- AKA the real world, a place where you have older appliances, legacy servers, contractual constraints and better things to do than watch a nasty yearly ritual become a nasty monthly ritual. I need to make sure SSL is working in a bunch of very heterogeneous stuff but not in a position to replace it and/or pick an authority with better automation. I just suck it up and dread when a "cert day" looms closer.
Sometimes these kind of decisions seem to come from bodies that think the Internet exists solely for doing the thing they do.
Happens to me with the QA people at our org. They behave as if anything happens just for the purpose of having them measure it, creating a Heisenberg situation where their incessant narrow-minded meddling makes actually doing anything nearly imposible.
- That tracks with how great it feels when you match the positions of the virtual and real wheels when simracing. Peeking under the lenses you see your own arms seamlessly continue into the virtual ones and feels like you are grabbing the virtual wheel.
- In many occasions, if there's a proposal for something very stupid or pointless I've found it's better to just say "yes", knowing full well the thing will never get done. The manager didn't really want the thing. He wanted a good happy meeting and to hear "yes".
- I have a Quest 3 and use it daily, but it's still a failure for Meta: I just click past their risible Horizons crap and use it exclusively for simracing, hooked to my PC.
When I get another headset it will be a PC-VR dedicated one, because my use case is clearly not what they intend. Their Link app is an abysmal experience and updates tend to break things and just make it worse. A third party app, Virtual Desktop, is plain better in every aspect, but still hampered by the general poor UX.
- I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
I'll stay thanks.
- My grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital.
I'd sign up for the same
- My org is always a decade behind, so I'm still just ignoring the official push for whatever Oracle low code crap is called.
Hiring is as haphazard and inadequate as it has been in the last 25 years, no change there.
AI usage is personal, widespread and on a don't ask don't tell basis.
I use it a lot to:
- Write bullshit reports that no one ever reads.
- Generate minimal documentation for decade old projects that had none.
- Small, low stakes, low complexity improvements, like when having to update this page that was ugly when someone created it in 1999, I'll plop it on aistudio to give it a basic bootstrap treatment.
- Simple automation that wasn't worth it before: Write me a bash script that does this thing that only comes up twice a year but I always hate.
- A couple times I have tried to come up with more complex greenfield stuff to do things that are needed but management doesn't ever acknowledge, but it always falls apart and starts needing actual work.
Morale is quite crappy, as ever, but since some of the above feels like secretly sticking it to The Man, there are these beautiful moments.
For example when the LLM almost nails your bimonthly performance self report from your chat history, and it takes 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, so you get to quietly look out of the window for a long while, feeling relaxed and smug about pocketing some of the gains from this awesome performance improvement.
- That guy that doesn't even show up might be just playing videogames... Or maybe taking credit for your work over a coffee with the boss of your boss
- I had more luck with a little experiment a few days ago: I took phone pics of one of the shorter BASIC listings from Tim Hartnell's "Giant Book of Computer Games" (I learned to program out of those back in the early 80s, so I treasure my copy) and asked Gemini to translate it to plain C. It compiled and played just fine on the first go.
- He's a disingenuous troll, not even worth engaging. Let him bask in the glory of his Greater North Korea alone.
- Just last Friday I was doing some cut&paste proof of concept of "Gemini plays Genesis MUD".
I gave Gemini a little prompt and just started pasting the game output into Gemini and the commands from Gemini back into the MUD. It managed to create a character, do the tutorial and started doing some initial skill training before I got tired of all the cut&paste.
Would be fun and interesting to let it completely loose in a similar environment.
- I "saved" another two.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
- There was even some kind of brouhaha with people claiming EQ was literally graphics on top of an uncredited MUD codebase.
- Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs
- As a lifelong Tolkien fan I have always been fascinated by Old English. Not enough for any serious study, but when things like this pop up I always take a look.
Then I like to sound a bunch of verses, it feels epic even if you don't understand anything, but then suddenly you get to:
"þæt wæs god cyning"
or
"Hē hæfde gōd ġeþanc þā hwīle þe hē mid handum healdan mihte bord and brād swurd"
and it feels like you solved a fun riddle.
Also, I'm sorry but I must:
For þone andweardan mycelan lust þæs geworhtan wites on þisse stowe, ic sceal cyðan þæt þa niwostan miclan spræc-endebyrdnessa sind swiðe gōde tō awendanne fram and tō ealdum Englisce.
- At that time I was developing with a friend what later was called a Learning Management System: It had content management, assignment uploads, event calendar, grade management, real time chat, forums... It was all plain C via CGI and it was hell to work with.
What almost brought us to tears the day we learned about PHP was how everything we had been painstakingly programming ourselves from scratch reading RFCs or reverse engineering HTTP was just a simple function call in PHP. No more debugging our scuffed urlencode implementation or losing a day to a stray carriage return in an HTTP header...
- This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
- I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
- I use it a lot for reducing friction. When I procrastinate about starting something I ask the AI to come up with a quick plan. Maybe I'll just follow the first step, but it gets me going.
Sometimes I´ll even go a bit crazy on this planning thing and do things a bit similar to what this guy shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY4sFxLmMvw I tend to steer the process more myself, but typing whatever vague ideas are in my mind and ending up in minutes with a milestone and ticket list is very enabling, even if it isn´t perfect.
I also do more "drive by" small improvements:
- Annoying things that weren't important enough for a side quest writing a shell script, now have a shell script or an ansible playbook.
- That ugly CSS in an internal tool untouched for 5 years? fixed in 1 minute.
- The small prototype put into production with 0 documentation years ago? I ask an agentic tool to provide a basic readme and then edit it a bit so it doesn´t lie, well worth 15 minutes.
I also give it a first shot at finding the cause of bugs/problems. Most of the time it doesn't work, but in the last week it found right away the cause of some long standing subtle problems we had in a couple places.
I have also had sometimes luck providing it with single functions or modules that work but need some improvement (make this more DRY, improve error handling, log this or that...) Here I´m very conservative with the results because as you said it can be dangerous.
So am I more productive? I guess so, I don't think 4x or even 2x, I don't think projects are getting done much faster overall, but stuff that wouldn't have been done otherwise is being done.
What usually falls flat is trying to go on a more "vibe-coding" route. I have tried to come up with a couple small internal tools and things like that, and after promising starts, the agents just can't deal with the complexity without needing so much help that I'd just go faster by myself.
Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.