Fundamentally, if it comes from AI, I'm not interested. I would not rely on AI summaries, and certainly nothing identified as AI produced. AI is not creative in the human sense. I would never knowingly waste time reading something produced by a room full of monkeys banging on a keyboard. The same is true of AI produced code. LLMs are a malignancy that needs to be excised from society.
Simple, politicians are short sighted and do what gets them the most votes. They’ll get more votes by virtue signaling about the poor, the environment, or whatever the hot topic of the day happens to be. And it’s incredibly easy to rationalize. Since government spending is boundless, especially in the modern monetary era, hard decisions aren’t necessary. So politicians latch onto the same types of arguments presented in this thread and focus on pandering for reelection. In reality, yes landing on the moon is dangerous. Contrary to the posts here, the moon is incredibly valuable and thus ultimately profitable which is why private companies will likely beat the US back to the surface. An argument can be made that no one other than Trump would have pushed this as hard AND how hard would he have pushed without China’s growing space program? As for things like teacher salaries? Yes, in some places, they are abysmal. OTH, overall US educational quality lags other countries significantly. Higher teacher salaries must come from reforms, which includes reducing the bureaucracy surrounding education substantially, starting at the federal level and working down to the local. I live in a major US city where the superintendent of schools makes roughly 10x the average teachers’ salary, despite presiding over a failed school system. That is unacceptable.
I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.
It's good to see NASA finally do something beyond navel gazing. Nonetheless, calling this flight historic is a stretch. Other than flying a few miles further than Apollo 13, it will actually accomplish less than Apollo 8 did 57 years ago.
Apollo 8 actually went into orbit around the moon. This flight is more similar to Apollo 13, hopefully without the life threatening problems. The risk on this flight is far less than on Apollo 8 obviously. Still, it's more than time for the US to step up and have an actual space program. The shuttle program and ISS fall far short of the trajectory of the US space program at the end of 1972.
Doesn't mean a thing in the grand scheme of things. Nor does having a woman, a minority, and a Canadian. Those are irrelevant. It makes some people feel good and others virtuous, but it doesn't further the mission one iota. Show me technical accomplishments, regardless of the crew composition and the agencies involved. The crew can all be women or minorities, I don't care. I'm looking for progress and accomplishments, not virtue signaling.
Raise your prices when it comes time to clean up the mess that they will invariably make. If they don't want to pay, look elsewhere. And skip the LLMs on your next job.
I'm curious. Vibe coding seems to be all the rage on HN these days. And yet many that discuss it are unhappy. My question, seriously, is why did you go into the software development field if you were willing to surrender your autonomy to an LLM? I can't think of anything more demoralizing.
Well I started out as an idea guy. I just got into programming because (1) I thought it was interesting, (2) wanted to be able to implement my own ideas and (3) if I'd ever be an idea guy towards programmers then they'd know I'd be able to speak their language.
So yea not demoralizing to me at all. I've been a SWE for 5 years now and studied for 8 years before that (2 bachelors, 2 masters - most CS related).
I have a lot of small apps nowadays. One of them is a HN dark mode chrome extension that I actually like. Another one exports my emails in bulk. Another one tracks what wifi networks I connected to on a given day. Small apps that make my life a bit easier. Also a lot of apps that I'd rather keep to myself. One of them that's on the edge of that is: certain companies have this math test. I recreated it pretty well I think. Oh and I implemented this thing I call "personal coach". It's a GraphRAG on my whole journal (all local). It has all the features I want and is great for answering questions solely by combining my notes.
Mine goes a bit further than that. It structures the codebase first, feeds that into local agents, and then uses whichever model is on top with actual system context instead of making it guess from prompts.
Yea I was on the doom spiral thinking vibe coding/agentic engineering is the future. I didn’t love my results. I’m back to hand coding things and my quality of life is so much better.
Anyone can get a "result". It's the quality of the result that matters. The intellectual journey of choosing the right algorithm, optimizing the code, etc. Software development should be a journey, not a goal. Once I learned that and started applying it as a manager, I found that team productivity and quality both rose. The result came from the process. Systems trump goals in nearly every endeavor in life.
