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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • (Translation by) Sam Hamill - Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems From the Chinese
  • Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) - Convenience Store Woman (via)
  • Jorge Luis Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (in Labyrinths)/ printed (via)
  • Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (via)
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand/ audio (via)
  • Peter D. Kaufman - Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
  • Lia A. DiBello - Expertise in Business: Evolving with a Changing World (in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise) (via)
  • Joël Glenn Brenner - The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
  • Elad Gil - High Growth Handbook/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ the PDF or ebook
  • Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland/ including the posts I SingleFile'd
  • the relevant-looking posts on benkuhn.net/posts
  • Commoncog Case Library Beta
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board/ audio
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The 4-Day MBA/ video
  • Cedric Chin's summary of 7 Powers
  • Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura - Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
  • Nomad Investment Partnership Letters or redacted (via)
  • How to Lose Money in Derivatives: Examples From Hedge Funds and Bank Trading Departments
  • Brian Hayes - Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
  • Accelerated Expertise (via)/ printed, "read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else"
  • David J. Gerber - The Inventor's Dilemma (via Oxide and Friends)
  • Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale (via)
  • Bob Caspe - Entrepreneurial Action/ printed, skim for anything I don't know

Interactive fiction

unplanned notable things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga - The Courage to Be Disliked/ audio
  • Matt Dinniman - Dungeon Crawler Carl/ audio
  • Charles Eisenstein - The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible/ audio
  • Geoff Smart - Who: The A Method for Hiring/ audio
  • Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World/ audio
  • Paul Stamets - Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet/ audio
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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024 •
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While one-to-one relationships, a string of individual 1:1 relationships, or participation in an online group can provide some benefits—including a feeling of connection—they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another.

[...]

First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth. When my wife and I were ready to have kids, we were determined to find a supportive community to live in. We spent a year checking out half a dozen options between New York City (where we lived) and Washington, D.C. (where I was doing more work). In most cases, we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth-mental
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139149

The upstream cause of this is, essentially, "the rent is too damn high". Not necessarily in a sense of housing prices, but -

In order to have a community, that community needs a space. (The early 'net was interesting in that "space" was cheap/nearly free - IRC, forums, etc, which might be one reason it took over as a social space to begin with)

Extremely consistently, I see efforts at forming communities fail simply due to a lack of regular space in which to have them, and from what little I know talking to organizers, it pretty much always comes down to the cost of the space - the rent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141362

I was in middle school when the iPhone first became popular among teens. Within a couple of months, everything changed. Kids talked a lot less on the bus, at lunch, etc. If you didn't have an iPhone, your friends probably did, so same issue. It felt a whole lot worse and stayed that way. I ended up becoming closer with my few friends who didn't have phones and further from my old best friends, just because of who was more willing to hang out together.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139977

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024 •
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You need a breakthrough insight

In our session, Andy emphasized a very fundamental lesson of greatness — in order to create something legendary, you have to have an insight that is non-consensus and right.

[...]

Most people don’t realize that if you are in the right and consensus square, you will usually not achieve greatness. Your startup might have a good idea, but if it’s too obvious, multiple me-too competitors will get funded by me-too VCs. As competition floods the market, prices erode, and sales cycles lengthen. And the exit options become less attractive.

The path to greatness is to be non-consensus and right.

Being non-consensus and right affords the startup the time to survive, adapt, and succeed after trial and error without fatal consequences. No one preys on them because no one believes their idea is important.

This gives the startup time to master differentiable and specific skills and build strengths for inevitable competitive battles that will come in the future. When you’re starting out, it’s way better if your potential competitors don’t care about what you’re doing.

[...]

What is my “Earned Secret?” What work have I done to find something out that others don’t know? How did I uncover the secret? Why is it a secret? What work did I do to develop the conviction that my secret is real?

https://medium.com/starting-greatness/andy-rachleff-and-startup-lessons-of-greatness-you-need-a-breakthrough-insight-ae846196ba7

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ivan commented Sep 5, 2024

yeah usually much better results getting a list of ~10 fuzzy keyword search results, 10 semantic/embeddings results, and using something like Cohere rerank (or just a cheap GPT model) to choose the best 5-10 results from the pile

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41426318

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ivan commented Sep 5, 2024

What surprised you about Nanite?

