I don't care about my career so much, but the weekend and school dropoff thing resonates hard.

Work is the only part of my life where I feel any sort of competency. Anything else I'm just a ship on a stormy sea being battered around. I can change the sails and move the rudder, but the sea takes me where it wants me to go anyway.

The joke was "welcome to your vacation" when people got back from paternity leave for their new kid. I don't think I ever left that vacation.

Time to put in a call to Ellison.

I think Oracle stock would plummet if Ellison got caught pretending to care about ethics. Not that it'd happen lol

Drives better, isn't distracted, doesn't get lost, care are always clean, will always take you where you want to go day or night, and yeah, no human.

Yea, it not that most uber/lyft drivers are bad (most are good), it’s just that all Waymos provide a good experience.

It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.

    > car[s] are always clean

This is a real surprise to me. I don't write that to doubt you. How do you think it works in practice? My point: If you have a human in the car, they can keep a closer eye on the car between rides and keep it clean. Without a driver, you lose that. How does Waymo know when a car needs to be cleaned?

Waymo regularly brings the cars in to central service depots for cleaning and battery charging. Also, as a passenger you can report that a car is dirty and it will be pulled out of service for immediate cleaning (and you get a small credit towards your next ride).

Waymo has done a great job of making its rollouts into new cities smooth. I have to wonder what will happen once they pivot to profitability in a few years. Will they be willing to lose revenue pulling so many cars out of service? Will they optimize the human costs by not having so many humans on staff?

Maybe they'll kill Uber first and then drop the quality.

"Doesn't get lost" is generous. they always cause so much caos in SF

It's a race to retool. If he can retool to an agentic coding environment quickly he will be OK. Might have to build up the skills outside of work if the current job doesn't allow for it, but I'm less worried about younger people realigning quickly. They're used to it, and younger people are so much more resilient/used to disappointment than we are (economic prospects have been so fucked for Zoomers for so long by so many "once in a lifetime" events and they still soldier on which is a huge testament to them).

Whether reviewing agentic code rather than writing it is a job he wants to do... Different question.

Its older people who can't or won't retool that are going to find that in the game of musical layoff chairs they won't have a chair left when the music stops (and some I've met haven't really internalized that they're even part of the game...)

The rest of my 6-person team (ranging in age from 20s to late 50s maybe early 60s) has been very reluctant to embrace AI despite the push from our manager to do so. I was very much on their side initially, but creating a few little tools to ease some of my burdens sold me on the possibilities. It does feel like cheating and I have to admit that for one of the tools I built,¹ I haven’t even looked at the code, but rather did a few rounds of back and forth with Claude to make the thing do what I needed and to address bugs that showed up as a result of putting it through some real-world usage.

⸻

1. A Mac menu-bar app to make it easier to know when I need to either do a PR or look at someone’s feedback on my own PR. Clicking the icon shows a list of all open PRs that I’ve created or that my review has been requested on (and clicking an item there will open the PR so I can act on it). If there’s a PR that I’ve not left comments on or approved, or if there are unreplied/unclosed comments on my PR or it’s been approved, a badge is added to the menu bar icon.

Nothing in this world is free, GLP-1s have their downsides (excluding cost).

Mostly it's nausea and gastrointestinal distress side effects. These tend to cool down over time, but it'll put a ceiling on how big a dose you can tolerate. Some people can't tolerate a dose at any level.

Yeah, you see, this is the same thinking that leads you to say "People who are depressed should just think happier thoughts."

This is it.

I am on GLP-1 (Zepbound). I have done Weight Watchers multiple times. I'd lose the weight for a little bit, then it would come back. The reason was _I was hungry all the time_. It's not sustainable. As someone else in WW told me: "The easy bit is losing the weight. The hard part is continuing to eat that way your whole life."

It's simply a faulty hunger sensor in my body. It was not what I was eating, simply how much.

GLP-1s fix the sensor. It's really simple. Nothing else to it.

I still enjoy food (although my palette has turned away from anything greasy, which is for the better anyway), but I can finally understand why someone would eat half a plate of something and say "I'm good" and actually mean it rather than trying to diet/starve themselves.

My friends who have been on it can genuinely enjoy food more now. There is no guilt. The portions make restaurant budgets more manageable. And they’re trying more of the menu. They liked food before. I think they can genuinely love it now, and that’s really great to experience with them, even aside from the massive lifestyle benefits losing weight brings.

Yes!

I was able to drink an Italian soda this week and not feel like "oh God I'm drinking my calories I'm going to be punished for this on the scales later".

So many misconceptions in these threads; your take is spot on and accurate.

Yes, it can do.

At Big Tech Company I Work At the LLM is quite happy to make raw API calls. If it thinks the data is big, then it'll write a Python tool to do it.

The reason crafted backing CLIs are useful is you can guide the LLM towards stuff that is immediately useful rather than hoping the nondetermism can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Take CI: is it interesting to know which tests passed? Maybe, but probably not. What is really interesting is what failed. Instead of having the LLM go out and talk directly to the CI system, write an intermediate CLI that filters out less actionable stuff by default, and have a flag that'll deliver the full dump if necessary.

It's a skill to do this stuff, and it's a lot of hard won experience than something I think is easily teachable. You kind of have to feel out your model and how it "thinks" about solving problems.

And then a new model version comes out and you have to learn it all again!

I think having highways turned off has really hurt pickup times and availability in South Bay right now. It pays to always book as far ahead in advance as you can.

There are places with construction where Waymo just seems to turn off the road and makes the car go around. But then taking away freeway access has made it more likely for vehicles to have to navigate these.

This is a male perspective.

My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.

This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.