Most people seem to agree that building a personal brand requires consistently delivering useful content around a specific topic. I'm putting that together with my understanding of how ADHD presents for me personally. It feels like a challenge. 😅
@polotek 100% this. Even though I was nowhere near as influential, most people who followed me on Twitter did so for my work, and I never felt comfortable bringing my "whole self" there for that reason. The fediverse experience is something else entirely, or it's been for me at least. I still post things related to my work, but I have no interest whatsoever in cultivating a personal brand, and I'll happily post pics of me picking up the kids at daycare, random thoughts on whatever, etc.
I'm reaching the end of my time as an unemployed person. I have been so fortunate to be able to not work at all for the last year. It's hard to convey all the things I've learned about myself.
I should get the disclaimers out of the way. I know that being able to not work is an incredible privilege that most people will never experience. I was able to do this through a lot of luck, diligent financial management, and the grace of my partner who still makes good money. I understand that talking about this stuff will probably make some people mad. I'm used to that.
What I'm thinking about now, as I shift back to thinking about work, is how do I make intentional decisions about my career that are based on where I want to end up? That is harder than I thought it would be tbh. I work in software tech. It's a shit show. It feels difficult navigate in a ethical way right now. But work can't solve every problem. Instead I'm thinking about what work would be right means to get to the right end.
That's right. It's sort of the core issue in educating people about LLMs. They don't "sometimes hallucinate". They always hallucinate. By design.
But I also think we should graduate from saying they "just" make things up. They have a sophisticated inner model that means they're more likely to hallucinate towards things that seem correct when read by humans. And studying how they are able to do that is actually interesting. https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/112203183163246574
As a small diversion, I think the fact that LLMs can produce plausible sounding human communication is the least interesting thing about them. I'm very interested in the ability to migrate towards the "right" information given vague starting instructions and a very large corpus of data.
@polotek My main concern isn't that LLMs will replace humans in the long term. Nothing about that seems likely. I'm mostly concerned about the medium-term impact of foolish decisions by rich men to replace humans with LLMs to drive short-term bumps in stock prices. I expect those moves to fail, and there to be a scramble to rehire, with no accountability to the decision makers. But in the meantime I worry about a lot of disrupted lives to get us there.
Open ended question. Do you have any investments besides stocks/bonds? Why did you get into them? Do you have a strategy, or was it more happenstance? If you have a strategy for investments, I'd like to hear about that too.
(Without judgment. It's okay to say cryptocurrency. But I will not be engaging directly with that topic.)
I have a reputation for being salty. I wanna pledge to do my best to be cool in this conversation. I'd like to make it safe for people to share. Talking about money is already difficult.
@polotek VWRP.
I'm not smart enough to play the stock-market. I read Tim Hale's "Smarter Investing" a decided that a whole-world index tracker was good enough for me.
In the UK, we also have "Premium Bonds" which are like a state lottery, except you can't lose your capital.
@miguel@hazelweakly just focus on one framework. If you get some experience and understand the different patterns, learning the second one gets easier.
This is an interesting question. And I want to give a thoughtful answer. The reality is that the backend has all of these same problems. They have also experienced an explosion in complexity. I think the outcomes are different mostly because they have more support. The reality is that cloud vendors have assumed a ton of the complexity and the risk on the backend. So engineers aren't drowning to the same extent. https://mastodon.social/@floby/112107065645789780
Alex and I met a long time ago. When the js community was still niche and fun. We've stayed loosely connected, and I watched as he has done his best to steer the community away from the ridiculous place we currently find ourselves. For Alex to be entirely fed up is not a small thing. He has spent more than a decade being unfathomably nice and patient about it. I was there. https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/112106647240601587
My message has been related but a bit different. The complexity here is unsustainable. As a leader of engineering teams over the last 10 years, I've watched them become less and less empowered. There are a lot of engineers who still care a lot about building something good. But I watch as they drown in complexity. They want to fix things, but they literally can't. And that frustration comes out in all kinds of dysfunctional ways.
Last time we talked about this, John hit me with something that I'm still sitting with. The tools we have tend to demo really well. People are buying into all of this marketing promise. But when it doesn't work out, when they realize they were sold snake oil, it's hard to talk about. I think many engineering teams are blaming themselves. Or more likely blaming their managers. https://indieweb.social/@johnallsopp/112050757204780359
In the interview, I talked about equity as an investment. I think that's the right framing. You can lose money, the same as lots of other investments. Especially if you go into it uninformed. https://mastodon.social/
The other thing that happened is that base salary for tech jobs went way up. It used to be the case that you were explicitly taking stock options in lieu of cash. Because startups couldn't pay market rate salaries. But due to increasing competition for talent, that changed. People were making big salaries even in startup roles. At my last job, I made $280K.
I think that was the right thing. Money in hand is always better than an IOU. But what it should've done is allowed more employees to purchase their stock options. It should've enabled a lot more people to take part in the upside of the explosion in tech the last 10 years. I don't think enough of that happened.
@polotek yeah probably I could find other jobs but it's not like it's a fun exercise to change jobs, interview, negotiate, it's super stressful, energy draining. Finding the perfect job/company is not easy especially when you have a very unique profile.
Of course we all have different criteria. What do you suggest I could do differently ?
@MorganGeek I wasn't offering advice. I don't know your situation. I was only reacting specifically to the feeling that tech startup jobs are the most interesting with the best pay. I don't think that's accurate.
I understand all of your frustrations. My answers are unlikely to be satisfying to you in any way. I will say that saving and investing is what allows you to be less beholden to shitty jobs.
I'm not sure how often I've directly articulated this fundamental change in my thinking. Many people have been convinced that arguing and debating your goals and values with those in the opposition is the best way to influence people. I just don't believe that anymore. Debate has it's place. But it's not the best lever to reach the people I want to reach. https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112050290234438314
React starts off really easy. Because it hides a lot of the complexity from you. "Easy to get started" is also at the root of a lot of dysfunction today in my opinion. Getting started is cool. But you know what's even better? Finishing the thing. Expanding the thing. Maintaining the thing as is scales. Changing the thing when the goals or requirements change. Improving the performance when users report that it's slow. All of those things matter way more than "getting started".
The main reason that productivity metrics for software development aren't useful is that we don't really have any standards for determining what outcomes we are shooting for. Nobody knows what "good" is. So we don't know what we're measuring for. https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112010057412867182
Last week was my first time really looking into what settings are available to admins who run their own instance. I was a bit surprised to find there isn't much there. At least through masto.host. I don't think they hide settings though. Only some of the deeper technical stuff.
As I continue to educate myself about how mastodon and ActivityPub currently works, I found myself asking a basic question. How do I see the list of servers I'm currently federated with?
I expected to see a list of servers that I federate with. There is a view that looks like it should show that list. Under the moderation tools. But it was empty.