bluefirebrand

You're offering the very common advice

This only works if your managers are actually invested and interested in having you grow.

If you start trying to take ownership of things without being asked you might also just be told to stay in your lane. If you start raising problems pro-actively you may be told to pipe down.

Yes, there's always "go somewhere else" except bad managers are more common than you think.

Woof

This cuts me to the bone

Was this really written in 1911?

I guess things never really change, humans are still humans

I genuinely used to think that the reason CEOs and other executives made as much money as they did was because they were accepting the risk of steering a large company that might screw them

Boy was I wrong. They have zero risk and pure upside of being an executive. Oh it's a hard job, it's stressful?

So is mine and I get paid peanuts in comparison!

That's not really very useful if you're struggling to make rent or put food on the table :/

No? Code is literally instructions to the machine. Especially low level code. It's not a representation of anything, it's a list of commands in sequence for the computer to execute

The fact that you do not understand that is concerning.

For me, the stress about making decisions as an employee isn't about making a choice.

It's knowing that any moment a manager is going to wander along and change it from under me. So I might as well ask the manager first.

It showed up on my performance reviews that I'm bothering other people with questions and I should make my own choices, so I started doing that and documenting every time the choice I made got overturned by a manager. Next performance review when it came up I brought out my list. My performance reviewer was pissed at me for documenting this and I was let go four months later. :)

I would love a job where people let me make decisions after decision after decision

And yeah you could say that if my manager had to overturn my decisions that often it probably meant that I made bad decisions, and maybe that's true, but I don't think so. It was often things like "this is the best solution but it will take longer", "This low priority, do it the quick way instead". But priorities changed a lot.

Engineering by feels...

Is this what we've come to?

Markets might be booming but society sure isn't. Everyone's miserable and burned out and broke.

The reason that you didn’t hear about them was that you weren’t looking in that area

The purpose of advertising is to reach people who aren't looking at a specific area.

You've been wondering about that not because these programs weren't there but because you weren't looking for them

I wasn't looking for grants as a woman in compsci either, but I sure heard about those

There are a lot of good reasons why we want more men in nursing.

I never disputed or questioned that

Maybe!

Could be just me, confirmation bias or whatever but around 2010-2020 it felt like you couldn't go two minutes with tripping over a "we need more women in STEM" article but this is the first I feel I'm ever seeing about "we need more male nurses"

And male teachers have always felt fairly plentiful starting around high school levels to me, and going into university. Not in primary school, but people don't seem to trust adult men around children as a rule so that might be why

I have been wondering how long it would start to take before historically female roles would start courting men the way STEM has been courting women the last couple of decades

After years of "why are men dropping out of the workforce" articles it seems we finally are seeing some people come to their senses that yes, you do actually still have to "court" men to enter different careers to make it seem like appealing work for them to do

Can we talk about how gross it is to call real human women "3D girls"? Is that just me?

Yeah, I was thinking that too

Gawr Gura sang "take me out to the ball game" at a Dodgers game in 2024. This stuff has been super mainstream now for years

Here's a hypothetical: if everyone owns a home, no one rents homes anymore, right? I mean why would you?

So why would anyone buy a second home in that scenario? Maybe as a studio or whatever, perhaps. But as homes become less useful as a rental investment, the number of non owner-occupied homes seems like it will decrease too?

As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down

Not necessarily at all. Plenty of people rent who would like to own homes too

I really can't understand how people seem to expect "intelligence" to be deterministic and infallible

We don't really expect this of intelligence

We do sort of expect this of machines

Most people in society use machines and computers expecting very deterministic behavior, within some constraints. A saw cuts wood as long as your blade isn't dull. A computer shows your emails as long as the power and Internet is not out.

Comparably Unconstrained computer AI systems are still extremely new and there is no social norms or expectations around it yet

Most of the most painfully over-engineered swamp projects I've dealt with have been a result of not understanding the requirements.

For me it's been a complete lack of requirements. Absolutely no one in the company seeming to want to make a firm decision on what we're building right at the moment. Every decision coming with a hedge "but maybe we might want to do this sometime later so we should keep our options open"

So any time there was a tradeoff we would take the option that leaves our options open, which takes way more time and effort to get right

optimizing for constraints that don't really exist or can be dealt with once a better picture is in place

I think these both fall comfortable under the umbrella of "solving the wrong problem"

It's a clear illustration that these systems are not oracles. No matter how much they've improved since then, we should assume they are still capable of making hilariously big mistakes. Only now the obvious mistakes are fixed and the big mistakes will be a lot more subtle and a lot harder to catch.

Many middle aged people might also remember a time when every adult in the world was shouting "don't believe everything you read online" and schools wouldn't let you cite wikipedia as a primary source.

That attitude seems to have gone away for some reason

My favorite blog for a long time was Shamus Young over at https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale

He passed away a couple of years ago unfortunately but there's a lot of stuff there that is pretty interesting. He has some awesome stuff about procedural generation

It's really more of an entertainment blog than an information one but there's still some really interesting stuff there.

Rest in Peace Shamus. You made a huge impact on a younger me

What do you want them to do about it, exactly? 3D artwork is a complex activity that requires a lot of keys to have a useful keybinding setup. Some of those keys are going to be the numpad

Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.

No one is funding "anti AI" the way AI is being funded :/

It makes assumptions that people doing serious 3D work are not on a laptop and can afford a keyboard with a numpad.

Those aren't really bad assumptions.

I would like to see that happen. We've really let tech companies get out of control

Something I think about quite often with HN is there are probably people on this forum that have friends / family who work at AI companies or are highly monetarily invested in AI themselves.

I don't think everyone on this forum is as objective as we'd like to think. I know I'm not. A large part of why I dislike AI is because I view it as making my life, personally, worse. It has completely fucked up the career I've been building for going on two decades

And all I hear is "adapt or die" from assholes who are chugging the AI koolaid by the bucketfull

Even having access to a flushing toilet and consistent electrical service are luxuries

Globally sure. But we don't measure ourselves by global standards. We measure ourselves by what we have around us, and the norms we were brought up with. No one in North America thinks indoor plumbing with flushing toilets is a luxury it's a basic necessity, and they're right to think so by the standards of their society.

The US social safety net is embarrassing by the standards of what lives people in the US expect to have.

Saying that their expectations are silly because people in rural Africa don't have indoor plumbing is kind of asinine. They are reasonably setting their expectations based on their neighbours experience not the most baseline human experience.

Personally I watched my Grandpa wither away from Parkinsons and eventually Alzheimer's for over a decade, starting only a couple of years after he retired. He spent most of his retired life in hospice care not recognizing his children or grandchildren.

Knowing that is likely my eventual fate too, I really don't want to wait to the last possible minute to retire.

It's a huge shame we can't accurately predict future illnesses and such, we could plan so much more effectively. As it stands we have to do our best and live good lives before we aren't capable of that anymore. Many people won't have a nice retirement. Many won't even live that long in the first place. Society can probably do better for everyone than we currently do

the mundanely pleasant reality

There are a shocking number of people who do not experience anything resembling a mundanely pleasant reality

Those of us who do are extremely fortunate