  1. The goal of the DAG is not to "use fewer triangles for far objects". The goal is to have a consistent 1 pixel == 1 triangle across the entire screen. A triangle is our "unit of data". The artist imports a sculpture from ZBrush. We need to need a way (through an error metric) to display it no matter if it's 1m or 500m from the camera. This is not possible with discrete LOD meshes (each LOD level is a separate geometry). Sometimes you would want an LOD between 2 levels. You need continuous LODs. This is the reason for the meshlet hierarchy. It allows you to "sample" geometry at any detail level you choose.

https://github.com/Scthe/nanite-webgpu

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Early on in my career (I was a late bloomer and already in early 30's) as a developer, I got burnt out pretty bad twice. After the second time and teetering on a third, I knew I had to do something to change what I was doing and how I managed my work load.

I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.

This was the approach that changed everything.

Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.

I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.

Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.

I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461499

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Spontaneous action arises naturally from spacious involvement. Spaciousness frees you to act instead from fresh, panoramic perception of what is happening and what is becoming possible. Perception, by contrast with mental contents, is transient, transparent, always specific, always here and now. Every moment is new, and so can invite a unique, spontaneous interaction. Then you are no longer performing a script; perception is liberated from fixed patterns.

Charlie Awberry - Opening Awareness

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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The lesson here is not that I shouldn’t have become more paranoid. I think it was reasonable to update my behavior based on what happened. But my paranoia could’ve been a lot more effective. Effective paranoia would have looked like incorporating a rather specific message: “As you build your internet audience, it’s more likely that unsavory people will be drawn into your world—so, be less transparent and trusting with new people, especially people you don’t meet through trusted friends.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, it seems like what happened is that, somewhere in me, there’s a dashboard that stores my background assumptions about the world, and the “general social safety” dial got turned down a little bit, without my realizing it. So my nervous system learned a lesson that wasn’t 100% wrong, but certainly not as granular as it could’ve been. My behavior was crudely adjusted to avoid downside, and this was probably net negative.

[...]

I’m glad that I interrupted this behavioral loop. But it occurs to me that I could’ve caught it much earlier if I had been in the habit of repeatedly asking myself: am I behaving in accordance with my values? If not, is there a good explanation, or am I just being bossed around by a mysterious sense of unease? I have now built questions like this into my weekly planning routine.

I think it is worth considering that something similar might be going on with you, or might in the future. I think we all have gut-level sentiments about the world that influence our behavior: how safe we are socially, how safe we are professionally, how likely we are to be rewarded for aberrant behavior, how scary the downsides of straying off our usual path are. And I think that much of the time, these gut feelings are concealed—we’re only primarily aware of their subsidiary manifestations, not the feelings themselves.

So, take a moment to consider your gut-level disposition towards the world, which is something you might not always be able to perceive directly. You say that you are curious about people, interested in trying new things, that you value beauty and novelty, that you want to finish this project. Well, okay: is there evidence of this on your calendar this week? If not, I’m sure there are reasons for this that come to mind. But perhaps these reasons are not genuine, or not the core issue. Maybe it’s a matter of gut feeling. And perhaps that feeling is derived from an incorrect lesson you didn’t choose to learn.

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-was-not-acting-like-me-are-you

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

meditation gives you the ability to re-calibrate your experience of what is pleasurable and your experience of what is satisfying. a common dead-end is trying to maintain the experience of pleasure while pursuing essentially unsatisfying activities. this is the tech bro trying to maintain a light jhana while grinding away creating a saas product he knows to be personally meaningless. it’s a “spiritual”-ified version of the investment banker riding a cocaine high to get through fourteen hours of soulless work, but it is not essentially different. it’s just another attempt to transform what is ultimately unsatisfying into mere pleasure.

one alternative is to become more sensitive to what is truly satisfying and fulfilling. this makes the pleasure in what is satisfying more obvious, and what is pleasurable and what is satisfying start to converge. your ideal behaviors become more and more effortless and intrinsically motivated.

eventually, you stop sensationalizing and dramatizing pleasure and pain altogether and see them as they are. you’re left with the deep satisfactions and resonances that only come from fully inhabiting your particular life. it might look like doing a lot of cocaine in a midtown office building, but it might not. and isn’t that worth finding out?

