a fun thing about having a high-dimensional fitness function is that it's pretty easy to not be strictly worse than anyone

pareto adequate

i think there's an opportunity here

a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom

same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill

with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer

convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn

i like an ad monopoly. it makes ads cost more

which makes everything you buy cost more, are you sure you still like it then?

there's externalities with ads. one is that the more ads i see, the harder i ignore them. i would expect consumer attention to work like roads, where charging more to use it is balanced out by the appeal of less traffic

it's not clear to me that an ad monopoly makes products cost more, even without getting into ads distracting the whole workforce

that's an interesting perspective.

are expensive ads higher quality? but are they therefore pushed more to justify the cost?

does the higher cost improve the information conveyed?

Not sure how it is these days, but back around y2k my buddy and I would hunt down Superbowl ads on the internet cause they were usually quite funny (and not aired here in Norway).

there's the cosmopolitan libc one: https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/bash

you'd probably want the rest of the programs, too. bash isn't too useful on its own. you can also find those on the same website

i often carry a book. yes. it's much easier to let my eyes and mind drift from the page than from my phone, even if the book is good

edit: even a steam deck is somehow less distracting than a phone, despite distraction being one of its main purposes

IP67+ on your phone is bad for mental health

Yeah my lifehack in that department is assuming that the seals might not be perfect anymore. Plus a brief brush with seawater splashes made my iPhone speaker sound like crap for a few days a few years ago so I've decided it's not worth the risk!

Seawater destroys everything you ever loved and cared for, no IP rating will defend against that for long.

I have never had a (smart)watch damaged by seawater. (I am not a sailor though, I guess keeping exposure fairly short matters.)

If my phone gets dirty watered, i ensure I rinse it with fresh water; really confuses the onlooker.

it'd be cool to have a proof of work protocol baked into http. like, a header that browsers understood

the main issue you'd run into is probably your ISP's NAT

you generally need a stable IP, and a firewall that'll let people initiate connections from outside your house

I find that most ISPs provide that. Generally you have a stable (though not permanently so) IP through DHCP, and most ISPs aren't doing CGNAT.

p2p stuff looks like it's getting better

there's iroh, which looks like a nice balance of batteries included, and not a bunch of bloat

and pkarr, which does exactly one thing: maps ed25519 keys to DNS records via bittorrent's DHT

i think the big blocker for wider adoption is that browsers, ISPs, and airport wifi are all hostile to general purpose network protocols. you're mostly stuck with TCP, or the quagmire of WebRTC right now. (iroh works in the browser, but it has to go through a relay)

another issue is that at least in the short term, the "made in america" sticker is likely to be detrimental in many foreign markets

so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off