You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s

I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).

I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).

It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.

The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).

Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.

So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?

I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you

This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.

Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.

> This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.

Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.

I live in country where shrewd salesmen know that people like me would pay extra for quality so they sell me crappy quality still, just for 3x the price.

So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.

I have a hard time finding quality stuff, even when I want to pony up for it. Do you have a good resource?

It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.

> Actually good quality stuff is prohibitively expensive for the non-ultra rich, and the rest of the quality stuff is increasingly being hollowed out by private equity and rapidly declining quality. People just can’t afford to pay for quality and things that last due to price gouging, wage stagnation, and increased cost-of-living.

There, fixed that for you.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like people remember how expensive in real terms things were in the 80s.

Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now.

It's not forced on you. If you do a minimal amount of research (which LLMs are very helpful with!), you can still find durable stuff. A Speed Queen washer is still built like a tank. It's just that the less durable stuff is absurdly cheap now. /r/BuyItForLife/ is a decent place to hang out if you care.

If you really like to argue semantics, OK, nobody put a gun to my head and said: "Here, buy this washing machine that will break just two weeks after its meagre two years of warranty, or I blow your head off!". Fine. But it is, shall we say, strongly encouraged with marketing and it makes sure those less quality products are always the most prominent. Happened to me and many acquaintances with extended families.

Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.

And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.

> 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger. Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.

What’s your data source?

Keep in mind that the modern, mass middle class was created in the mid-20th century through government policies and post-WWII economic growth.

Am I the only Korean(or other countries under colonialism) laughing?

The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.

This is a truth very few people are willing to confront. My grandmother lived in a village, on a farm, growing her own food and slaughtering her own animals, with no working plumbing, using a well for water. Of course a lot of that changed even just moving up to the 70s, but at that point there still wasn't quite the consumerist "buy whatever you want from wherever and whomever you want and have it almost immediately" environment. I can go to a grocery store here in Canada, buy tropical fruits year round that grow nowhere near me. I never have to concern myself with "this ingredient won't be here because it is seasonal", it'll be there, it'll just be more expensive out of season, worst case I just have to go a bit farther out to a different grocer than I usually go to.

This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints.

For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?

In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.

And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?

I guess it's "only" 40 years, but my 1985 Civic was an amazing car. Definitely not a death trap, but after I did end selling it for a 99 Acura with airbags. Still kind of regret that one. My house was built in 1970, it's enough for the two of use, but would admittedly be cramped for more. That said at 850 square feet, it's quite a bit smaller than the 1,400 average for 1970.

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/real-estate-...

I'll just add...

Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.

Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.

Or fresh oranges.

That's total bullshit. Middle class families in 1976 did NOT live in smaller houses than today, and certainly did NOT eat "poverty meals"... What on earth are you even talking about.

Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.

Again, I would encourage you to research historical statistics or talk to people who lived in 1976 about their practical living conditions, rather than going off of your intuition about what is "bullshit" or which things are "absolutely fucked". Our intuitions about these things are heavily warped by social media, where stories that feel true without being true are easy to tell and often more viral.

In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.

you can live an 1880's lifestyle working about 5 hours a week. Outdoor toilets, no plumbing, uninsulated housing. Essentially zero healthcare. No lighting after the sun goes down or before it comes up. Little variation in diet and enough calories and nutrition to make you a strapping 130 lbs five foot four.

You just don't want that.

Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go

It turns out the demand for software is so great that even when it can be produced instantly at zero cost demand still far outstrips supply.

Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit.

It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.

The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?

Don't MacOS users all have apple.com accounts? I hear no complains though.

BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?

Most probably do yes, but it's not a requirement to use any of Apple's devices. You don't need to do some command-line kung-fu to get around online account requirement like on Windows, you can just click "Skip" at the online account step, and that's it.

Perhaps you hear no complaints because unlike on Windows, MacOS does not spoon-feed you 10 screens of dark-pattern-riddled upsell ads with options of "Remind me later", "Yes" during set-up. It quite literally feels like being spat on, considering Windows is not a free operating system, and yet it still riddles you with ads and dark patterns as if some horrible shareware from the mid 2000s.

It's not really needed at all for macOS, but remains mandatory for even free apps on iPhone/iPad, so yes virtually all users have one. Same goes for free macOS App Store apps but that's not the only or even most common way to install stuff.

No.

I believe Rust will never be a major player in GUIs.

As in other areas where business outcomes of a software is more important than efficient memory management. I don't like Electron, but its popularity just makes it obvious that nobody cares about RAM usage in the GUI area.

I couldn't understand author's point, because they haven't provided the right way to do each thing, their opinion.

It's easy to criticize.

Yes, and that's normal (except for maybe eastern European cultures who better hire an American/west European).

I would argue that command line is for human input, so the failure already happened when they composed a `ping` shell command programmatically.

Granted, a lot of software works like that, but the command line was invented as a human interface, we just bungee-strapped a computer instead.

On the other hand, seperating concerns by process boundaries leads to more secure, composable and stable code. By not reinventing the wheel, you avoid a whole class of problems. Of course a stable API or library might be better, but convenience always wins out.

No-no, I mean launch processes by all means, just without shell substitutions.

Ever noticed that docker (and k8s) accept command line as an array? That's the way to go. It does not expand any env variables, path expansions (.. or *). Like

   command: ["java", "Main.java"]

But people hack it in order to get shell features, and that is the failure I mean:

   command: ["sh", "-c", "java Main.java"]

the second example runs shell, and shell is for humans, so is vulnerable to the attacks above.

Yes, and I probably was that student in school.

The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.

Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.

And that is why China wins in production.

Because they'll pollute their land/air/water and force their people to be harmed whenever it's economically convenient because the people in China don't have a voice in their government? I think I prefer democracy.

Just, for god's sake, move SELECT after GROUP BY, I beg you.

Current structure makes sense to me.

  SELECT .... what do I want
  FROM .... where is it 
  WHERE .... what filters do I want to apply
  GROUP BY .... how do I want it aggregated

Maybe it's just that I'm so used to it. I could see FROM being first, that would actually make a little more sense to me.

A pretty common request is to lift the FROM up before the select, like the below. I'm pretty fine with status quo since my mind is usually "hmm what do I need to get" first, then I figure out how to get it, but some engines (duckdb, I think?) support both so everyone gets their cake.

What people often want: <where to get data from> <what I want from it> <how it's filtered> <how it's grouped> <how it's filtered post group>

Also helps with autocomplete, which is why LINQ starts with `from`

Linq took that from Hibernate in believe. But in general, I'd say almost all ORM and SQL-gen libraries have FROM first, because it's clearer for programmers.

Hibernate puts SELECT last if requesting only specific properties?

LINQ:

  var query = 
    from e in entities
    where e.property1 == value
    select e.property2;

> I could see FROM being first, that would actually make a little more sense to me.

Personally, I disagree. In English, an imperative statement like "move that chair from the dining room to the living room" is generally verb-first (with respect to location, anyway). SQL's flow has always made perfect sense to me.

Don't make a work off your hobby, you'll stop loving that.

"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.

Not necessarily true for everyone, either of them. Both parts feel too dogmatic, it always depends.

True for me. I used to love writing software. About fifteen years into my career I lost interest in side projects, and by the time I retired anything that smacks of coding seems like drudgery.

I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.

I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.