I was retired before the current "AI boom", but Visual Studio and the like were ubiquitous. The company I worked for tested developer applicants on a whiteboard - no auto complete, no documentation, etc. If one failed the whiteboard part of the interview, they weren't hired. I've talked to some of my former peers and they tell me that the whiteboard part of the interview continues and that those oriented towards "vibe coding" almost never make the cut. If they can't articulate a solution to a stated problem and outline a skeletal solution, they aren't hired. Personally, I don't care how effective one is at prompt construction, if they don't know how to design a solution, articulate it to a broad audience, etc., they have no business being hired. I realize many likely disagree and that's okay. Vibe coders could become this generations script kiddies.
There's far less to recommend Amazon than there once was. Service quality has dropped. Their recommendation engine was better 10 years ago than it is today, e.g,. recommending an item I've already bought or items in my cart isn't a recommendation. Using the USPS for final delivery doesn't help as "Prime Delivery" can now take a week or more to arrive here. And then the postal worker will do everything in their power to cram the book in the mailbox. I've returned about half of the books that I've ordered in the last year. Consequently, I've been ordering more through the local B&N and picking it up in store. There I can see the quality and condition before deciding to keep. And I wish poor quality book publishing was limited to Amazon. It's not. I ordered a new copy of Apostol Calculus direct from Wiley. It was expensive ($300+). It turned out to be print on demand as well and of such poor quality that many equations were illegible. It was "new" but unusable and I was able to find a used copy in fine shape. Fundamentally, in my view, publishers are killing the book industry. Eliminating mass market paperback drove up the price of trade paper as well as digital. Consequently, many books become "unaffordable" from a demand perspective, i.e., many of us are unlikely to throw away $25+ for a causal airplane read. We'll acquire it used later, or borrow it from the library, if we bother to read it at all. Further, with younger generations reading physical books far less often than their parents or grandparents, they've initiated a feedback loop that doesn't end well for the industry. Amazon doesn't care. Books aren't their driver anymore. So the reader draws the short straw.
I went through 11 takeovers in my career. I survived them all, some with promotions, until the very last one. It was within a couple of weeks of my severance that I was diagnosed with the Big C. That puts everything in perspective. Nothing really matters then except treating and beating the cancer. Focus on that. If in the process, this job doesn't work out, find a new one when you are in remission or cured. And decide what you want to do after that. I was nearing retirement anyway and decided I didn't need anymore of the corporate life. Not knowing your age, that may not be an option for you. What is an option for you is keep a positive attitude, eat right, exercise, and get treated. Yes, cancer is a serious kick in the pants, but you can't let it beat you down. If you do, it's far, far worse than it has to be. Yes, it's depressing. But, don't give into it. And remember that you aren't really alone. You'll likely sit in the waiting room before treatment with people that have a far worse prognosis. Certainly, I did. Which made me all the more determined to not give in to my darker thoughts. I'm five years cured, though life is irrevocably changed. It happens. Strive to be one of us.
Was hoping to find that good end in your story and found it, happy for you. I'm thankfully healthy but found myself in an adjacent circumstance as the child of a newly diagnosed dementia patient who forgot who I am. I was able to reintroduce myself and she has not forgotten again so far but she is at the point where she will believe anything without ground truth as basis. I find myself clamoring for time with her, pioritizing FaceTime calls with her over anything else, as each time I talk to her I can sense her drifting away. I don't mind her forgetting about me, which finally convinced the psychiatrist who said she didn't have a problem the previous year that yes she is in stage 5-6 dementia after all. She woke up once not knowing who she is, and that is something I can't have her forget. This is the closest I've experienced something like what you've survived through and what op is going through, something that puts Everything in perspective. So I'm thankful for threads like this on HN especially given this point in history where everything is happening all at once, which makes this Total Perspective Vortex (HHGG) thing all the more epiphanic (the TPV in HITCHHIKER'S was meant to destroy you by showing you the evident infinitude of your insignificance, but the reality of mortality just shows an indifferent universe being equally, coldly, largely ignored)
I took the real MBTI test in grad school as part of the professor's research. Nothing online comes close to the real test. Despite the fact that it's not viewed as positively as it once was, I found the MBTI to be rather insightful and helpful to me personally. I've also taken the Big 5 as part of a professional seminar at work and didn't find it as helpful. It seemed to be biased in favor of extroversion, for example, while MBTI merely outlined the characteristics without attaching value judgements.
reply