preordained

This is very important question that demands answer

I can't be the only one to think it is silly to interact with tools in this way. Honestly, I see skills, "hooks", and other monkey-patch efforts as things that will be short-lived investments, weird kludges from an era where you had to "hand-crank" your AI, more often. Something to go the same way as using HTML tables as bastardized CSS

Terrible, honestly. Betrayed, gaslit. Don't tell me it's just a tool and it's my problem...hell no, fix your stupid tool. The whole point is to immerse yourself so you don't feel any different than having an energetic and resourceful junior or some perhaps limited but useful companion at your beck and call. If that illusion drops, it's on the tool.

Delightfulness? I'm seeing some indication "delightness" may be a word (can't say 100%)...but it seems a poor substitution for IMO the natural version of it

They are utterly cooked. The only ones I've ever seen on the "it's not so bad" side of this argument are aloof boomers and anyone young enough to never have experienced at least a good swath of the 90s--i.e. has no truly visceral basis for comparison/has no clue how bloodless and sick the vampires have left society

Is there no pipeline--or a job fair? A way to get a moment with prospective employers? It seems tragically stupid if MIT offers no such thing. Applying into the void seems like a fool's errand.

I think as-applied now, the author's take strikes a chord with me. LLMs are a technical marvel, but their results feel very cheap and tacky...it doesn't take much to catch at glimpse at the fallible man behind the curtain. They are lauded more for how impressive the illusion they render all things considered more than what they are actually GOOD FOR. Weird hallucinating search, smart but untrustworthy coding intern...people hold these things up in a way that suggests we've arrived instead of acknowledging their disappointment and saying "yes, there is a lot of power here, but we still haven't found the killer application or the thing that takes this from an impressive but flawed trick to indispensable".

"I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet"

There is an indictment of AI "products" if I ever heard one

That sounds terrible! Some people just take these things in stride I guess, but I have no interest in going through these kind of hurdles for something like this...

I wish this was a joke...

"pay-to-win"

Yah, good luck with that. Anyone who has played competitively knows you will absolutely get stomped by a higher skill opponent even if your deck is more powerful on paper unless the discrepancy is ludicrous. Garfield made his game too well to fall to such trite criticisms...he outdid himself, its immune to his own potshots, lol

This is real thing I'm glad you've acknowledged as more than just a figment of my imagination. There are things I want to do outside of work programming that are there own level of mental taxing and/or creative...side projects, competitive Magic the Gathering...and I while usually find some juice to squeeze into these, I do agree that it seems like many other professions leave a lot more in the tank.

Weird troll, or sociopath?

Well, I guess we're just naturally evolving and adapting into enslaving ourselves, just following nature's course... There doesn't need to be a "master plan", but clearly there are some working themes

That's cool...but won't lie, I get the "Microservices" vibe reading this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

Datalog! I especially like that in the smorgasbord of features. I'm still not convinced having a sentient AI encoded in the type system is what the doctor ordered for industry at large.

I'd argue that better relative ergonomics had diddly squat effect on Python's current position. It's first mover advantage, plain and simple. It got its hooks in data science like JavaScript got its in the browser.

I can say that personally using Ruby, Python felt like a massive step backward. I can see how others might disagree, but I feel like it's all in what you know first. On a certain level, most of us know JavaScript is just terrible, but there have been millions of new devs who knew nothing else and thought it's fine--better than fine, its great, it's the other stuff that's weird! But then you go on for a while, maybe eventually find lisp and/or functional programming, and you realize how brain-damaged our most commonly used tools really are.

It can be. Anything can be. It is far more treacherous, though.

By this logic, the Imperial System is the best measurement system for the US (pick whatever entrenched system you want). Whether you agree or disagree with it, it's the most widely used in US so its superiority there is self-evident.

That's really not fair here. These would be trains you could bolt onto highways, and "transform" them back into cars as needed.

The media hates him, and I can understand how that can be hard to separate out from one's view of reality; but, I think whether Elon has success despite actually being terrible as some might think, or is actually really good at what he does, he's been very successful on the whole if you can be the slightest bit objective. So, given that, you would have to claim to know, really know, that it's all despite him to say he's ineffective, which is a pretty silly thing to propose unqualified.

I've found playing Magic the Gathering improves my ability on this. There is chess, too...but IMO you encounter more novel situations more often in MTG where things will cost you. It's interesting in the sense that sometimes things proceed in a very straight forward manner, but usually (sometimes unknowingly, if you're not careful) there are several branches to take, and doing things just slightly sub-optimally will cost you big in the end. Some games every decision is crucial...do a mulligan this hand knowing what he's playing, I can play 3 different lands on turn one, but which one best sets me up for how this match is likely to proceed, etc. I still don't think I'm naturally good at this, but I've noticed I've been able to better force myself into a mindset to be very deliberate for short periods on account of it.

You can open a Clojure REPL in IntelliJ. But, you need nrepl running in your server/running Clojure

You actually identify with your values and they have personal meaning for you? You don't spit them out only when given a specific prompt, them becoming completely forgotten and irrelevant when given some other, perhaps contradictory prompt?

If you ever believed such a thing for a moment, I have a bridge to sell you. A big one!

No. I'm not sure I understand either the appeal or the intuition behind that position. The logic, I can grasp, once you've "gone in" and accepted a premise that we're in some multiverse where the uninhibited numbers make a simulation like ours, so to speak, inevitable. Why that's the type of premise that speaks to one, is beyond me. Okay, maybe I was wrong just now, I think I do understand. It's about not being beholden to anything. Not a creator, or a design. You might be meaningless if you're a random happenstance, but there is no blueprint or conductor guiding your destiny. There is an impulse to associate meaning with tyranny, because if you are meant for anything, it has been without your say.

And good things are sure to follow when it becomes the hottest new status symbol/ego magnet...

That's cool. Still, I had a difficult time stomaching the exposition, though...all this "our harsh cruel capitalist world stifled me so I took a journey within..." (and then made some neat toys, apparently). It honestly feels very spoiled and self-righteous.

Do Clojure, so I use Java (directly anyhow) sometimes...through the bars of a cell where I keep it in my attic. Despite that, I'm not big on chasing frameworks or trends, and I think plenty of the community is that way (Rich Hickey himself has described the language as somewhat being for old programmers who are tired of it all). I'm not sure I could go back full-time to a curly brace language, though.

for the sake of extra money

Do you know what the money is for or why they are sacrificing for it? Of course not, you just want to sound high and mighty