Can vouch for the nomad. Battery is about 6 months and can be wirelessly recharged in a day. Speaker is a bit quiet but functional. Updates reliably and frequently.
I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $
I agree: Curiosity is not enough, you also need the time to explore it without easier dopamine rewards to distract you. It's quite ironic how having money can end up hurting you here as you can afford whatever entertainment you want.
I probably wouldn't be an engineer now if it weren't for poverty. I was in my twenties living with my mom, working part time for an educational center and though I enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling, it wasn't anything that could sustain me long term.
Then my mom goes, you can live with me for another year, after that you're on your own.
Asked my dad, a software engineer, if he could teach me how to do what he does. He recommended a boot camp and I learned enough to get an entry level role, and still here I am, ten years later.
I 100% agree. My parents were both disabled. A malpractice lawsuit left us with a little windfall. My parents saw where the future was going and bought me my first computer. Being poor made it so I had a lot of free time as a little kid, so I learned that machine inside and out. I made my own games. I troubleshooted any hardware problem, learning as I went. After getting the internet, things took off from there.
If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.
If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.
You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.
Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF). Don't sell investments when the market crashes, just ride it out (assuming you bought diversified fund). Don't stock pick, it's largely gambling and 99% of people can't beat the market doing it. If you must stock pick, do at most, 5% of your investments.
Avoid actively managed/high fee mutual funds/ETFs. Research clearly shows, long term they do worse then the market. (And if there is an active fund that does end up beating the market long term, you have no way of knowing which fund that would be ahead of time)
The Millionaire Next Door is a great book, and gives a good perspective on money.
If anyone here is interested, Google the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
Even just doing the first 2 letters, Financial Independence, would be huge, and give you way more flexibility.
When/if you retire early, keep doing things to keep your mind and body active. Most people who retire stop doing the things that kept them healthy, and there body deteriorates quickly (with xyz illnesses).
The sad true is that, for many, work forces them to do the basics to keep your body running ok.
But what's the point of it being long-term? I want fuck-off money right now. What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house and everyone and everything I cared about is long gone?
Why do I want to have a million in the bank by age 70 if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?
How old are you ? I used to espouse similar view but now that I am past 40, I regret not starting investing in my 20 and see myself living well into my 80's.
That punk-ish no future mentality usually dampen past 30-35!
I wonder if you'll view things differently again once you start deteriorating mentally and physically. Fact is that the median person does not live well into their 80s and many of those that do will be severely limited in what they can do during those final years.
This is true. On the other hand, I've found myself lately starting to wane a little bit the other way. Let me explain. I'm doing ok, because I got involvednin the FIRE movement early and invested early. Now about to be 40, and having a couple kids, I've realized that so long as I have no debt and good security (enough to see my kids into adulthood) then what is the money for??? To be clear, I haven't started spending my retirement money yet, but I already know I'm never going to quit working. So.... I don't know, you know?
Maybe you will. But probably whatever stopped you from doing it today and made you push it away for years will feel the same tomorrow, the same next year and at age 30 and 35, saying "if I'm going to kill myself by 40-45" and then "by 50-55".
Not always and not everyone, people do suicide, but consider there's 37 million people in poverty in the USA, 18 million with cancer, and a lot more with shit lives in various ways - chronic diseases, disabilities, lost loves, hopeless futures, victims of horrors - and out of that vast amount of misery the USA has "only" 50,000 suicides annually. Much less than I might guess from the numbers. Bodies are 4 billion years of survival machines and they don't quit easily and that includes mental trickery as well as physical resilience[1].
I thought I would commit suicide as a teen. I planned it and tried in my teens and twenties. I thought I would force it in my thirties. Did "it get better"? No not really, mildly worse in several ways. Is the world better for me staying around? No, not really. Did I discover a hope for a brighter future? Maybe[2] but not a strong one. Maybe I'm discovering a bit more selfishness and less obligation to do what other people demand.
The years are going by faster now and "the rest of my life" doesn't seem so long. Interesting ideas are still interesting, books are still readable, work is still available, death is coming whether we hurry it or fight it.
> "What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house"
Pay for your healthcare so you can still leave the house, or pay for home help if you can't.
In that 5 years your industry would have left you behind :( unfortunately. Unless you do the type of job that allows this style of living but afaik, it's not tech.
