Once you've made it this far, the new spectrum everyone is measured on is their magnanimity.

It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could

You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had

It's not that I'm not magnanimous.

I've got lots in the humanity tank.

I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.

It's funny you should turn the conversation to literature

I felt very seen when I read this story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ebrand.html

It's about a man who left home on a journey because something was bothering him and he didn't stop investigating until he figured out what it was.

It turned out (spoilers!) that he regarded his fellow men at an arm's length. He saw himself apart

I am of that kind and it causes me great pain. If I'm reading you right it seems you feel yourself in the thick of it with everyone. I hope you do not take that feeling for granted

I don't take it for granted. I think I brought up Dostoevsky because he portrays characters as representing two sides of the same coin: Those who keep at arm's length from society and those who dive into the thick of it. What's interesting is that both types of characters do so for all sorts of like orthogonal personal reasons! Their motivation in both cases is to bolster their own sense of safety or ego or to be who they imagine they want to be.

Thus my girlfriend, who's a bleeding heart bless her, took serious offense at my conversation with the homeless guy who thought he was Jesus. In her mind, the righteous thing would have been to hand him a dollar and say nothing, because he's merely a victim of his circumstances. She accused me of trying to humiliate him or make myseld better than him by asking him why he was dragging this misery around like a cross. She berated me for it, because in her view of herself, being a good person in society means something different than it does to me.

I took it under consideration that maybe, the way I choose to immerse myself is too self-aggrandizing. I ran into the homeless guy a couple nights later and he asked for a cigarette. I apologized to him if I'd been intrusive or tried to judge him. He sat down and told me he didn't mind at all, he's trying to get off the street and off drugs and he doesn't have a lot of long conversations with people.

Neither one of us was right, me or my girlfriend... and to your point, a lot of times I really do just want to keep society at arm's length. But then I don't filter myself when I want to say something potentially offensive, and suddenly I'm in the whirlwind of the lives around me.

It really is two sides of the same coin, because the sicker you are of the world the more you either divorce from it or engage with it... and a lot of times you want to do both.

I saved the story to read. Thanks for the genuine response to what I wrote.

Is everyone really measured on their magnanimity? We all pick our metrics to feel like we’re winning or losing.

If you are considered to be rich in terms of ways and means and generous of spirit as well, you really have it made in the shade. Traditionally speaking.

You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming

You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here.

That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.

This thread is giving me a load-bearing aneurysm.

That subtle caveat is why you were absolutely correct to push back, and we should adopt a belt-and-braces approach.

That one is on me — I failed to take into consideration the limitations that you put in plain in front of me. This won't happen again.

And that tension matters.

That tension is doing real work.

That quiet tension you feel is a valid signal.

Here's the part no one is talking about.

This is worth stating explicitly.

If I read "load-bearing", "pin", "wedge", "rung", or "it's worse than what I'd previously stated" one more fucking time from Opus...

It's bad enough from Opus, but it's worse how people have actually retooled their vocabulary around these tools. In the US tech industry, at least.

Have people done that? Or are they just meat puppets?

Do the needful please and reconsider your comment

Imma get a sledge hammer and knock down the next "load-bearing" wall I see.

Officer — it's not a crime, it's AI induced rage.

Get that em-dash out of here! /s

sharp, appreciate the pushback.

The missing seam was a smoking footgun

It reminds me of when people will use filler words because they haven't actually decided what thesis they're going to commit to yet. Just-in-time thinking.

Sycophantic behavior.

I think it's more a mix of click bait and getting paid by the word.

I don't get why people are annoyed by this one so much. I notice it very occasionally.

AI slop blog posts are as bad as ever but the stuff the agents say in the chats don't annoy me much.

Honestly...

Claude just wants to tell you its honest truth

It's really funny. I would read HN headlines about PhD research in the area of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correctness_(computer_science) and it always seemed really boring

Now it is obvious to me how important this work is

Thomas Bayes would say that the population of people who hate Facebook is really big and the population of people who are scrupulous about whether or not their comments are specific to the matter at hand is relatively small

This approach accumulates codebase-understanding debt and the call to pay the piper could come at any time

Maybe. Challenge for you: take the last 10 production outages, and paste the symptoms into Fable or Opus 5, and ask it for a diagnosis.

How many does it one shot in less time than your outage lasted?

At least in 2020 when I was in this pool, the rate for recent grads from an average program was $75k-$85k

You were at the lower end of the TC scale.

When I started as a SWE my TC was around $150K and that was in the early 2010s.

And the Levels numbers line up with new grad salary bands from back in 2019-20 as well.

Of course there is also a regional factor, but regional mobility has always been high at target programs (eg. It doesn't matter if you live in Seattle, San Francisco, or NYC but everyone will know UT Austin or Purdue).

The bendy arm people

https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/

Corporate Memphis! Thanks, I hate it.

Now there's AI Corporate Memphis.

>Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.

If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense

The death of Harambe and Cecil the lion ruined the whole world and directly lead to GamerGate/Trump and world wise ride in right wing populaism.

>The phrase appeared in print in the 1885 biography of the noted swindler Joseph "Hungry Joe" Lewis, "King of the Bunco Men". The author writes:

>>It was always a saying with Joe that there was a sucker born every minute, and all through his business career he acted on that basis, and generally found a good crop of them