You should speak with a therapist, so many negative thought patterns and things to unpack with burnout and imposter. That’ll help you more than any technical tip. Your brain is more buggy and in need of repair than any side project.
Thanks for bringing up therapy. I've been in therapy for some time, which lead to leaving my former position. I agree with you that my brain is certainly more buggy than my side projects :)
We can’t control our thoughts though, right? They just pop up, appearing randomly. We can control our attention and train ourselves not to get onboard trains of thought though. But I think it’s important to acknowledge thoughts randomly crop up and it’s not our fault.
My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.
We already had a soft landing last year right? That referred to coming out of the pandemic inflation without recession.
This year is tariffs, trade wars, uncertainty, AI, labor markets, mass firings, mass deportations. Seems like we’re into a new phase of potential stagflation.
Seconded! Funniest content out there right now. I’d recommend Game Changer season 2 or Make Some Noise. Good old funny improv games. Like whose line meets modernity with younger people.
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.
Yes, they should know that now, in 2025. But last year, or 10, 20, 30 years ago? Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.
I hope that someday we will put this genie back in the bottle and return to the previous normal.
> Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.
I don't buy this. These folks literally swear an oath. National Guard troops are literally flag bearers. Those US flag patches on their uniforms mean that they don't get to decide that an order that is otherwise lawful is "political" in nature and therefore invalid. If they don't want to do their jobs, as ordered, they should resign. These are not private employees, they are public servants.
I agree with you that they swore to uphold lawful orders. Yes, that is drilled into us from the first day of bootcamp, over and over and over and over. But you were saying they signed up with the expectation of being political pawns. That is not the argument you seem to be making now.
> But you were saying they signed up with the expectation of being political pawns. That is not the argument you seem to be making now.
I am still making that argument. They don’t have the authority to decide if they’re pawns, political or otherwise. They’re part of an unbroken chain of command. I don’t see the contradiction that you are implying, as I’m not trying to change my position to my reading.
I can’t speak to realities perhaps as you can if you have served, as I have not served. No disrespect to you or to any service member intended by anything I have written.
I'll take one last shot at clarifying my viewpoint, but then we'll just have to let this one rest ;-).
I think people who joined the military, or the FBI, or some other federal agency, expected to be serving their country, not the whims of the sitting president. They went in to catch criminals, or defend the nation in combat, etc. Of course they know that orders are orders, but it's perfectly reasonable, before 2025, to assume that the commander-in-chief is generally working in the best interests of the country, and what you will be ordered to do will therefore be serving that interest.
I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality. That has not been broadly true in the recent history of this country; the military I was in considered itself a professional organization and we hated politics.
I agree with your post, but this part is kind of wishy-washy.
> I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality.
Most folks who are in the military or are considering it have heard of the honor guard. This is the most obviously political post one can have, but it is arguably one of the most important, due to the virtues such a post embodies, and the highly visible, public nature of the post.
Many folks would leap out of their seat to have such a post, though I can see how some would rather decline if given the option, due to the importance of the job and perhaps their own feelings of unsuitability, or desire to not interact with the public, or whatever.
I think it's an inherently political job, and everyone should know that going in. What you do in uniform reflects directly on the nation whose flag your uniform is emblazoned with.
All of this is acting as if government computers don’t have AI currently. They do in fact, though mostly turned off. The default browser search now pops up an AI assistant. By default my government org has some old crappy free AI on Microsoft edge.
I think I explained why this is different from the point of view of it being "encouraged" vs. "available". If your employer provides a tool in an official capacity (for example, through single-sign-on, etc.), then you may treat it more like the internal FBI database vs. "Google". Additionally, many of these AI tools you listed don't have the breadth or depth of OpenAI (whether it be "deep research" which itself encourages you to give it documents, etc.). All that being said, yes, there already existed issues with AI, but that's not really a reason to say "oh well", right? It's probably an indication that the right move is developing clear policies on how and when to use these tools. This feels an awful lot like the exact opposite approach: optimizing for "only paying a dollar to use them" and not "exercising caution and safely exploring if there is a benefit to be had without new risk".
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