Given the capitalist nature of this country, all it would take is the top 10 richest people here to put the government back in its place. Really that’s it – that billionaires lunch and dinner pictures you see from White House – those very few folks in that dining room – all they need to do is to collectively say STFU. But you know and I know they won’t.
Macro
It’s been exactly two months now since I left my cushy “safe-ish” job in my last company to come here and it’s been a hard two months of not just ramping up on a space that I don’t know much, but also dealing with effects of a terrible political environment, lack of trust in teams and overall morale which took a hit with layoffs that happened just a week into my tenure. Now within last two weeks a new situation has emerged which does not involve me but the effect of the outcome is going to mightily impact me, including one of the very reasons why I joined this company in first place! Of course hindsight is 20/20 and I nor others had any insight into these things, but last night I was like remind me again why I left my relatively stable job in a lousy economy to come here! It is true however that I have had the most amount of learning I could have had in the last 2 months that I didn’t for a year but gosh increasingly feeling itchy about choosing risk over safety of my job.
What a kaput of a day – nothing needed to close today. Even my gym that rarely ever closes shut down today coz of impending doom. Schools could have been all day. I get that we will have winds later tonight but even that prediction has gone weaker than it was supposed to be. In this age of AI and tech available the fact that meteorologists simply couldn’t figure this one out is quite remarkable. Like entire area shut down here today.
We get a lot of shitty weather but it’s not often that weather people sound alarms as they are about tomorrow – which begets the qn – why aren’t the schools closed for tomorrow? If schools can shut down for 2-3” inches of snow here well in advance, tomorrow’s weather sounds legit concerning enough to close.
Yesterday at dinner in restaurant my teen was like one she moves out of house we shouldn’t expect to see her beyond a few times a year. I was like wouldn’t you want to meet us more than a couple of times? Her response it’s not like you meet your parents more than once in two years so I am perfectly ok meeting you all a few times a year. I know this is all part of teenage growing up but I have to admit it stung a little. We explained to her that both our parents and us sacrificed this part of our lives so we were hoping it will not be the same with her to which she replied “we will see!”. This kid 🙄🤷♂️
I don’t know how MacBook Neo is going to work as it’s promised. We have a home M2 macbok air that barely keeps up with just browsing and extremely basic photo editing through photos app. Surely it has to be far worse? I will say though our Mac was far faster and better without Tahoe. Tahoe is a wrench alright.
At one point it used to be cheap to rent camera and lenses for your trips. It was a good way to try out a fancy camera + lens combination for a week or so and figure out what you liked. Now? There are no serious options in market so lens rental, the default rental place for camera is frigging expensive! A 10 day rental of lumix s9 with a lens is almost 300 bucks?! That’s like nearly 30% of the value of a new kit anyway – I might as well just buy the new kit in that case. So stupid. I hope these companies shut down.
It’s insane that there is a partial government shutdown happening which means tsa agents have been working without pay for a month but this country can also spend more than a billion a day on a useless war. If this happened in India there would general strikes and bharat bandhs galore with violence on streets against the govt. Americans are truly remarkable people.
I am aware the same argument will work in reverse too if data science wanted product management time. I am also fairly certain AI will do a pretty good job of my job too. We are truly in a different territory here and if you are in tech you should at this point really think through how you can use AI to augment and keep you a step ahead of it as long as you can.
I gave a page long prompt to internal ai tool to do some deep discovery and do data analysis on given data. It’s been 15 minutes and it’s still doing its analysis. It’s tempting to think this is so slow, but I know that if I have the same problem to my data science team they would give me a 2 week estimate to come with analysis. Why would I go to my data science team?