u/alex_strehlke

I’ve got a shelf of O’Reilly books that I bought over the years, the ones with the animals on the cover. Some I read cover to cover, some I used as reference, and some I definitely bought aspirationally and never opened.

Lately I’ve noticed I reach for them almost never. If I need to know how something works, I ask an LLM and get a tailored answer in ten seconds instead of flipping to chapter 7. It’s faster and it’s shaped to my exact problem.

But I keep having this nagging feeling that I’m losing something. The books forced me through a mental model. They gave me the shape of a domain: the tradeoffs, the history, why the API is weird, not just the answer to my immediate question. When I ask an AI, I get an answer. When I read a book, I got a map.

Curious what other people think. Do you still read technical books? Have they become reference material only? Or is the mental-model argument just nostalgia dressed up as pedagogy?

Pretty much just the title. With more intermediate/advanced lifters, does it make more sense to just focus on one or two of the main lifts at a time? I find it difficult to grow when I am trying to grow all my squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press at the same time. Curious if anyone has hit this point with their lifting and if they found programs that work to rotate between them.

Looking for workout programs that are easily adaptable to a chaotic work schedule. I can usually train both weekend days, but weekdays are hit or miss, normally only one or two days available. I'm also usually exhausted on the weekday sessions, whereas on weekends I have more energy. What matters most to me are the main lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, OHP, pullups), but I'd like some accessory and isolation work in there too. Any recs?

I feel like there have to be a ton of ways people are using AI to do marketing and outreach way faster than before. I come from a primarily technical background, and AI has completely changed the way I code. But I get the sense it's not quite there yet when it comes to marketing and outreach. What are some ways people have felt it's actually changed things significantly?

Curious how everyone here actually splits their time, because mine feels really lopsided and I want to know if that's normal or if I'm just doing it wrong.

For context, I work around 60 hours a week at my day job, and I run my side project (a workout tracking app) completely solo on top of that. Design, code, marketing, support, all of it is me. Realistically I'm squeezing maybe 10 to 15 hours a week into it, mostly nights and weekends, and a lot of that time is chopped into 30 to 90 minute chunks instead of real focused blocks.

The thing I keep noticing is that the fragmentation hurts way more than the raw hour count does. An hour at 9pm after a 12 hour day is worth almost nothing compared to an hour on a fresh Saturday morning. I get a ton more done in a focused weekend sprint than I do spreading the same hours across the week, but those weekends are really hard to actually protect. And honestly the hardest part isn't even the work itself, it's getting my head back into the project after being away from it for a few days.

So I guess I'm wondering how many hours a week you all realistically put in, and how that stacks up against your main gig. Do you spread it out or batch it into sprints? And for anyone who's actually shipped something real while working full time, did you do it on 10 hours a week, or did something eventually have to give?

Mostly trying to figure out if slow and steady actually compounds over time or if you just have to go all in at some point.

Went back where I grew up recently and the street I thought of as long my whole childhood is about a two minute walk end to end. Nothing changed about it. What changed was the scale I'd been carrying in my head, and it was off by a lot.

I can't tell if the shrinking is mostly a kid-versus-adult body thing, everything's bigger when you're four feet tall, or whether the place just felt big because it was your entire world at the time, and it shrank because your world got bigger. Those explain pretty different things.

What shrank the most for you going back? And did anything go the other way and feel bigger than it did when you lived there?

I ran into this trying to recall the name of someone I worked next to for two years, blank, while a jingle from a cereal I ate maybe four times as a kid surfaced instantly and unprompted. The frequency of exposure clearly isn't the thing doing the sorting, or those two would be reversed.

What I can't get a clean answer on is whether retrieval failure and storage failure are actually separate mechanisms or just two labels we put on the same underlying process because it's convenient. The classic framing is that the memory is still physically there and you've just lost the index to it, which would explain why a smell or a song yanks something back that you couldn't reach on purpose. But I've also seen the argument that a lot of what we call forgetting is the trace genuinely degrading, and the occasional vivid recall is reconstruction rather than retrieval. Those feel like very different claims about what's happening in the tissue.

For people who actually work on memory, where does the current evidence sit on that? And is the emotional-salience tagging that makes the cereal jingle sticky a fundamentally different system from the one handling the coworker's name, or the same system weighted differently?

Has anyone here built an app and extended it to support wearables like Apple Watch? Did users actually adopt it, and do you have visibility into wearable vs. phone app usage?

