> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing. It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and passing their skills on to other people who care about getting better.
I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there.
They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares.
You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.)
Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job.
You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop.
Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job, but stay in it purely for the money as very few other careers pay as well as what you can make in tech without advanced education.
Oter "bike shop" jobs I think you'll find in mostly hobby places - photography/camera shops, outdoor gear shops, local/independent bookstores, and craftmanship work - woodworking/hand-made furniture, musical instrument repair, some mechanics.
It makes me wonder if there are still those "bike shop" jobs to be found in tech. I feel like I missed out on the golden years of the tech age where I would have found my curiosity and interests satisfied by my job, but maybe there might be a few niches out there somewhere...
VFX software development, repairing and modifying pipelines for artists, at a company with a large internal tool infrastructure like Weta, ILM, Pixar, is my target job
I think some of the indie game studios have this. Think of team behind Clair Obscur. Not that it also isn't very hard place with lot of risk and on average more meagre rewards...
Bike shops generally don't drug test, rarely have a dress code and attract a pretty select crowd.
Aside from that, you're a mechanic. Motorcycle dealers/car dealers/random car lots hire mechanics too any may or may not care what you do on your own time.
Plenty of maritime industries need that same skill set, as do mining operations, agricultural equipment dealers and all of the medium size shops that repair heavy equipment you've never heard of.
Fab shops are great, if you want a bicycle shop experience but bigger and with 100% more yeehaw. You can teach yourself how to weld for a pretty low sum of money if you've got a couple hundred bucks, some space and creativity.
I think some of it is about getting away from big box stores and working with smaller shops. Now, that's not saying that small shops are automatically good, but you'll find people way better at some of them than you ever will at a big store. Big stores tend to care about pushing numbers and not expertise.
These are usually individual, passion-driven jobs. Others that come to mind include local outdoor outfitters, musical instrument makers, clock repairers, craftspeople (like textile artists, quilters, and jewelers), artisanal food producers, and coaches.
GP says "consistently encountered" and you respond with "well, that's true, but only in certain places". Seems like you're contradicting what they're saying and acting like you're in agreement.
I worked several different SW roles in Norway last year, it was the opposite; I now suspect the entire country is simply faking it until they run out of oil.
I think New Zealand tends to follow the same trends of cultural rot as the rest of the Western world, but years behind, and therefore a bit weaker too.
Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing papers is below them.
Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
> Emacs is a Gnostic cult. And you know what? That’s fine. In fact, it’s great. It makes you happy, what else is needed? You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy. We are all going to die.
There’s a handful of things like Emacs and APL/J/K that HN introduced to me a decade ago that actively reduce my productivity — and I don’t need your explanations for how I’m using them wrong. They’re, to me, like a good book I’ve already read but keep rereading in-place of books I haven’t read. The reduced productivity is fine because we’re some unknown time away from nuclear war or falling down the stairs.
In fairness to Emacs, this is a bit sour grapes on my part!
I have tried to go fully into the "Emacs mindset" (org-mode for everything, multiple pages of custom hydra keybinds etc.) a number of times and I always bounce off. I always feel there is some activation threshold that if I could cross it, I could enter editor nirvana.
I used to joke that the way I use Emacs is I open it, give the empty buffer a very meaningful look, C-x C-c, and open VS Code.
For whatever it's worth, I think in 2025 with good LLMs, Emacs is actually bliss. Even as a true believer, I would regularly think of customisations, and then sigh at the effort and not bother. Now, I just get an AI to help me write the Emacs Lisp which not only teaches me new things, but also gives me (in seconds) an upgrade to my productivity which will last forever. Not only that, but I am using LLMs in my editor to help write code to make using LLMs in my editor even easier, so I feel like I've simultaneously crossed two thresholds.
My story is a lot like yours, except swap the two editors. I decide I'm really gonna try Visual Studio Code this time. Everybody uses it, it's become the default editor for like every recent programming language... it must be better than what I'm using, right? Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong!
And then I fire it up and... it's not compatible with my muscle memory. Plus I can't just pop open a buffer and morph my editor into what I need for the task in a language I like. (There is considerable rigamarole involved in writing a Visual Studio Code extension; I tried.) I can't work with buffers the way I'm used to, it doesn't indent the way I'm used to... and unless I'm willing to limit myself with VSCodium, it's spying on me in a way I consider hostile. So I put it away and get what I need done in Emacs. I must've been through this cycle like, six times.
The Great Toyota War is interesting to read about. Libya spent billions and lost ~800 tanks to Chad’s Hiluxes and Land Cruisers. Specifically the Battle of Fada was very lopsided with Chad dominating. If you ‘s/Toyota/drones/g’ you get some similar situations in more current battles.
Using Claude Opus 4, this was the first time I've gotten any of these models to produce functioning Dyalog APL that does something relatively complicated. And it actually runs without errors. Crazy (at least to me).
Same here, plus if you’re traveling with extended family (like siblings’ families) the total price can become insane in a hotel. And feeding all of those people is cheaper if you have a normal sized kitchen.
I just wish more Airbnbs had really dark rooms with blackout curtains. Hotels normally have that covered
Yeah, ignoring the OT, 70k in the Bay Area is ~40k in Omaha, Ann Arbor, Orlando, etc [1]. Without the OT it's more like 30k. And if your brain, like mine, hasn't adjusted to inflation yet, that's ~23k in 2019 dollars [2].
Can anyone recommend a decent Backblaze alternative in case things really go south? Not so much for storage but for the automated computer backups that I have Backblaze doing. I'm okay paying more than Backblaze's $9/month.
I suspect the quotation was due to that inside their own head — that they were actually going to say "on one hand" but stopped themselves because it wasn't correct.
I'm inclined to agree simply because "friend" is too gentle of a term. But, if that's true, then which country has America really been friends with? It seems like if not Canada, then there's none. That may be true, but at least initially surprising.
Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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