"by almost any measure, anyone gainfully employed in the USA is rich beyond the world's wildest dreams"
I'm not sure your mental model holds. A lot of Europe has higher standards of living than the USA. And a lot of Asian countries have made huge strides in the last few decades. Also consider the difference between Mississippi and Massachusetts. I wouldn't say that anyone gainfully employed in Mississippi is "rich beyond the world's wildest dreams".
Which even "poorest in Mississippi" is above - but that factoid is entirely useless to basically everyone, and frankly insulting to our poor family in Mississippi.
Strange that this page has weird distracting "gnats" flying around in the background. A key rule as a communicator is: never compete for attention with yourself! If you want people to read your words, why add distracting gnats?
> “Then you tried to ship real client work, and the dream fell apart.”
For me it was here. I have tried for months to get AI to write for me and have now fully embraced the fact that LLMs are not ready to do that for me. None of them. I’ve gone back to writing my own content and only using the LLM to brainstorm.
> Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me.
Good for you! Everybody has their own "twist" on Stoicism, and that's fine. You have to find your own twist on it; you have to make it your own.
In my own experience, what is most rewarding and promotes my progress the most, is when I put philosophy into action. Then I get authentic feedback from life about what actually works. It helps me separate mere opinions and good sounding ideas from true insight.
I think you hit the nail on the head here and something else I seem to struggle a bit with. I am very good at reading, thinking, contemplating. But I need to get more out of my head - from lack of better wording. I actually wrote "read less - do more". In my notebook recently. So I could not agree more with what you are saying.
Don't forget how they found a way to squish closed caption information into analog broadcast. The electron beam traces a path on the CRT display by drawing the odd lines from top to bottom (which draws half the image) and then the even lines (the rest of the owl) from top to bottom. While the electron beam is repositioning itself from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, there is a brief period of time where other data can be transmitted. That's where closed caption data was shoehorned in.
Teletext used the vertical blanking interval too. It consisted of numbered pages of text, each number input on the numpad on the remote control as a form of hypertext. Page after page was transmitted after one-another, repeatedly. It was sometimes used for subtitles, with some pages with a transparent background. Better receivers cached pages so you wouldn't have to wait for its next transmission when going to another page...
Digital television formats adopted the framing from analogue formats and sends the same data in digital form within the vertical blanking interval. Many channels have stopped offering teletext. One network here in Sweden still uses it to deliver news, and I often prefer that format because the articles are concise and distraction-free.
BTW. I was once asked to hack together a system for using data in the vblank period to control relays at a remote site.
The 30s is the first decade of life that people experience where there are adults younger than them. This inevitably leads people in their 30s to start saying that they are "old" even though they generally have decades of vigor ahead of them.
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We are a fast-growing startup that uses AI to analyze legal contracts. We have a lot of exciting new projects in the works and are looking for software engineers and software architects who love to make an impact. Key skills: Ruby on Rails, React, AWS
LinkSquares | linksquares.com | Software Engineers, Software Architects | Boston, MA | Full-Time | OnSite or Remote (Eastern Time Zone preferred)
We are a fast-growing startup that uses AI to analyze legal contracts. We have a lot of exciting new projects in the works and are looking for software engineers and software architects who love to make an impact. Key skills: Ruby on Rails, React, AWS
I'm not sure your mental model holds. A lot of Europe has higher standards of living than the USA. And a lot of Asian countries have made huge strides in the last few decades. Also consider the difference between Mississippi and Massachusetts. I wouldn't say that anyone gainfully employed in Mississippi is "rich beyond the world's wildest dreams".