I find it's really nice to just have Claude run the compilers and linters when it's done making a change, as it often has some mistakes and will catch them at this step. It lets me step in for review after some trivially stupid thing is fixed up, rather than wasting my own time.
I'm starting to believe other people have a very different experience from me. I use AI to write Terraform. It "fixes" things I don't want "fixed", changes the functionality I wanted, disobeys restrictions I gave it, etc. About half of the time, my time is wasted.
Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle.
For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.
The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.
> Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here
“Recreation” is perhaps a good word.
But I also use “vanity” for doing serious things, for a non-serious purpose in a similar way. I.e. one day I would like to be able to afford to have some “vanity businesses”, regardless of profitability, like bar I have designed, a winery, etc.
Pretty common hobbies for the wealthy.
Those are not things that drive me, and not for appearance sake (I.e. not that kind of vanity). But if I had enough to throw in this direction without any risk to myself, I would enjoy that.
> Tourists that drive to the crater, take pictures, and drive down have no idea what they're missing.
And for some reason blather on and on loudly up there when the most mind blowing sunsets are happening. Can we not be silent for 15 minutes and look at the universe doing it's thing?
I mean you could buy books your first semester of your $75k/year freshman year of college though! Think of all the new Calculus that'll be in the 23rd edition of the standard textbook that costs $150. /s
Blood Meridian is one of the few books where I reached the end and then just started again right from the beginning. It's probably the book I've read the most amount of times and each re-read still manages to amaze me.
I was still using my iPhone 13 mini until last week when I bought an Air. As a city dweller without a car, I'm constantly in situations where I'm carrying something in one hand and need to pull out my phone for something. Now with this huge form factor I can't comfortably do that. For example, I was traveling internationally and was carrying my duffel bag in one hand and needed to get information out of the Airbnb app on my phone, and I almost dropped it. The mini would have been (and was always) fine in these circumstances.
The Air doesn't even fit in my jeans comfortably, I have to carry it in my jacket now (what do I do in summer?). I'm considering returning it and switching back to my mini until it just can't run anymore.
Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone. I paid more for a worse spec'd phone (Air vs 17), solely hoping it would be easier to use as a mobile, out in the world device. It's not. If they launched the same exact mini with a processor bump at $1k or more I'd be fine paying it.
> Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone.
The reality is that “I want a small phone” for most seems to mean “I would prefer that the phone is small but this is actually the least important factor for my purchase decision”. The set of people who bought the mini was quite small, estimated around 3% of sales.
You didn’t even buy the smallest phone. You got seduced by the thin phone but the 17 and 17 pro are both physically smaller devices corner to corner and would fit in your pocket better.
For sure, I admit I'm an outsider in most of my life choices, including retail decisions. But for about 13 years there I was able to purchase phones that worked one handed before the market completely shifted away from that.
I purchased the phone that was the lightest, thinking that maybe it's thinness would make it nice to hold in one hand (it does), but it's still too big. And so back it goes for my 13 mini until that thing can't hold on any longer.
I bought an Air, coming from a 13 mini, and I largely agree with you on all those points except the battery life. I'm not sure why everyone keeps saying the Air has bad battery life, which maybe it does compared to the 17 or 17 Pro etc, but the past week I've been test driving it it has more than all day battery life for me. My 13 mini needed a recharge in the middle of the day (battery was worn down to about 83%).
Otherwise, yeah, you're right. I'm pretty sure I'm going to return it this week before my 14 days are up.
I was just talking to my wife about this, literally 5 minutes ago. I just moved from the 13 mini to the Air and am hating that it doesn't comfortably fit in my jeans, to the point where I might go return it today. My young cousin was wearing her iPhone on a cross body sling, and I was commenting that we've gotten to the point where the phones are so big that you need bags or extra things to carry it comfortably.
To a contemporary person their smartphone is probably the single most functionally important object they carry with them. People have always modified their clothes around common items, and then those modifications become subject to fashion trends and then eventually tradition themselves. Think like briefcases and wallets, but also japanese inro, european snuffboxes, decorative scabbards, etc.