Would love to hear whether it was worth the investment — considering going that direction myself.

Just finished both of these within a couple weeks of each other, which I think is a mistake I'd recommend making.

Rules for Power is pretty unflinching about how power actually moves in organizations. Build a reputation, manage visibility, understand that loyalty and performance are not the same currency. The book is written from the individual's perspective and it basically says: the game exists whether you play it or not, so you might as well understand the rules.

But The Knowing-Doing Gap keeps returning to the same observation — that organizations consistently fail to act on things they know, and a big reason for that is internal politics. People optimizing for position rather than output. Meetings that produce language instead of decisions. The gap between what gets said and what actually happens.

The thing is, every person running that playbook from Rules for Power is contributing to the gap Pfeffer diagnoses in the other book. The rational individual move and the good organizational outcome are working against each other, and Pfeffer has written a manual for each side of that without ever really acknowledging they're the same problem.

I don't think this makes either book wrong. If anything it makes the dynamic feel more honest than the usual management writing, which tends to pretend the incentives and the mission are naturally aligned. Pfeffer knows they're not. He just hasn't written the book about what you do with that.

Curious if anyone else has read both and had a similar reaction, or if I'm misreading what he's actually trying to say.

I’m at a crossroads and trying to figure out whether to buy in Manhattan (or one of the outer boroughs) or just head to the burbs where I’d probably get more space for the money.

Curious to hear from people who have actually done one or the other. How was the buying process different? Do you have any regrets? What surprised you most? And if you’ve done both at different points in your life, even better.

Not looking for generic “city vs suburbs” takes, more interested in the real, lived experience of navigating the actual purchase. The co-op board process, bidding wars, dealing with HOAs, whatever you went through. Let me know.

I’m looking to get out more and catch some live music around the city. I’m open to pretty much anything, small jazz bars, rock venues, singer-songwriter nights, whatever. Bonus points if it’s not a tourist trap and actually has a good vibe.

Drop your go-to spots. Hidden gems especially welcome!

I’ve been eyeing Titan for a while and I’m considering picking it up as my next read. Before I commit to 800+ pages though, I’d love to hear from people who’ve actually read it.

Is it a page-turner or does it drag in places? How does Chernow handle the more controversial aspects of Rockefeller’s life — does he feel balanced or does it lean one way? How does it compare to his other biographies (Hamilton, Grant, etc.) if you’ve read those?

I’m generally drawn to business history and big personalities, so the subject matter is right in my wheelhouse — just want to make sure the writing holds up. Any thoughts appreciated!

Hey everyone! My partner and I are planning a trip to North Carolina this July and would love some local insight before we book anything.
We’re specifically hoping to find:

•	A beach with good surf (we’re beginners, so nothing too gnarly)  
•	Somewhere with a laid-back beach town vibe  
•	Bonus points for good food and things to do on flat days

I’ve seen the Outer Banks mentioned a lot — is that the move, or are there other spots worth considering? Open to anything from the northern beaches down to Wilmington/Wrightsville.
Any tips on timing, crowds, or hidden gems would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

The case for microservices is well-documented. Independent deploys, fault isolation, scaling specific components, teams owning their own surface area. All real. But the case against feels underrepresented, probably because the people dealing with the downsides are too busy dealing with them to write posts.

The failure modes I’ve run into or heard about: services that are too fine-grained so every feature touches four of them, distributed tracing that tells you something is slow but not quite where, local development environments that require spinning up eight things before you can test one thing, and network calls replacing what used to be in-process function calls for no real gain.

There’s also a team dynamics version of this. Microservices get sold partly as a way to let teams work independently, but if the domain boundaries are wrong the services just shift the coordination problem rather than eliminating it. You end up with cross-service PRs and synchronous deploys anyway.

Curious what people have actually seen. Specifically: has anyone been through a microservices migration that the team later partially reversed, or wished they had? What made it clear the split was wrong?

Nowadays I often hear microservices being the go-to method, and honestly I have a grudge against monolithic architectures. But can the monolithic approach actually be justified? Does anyone have a use case where they derived a lot of value from it?

We hit a point where our product had a user-facing feature that needed to query aggregated data, and Snowflake was just not built for that use case. Cold query latency was brutal, cost per query at that frequency didn't make sense, and the connection model isn't really designed for thousands of concurrent lightweight hits from an app backend.