I don't know. I just had a break for approx 3 years with very limited access to the internet. Absolutely nothing has changed. AI is now useful, but it doesn't operate differently than before.
My very good colleague who was absolutely brilliant statistician shared his wisdom: Max the now, min the future.
He focused on the present but hated work, it was utterly boring to him, even if objectively the work benefited humanity. One day he quit and never came back. He spent his time learning to dance salsa. He was in his mid to late twenties.
Of course he was an extreme case. But his zen is important to take and balance together with future planning.
I think you can do both, aim for fuck off money but put aside a little bit for the future.
Edit: if youre wondering what happend to him - he's studying electrical engineering because I suspect he's aiming to not be behind a desk.
> Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money
This is great advice anyway, even if you were born poor/working class. With the added proviso that you should be paying down your debt, highest interest rate first, since that will have far higher returns than your average investment. Also make sure that you have enough liquid cash set aside that you'll be able to deal quickly and completely with any issues that might come up; this makes a significant difference to your ability to live and work stress-free.
> Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF).
i despise stock markets, investments etc., so i just kind of have accepted that i'll probably never grow my money passively. from time to time i stumble across advice like yours, talking about ETFs, and feel a bit left out again.
money just sits in my bank account with close to 0% interest. i know that ETFs would slowly generate more money, but i also know that my money would then be invested in a ton of companies i absolutely don't want to be a part of, even when considering that my sums would be a drop in an ocean.
There are ETFs that specifically exclude companies with lots of negative externalities (no Exxon, etc.). The term to look for is "socially responsible".
a bit ironic to recommend a "socially responsible" ETF, managed by the one and only UBS.
but you're right, i forgot that my socially responsible bank claims to have socially responsible ETFs. i just hope that they are actually socially responsible, and not "socially responsible".
lots of things claim to be socially, ecologically or otherwise responsible, but that's exactly my issue. they're claims, most of the time just [insert color]washing.
I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.
Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."
Not sure I follow, you were afraid of being a "nerd" and dialed your ambitions to try to be "cooler"?
"because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in."
I think usually it's the other way around, or I'm not understanding this correctly. I was best at math in my class from grades 5 through 12 but never felt "awkward" because of it, rather I felt proud. Which is also wrong but I digress
Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.
People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.
Many people have this potential but it doesn't necessarily materialize or evolves. That's fine, that's okay. We'll always have Paris. The trick is to be fulfilled, not renowned.
I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.
The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.
Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.
VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.
Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.
I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.
Maybe 20 years ago but there is too much empirical data across multiple countries and environments now.
Assuming our cost for care drops commiserate to what's been seen in other countries we could use the saving to increase merit scholarships for the contributing young as a introductory form of UBI.
Doctors are the primary and most numerous beneficiary of the American status quo. And have you seen the houses they live in? In 99% of America, doctors live in the nicest biggest houses there are in town. What's more, doctors are politically and socially untouchable. Even saying what I've said will probably have people itching to respond that doctors earned their huge salaries, that medical bankruptcies are completely unrelated, that doctors actually have little political power, that some doctoring organization has released some feel-good vague statements about fixing the system (but nonetheless not actually financially backed the candidates that might fix it), etc. How doctors are actually the victims and it's all the insurance companies, even though doctors have way more political and social sway than insurance corps. How doctors are the victims of the executive leadership of hospitals, even though those executives are usually MDs as well..
How can the problem be fixed if we don't even talk about it? How do you even negotiate with, "Yeah but you're going to need a doctor some day, so you better not be critical of them in any regard." ?
Strictly from a realpolitik standpoint, universal healthcare like the systems found in Europe is unlikely to happen because too much of the American economy is tied up in healthcare and healthcare services. People trying to improve the system here in the US would be better served by looking for a fix that's uniquely American (ACA, all-payer rates, public option, etc.), rather than trying to tear out what we have and replace it with universal healthcare.
Mandatory disclaimer that I don't like our health insurance or healthcare prices any more than anybody else does, and in a perfect world I'd love to have universal healthcare instead.
Neither party is interested in amending the Constitution, which would be necessary, and even if they were, the country is so deeply divided that it would likely be unsuccessful except maybe to knock a few inalienable rights off the list.
> How about fixing the government so it can’t be shut down because a few hundred politicians can’t agree on the next budget?