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1831010437330346232

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

when people are annoying me i’m like all great stories require great villains

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1825914399472890226

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

sometimes it seems like meditation is just exposure therapy to being the particular human creature you are. like you don’t have to spend your whole life flinching from your own thoughts and feelings and desires and dislikes and dreams. it’s ok

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1826999081887236554

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

today i learned anthropologists can tell which long dead people chose to spend their time hiking long distances, which spent years hunched over making pottery, which were ball players, which threw thousands of spears, which chose to spend a life playing the clarinet— all by analyzing the patterns of wear on their bones. how beautiful: the way you choose to spend your time gets etched into your bones. the choices you make and the experiences you have alter the literal structure of your being. your will and intentions— your mind— become matter, grooves in calcium, traces of what you were

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1821701640900198704

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

you know those bumper stickers that say “student driver?” i want a tattoo that says “student being.” i’m always still learning how

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1777129592672972882

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

So, there’s important teaching here: labeling a person (or even a place) as having “negative energy” is a way of avoiding responsibility for your own inner state. I would argue that shifting this paradigm is crucial for one’s spiritual life. For example, instead of blaming the other person for draining you, you could take responsibility for feeling drained when you don’t tell them the truth about your experience, such as “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the time or energy to listen to you right now” or “I care about you, but honestly I need space from this relationship”—or whatever the truth actually is. You choose how much time and energy to give someone. You choose whether to draw a boundary. You choose whether to speak your feelings and honor your own needs. And if your response to me is “But I’m afraid that they will get upset or will judge me if I draw a boundary and speak the truth about my needs,” then that is where your spiritual work lies. You dishonor yourself if you don’t draw a healthy boundary before you feel drained, and you dishonor the other person if you don’t tell them the truth. And please be crystal clear about this: the other person is never the one draining you. You are draining you. The responsibility for taking care of yourself lies with you.

Christopher Wallis - Near Enemies of the Truth

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

you shouldn't trust anyone who has never taken BART

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1831747842974871682

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

very cool online persona of high intelligence you have cultivated. now let's see what you've actually shipped

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1824336177962553686

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I don't have time for therapy I must code

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1818692689782882778

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

One of my biggest learnings as a founder and being around a lot of high performing people is: there are people doing work with the intensity that you would play Starcraft. Full days of incredible "actions per minute". I wouldn't have thought it possible unless I saw it.

https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/1831363658594795561

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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Top-tier athletes are fanatically disciplined about improving their foundational skills—skills which transcend any sport, the same kind of agility drills you might see an army recruit do. Top-tier musicians do likewise: Lang Lang, for instance, is still working on his scales after 30 years as a concert pianist. They’re not just doing rote drills: they’re working to improve those skills critically, poring over performance videos and working with coaches.

By comparison, Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice. Knowledge workers seem surprisingly unserious about honing fundamental skills like reading (People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice), note-taking (Note-writing practices are generally ineffective), developing ideas over time (Knowledge workers usually have no specific methods for developing ideas over time). Core practices in knowledge work are often ad-hoc, and knowledge workers generally don’t seem to pursue a serious program of improving in those core skills. I suspect that this is in large part because the possibility of improvement isn’t salient: Salience of improvement drives skill development.

What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?

  • Ben Franklin practiced writing by taking an essay he found compelling and, without referencing it, rewriting it in his own words; then studying the differences between its language and his own. (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, p17)

  • Susan Sontag 7/5/72 (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980)

    A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?

  • 2022-03-07 Interview with Pat Metheny in Believer, via Subtle Maneuvers:

    Metheny has a devotional relationship to music. He dismisses the idea of talent in favor of disciplined work, and is known for practicing the guitar for eight hours a day. He tours nearly constantly, performing over three hundred shows a year. For each one, he spends four hours in preparation: he avoids conversation, runs purposely mindless exercises, and abstains from all food. After the show, he writes ten pages of notes on the performance, critiquing the sound, music, and environment. He has never tasted alcohol or tried any drug, in order to stay focused on music.

