I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.

Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.

Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.

Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.

I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.

Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)

Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.

This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.

I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.

This is super hard for me as well.

I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.

But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.

I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).

But still...

Yeah, no joke. For bald people like myself these headphones are unusable once the mesh stretches enough that the metal bands touch your skull.

I could go 30 minutes before the discomfort made me have to take it off.

No such issue with the WH-1000XM6, I can wear it the entire day.

This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!

This kind of reminds me how I saw some teams deal with a vulnerability scanner flagging an OSS dependency as having a reported vulnerability. The dependency was always OSS anyways. Copy & paste the entire thing into your project. Voila, dependency scanner doesn't find any problems any longer.

Even AI couldn't have come up with that!

There would also be no way China would admit to any breaches.

I had an Air with the same camera system as the 17e, I believe.

Coming from a 15 Pro Max, it was perfectly serviceable if you were happy with the limited zoom options and lack of wide angle shots.

I never realized how much I used those two features, so, regrettably had to go back to the chunky 17 Pro Max.

Maybe one day…

Wide angle is rarely used by me except it’s pretty good macro capabilities. It is better than your eyes.

I don't think I ever used the ultra wide camera in my phone. I find the default wide angle already too wide for most use cases. For some reason every phone includes one but not a ~50mm equivalent. Weird.

Being better than eyes at macro vision is not hard.

You recon? Only last few years it finally became useable.

This is an insanely privileged post.

“Advice for my fellow Ivy/top 10 grads”, is more accurate.

Mate, no matter what you do, you will have at a minimum an upper middle class life and a good chance of moving in circles where opportunities frequently present themselves.

This isn’t envy, everyone has the cards they are dealt. But damn, I can’t relate to anything in this post, it reads like instructions to min/max your already great situation!

You can also add golangci-lint with the modernize linter and tell Claude in CLAUDE.md to run it on every code change as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Won’t stop Claude from writing “old” style, but it will fix the lint errors.

Whenever I fly to Europe (from New Zealand), I always go via Singapore, I just zip through, everything is convenient and clean.

Transiting through the American shitshow that requires clearing immigration again on the other hand…

> That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.

These two things are not alike. At all.

I used it as another “there was a strong tech push but ultimately we couldn’t make it work” kind of idea. With NFTs the grift was immediately visible, with LLMs it’s a bit harder, the whole “AI” facade gives people hope - I want to believe and stuff.

His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.

He’s not just a “vibe coder”.

There's an excellent Changelog podcast interviewing him which talks about his early career as well.