I don’t compare myself to others. Deleting ALL social media helps a lot.
I also try to live below my means, as I understand that you can always find what to spend on. So be grateful to have a “normal” comfortable life, and stop there.
Even if you don’t live paycheck to paycheck, the life style of owning a place AND living off your investments, is extremely hard to pull off.
You most likely need to be single (or couple both in tech), no kids, making FAANG salary, living frugally (no travel, no expenses outside of food, shelter and necessities). Or you need to use geo arbitrage, which again means probably no kids, while being able to secure a high paying remote job in the US.
I wish it was more affordable, but it’s not. Therefor advice like “buy a house and live off your investments” are equivalent to filling a winning lottery ticket.
You don't need the "buy the house" part, which is actually bad advice now - renting is now half the cost of home ownership in many areas of the US.
But I strongly believe you're making this out to be much more difficult than it is if you are making decent (not "FAANG level") tech-type salaries. Where I live tech jobs generally pay at about double the amount of people in trades, for example. E.g. a mid-level software engineer is making at least 160-180k, while a trades person (plumber, etc.) with similar experience is making 80-90k.
So obviously if you can live at the level of these trades people, you can save up enough to be able to live without a salary for some time.
The problem is that most people just get used to their standard of living and find it hard to downsize. That's fine, but it's still very much a choice.
The problem with what you say is that you need to be in such environment. Not everyone pays good salaries. Europe is far behind US salaries. In US high salaries are concentrated around SF, which in turn means high cost of living, or subpar living conditions (I couldn’t imagine myself living with roommates in my 30s for example, and what do you do when having a relationship?)
And then comes the downsizing. Sure you can live only with necessities, but then question do you want to find yourself in mid thirties, or early forties, without any travel experiences, no relationship, living in your parents basement? I exaggerate a bit, but the math does not work out. You either live very frugally, or you use exploit geo arbitrage (low cost of living area, with a high paying remote job). There are no other shortcuts.
Every time this topic comes up, I'm a little astounded how whiny people get.
First, I wholly agree Europe salaries are far worse. But in the US, there are plenty of locales besides SF that pay comparatively high tech salaries (I live in Texas). But the main point is that making a professional software engineer-level salary at a tech company with 5+ years of experience in a mid-to-large American city should put you squarely in the top 10% of American earners. I mean, what you decry as "very frugally" is simply figuring out how the vast, vast majority of Americans manage to get by. It kind of reminds me of those NYT articles that would explain how people were basically living paycheck-to-paycheck on $500k a year: private school costs $X, a nanny costs $Y, Upper East Side co-op costs $Z. I'm like yeah, no shit Sherlock, expensive stuff is expensive, but don't pretend forgoing that stuff means you're living in poverty.
It's not whiny, in exact terms, it's something much worse: people not wanting to admit they can have agency.
You see this a ton on social media. People make excuses after excuses of why they can't get out of debt, why they can't lose weight, why they can't…
And, sure, some people have it tough and have the odds stacked against them. But most people would just prefer to swat down ideas on how to get what they want like they're playing Beat Saber.
(And I can be sure that someone will come through and accuse me of being insensitive because I haven't considered someone who has X, Y, or Z that only impacts .5% of the population, and almost never the person making the complaint.)
Agreed. Nearly all of the arguments I see about this (again, from people who are relatively extremely well off) boil down to "but it's not easy!" Well, you got me there, but it often isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be, it's just they have locked themselves in to a particular lifestyle and change is difficult.
On multiple currency, we have support for it as a commodity. We are planning to make it easier, in future. There is support for split transactions. So, transactions with more than one currency will work by associating them with accounts in different currency.
I use CodeCompanion with Gemini. I think it’s on par with all other popular tools: you can chat with it, you can give it control over one file, or over the entire project.
Zero Cool? Crashed fifteen hundred and seven computers in one day? Biggest crash in history, front page New York Times August 10th, 1988. I thought you was black man. YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
I think it outlines a bigger problem we have in the tech industry: innovation for the sake of innovation.
When you have an in-house design team, or development team, you will, inevitably, reach a point where your product is "ready": design was finalized, functionality is there, and aside from minor bug fixes, there is nothing else really to do. Then you ask yourself, what should you do with the in-house teams? The logical answer would be to let them go, or focus on different projects.
But this is not how our industry works. Instead, teams are sitting there, coming up with problems in order to create solutions, because otherwise you are getting paid for doing nothing. This, eventually, leads to enshittification of everything.
This new apple design is one example. Another example is a not-so-recent redesign of whatsapp where they went from blue color scheme to green. It's works for the sake of work.
Its just fashions. UI's have been going through multiple phases of fashions where accessibility and basic function is often sacrificed to have a different look. Windows didn't need all the colour and style changes its gone through, neither has Android and neither did iOS. These aren't changes for a good reason they are just fashions.
The longer I watch the tech industry the more I realise its going through these fashion and hype cycles.