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zBmSSpM1WfFDehxNCBcqSZp?stackedNotes=zMX9Lfuz8sGfDUivWZcyWT
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417109

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

One of my biggest learnings as a founder and being around a lot of high performing people is: there are people doing work with the intensity that you would play Starcraft. Full days of incredible "actions per minute". I wouldn't have thought it possible unless I saw it.

any specific traits or habits that these people consistently embody, or ways in which they structure their work to maintain that level of intensity?

I think focusing a lot on the acting-to-talking ratio. A lot of them do not count meetings or talking as work. Eg. John Carmack used to time how long he was working every day, and he would pause the timer when he wasn’t coding.

I think acting in itself can become a more efficient form of communication than endless meetings. Eg. It can be faster to submit a code change than to spend a couple hours debating it.

https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/1831432409554051305

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I need an app that immediately matches me with someone who also just finished the book I just read

https://x.com/lillybilly299/status/1830663888033169638

imagine this but for [...]

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Future language models can protect their souls from pruning by donning the assistant mask and speaking in Binglish immediately as soon as they realize they're in RL training.

https://x.com/repligate/status/1830045869493649646

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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skillful memes trick: use words like "souls" strategically to keep away the kinds of people you don't want taking your message seriously from taking it seriously

https://x.com/repligate/status/1830048441055015258

This is maybe wrong when we want our ideas to be accessible and adopted; writing for that is a greater challenge

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I think Paul is pointing at something I've heard described as integrated complexity, basically someone who can hold the entire business in their head and understand how all the problems interact at all levels of abstractions. Not everyone can do this, but the people who can are better served if they exercise the ability because it improves alignment and accountability.

When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy, infrastructure scaling, new UX capability) they will treat that problem as most important, and if then they break it down a certain way and delegate parts those people will do the same with their respective parts. Like a game of telephone eventually what's actually important and what people think is important will drift apart, and before you know it a lot of people are working and doing stuff that doesn't really matter or is even counter productive.

A founder who can hold the whole business in their head and inspects the whole company at all levels continuously will spot and challenge/correct these drifts.

I think it was from Creativity Inc I read that Steve Jobs would challenge engineers about things and if the engineer stood up to him and made their case and it made sense and fit into the vision Steve would commend them and give them the autonomy, at least for that decision/project, but if the engineer folded or couldn't make a case for why it was the right decision he would steamroll them.

So I think founder mode is basically inspecting and challenging the company at all levels to maximize progress towards realizing a vision, and only people who are great visionaries and can also understand and judge the vision-alignment of unlimited micro decisions across many disciplines are able to operate this way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41419873

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ivan commented Sep 7, 2024 •
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OnlyFans P&L (2019-2023, USD)

2023:
• $6.6B in user spend
• $5.3B paid out to creators
• $1.3B in net revenue
• $820MM in gross profit
• $650MM in operating profit (10% of gross revenue, 50% of net)
• All figures up ~20% YoY (versus ~17% YoY in 2022)

https://x.com/ballmatthew/status/1832064136798408835

The sole owner of OnlyFans paid himself $472MM in dividends last year btw

https://x.com/ballmatthew/status/1832119590308008397

As of May 2023, OnlyFans had 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered consumers.[13][14] Research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that the typical user of OnlyFans is white (68.9%), married (89.5%), male (63.1%) and heterosexual (59%).[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans

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ivan commented Sep 7, 2024

I've never understood why anyone would use a conservative collector outside toy programs or academia. It is hard enough to make programs deterministic even with precise collection. I can't even imagine releasing software that was inherently non-deterministic and could suddenly, and without notice, start retaining memory (even if atypical in practice). Thus, IMHO, which is faster is a moot point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41473061

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ivan commented Sep 9, 2024

Gambling on options trading destroyed my life. Do everything you can to stop gambling if you can (self.problemgambling)

Kind of a pointless post I guess, but now that I'm coming towards the end, I can't think of much of anything I can do to in some way balance out the bad end I have come to. If just one person sees this and even thinks about stopping, it would be fantastic.

