There is a saying I've heard: "Silicon Valley is powered by Waterloo Grads"
The problem with Canadian innovation is that our best and brightest tend to complete their education in Canada, then emigrate to the US. The brain drain is a real issue for us.
One of the "positives" of Trump's hostilities towards Canada is that perhaps this would slow the brain drain for the current generation.
In an interview, Yann mentioned that one reason he left Meta was that they were very focused on LLMs and he no longer believed LLMs were the path forward to reaching AGI.
Russia is expending its soviet cold war materiel. Its trade embargo is seriously undermining its ability to continue to fight. It may be sooner than we think that they'll run out of weapons and equipment so long as Ukraine has support from its allies.
From the article: "...explains this rate of muscle decline is significantly higher than what is typically observed with calorie-reduced diets or normal aging and could lead to a host of long-term health issues..."
The warning isn't that you're losing muscle during weight-loss with these drugs. It's that the ratio of muscle vs fat loss is much greater with the drugs compared to traditional weight loss methods.
It's been well studied that if you exercise and eat enough protein while losing weight, you can retain more muscle.
Losing a lot of lean mass is incredibly detrimental to your longevity and quality of life.
I think it's the opposite. I think quality often comes from evolution and iteration.
There've been so many projects where I get stuck because I want to maximize quality, so I get writer's block. The worse, is that sometimes you'll try to perfect something on your project that ultimately isn't of great value.
Building something quickly, and then iterating to perfect it seems to work for many people.
I've experienced being on teams where PRs and commits happen infrequently, resulting in massive PRs and merges/rebases that constantly have conflicts.
The spirit of pushing small incremental changes on a team really helps address that.
This can be sustainable if everyone on the team realizes that every PR is expected to be small and incremental. It shouldn't be a large push every time.
Content is paid with your eyeballs or with money. If you're not willing to pay with your eyeballs, then you shouldn't get the content. I think that's fair.
In China where copyright laws aren't enforced, there's simply no economic incentive for producers to create content...let's not go there.
I have a similar anecdote in my career as a developer.
At the height of the financial crisis I was just 2 years out of school and working for a small startup. Our first child was just born, and I got fired from my job as they discovered I was trying to bootstrap my side-project. There was no non-compete clauses in my contract but the company used it as an excuse to avoid paying me severance as they laid off a quarter of the staff the following week.
So there I was, anxious that no one would hire a young developer who has a tarnished work experience with a newborn at home.
I was desperate to just find some work. I eventually got two offers with the exact same salary as the job I had gotten fired from. One job sounded more appealing and offered me a chance to learn and grow. The other was for a job to maintain an existing legacy codebase for a struggling company that just went from 100 employees to 10. My wife suggested to just counter-offer with a 50% increase for the unappealing job. If I didn't get it, it was no big loss as I had another in hand. Sure enough, they accepted and the job wasn't actually that bad in the end.
Strangely, when I look back everything turned out in the end for me. I got a 50% pay raise and I also got to spend 3 months at home with my newborn child while unemployed.
One of the positive things that came from the pandemic for me was that we were forced to work remotely, and that gave me an opportunity to nap at noon.
It's made such a big difference in my life in that I no longer feel completely dead in the afternoon or require that second cup of coffee to keep going. It's almost like I get a second "day".
I'm in a situation where my partner loves to acquire things whereas I have a minimalist mindset.
I have felt like every item I own is a burden, and when I live in a house where the vast majority is "owned" by the both of us, it can be overwhelming.
I've learned to cope though by simply internally "letting go" of ownership. They're just inanimate objects and they're not "mine". I simply possess them as a mental/legal construct.
For me it, the drive to be more disciplined stems from the fact that I live my life so compulsively and I want to experience more things in life that require discipline.
As an example, video games and mindless doomscrolling eat up an inordinate number of hours. Hours that are precious and could be used towards a goal that I would feel proud of experiencing or achieving.
It feels like so many of these complaints on your list are things that have existed for decades in western culture. I'd argue things are getting better.
Greed has always existed.
Anecdotally I find people less loud these days compared to when I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Remember boomboxes?
No one's really cared about quality when it comes to low skill labor. Western culture typically doesn't carry that kind of value or pride in work.
Police don't give a shit? Crime has been steadily falling over time.
If you've been in the industry long enough to experience working on a variety of different projects and teams it's an easy sell to understand the concept of a 10x programmer, but the 10x programmer also isn't as exciting or "sexy" as we make them to be.
They aren't mythically smart and intelligent and can recite api features off the top of their heads.
No, the 10x programmers I've mostly encountered are "boring":
* They write solid code that's maintainable and relatively bug free. Fixing bugs is an incredibly time consuming activity. A developer who can reduce their bug rate is incredibly efficient not just for themselves but for the entire team and project.
* They aren't going to prematurely optimize in terms of code or design. How many of us have seen development grind to a halt due to an incorrect use of a design or architectural pattern? The worst grievances I've seen are using Microservices when it's not needed...leading to huge slowdowns of productivity due to overhead costs. And that's just one example.
* They understand the value of good software engineering practices that lead to long term success of the product/project/team. Many of those practices are "boring" but are necessary such as writing effective automated tests.
I guess another way to put it, many of the 10x developers I've seen are ten times more effective because they can avoid common mistakes that the average developer makes.
I discovered the 12 hour walk from a podcast (https://12hourwalk.com/) where the idea is to really contemplate and analyze your life by walking alone, without any music or distractions, for 12 hours. I've yet to try it, and am thinking maybe doing a shortened version at first (3 hours maybe?).
But I could see how it would be a way to wrestle with your thoughts.
The problem with Canadian innovation is that our best and brightest tend to complete their education in Canada, then emigrate to the US. The brain drain is a real issue for us.
One of the "positives" of Trump's hostilities towards Canada is that perhaps this would slow the brain drain for the current generation.