We ended up syncing a materialized subset into Postgres and serving it from there. Latency dropped to something usable and the cost profile looks completely different. The tradeoff is maintaining the sync and accepting that the data is slightly stale. For our use case that was fine, but I can see where it wouldn't be.

Curious what routes other people have taken. Did you stay in Snowflake and optimize around it (caching layer, result caching, warehouse sizing), move to a purpose-built OLAP store like ClickHouse or DuckDB, or sync into a transactional DB like we did? And if you stayed in Snowflake, what made that workable at the application layer?

I've been trying to figure out if something has changed in how I work or if I'm just rationalizing. Six months ago I would sit with a problem for a while. Not always productively, but the sitting was doing something. Now I just throw it at AI immediately. The gap between "I have a problem" and "I am typing at a model" has basically collapsed.

On one level this is fine? I ship faster. The output is often good. But I've caught myself a few times not knowing why something works after I've implemented it, which used to be rare. And I'm not sure if that's a new thing or if I'm just noticing it more.

For a brain that already struggles to stay in a problem long enough to actually solve it, AI kind of removes the worst part of coding. The blank-page paralysis, the loop of reading the same line twelve times, the context-switching spiral. So I don't know if I'm losing something real or just grieving a version of focus I was never reliably accessing anyway.

Anyone else sitting with the same thing? Or found a way to use AI that doesn't feel like it's slowly replacing the thinking?

I went in expecting a biography about an ambitious guy who accumulated too much power. What I didn't expect was how much of the book is really about the people around him. The city officials, the park commissioners, the governors who knew exactly what he was doing and either helped him do it or just didn't stop him. Caro is so careful about this. He never lets Moses be the only villain in the room.

The part that genuinely unsettled me was the Title I housing section. Not because Moses was corrupt in the obvious sense, but because so much of what he did was technically legal, technically within his authority, and still managed to displace hundreds of thousands of people in ways that were clearly intentional. The mechanism was the point. He built the mechanism specifically so that what he wanted to happen would happen without him having to say out loud that he wanted it.

I've been thinking about that a lot since. How much of institutional damage is done by people who are genuinely evil versus people who build systems that produce evil outcomes while keeping their own hands clean.

For people who've read it: what section actually stopped you? And did it change how you read other political biography, or does Moses feel too singular to generalize from?

There's a ton of AI slop flooding the App Store right now, but I keep wondering if anyone's actually doing something cool with it.

You know the apps I'm talking about. Rebranded ChatGPT wrappers with a $9.99/week subscription, generic photo enhancers, etc. It's everywhere and most of it is pretty uninspired.

But I have to imagine there are developers out there actually thinking creatively about where AI fits into a mobile experience, not just bolting a chat interface onto something and calling it a day.

Some things I've been thinking about: using on-device models for stuff that actually benefits from being offline and private, or using vision/audio in ways that feel native to a phone rather than just porting a web experience. Like, your phone has a camera, a mic, GPS, an accelerometer... there's so much more to work with than a text box.

Has anyone here built something for iOS where the AI integration genuinely made the app better in a non-obvious way? Or come across an app in the wild where you thought "okay, that's actually a clever use of this"?

Curious what people have seen or shipped. Good ideas are getting buried under all the noise right now.

Just finished Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe and I've been sitting with it for a few days now. Going in, I expected to come out hating the Sackler family — and I do — but what actually left me staring at the ceiling was how many people and institutions had to look the other way for this to happen.

The FDA reviewers. The doctors who kept prescribing. McKinsey literally consulting on how to "turbocharge" OxyContin sales. The museums and universities happily slapping the Sackler name on buildings while the money trail was pretty well documented. Keefe lays it all out methodically and it's almost worse than if one cartoonishly evil family had just pulled it off alone.

The part that really got me was how the family used philanthropy as a shield. Arthur Sackler basically invented the playbook: pour money into institutions so your name becomes synonymous with culture and prestige, and suddenly nobody wants to ask hard questions about where the money comes from. It worked for decades.

I think what unsettles me most is that the book doesn't really have a satisfying ending. The settlement was a joke relative to the damage. The family walked away wealthy. And the system that let it happen is still mostly intact.

Has anyone else read this and come away more frustrated with the institutional failures than the family itself? I keep going back and forth on whether the Sacklers were uniquely evil or just uniquely positioned to exploit a system that was already broken.