I have a really mixed feeling about Costco. I hate it, I going there, I hate the crowds, the parking, the people, being hawked a credit card, a cell phone, whatever the vendors are selling. It makes me feel like a pig in a slaughterhouse waiting to get out of the store, I feel like it's the platonic form of consumption. We all go to the nice little consumption center like good piggies to get our sustenance and to get milked further (maybe I should buy some electronics!)
Yet, I keep going. I like the cranberry bread, the cheap chicken, the granola, I like not thinking about what to buy so much. I like that it's of an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. I like that I can return stuff easily without getting shit for it. I like "scoring" deals on stuff that seems like a good value.
I have a directory of skills that I symlink to Codex/Claude/pi. I make scripts that correspond with them to do any heavy lifting, I avoid platform specific features like Claude's hooks. I also symlink/share a user AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md
MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.
Maybe when I was 15 or 16, PHP stuff in order to maintain a website. I never really became interested in coding itself, I learned it for practical reasons and I studied it informally (forced myself through some boring books) when I was in my early 20s and wanted to get a real job.
> But taking a bird’s-eye view of what happened that day? A table got a new header. It’s hard to imagine anything more mundane. For me, the pleasure was entirely in the process, not the product.
I think that's where I differ from a lot of the artful programmers, I've never found pleasure in a perfect, beautiful solution. I get annoyed when I have to dump hours and hours into something that 'should' be simple! I don't want to spend my time fiddling with layouts, CSS, Oauth handshakes, etc. I want to build stuff and get paid for it, that's how I view my job as well. Less logician and more mechanic.
I use ChatGPT as much as I can, to do all I can and then fix the output when it's needed. I view it as a higher level programming language, that spares me from the burden of thinking of low-level details. It's same the reason I code in Python/Javascript rather than C++ or other languages, the goal is to make something of use. That's my goal to stay employed, become one with the language du jour, in the same way I've jumped from PHP to Jquery to React to ...
Well, could go either way on the healthy/unhealthiness of it. I would argue that it's accurate though. I've had good bosses too! They're not demons, just doing their job. It doesn't change that relation between us though: I'm subject to their whim, for payment. We're not peers, not collaborators, it's a hierarchical relationship of dependence with clear boundaries. I recognize the lines can be more blurred with more layers of management in large corporate structures, when the direct manager is subject to similar pressures that the end-worker is under.
Camaraderie is an illusion with management or your boss. We're not comrades, we're their subjects. We can have comradeship with our peers, of course, but that's unlikely to provide a safety net where none of us are unionized.
So no, I don't feel safe. I smile and say polite things when they mention how great the company is or how the sales are, or what a great year it will be!(how will any of this benefit me, besides more work) I consider this performative act part of what they pay me for, even if it is very painful. I'm not in a FAANG though, just slumming it.
It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that.
That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double checking the output to see how it's wrong.
Makes the stalling on releasing 1.5 publicly more understandable. Hopefully they won't become the next "OpenAI" but the material incentives are not aligned with public releases.
I appreciate this methodology for getting stuff done, It's how I do my programming work, but I really do want to just "learn math" for the fun of it, like a puzzle, not make work. I was reading Descartes and he was writing about how the practice of math structured his thinking and I'd like to try to recreate that in myself. Maybe creating a project would be the best way to do it, but that seems like work rather than play to me.