shric

In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant?

“Wholly” was too strong a word now that I think about it.

But I’ll give two main things I find unpleasant.

One: Normally I like working with other people. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating on a complex problem with smart and conscientious colleagues. However, the bad experiences are now amplified:

- a random colleague gets sent down a wild gooose chase of an LLM claiming there is an issue with something I wrote. It’s a full blown hallucination because it found a confluence page which mentioned me and just decided to connect things together.

- another colleague is suddenly empowered with being able to vibe code websites and is now copying and pasting my replies into an LLM and pasting the LLM back at me over Slack.

- a colleague gives a quick drive by vibe coded PR to add a feature into something I own. It reimplements the same business logic that is already done elsewhere. It takes me more energy to explain all this than just do it myself.

There are dozens more examples. In isolation I can shrug each of these off, but it’s draining. Large organisations have become more “agile” with local optimisations and missing the bigger picture.

Two: while I agree that everything is getting done faster and I do get satisfaction out of that, I’m a deep in the weeds technical person. I don’t have it in me to be a big picture person or a people leader. I love having to think about algorithms, data structures, schemas, etc. While I can use AI has a pair programmer, it’s doing a lot of the thinking for me and it’s usually faster. So yes it makes me a better engineer, no I don’t enjoy not thinking as much. I don’t enjoy shifting solely to a higher level of abstraction. Maybe that makes me a bad engineer, but I cannot change how I feel about it.

30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.

In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable.

Except there’s a competitive incentive to either use less tokens or make the tokens go further

Yeah, for that I use periodic scrubs and zfs event daemon

smartmontools makes this trivial and can email you which might be better than beeping and lights if you’re not always near your server.

I use that plus smartctl_exporter so I can do metrics and alerting off that.

It may come as a surprise to any rational person but some people actually believe that attempting to regulate safety into these models and arbitrarily enforcing them is a good idea.

To literally broadcast to the world that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?

Yes. Per your previous statement, those people who are “forced” to use it at work. While it might be a requirement of their job, what job they do is usually a choice.

Walter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).

You said “Unions are the *only legal way* for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions.” (Emphasis mine)

My reply was not to say unions were bad or ineffective at accomplishing the goal, it was simply refuting your blanket statement.

Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions.

How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?

I’m curious how he got caught. Polymarket accounts should be untraceable

In what backward place does this happen? It shows up the second I pay here (Australia)

The key here is “coworker”. He has an obligation to do reasonable things due to being employed by someone and it affecting others.

This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.

Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.

Per a comment I made to one of your other replies in this thread, VPS doesn’t exclude this. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.

And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.

want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

You can put it behind cloudflare for free.

I don’t do it myself, but “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” is a bold claim. It might be harder, but we (geeks) love to do things ourselves.

If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.

You can also over use the same initialism: ATM the ATM is connected via ATM

Your entire reply seems to refute that they’re useless yet nowhere did it say they were useless.

In fact, in many occasions they point out they’re indeed useful.

You can buy 128GB M5 MacBook Pros?

Configured one just now, delivers in 2 weeks

Looks like early 2025. Anything in it in particular that you see as comically out of date?

Asking because of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon :)

I recently learned about that and now I see it everywhere, weird.

I have owned a AU$7,000 (US$5,000) ebike in Sydney, Australia for a few years and have parked it everywhere without worrying about it getting stolen.

It has a built in lock that blocks the front spokes, an alarm and I use a $200 chain lock around the frame to fix it to something.

Doesn't excuse it but in case you or other readers are unaware, there are some ways to mitigate it: https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...

Yeah, my father is now 70, I do remember he wrote assembly language in the late 80s but not since.

You had ~160,000 times more storage than I did for my first personal computer.

It exists on my work enterprise account but not my personal account which is a monthly flat rate. I assume if I exceed my quota and I choose pay as I go then it will become available.

I agree, but I struggle to think of a cleaner way without sacrificing the minimalist and mostly accessible theme.

I love that there are no images, not even Unicode emojis, no ads, no side bars, etc.

There is either an unvote or undown option once you’ve hit one