J. M. Smith

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@GergelyOrosz It’s not that brilliant to vibe code a port; copyright still applies due to the obvious overlap in project structure, features, logic, data, docs, etc

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@FXStrypes @HeroDividend …letting the bar slip one too many times.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@FXStrypes @HeroDividend …ensure it doesn’t slowly degrade as a result, as it affects team morale, attitude, etc, especially in a physical environment where optics matter. People who haven’t managed teams/hiring before will be skeptical naturally, until they get into that position and get burned for…

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@bryan_johnson Back or side sleeping or both? 🤔

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@nalbis There’s one in Sydney

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@svpino So long as they’re given narrow tasks with human verification milestones they’ll still average out to be fundamental in workflows, features, deployments, testing, and ops. for all sized tech companies.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@svpino Instantiate the class, and test whatever scenarios eventually lead to those private methods being called from a public entry. Or, extend the class with a TestClass that exposes the private methods in wrapped publics.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

I understand the counterpoint to this: live a little; sure these things we indulge in are bad for us, but it brings us joy in the moment, and all things in moderation are fine. A tightrope of hedonism.

However I think large swathes of people would change their tune if they could experience the absolute peak version of themselves for a single day, because now they have a lived experience to compare their current selves to. Overall health and a general feeling of “wellness” is very much relative to the individual. My version of feeling “healthy” may be very different to the next person, and your concept of reasonable health may therefore be a lot poorer than you think, but you wouldn’t know, because you can’t temporarily occupy the body of someone in peak condition to compare it to.

Only those who have lived the extremes of poor and good health have a clear gauge on what being in good health really feels like, and these people are low-key haunted by their former selves, providing a limitless source of motivational energy to take the best possible care of themselves.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

Can attest, especially when stuck somewhere in between parasympathetic and sympathetic over long periods of time. It’s a slow acting poison you don’t often notice until something breaks. It’s a vicious cycle wherever you land on the spectrum, even for the fundamentals: a slather of low-key stress and emotional deregulation ever-present can slowly chip away at your body in ways that progressively worsens your sleep, energy levels, cell toxicity, inflammation, and hormonal/metabolic levels; and that’s just the body alone in the mind-body-soul trifecta. The damage we may be doing to our metaphysical facets, such as the spirit and the soul, is much harder to measure.

In any event, the measurable symptoms of chronic trauma feed into each other as negative feedback loops; a self-sustaining civil war you’re unwittingly nourishing until you start breaking the cycles, recognize the triggers, and change any energy-draining aspects of your environment.

Save for a sudden traumatic event that can cast you headfirst into a storm that leaves you slowly piecing yourself together piece by piece, be mindful of the insidious and far more common form of trauma that slowly builds up over time, or forever lingers just below your conscious radar. That’s the kind that takes too many too soon as it goes by either unnoticed or untreated until something gives.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

Possible but unlikely is my initial inkling if we’re talking about the vast majority of the video content being AI-generated. The problem with AI film will always be lack of continuity between lots of small cuts, and myriads of small unnatural oddities that constantly remind the viewers they’re watching AI-generated/enhanced content, perpetually niggling their suspension of disbelief.

If a human is still doing a lot of the work in tandem (especially in post) then yes, AI video tooling will fast-track film and video content creation no question. But it’ll be a while still for professional-grade cinema to use these tools in any significant way beyond drafts and storyboard / idea iterations, which AI is very good at.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

This rule is amplified based on what industry you pick too.

In tech we’ve hired seniors with 15+ years experience who performed below first-time juniors.

The majority of this particular senior’s experience was with legacy software and old mainframes and they couldn’t/wouldn’t adapt to new technologies / modern tooling. The junior had started off with the modern tools, and was thus much more adept for the times (and this is purely from a hard-skills perspective alone). The junior was also a natural born problem solver; an intellectual blank slate not yet entrenched into rigid ways of thinking; able to design elegant solutions to complex problems with abstraction and tools free of bias, and able to intuitively forecast problems with impartial eyes that were worked into the solution from the get-go; to stand the test of time. The senior, comparatively, wanted to shoehorn in only what they “knew” to solve the problem; effectively the wrong tools for the job; resistant to change regardless of what was best for the product.

Superior soft skills, adaptability, raw intellect, a hunger to solve problems and to leave your mark; that’s what you should be hiring for foremost.

The seniors who understand this are forever students, and never lose that spark that keeps them diving headlong into things they know nothing about.

Cultivate soft skills at every moment, and be a relentless academic if you want to reach the peaks of any human endeavor.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

My own personal observations in tech is that these variety of executives/seniors that climb to the upper echelons have a careful balance of any of the following: right time right place; who they know; politically savvy/conniving; remorseless rule breaker; morally ambiguous; just enough technical knowledge to not sound foolish in meetings, but not enough to contribute meaningfully to their core product in any tangible sense (hence the need for the first 4).

The problem is that these weapons work in the short/mid term to climb the corporate ladder, but are poison to those you need to build your product/visions: the engineers, the designers, the architects; these critical builders slowly lose respect for you the more you use these slimy weapons wielded time and time again by fat cat suits who make their money, and gain admiration of the uninformed layman, but don’t have the respect of the people who truly move humanity forward with their thankless/tireless work happening behind the scenes.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@Dexerto Minimalism is in, a symbol of modernity. It permeated through the arts as contemporary, post-modernism, etc, extended into architecture, and made its way through all manner of design.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

It really isn’t though with all respect, or at least not at all close to what that statement implies. And the present hardware couldn’t scale anyway to meet that pace even if it were true right now. There has to be major leap in software or hardware innovation to really take us to the next level. The current brute force model does have a peak.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

Everyone has to be aboard the AI hype train now regardless of how much it fits into your core business. This is especially true for investor-related relations. If your company literally falls under the tech umbrella in any capacity, you have to keep flashing the two big letters in front of investors like a pair of jangling keys to lull them into a sense of calm, because in their eyes, if you’re not on the AI bandwagon, you’re toast.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

Newgrads and job seekers in tech take note: you won’t learn much of what you need to know from an institutional education. You’ll learn most of what you need to succeed by doing some real world elbow grease; build apps from end to end, work on side projects, solve an actual technical problem with abstraction, have a desire to solve problems with elegance and refinement (learn SOLID principles; build things that will last), work on open source projects to leverage community feedback, and prompt modern day LLMs to learn every little step of the way. Do this in your own time or take some unpaid internships if you’re able. Real world experience still, and always will be, the best teacher.

[J. M. Smith @aujmsmith]

@TIME Good one TIME; subtly exclude certain people more deserving to be on this list/cover to get more engagement, but don’t do it too much to make it obvious your leveraging controversy for more eyeballs / attention. Well played.