>Why bother playing when I knew there was an easier way to win? This is the exact same feeling I’m left with after a few days of using Claude Code. I don’t enjoy using the tool as much as I enjoy writing code.
My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.
I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.
My experience from these projects is the opposite. The projects are always secondary priorities for participants, and the difficulty of coordinating some dozen entirely separate organisations towards something actually productive is immense. In practice each participant independently spends the money they get on something lightly relevant, and the occasional coordination meetings are spent on planning how to fulfill the reporting requirements of the grant.
Business and research are difficult enough even when done by tightly knit teams and constantly tested against real world systems and customer feedback. The idea that a hodgepodge of organisations can achieve poorly defined yet aspirational goals on a low budget is massively misguided.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
There is a market for technical due diligence consulting, but the work is typically done by friends of investors; it's a difficult and tiny market to get into.
Pinboard was nice and simple once, but nowadays doesn't seem to be maintained and is broken in many ways. I've been trying to export my archive backup for almost a year without success.
I'm in a similar situation. I think if you read a lot of HN and are reasonably successful, your expectations for life can get detrimentally high. And what happiness and meaning you experience largely depends on what you expect. You're already quite successful yet you're probably very unsatisfied. We read so much about startups and these amazing projects other people are doing, but it's hard to understand what you should actually expect from yourself and your life — are these reasonable things to aim for, or even to just dream about? We're only seeing the survivors and successes, not the (how many?) others.
You could try planning for a longer break or vacation to see how you feel with more freedom, do you still want to do something "more meaningful" or do you actually miss work?
Even more than HN, what meaning you find tends to depend on the people around you. Imagine how some people in objectively much worse positions than you can despite that find much more meaning in their lives than you; usually because of the bonds they create with other people. (If you ever watched Star Trek or Futurama, remember how it wasn't the stuff the characters did that made it meaningful, but rather the characters themselves and their relationships..) Your social influences can be hard to change, but that's how it is. Meaning comes from being a part of something. Stuff you do on your own requires so much more effort to reach that same level of meaning.
OODA loop is often hyped, but really it is just a description of how humans (and animals) behave in almost any situation. "Look, Think, Decide, Act" in other words.
It's not valuable in the sense that you can "practice" or "apply" the loop and perform better. Your behavior already follows this model. Its real value probably came from presenting this common decision making process in a way that appealed to upper military management, which made it easier to develop processes and practices that help decision makers (like pilots) in critical situations.
> "There is not even complete agreement about the causal relationship between the swine flu vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome"
> "Studies suggest that it is more likely that a person will get GBS after getting the flu than after vaccination"
In the worst case, about 450 people got Guillain-Barre due to the vaccine. Counterfactually, some thousands or even a million Americans might have died from the swine flu itself.
Try finding out how many people have died from vaccines that have passed phase 1 & 2 in the past few decades.
The number seems to be closer to zero than anything else.
Even one of the worst vaccine disasters, the Cutter incident in 1955, seems to have resulted in only some 10 deaths, of which 5 were indirectly caused.
Every day vaccines are delayed costs thousands of lives.
Bioethicists who have forbidden challenge trials in vaccine trials have firmly taken the no-action stance in the trolley problem.
A normal phase 3 trial gives the vaccine to volunteers and waits for them to get sick (or not). A challenge trial is the same, but infects the volunteers intentionally, which significantly speeds up the trial and reduces the sample size needed.
The trolley is running over thousands of people every day, and by flipping a switch you could reroute it to another rail where only a few people would be at risk. The modern bioethicist stance is that flipping this switch is unacceptable. Maybe waiting for people to randomly fall ill instead of acting is more holy and sacred — or perhaps "natural".
I wouldn't place too much trust in the Finnish IFR estimate. Their IFR estimate a month ago was 0.05% - 0.1%. At the time there was no data to support that, and it turns out that they had simply taken their estimates from a ten year old pandemic preparedness plan, which was designed for an influenza pandemic.
It was basically the same mistake UK did. Now they have very slowly begun to adjust away from the misleading path they originally set on.
The Finnish national health organization has been subject to severe budget cuts for the past ten years. They are still saying that masks do more harm than good, and that it's absolutely impossible to stop the virus, despite South-Korea having done so for almost 50 days already.
All the Nordic countries underestimated the pandemic. Norway switched their goal from mitigation to suppression a few days ago, Finland is still teetering somewhere in between, and Sweden is solidly in the mitigation camp. Government officials in these countries seemed incapable of accepting just how horrible the situation is, so they only created optimistic models of the pandemic. Finland and Norway have released more and more pessimistic models each week, while Sweden has kept theirs secret for some reason.
I fear Sweden is still basing their approach on those optimistic models, that likely don't apply to this particular pandemic. They seem to be making the same mistake UK did, except they haven't changed paths yet. They say they are only doing what is "scientifically proven", without realizing that peer review and randomized controlled trials alone are not enough for situations where decisions need to be made in short time with imperfect information.
I worry that if the "keep them talking" -heuristic becomes widespread enough, we'll experience a cultural evolution where people flat out refuse to talk.
If you know the main strategy of your opponent it to get you talking, your most obvious strategy is to not talk.
My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.
I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.