Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.

Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.

Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.

Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)

I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.

This 100%. Just to give another viewpoint on this, having just started going full time on my solo agency, I actually love doing the sales and marketing stuff and scoping the work for clients. Yes, it does take a lot of time away from pure technical work but I do enjoy the balance of it. So, it does depend on your own interests and how you like to spend your time. Freelancing/Consulting is definitely not for everyone. And tbh, lets see maybe in a year or two I will be fed up of the sales/marketing stuff too.

One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.

I think this is under appreciated. I also had my stint (some years) of freelance and found that my general take home pay was too low.

That said. When staying in a job skill atrophy is a very real thing.

As nassim talen would say, it is less risky to be a contractor.

The human brain does not have perfect memory. It is not always logical. And more often than not it is motivated and influenced by "external" forces - health, hunger, sex drive, environmental conditions, luck, spiritual inspiration, or whatever. The perfect worker is purely logical and has perfect memory and no external influences - never gets hungry or sick or wants to be the boss themselves. The AI race is funded by folks interested in creating the perfect worker, not a human. I have to agree with the conclusions of this paper that they won't be able to make humans. (But they don't really want to.) The Vatican has also published interesting works on this idea. The question is - if you take out everything that makes it human, can you call it intelligent?

It's the old " I never used algebra in my job, but I did use things the football coach taught me" mindset.

considering that ~50% of all of our new scientific studies annually don't replicate, its far far worse than you might think.

Any citation for your "exact" claim here??

Reading a few headlines about psychology and extrapolating it out to everything, including hard sciences, most likely.

Ironically, shocking claims about the scope of the replication crisis are themselves difficult to replicate.

Yes, exactly. Medicine is progressing very quickly and I don't understand where these people get this idea that modern science is fake.

We have big and complex problems, sure. Yeah we're taking a stab at more complex issues, like anxiety and depression. Which, might I remind everyone, had a solution of "idk lock them up I guess" until about 40 years ago.

“Ah! I see you’ve got the machine that goes PING!”

https://youtu.be/VQPIdZvoV4g?si=19OCFyMXkpS96RWe

For that matter, American Science is fighting for its life too.

Getting a sql query to optimal performance is still much more of an art than a specific science. Having the LLM generate a query that appears to work (correctness issues aside), is much more likely than the LLM generating an optimal performing query. While this may not matter for one-off queries common in analytics, when you start worrying about scalability, even the tiniest tweaks can make a huge difference.

I wonder how hard these would be to steal?

The new head of the FAA promises to make flying safe again by getting rid of minority and women pilots.

Don't worry, us taxpayers will cover the damage.

Several hotels I've stayed in recently charged an "amenities" fee. When I asked what amenities one said it was for the free wifi and use of the lounge.

Check out this guy's work: https://bleuje.com/animationsite/2023_1/

The same artist has some excellent tutorials on how to implement a lot of those effects: https://bleuje.com/tutorials/

I have been looking for such an in depth tutorial on generative art for ages. It's decided, tomorrow is a day off for me to explore Processing.

Thanks!

Very cool. Instant follow. I also like: https://www.instagram.com/davebeesbombs/

Amazing.

It seems he did not share any source code, though.

This is incredible, thank you for sharing

awesome, thank you !

Wow. Thanks.

lovely