"Thanks I'm cured" material. You're not the first person to think of that, and the fact that it hasn't been done yet probably means it can't be done very easily.
> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.
Single payer / universal healthcare ≠ doctors/nurses are government employees (necessarily).
You go to your local health care provider, show your card, and received treatment. The single payer (government) then gets billed and money is transferred to the providers account.
If the government is shutdown, there could be a delay in payment in outstanding bills, but that does not mean health care providers shutdown. Medicare ran during the last shutdown:
It's possible for some of that to continue, but we really don't know what would happen if we directly connect payrolls and finances of the healthcare industry to the federal government in the US. It's a fair question how such a big connection would suffer when the government is punitively closed in a faustian bargain as part of a political struggle, as seems to be common recently.
There might be a few top-down emergency provisions to ensure checks go out to keep the system from toppling, but I wouldn't work if my pay is frozen and neither would my plumber, electrician, lawyer, etc. The last few shutdowns have run over a month - that can easily exceed the cash reserves of most businesses (that would be providers) and large businesses would shutter or have layoffs before burning that much cash.
We can't be so confident in how a $5T/year system would react if its primary cash flow valve is turned off, is all. Handwaving away the scope and complexity doesn't help anything.
Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons. It's not about the model of provision, it's about whether the sector itself is sustainable. U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.
>Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons.
> healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation
Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.
And regulation is lacking in Health Insurance and enforcement is lacking in healthcare. (So many doctors that have committed malpractice just switch hospitals.
> U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.
Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.
So please stop with these right wing baby bird food regurgitation.
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.
There’s a crazy amount of corruption in the healthcare space. Some of the medical fraud busts that come out every year have staggeringly large sums attached. In some areas there are still schemes that openly recruit poor people to use their information to bill for medical care that is not actually necessary or provided. It’s wild.
> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.
Sorry, the world isn’t so simple that you can pick your villains (insurance companies and private equity) and declare everyone else to be free from blame. There’s a lot of bad behavior in these systems at every level. Yes, including some doctors.
If we removed insurance overhead entirely, your healthcare costs wouldn’t change more than a few percent. It’s amazing that everyone united against insurance companies as the cause of high healthcare costs when they barely take a few percent of the overall spend.
> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.
It is actually the opposite.
UnitedHealth, one of the 'worst' insurers in terms of denials, has a profit margin of ~5% [0]. It is mainly the providers that overcharge, under the guise of "the less and lower we bill, the less and lower insurance pays us".
Insurance only works if there is at least as much going into the pot as is going out. What do you think would happen if insurances weren't denial hawks?
Get angry at your doctor for overcharging you whilst using insurance companies as the heel.
The reason UnitedHealth has such a low profit margin is that their profit margin is capped by the ACA's Medical Loss Ratio provision. They fraudulently get diagnoses for their insured patients to upcode and incur more charges to Medicare Advantage that they can collect their profit from. Any doctor could have told you this has been going on for years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=UnitedHealthmedicare+advanta...
If the government were the insurer, it would not have the same incentives to commit this fraud.
As a person who moved to US from Europe recently I can say that prices charged by US healthcare providers are ridiculous - all overpriced 10-20x compared to my home country.
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.
¿Por qué no los dos? Guess what, it's a lot more likely that insurance companies will go corrupt if what they interact with - healthcare - is corrupt.
> private equity, not doctors and hospitals.
Guess what is limiting private equity's ability to compete amongst themselves in expanding the effective provision of healthcare and driving costs lower for the ultimate stakeholders i.e. patients? That's right: doctors, hospitals (including those that are nominally not-for-profit, but where the profits just turn into salary for those who can control that flow of money) and government regulation throughout the sector.
No, they could not have, based on the voting records of the previous 30 years of the federal US Congress. Even what they have passed only by the skin on their teeth.
The only federal wealth redistribution policy in the US in my lifetime of almost 4 decades only had a 6 month window of passing in 2009. And half the population still hates it, and has worked and succeeded at gutting major parts of it.
Even better you can have both like a lot of countries in Europe. The access to public healthcare also keeps the premium down. Extensive cover for a family of four is less than 200 in Spain a month out of pocket.
Actually in Spain Social Security is 30 to 40% of what you earn. From the remainder 60% it is up to 50% in IRPF taxes, so you could pay 70% of what you earn.
The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.
Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.
