- All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.
- Definitely. There’s pluses and minuses to that shift.
- Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency.
This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
- I’m sure it is. Though I can never tell if it is astroturfing or extremely weird AI maximalists just reminding us that they’re in a cult.
- Yup. The big AI companies are scared to death of LLMs being seen as commodities. But in the long term, they are.
See also: the big deepseek smear campaign.
- Haven’t tried the latter, will give it a shot. Thank you!
- My stomach hates coffee at the moment :(. Too acidic. Not sure I’m ever going to be able to have it regularly.
- I suspect AI appeals very strongly to a certain personality type who revels in all the details in getting a proper agentic coding environment bootstrapped for AI to run amok in, and then supervises/guides the results.
Then there’s people like me, who you’d probably term as an old soul, who looks at all that and says, “I have to change my workflow, my environment, and babysit it? It is faster to simply just do the work.” My relationship with tech is I like using as little as possible, and what I use needs to be predictable and do something for me. AI doesn’t always work for me.
- I’m an AI skeptic. I like seeing what UIs it spits out, though, which defeats the blank page staring into my soul fear nicely. I don’t even use the code, just take inspiration from the layouts.
- Oh I know, I’m just sowing doubt in the OP’s claims. Note the lack of response to this.
AI is not a value neutral tech.
- > The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities
AI is being touted as extremely intelligent and, thus, capable of taking over almost any white collar job. What would I upskill to?
- Aka, which vanity is one most vulnerable to. Makes sense that they’d segment out like this, since the space tends to be winner take all.
- Yep. They’re just happy to light any sense of QC on fire.
Such overt contempt for pretty much everyone directly involved in the economic transaction. But not the investors, of course.
- I discovered I had PEM this year from working out. Found a trainer that is teaching me to stay in a non hyper mobile range + pacing and that is generally more manageable.
Good luck with the GLP-1. Hit me up via email if you’d like to chat more: HN username at gmail.
- Wow. Glad it panned out for you.
- GLP-1s seem to induce/mimic gastroparesis, which also can occur with hEDS. Has that been an issue? Also, do you have MCAS?
(Also have hEDS.)
- Ideological purity is a crutch for those that can't hack it. :)
I love it when the .NET threads show up here, people twist themselves in knots when they read about how the runtime is fantastic and ASP.NET is world class, and you can read between the lines of comments and see that it is very hard for people to believe these things while also knowing that "Micro$oft" made them.
Inevitably when public opinion swells and changes on something (such as VSCode), all the dissonance just melts away, and they were _always_ a fan. Funny how that works.
- > This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.
Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities.
This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact.
We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs.
There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.
In short, it's time to wake up.
- Beautiful, and by that, I mean completely and utterly horrific.
Pointing out that it wasn’t always that will make you seem “negative.”