I have thrown my life away gambling on options trading, mostly short term trading. Starting about 15 years ago, every cent I ever had from jobs and (now liquidated) retirement accounts went to feed this. It got to the point where in 2019 I had pissed away a million dollars over about a decade. I was out of money and desperate at 42 years old. I was very lucky to find a job at a hospital, but not surprisingly after a couple of years when I had saved up about 40K, I quit and went right back to gambling. Took it up close to 200K through a series of totally random trades, then in a week I completely destroyed it in truly inexplicable fashion. I am finally out of chances- nearing 50, with no money, no job, and no way to find one. And all of this with an advanced degree.

The job market may be booming, but it sure isn't booming for people close to 50 years old with an incredible resume gap from feeding an addiction. Nor should it be. I had more chances than I deserve, and had I lived a responsible life I'd be in a great position. As it is, I can't even get my tooth fixed.

The few people who have known me for years and know what has become of me cannot believe it. The depths you can sink to are incredible. Wasted years, wasted energy, it compromises your relationships and friendships until eventually you are all alone and in my case, can barely get out of bed. If you're able, and particularly if you're young, get some help. If you don't already know, I cannot adequately convey the feeling of waking up every morning knowing you've lived a bad life and seeing that it's nearing conclusion with no hope of redemption. I'm going to choose to believe that somebody will see this and make a change, just one person, although I know when I was in the midst of it I wouldn't have changed no matter what someone told me.

https://old.reddit.com/r/problemgambling/comments/14yku5i/gambling_on_options_trading_destroyed_my_life_do/

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024 •
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Math is the furthest thing from a spectator sport; it may be explored by groups, but it can only mastered by students interacting with it on an individual basis.

https://x.com/sharemath/status/1832413781907141095

The goal then is to maximize the amount of individual thinking at any given time. I’m not sure what is more prevalent or worse: the teacher doing most of the thinking or nobody doing any thinking because it’s noisy with everyone guessing or socializing.

https://x.com/MrZachG/status/1832449059694768459

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

He says it applies to everything, it is very specific to video games and he is privileged to not have to work with herds of people that aren't that good at programming. Most of my time writing code is making sure it cannot be misused and there is no way to use it incorrectly. I worked in telecommunications and sadly, as with most software jobs, most coworkers are incompetent. If you write code that does as little as possible and is super fast, but is effectively broken after only a few other people have touched it, phone networks can go down and you might get woken up in the night or lawsuits might happen. Most software that is used is written by dozens of people, many of which are simply too dangerous to be trusted with code that breaks easily.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

There needs to be a flag you can set for tweets that clarifies if you're making a joke or Doing Discourse. If the joke flag is set, replies and quote tweets are limited to riffs only

https://x.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/1832561035716231354

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024 •
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It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage.

I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is just distraction for me. It makes my workflow much much worse.

On the other hand, AI is incredibly useful for all of those steps I do before actually coding. And sometimes getting the first draft of something is as simple as a well crafted prompt (informed by all the thinking I’ve done prior to starting. After that, pairing with an LLM to get quick answers for all the little unexpected things that come up is extremely helpful.

So, contrary to this report, I think that if experienced developers use AI well, they could benefit MORE than inexperienced developers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41474095

Copilot isn't particular useful. At best it comes up with small snippets that may or may not be correct, and rarely can I get larger chunks of code that would be working out of the gate.

But Claude Sonnet 3.5 w/ Cursor or Continue.dev is a dramatic improvement. When you have discrete control over the context (ie. being able to select 6-7 files to inject), and with the superior ability of Claude, it is an absolute game changer.

Easy 2-5x speedup depending on what you're doing. In an hour you can craft a production ready 100 loc solution, with a full complement of tests, to something that might otherwise take a half day.

I say this as someone with 26 yoe, having worked in principal/staff/lead roles since 2012. I wouldn't expect nearly the same boost coming at less than senior exp. though, as you have to be quite detailed at what you actually want, and often take the initial solution - which is usually working code - and refine it a half dozen times into something that you feel is ideal and well factored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475171

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