have been listening carefully to talented people I trust who are getting coding assistant results that they are happy with (even given their TLC to fix the errors and lies), and will carefully evaluate for myself when the hype has diminished a little, as I have with other new tech, and when mostly the good stuff is still standing.
But at the moment I am learning a whole new complex toolset in a different area, in building physics to reduce emissions, and cannot really do both at once properly even if I was at my 18yo sharpest and wasn't trying to have a good social life too.
As I boringly repeat, I am not anti AI. I have a near 40yo AI degree and have hundreds of thousands of product units on the market featuring what is at least clever data science. I do object to overhyped LLMs from vastly rich peeps wanting to hoard even more resources while being oblivious to those who have provided the intellectial property that they have perloined, while flattening the creators' servers with badly behaved bots too!
I have already nominally retired (though am working on a self-funded PhD) so the "I will lose my job" cannot apply and is a counter example to one of your universal claims.
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