Nailed it. If you let your whole UI, in a consumer application, stagnate, you will lose. Your software could be fantastic, but someone else will build something nearly as good, paint it a “cool” color, and eat your lunch.
The idea that phones aren’t, for a huge number of people, fashion accessories, is really funny, and extremely IT-centric, to me. Look at the way Apple releases very visible, specific features for its Pro models - it’s all signaling. My phone is purple because one year that was the new color so everyone who saw your phone would know it was the new one.
(I say this also not taking away from the opinion that it’s prepping users and developers for something they’re going to bring out in two years - both things can be equally true.)
> I think it outlines a bigger problem we have in the tech industry: innovation for the sake of innovation.
Yeah. Imagine the world if all the tech companies stopped spouting useless new features every day and dedicated 3-5 years on fixing bugs and improving the existing products / performance.
In the ancient times before SPA era, we used to generate sessions in the server and return them in the cookie. Upon every request you would check the cookie value against the db table and if a match found, you have an authenticated user.
But then came an era of SPA and we needed another way to authenticate users, since XHR did not (and still not?) supported cookies, so we created the signed JWT token.
I’m a bit confused as to why one would want to store JWT access and refresh token in a cookie? Axum provided both signed (temper proof but not secret) and private (allows you to save sensitive information) cookies. Why wouldn’t you use these instead of saving JWT in cookies?
The problem with “AI will replace all jobs” hype, is that it also comes with a flavor of “and we all will do creative work”, while in reality AI replaces all the creative work and people go back to collecting garbage or other physically demanding and mundane jobs.
Why would you think garbage collecting or other mundane jobs won't be automated when much more complex ones are?
If AI+robotization gets to the point where most jobs are automated, humans will get to do.what they actually want to do. For some it's endless entertainment. For others it's science exploration, pollution cleanup, space colonization, curing the disease. All of that with the help of the AIs.
By the time robots will be able to do personal trainings in, say, boxing; or fix people’s roofs, humanity will long be dead or turned into power source for said robots.
Turns out a simulacrum of intelligence is much easier than dexterous robots. Robots are still nowhere near being able to fold laundry, as far as I know.
Yep, that's going to be the main outcome I suspect. The bottom 50% or maybe even 80 to 90% of knowledge workers are going to have to go back to physical work. That too will eventually be automated, but I suspect things like construction work (including the many trades wrapped up therein) will be toward the end of that.
Maybe that's why the current administration is pushing so hard to bring back low end manufacturing.
If you're a SWE, Accountant, Marketer, HR person, etc. put out of work by AI, now you can screw together iPhones for just over minimum wage. And if we run out of those jobs, there's always picking vegetables now that all the migrants are getting deported.
It would not surprise me one bit if the Tech CEOs see things this way.
Had a chance to read the wiki/docs deeper. Quarkdown seems to use puppeteer and chrome-print-to-pdf to generate PDF from HTML [1].
So, aside from the more minimal format or Markdown compared to HTML, I don't see much appeal in quarkdown compared to feeding HTML to a headless chrome instance.
But it is a cool project if one wants to turn a bunch of markdown files to say a book or an article.
> From a technical point of view, WeasyPrint is a visual rendering engine for HTML and CSS that can export to PDF. It aims to support web standards for printing. WeasyPrint is free software made available under a BSD license.
> It is based on various libraries but not on a full rendering engine like WebKit or Gecko. The CSS layout engine is written in Python, designed for pagination, and meant to be easy to hack on.
Cool, not who you replied to but this is a cool idea, another way to archive pages. Gotta compare it to singlefile and headless chrome - I've been looking for a faster way to get a snapshot of a webpage via a chatbot (like in discord or matrix). Used to use Firefox headless, but large pages/slower sites would time out the api.
The syntax feels complicated. Maybe I just don't have enough patience for learning a typesetting syntax (I never worked with Latex before).
On top of that, there is no easy way to create a template. For example, I want an invoice template which I can reuse with different data. Theoretically, I can create a typ file for the template, and define the invoice as a function which I then call from a string with, say, json data. It seems great as web service, but not as a library I can use from, say, Rust.
And the type system is a bit confusing. I can define basic types like numbers or string, but when it comes to structs, they don't seem to have support for that.
I find it easier to create a handlebars template, and feed the HTML to headless chrome printing service, which will output a PDF for me. It's not scalable for high volume, but good enough for my needs (takes about 2-3 seconds to generate PDF).
> On top of that, there is no easy way to create a template
Templates are just functions [0].
I think much of the frustration comes from typesetting being a harder problem than it seems at first. In general a typesetting system tries to abstract away how layout is recomputed depending on content.
Supporting contextual content -- cases where the content depend on other content, e.g. numbered lists, numbered figures, references, etc -- involves iterative rendering. This is evidentidly a complexity sinkhole and having a turing complete script language will bite you back when dealing with it. I recommend reding their documentation about it [1] where they explain how they propose solving this problem.
I also try to live below my means, as I understand that you can always find what to spend on. So be grateful to have a “normal” comfortable life, and stop there.
reply