A year ago, I saw some local work being done on city pipes. The team was using a bot with three telescoping radial wheeled legs like

\   /
 \ /
  O
  |
  |

and wheels at the end of each leg. They put it in one end of the pipe, extended the legs so the wheels touched, and then drove it around in the pipe.

It was a welding device, so they could do spot-fixes from the inside.

Tried to block same-sex marriage in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation

I don't understand how you think this works.

If I say, "now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!" the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don't think it's going to cause mass layoffs.

Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It's not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they're doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won't). But I don't see any radical shift in the industry.

immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office

Citation needed.

Every single person I know who reluctantly voted for Biden spent the next 4 years complaining constantly. Online forums were full of liberals calling Biden "basically a Republican". Plenty of news stories covered how more progressive Democrats felt Biden wasn't doing enough.

I was at Google when they announced that only AI-related projects would be able to request increased budget. I don't know if they're still doing that specifically, but I'm sure they are still massively incentivizing teams to slap an "AI Inside" sticker on everything.

I've heard this from others, too. I don't really get it.

I watched a teammate working with AI:

1. Identify the problem: a function was getting passed an object-field when it should be getting the whole object
2. Write instruction to the AI: "refactor the function I've selected to take a Foo instead of a String or Box. Then in the Foo function, use the bar parameter. Don't change other files or functions."
3. Wait ~5s for Cursor to do it

It did the instructions and didn't fuck anything up, so I guess it was a success? But they already knew exactly what the fixed code should look like, so it seems like they just took a slow and boring path to get there.

When I'm working with a new intern, they cost me time. Everything is 2-4x slower. It's worth it because (a) I like working with people and someone just getting into programming makes me feel happy and (b) after a few months I'm able to trust that they can do things on their own and I'm not constantly checking to see if they've actually deleted random code or put an authentication check on an unauthenticated endpoint etc etc. The point of an intern is to see if you want to hire them as a jr dev who will actually become worthwhile in 6+ months.

In my own experience, these are two different people.

One who hasn't thought about the actual evidence or legal burden. They just saw on the news that the suspect is definitely guilty and their reaction is: "yeah, guilty of killing someone who deserved to die. Rock on murderer-dude."

The other person is thinking about the law and the evidence presented so far and finds it pretty thin. They might or might not feel like healthcare CEOs should be executed, but I have not heard this type of person lauding Mangione for the killing because they are skeptical that he had anything to do with it.

It may be that your friends are less internally-consistent.

The job market is not terrible. But there is a frustrating thing where a "senior" developer with 3 years of experience will get tons of recruiter-spam offering them $200k+ positions, while a junior developer (your position) will get ghosted when you apply for a job that's offering to pay $50k. So it can feel demoralizing because people you see as your peers are having a very different experience. (And if you go in some circles the FOMO just never stops; people telling you you're wasting your life not being a Meta dev getting $800k TComp or founding a unicorn start-up...)

You say you enjoyed programming, which sure sounds to me like you could enjoy getting paid to do it. But it's easy to overwork yourself because your boss says that real developers pull 80-hour weeks. Or burn out because it's so frustrating to watch bad decisions ruin your good work. If you can find the right balance of caring and not caring, you can make good money and enjoy your job.

And it only takes a year or two to get rid of the "junior developer" label and then jobs are a lot easier. (Others have said that the market is bad. And it is bad compared to how it was in, like, 2020. But it's still a very good market all things considered.)

The national parks are amazing. But who knows if they'll still be around since we're firing everyone who maintains them. Not sure if the plan is to destroy them or to give them to some oligarch as a little play-area.

Changing jobs carries a lot of risks:

• Many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford to quit their bad job before looking for another
• American healthcare system means that if you are between jobs and anyone in your family gets seriously sick/injured then you will be in medical debt for the rest of your life
• For many people, there are few jobs available. Maybe the other jobs pay too poorly for them to live on
• As discussed, employees aren't given slack-time, so they can't search for a new job while at work
• Because they're exhausted, they can't search for a new job while not at work
• Amazon isn't the worst place to work. Your next job might be worse! (Small businesses in the USA are exempt from many rules and effectively-exempt from many more.)

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. "Oh sorry, it's a Microsoft limitation," I was thrilled to say. "I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data."

Just Egg works very well as a sub for liquid eggs, but it's expensive AF and goes bad fast. I prefer the powdered egg-replacers for baking, because they keep, and outside of baking I like my eggs runny or hard-boiled which Just can't replicate so I prefer to go without.