I was in a similar boat, and this book[1] helped me a lot. It deals with the roots of procrastination, which lie in poor mood management and the lack of self-compassion. If you want to go deeper into self-compassion, I found this book[2] very helpful.
It is scary for sure. We were heading towards a brave new world even before chatGPT, where what's real was no longer to be taken for granted and you couldn't trust your eyes and ears. ChatGPT has just hastened things. I'm sure a new market will emerge for authentication services that verify the speaker or the person in the video similar to how we had twitter verified checkmark.
On the flip side I can't wait for someone to build a product where I record a few conversations with my parents while they are alive, and then when they're gone, through chatGPT + vocalfakes, I can have a parent forever. Sure, I'll know it's not the real thing, but when you really miss them, it certainly can make the pain a little less.
This is the thesis of the book “The Vital Question” by Nick Lane. It’s a pretty interesting read. At points the book was slightly beyond my reach in comprehension but I still enjoyed it.
I'm currently reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace Is Every Step [0]. In it he says something similar. It's not that worrying is not useful. You need to worry for sustenance, shelter. But a lot of thinking that we as modern humans do is useless. Me going over over on why I didn't get that job, or why did my colleague say or ..., you get the idea. Mindfulness can help with this a bit where if you find yourself caught in a useless thought loop, you can step back and try to figure out if you do have agency, if not, just move on.
This is exactly why I hate it. They can and will lock people into their ecosystem. I see Firefox only losing to features like this. I love the present tab feature and that too is available only on Chrome. Now I’ve starting using chrome for Meet, but FF everywhere else.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
More likely explanation is that Amazon is using a third-party to provide candidate emails from LinkedIn profiles and using that to do proactive reach outs. That third-party is scraping emails from all sources, including HN and providing that as a service to Big companies. Some recruiter at Amazon decided to do an email blast using some generic query based on keywords and got your profile included. QED.
In the unlikely scenario that we are able to mine it cheaply or at least cheaper than current methods, won’t the cost of those metals go way way down due to the abundant supply, making mining it worth even less?
Always take other people’s experience with a grain of salt. You don’t know their motivations or their biases or even their situation.
Even if what you just read is 100% true, it’s from someone else's perspective. So you don’t know what you are missing.
I have worked in both big companies and small. Politics abound in all of them. In my opinion company culture plays a large role in how toxic the place really is.
Another factor is your manager. Sometimes they can even compensate for toxic culture by shielding you from it and having a pleasant environment to work in. Unfortunately I have not been able to come up with a great set of questions to divine whether someone is a good manager or not. It totally depends on how much they believe in having your back vs having their own backs.
Don’t let experiences like these discourage you. There are plenty of big companies where you can have a sizeable impact because team sizes are small and the work is challenging. And there are plenty of small to mid size companies that are just surviving from one round of funding to the next on the whims of their investors.
Only way to find out is ask a lot of questions and try a few of them.
If you're looking to build a deployment tool from scratch, please consider Spinnaker first. I work for Netflix, and it's an open source Cloud Deployment Tool they developed in-house (http://www.spinnaker.io).
PostgreSQL was indeed a very attractive option, but we wanted to keep a path to Aurora open. When we were working on the migration, Aurora was still in beta, so instead of going to Aurora directly, we decided run our own MySQL instances on EC2.
[1] Procrastination - Fuschia M. Sirois PhD [2] Radical Acceptance - Tara Brach