This is more like an ancient and near universal practice being applied to a modern tool, rather than a totally new thing in itself.
For sure, I had that thought as well, that clothing is evolving alongside the things people are needing to carry.
But, for me, it does seem like we're going in a functionally poorer direction. Just a few years ago I could have a computer I could fit in my pocket. I can't buy that anymore. The fact that people are selling modifications to these devices (cross body slings, cases with those weird pop up things on the back so you can hold it one handed) to me means we've missed the mark on design. For more than a decade we had a great one handed computer that'd disappear into my pocket. No longer.
I’m still clinging to my 3rd gen SE. My daughter had one too, but was forced to get a new phone recently because she had destroyed the old one. Got talked into a 13 mini and now I never stop hearing about how much of a pain in the ass FaceID is compared to TouchID. When Apple finally takes my button away I’ll probably go to android.
Note: the other thing I like about the SE is it was comparatively cheap. I will never get close to spending $1000 on a phone. Apple doesn’t want me anymore.
The visuals are like a fraction of the experience. Personally, I get very little in terms of visuals. It’s insight, wisdom, love, and the releasing of emotional holding patterns that is the most prominent thing for me. You can read about ego death all you want, but until you actually experience that sort of thing it’s just nice words on a page. It’s why Buddha would say don’t take my word for it, do the practice and have the experience yourself.
My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.
This exchange reminds me a bit of the experience of becoming a parent. The permanent reconfiguration of priorities from the intense oxytocin high is also quite impossible to explain to non-parents.
It is interesting to me as my first acid trip was 30 years ago but I have never gained anything profound from the experience.
My best trips were at psytrance parties as peak experiences in terms of fun.
I have tripped many times alone in a dark room and basically gained nothing from the experience besides falling into an existential void.
Personally, from so much experiences, reading thousands of trip reports, most the psychedelic literature up to about 2005, I think the psychedelic experience is like a blank white canvas. Some people end up with a Monet painting experience and some people end up with a Dali painting experience. Some run into a Hieronymus Bosch the first time and never try it again. You can't really make overall statements about what the blank canvas is going to be before someone starts to paint.
For me, my best psychedelic experiences were better versions of my most fun nights drunk. Anything I have learned that is all that deep though I have learned from reading books.
Never having a psychedelic experience I think is like never being drunk. It is really missing out on an interesting life experience but at the same time it is not this profound loss.
Working out all these life problems like some kind of pyschotherapy session is for sure something that never happened to me. That just lead me to the existential void when attempted.
Yeah, you're right in that it is highly dependent on the person and the set and setting. For me, I went into that first experience seeking a catalyst for insight into the things that were holding me back in my life, and got it. Intention setting is super important, which is why in formal meditation practice and in yoga they teach you to set a samkalpa for your practice session [1].
I've certainly taken LSD and gone to a rave with 6k people before, but I usually end up wanting to go home to meditate after a while. Insight into that existential void (sunyata) is exactly what I'm seeking out. But there's of course nothing wrong with wanting to stay at the party and dance all night! They're both manifestations of the same thing if you can see it.
I've been contemplating this a lot lately, as I just did code review on a system that was moving all the AWS infrastructure into CDK, and it was very clear the person doing it was using an LLM which created a really complicated, over engineered solution to everything. I basically rewrote the entire thing (still pairing with Claude), and it's now much simpler and easier to follow.
So I think for developers that have deep experience with systems LLMs are great -- I did a huge migration in a few weeks that probably would have taken many months or even half a year before. But I worry that people that don't really know what's going on will end up with a horrible mess of infra code.
To me it's clear that most Ops engineers are vibe coding their scripts/yamls today.
The time difference between having a script ready has decreased dramatically in the last 3 years. The amount of problems when deploying the first time has also increased in the same period.
The difference between the ones who actually know what they're doing and the ones who don't is whether they will refactor and test.
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