Oh don't get me started on the taxes. Just the solidarity tax they added from the younger generation to the pensioners makes my blood boil. How about cutting the top pensions and returning some of the money to the bottom of pile instead. The tax regime is also destroying small independent businesses.
But we have at least the option of additional private coverage and it is not crazy expensive like in the US.
Abortion is currently too divisive in the US to get a national health care system going. One side will absolutely refuse to include it and the other will absolutely require it. If one side brute forces it there will be immense backlash.
Along similar lines it isn't clear that having the federal government controlling healthcare at a more fundamental level is a good idea. Many (most?) would shudder at the thought of this administration controlling healthcare.
Do you think it's nature that people are born without it, or nurture that everyone has it and it's squashed by early upbringing, conformity, rules, and "don't do that", schooling, punishments, rushed and disinterested parents?
(I think it's a thing that introducing money changes intrinsic motivation into money-driven motivation and can ruin it. And that might also happen for children for other rewards - praise, sweets, dessert, etc.)
Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.
If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.
EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.
It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.
Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
Fraud implies intent, either intent to deceive or intentionally negligent.
If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:
A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or
B) Knowingly publish falsified data
Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").
Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.
The claim is that this would qualify as fraud, which is also illegal.
If you do a search for "contractor imprisoned for fraud" you'll find plenty of cases where a private contract dispute resulted in criminal convictions for people who took money and then didn't do the work.
I don't know if taking money and then merely pretending to do the research would rise to the level of criminal fraud, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
> I've always been a bit skeptical of JS charting libs that want to bring the entire data to the client and do the rendering there, vs at least having the option to render image tiles on the server and then stream back tooltips and other interactive elements interactively.
I agree, unfortunately no library I've found supports this. I currently SSR plots to SVG using observable plot and JSDom [0]. This means there is no javascript bundle, but also no interactivity, and observable doesn't have a method to generate a small JS sidecar to add interactivity. I suppose you could progressive enhance, but plot is dozens of kilobytes that I'd frankly rather not send.
I’ve had a lot of success rendering svg charts via Airbnb’s visx on top of React Server Components, then sprinkling in interactivity with client components. Worth looking into if you want that balance.
It’s more low level than a full charting library, but most of it can run natively on the server with zero config.
I’ve always found performance to be kind of a drag with server side dom implementations.
There's no question that it's a huge step up in complexity to wire together such tightly-linked front and backend components, but it is done for things like GIS, where you want data overlays.
I think it's just a different mindset; GIS libs like Leaflet kind of assume they're the centerpiece of the app and can dictate a bunch of structure around how things are going to work, whereas charting libs benefit a lot more from "just add me to your webpack bundle and call one function with an array and a div ID, I promise not to cause a bunch of integration pain!"
Last time I tried to use it for dashboarding, I found Kibana did extremely aggressive down-sampling to the point that it was averaging out the actual extremes in the data that I needed to see.
I am not aware of studies, but my experience agrees with this and I see nothing surprising in it.
In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades.
The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
I dropped out as soon as I could, I have ADD and school was the most excruciatingly painful thing I've ever experienced mentally. It felt like my entire life purpose was about waiting for it to finally end.
I enjoyed discovering new things and learning stuff that genuinely was interesting to me. Howeverlearning what a "big rock" symbol was in a map in geography class was the kind of stuff that made me want to chew my own arm for stimulation.
Plus not to mention having to accept wrong things as right because the teacher lacks the information and is just reading off a book.
I never did homework, except for a handful of times.
I spent my time programming and learning about industry stuff in the tech scene.
And I love working, because you're actually like building towards something, not just "trust me, this'll be valuable later on" (which my brain can't interpret as a motivator)
I envy those that get excited about acquiring credentials and getting formally educated about this and that, it's a way easier way to live in this world.
I taught myself how to program as a teenager by… programming. While I didn’t have an academic background, I was perfectly capable of contributing to OSS and working. Rarely ever did I think “I wish I had a degree to do this.” The little bit of academics I did need I also self taught, like time complexity. The only case really where the degree may be helpful is leetcode type interview questions where you need to know the algorithm.
So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.
There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.
The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
> Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast
I really like this thought. We used to take pride in elegant solutions and architectural designs. Now, in the era of shipping fast and AI, this has been disregarded. Redundancy is everywhere, spaghetti is normalized. AI code has always been unsettling for me and I think this is why.
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