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efsavage commented on Levels of Agentic Engineering   bassimeledath.com/blog/le... · Posted by u/bombastic311
efsavage · 2 days ago
Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8.

I think eventually 4-8 will be collapsed behind a more capable layer that can handle this stuff on its own, maybe I tinker with MCP settings and granular control to minmax the process, but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry about it any more than I worry about how many threads my compiler is using.

efsavage commented on Ask HN: How to be alone?    · Posted by u/sillysaurusx
rfc3092 · 4 days ago
To get things out of the way: yes it is hard being alone. But it is also hard to be with someone and is very hard to take care of kids and family and such. And it is waaay harder to be with wrong person. There are no easy roads in life and being single is one of the easiest.

Now I’ll focus on practical advise:

- gym every day. No excuses. If you don’t know what to do or lack motivation- get a personal trainer.

- besides gym pick an active “hobby”. Cycling, rollerblading, running, skiing, surfing etc. You need self-supporting way to spend time outdoors. Again: do seek instruction.

- learn to play music. It is very healing and rewarding. Also frustrating and hard. Guess what? Take classes. Joining (community) school is great. Getting into local band is amazing. Most importantly here: you do not need to talk to these people. Same goes for drawing studio.

- professional education. Maybe you always wanted to be CPA?

- deep and challenging activities: sailing, diving, flying, mountaineering etc

- checklist reading, movie watching

- study textbooks

- systematic traveling

- volunteer

- build things with your hands and give them away

- learn to recognize your emotional state and how it changes.

My “qualifications”: I was single for ~10+10 years.

efsavage · 3 days ago
Those are all great things to do, but I don't think OP needs to do more things, they need to do different things. The biggest thing that jumped out was that they know they need to be with people but work remote and with a huge time shift.

My top advice would be to get an in-person job, even that means less money or moving, or just pivoting to a new industry. Even better find a job where people are your business so you're not pinning everything on socializing with co-workers. The people I know who are like this do jobs where they have to meet/find customers, coordinate people and teams, do on-site projects, etc. They are energized and fulfilled by these interactions even if the job itself isn't that important to them.

efsavage commented on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services   neilzone.co.uk/2026/03/im... · Posted by u/speckx
efsavage · 9 days ago
I think there should be an option to assume I'm a child and proceed from there. If I want access to any mature content or real identify related stuff, I'll verify, but if your service doesn't have or need that anyways then there's no reason to prove I'm an adult.
efsavage commented on Uber is turning data about trips and takeout into insights for marketers   businessinsider.com/uber-... · Posted by u/sethops1
SoftTalker · 3 months ago
Not really. Cable TV started as a better way for people to get OTA channels when they were in marginal reception areas. My family had cable TV in the 1970s and it was a maybe eight or ten OTA channels and except for the PBS station they all had commercials, between shows and during shows.

HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.

efsavage · 3 months ago
Interesting, I grew up in an area with good reception, so the pitch was definitely fewer commercials on the cable channels (HBO, Nickelodeon, MTV), I remember standing in the living room as the salesman said this. It was true for a while, but eventually they caught up to OTA ad loads.
efsavage commented on Uber is turning data about trips and takeout into insights for marketers   businessinsider.com/uber-... · Posted by u/sethops1
dfxm12 · 3 months ago
So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
efsavage · 3 months ago
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...
efsavage commented on Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public   ft.com/content/3254fa30-5... · Posted by u/GeorgeWoff25
IncreasePosts · 3 months ago
Yes, those using the tools use the tools, but I don't really see those developers absolutely outpacing the rest of developers who do it the old fashioned way still.
efsavage · 3 months ago
I think you're definitely right, for the moment. I've been forcing myself to use/learn the tools almost exclusively for the past 3-4 months and I was definitely not seeing any big wins early on, but improvement (of my skills and the tools) has been steady and positive, and right now I'd say I'm ahead of where I was the old-fashioned way, but on an uneven basis. Some things I'm probably still behind on, others I'm way ahead. My workflow is also evolving and my output is of higher quality (especially tests/docs). A year from now I'll be shocked if doing nearly anything without some kind of augmented tooling doesn't feel tremendously slow and/or low-quality.
efsavage commented on Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public   ft.com/content/3254fa30-5... · Posted by u/GeorgeWoff25
Lionga · 3 months ago
Dario Amodei gives of strong Adam Neumann vibes. He claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago...
efsavage · 3 months ago
It was "writing 90% of the code", which seems to be pretty accurate, if not conservative, for those keeping up with the latest tools.
efsavage commented on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering   tomwphillips.co.uk/2025/1... · Posted by u/tomwphillips
simonw · 4 months ago
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule.

Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you complain about water usage I think it risks discrediting the rest of your argument.

(Aside from that I agree with most of this piece, the "AGI" thing is a huge distraction.)

UPDATE an hour after posting this: I may be making an ass of myself here in that I've been arguing in this thread about comparisons between data center usage and agricultural usage of water, but that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes.

I still think the way these numbers are usually presented - as scary large "gallons of water" figures with no additional context to help people understand what that means - is an anti-pattern.

efsavage · 4 months ago
The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

efsavage commented on Apple’s Persona technology uses Gaussian splatting to create 3D facial scans   cnet.com/tech/computing/a... · Posted by u/dmarcos
pksebben · 4 months ago
Came this close to buying an AVP, before learning that they only mirror a single screen with no virtual monitors.

Like, guize, c'mon. Virtual desktop can do three. For 3.5k you gotta do better. I don't particularly need a virtual me in space as much as I need more screens that can do, like, actual work.

efsavage · 4 months ago
I've always used 2-3 monitors pretty comfortably but with high latency AI agents adding more concurrency to my workflows I'm feeling very crowded. I would love a VR experience with an arbitrary number of screens/windows as well as more clearly separated environments (like having a visually different virtual office per project) that I can quickly switch between.

u/efsavage

KarmaCake day2702September 2, 2009View Original