Obsidian is my favorite new tool. I started a new job last week and decided to spin it up on day one to help me onboard and learn their system. It’s been wildly successful, the missing piece I needed to really turn Claude Code into the learning and documentation tool I dreamed about.
Started looking in November, four offers by end of January, all decent, last two competing offers were fantastic with great companies and I accepted one. Past few months and even now I’ve had more inbounds from recruiters than any time since Covid boom. Offer salaries aren’t as high as Covid boom days but there are a ton of startups that need people.
Varied. Most were exactly the same processes I remembered from interviewing years ago: some startups with no processes and unable to get signals, big public tech companies abusing leetcode, awkward screeners hoping for keywords, and everything in between for the most part. Biggest change is they all asked about AI and wanted to hear that I embrace modern tools and am hungry to find the best ways to work. I am positive that skepticism about AI in November prevented me from getting some interviews; demonstrating fluency (insofar as one can be fluent in these racing waters) and excitement for it in January was key to getting some (but not all) offers.
Around 12 calls if I remember correctly. With the exception of those who ghosted me, every company was very prompt, respectful of my time, and had a reasonable process that went from first to final interview pretty fast. I got a ton of outright rejections to my resume, which I sent around a lot. Getting the first call was the hardest part. YC job board ultimately led to finding my new role.
The company I went with had the best, warmest process that reflected how they like to work and was built to find people who had overlapping priorities. Thinking back, I think that most companies either deliberately or inadvertently wind up with processes that sync up with how they are organized internally and what kind of people they hope to hire.
The docs remark “VMs share the resources allocated to the user” so I interpret as resources allocated to your account, VMs provisioned within those limits.
I’m still unable to get Claude Code to contribute meaningful features directly my large web app at work. Specs will sometimes help it get close but it eventually veers off course and enters a feedback loop of bad decisions. Some of this might be attempting tasks it’s not suited well for, or perhaps my specs just aren’t precise enough, but I had enough failed attempts that I stopped trying to do anything that I’d describe as “challenging” or need too much domain knowledge.
A friend recommended I try it for less brainy backlog tasks, especially the kinds of things I can run casually in the background and not feel too invested in. This keeps failure from being too frustrating because there’s minimal effort and success becomes a pleasant surprise.
My first attempt with this was writing Playwright tests of the large web app in a new workspace within the monorepo. It was a huge success. I explained some user experiences the way I’d walk a person through them, pointed it at a path on my dev server, and told it the process I wanted it to follow: use Playwright MCP to load the page and discover the specifics of using the feature, document execution steps, write playwright tests based on what it learned from discovery, run the tests and debug errors with Playwright MCP. I instructed it to seek out the UI code within the project and add data-testid selectors as needed. I had it write this process to a master task.md, then make more task markdown files for each feature to be tested. It was very effective. Some of the features were somewhat complex, requiring two users with two browsers interacting in non-trivial ways. Not 100% accurate and more complex features needed more contextual and code corrections, but overall it probably saved days of frustrating work.
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
>As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums.
Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well.
And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note.
And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
They are given fake names and identities in the platform in a deliberate intent to mislead the audience, deprive the real author of credit, and hide the real source of the work the major record labels. “Fake artist” is a generous term.
what is an artist name, alias, etc. if not a fake name? should people be forced to put their government id name on display to be deemed real artists?
there are some genres in which making up artist names, even just for a one-off release, is almost the point and part of the fun of making music. should artists be forced to release music under one name exclusively as well?
Indeed, ghost writing/producing being so popular in the ecosystem that if a "Real-name mandate" happened over-night, much of the industry would be in shambles as people realize most superstars don't write and/or produce their own music.
they can look up credits of any given song right now and realize that literally everybody involved in music making has some sort of made up name, be they a singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, or whomever. like, spotify has a credits button. it's not really a revelation.
I'm hitting a bug where clicking New York just refreshes the page instead of loading the city's page. Los Angeles, San José, and... most cities seem to exhibit it. Chicago seems to work?
Picking a city was tough. It insisted on the more general New York instead of the more specific Long Island City.
So is Apple the building that contains a Starbucks or the business known as Starbucks? It seems like it’s both — that is a problem. Is Starbucks charging its customers steep costs for entering the building? Where does the existing App Store with its large transaction fees and restrictions around billing fit into this analogy?
