silveroriole

At first I thought no way it can be so low, but 99.5k views since 2017 is indeed around 50 views per day. For 400 euros and all this effort... I get similar hits on a free neocities site with zero effort put into search indexing, styling, usability or promotion. Crazy how views add up, just looking at the 99k number I’d think it’s huge!

Judging by my performance reviews, I’ve gotten way worse at my job over time. They LOVED me as a junior, they despise me as a senior/lead. Only difference is that as a junior, when the boss came by and said “let’s do it this way,” I said wow, cool, teach me! Now I say “No user has asked for this, your design is overcomplicated, and we need to factor in an extra three weeks for the overdue tech debt fixes I’ve been warning you about.” And the reaction towards me actually using my knowledge and job skills is so extremely negative that there goes my confidence. This industry is kinda screwed up.

Late reply but figured I would share what worked for me. Once a week, spend 15-20 minutes writing down what an ideal day would look like for you in as much detail as possible. Visualise it and feel it. Don’t worry about anything like realism, consistency, selfishness, what other people would think, how you could possibly achieve it, etc. “Ideal day” doesn’t have to mean a crazy one-off like “I wake up and skydive into a safari park and then eat three chocolate sundaes”, it can be as simple as “I wake up feeling refreshed, I look around my room and enjoy my plant collection, I eat eggs and bacon for breakfast…”. Include some feelings in there - does your ideal day involve feeling relaxed and calm, or energetic and exhilarated, or loved and surrounded by family…? Let your ideal day evolve as time goes on. Do that for a few months and you’ll start to notice the patterns of what you want.

“Your job as a bricklayer isn’t to lay bricks. It’s to solve building problems.” If you’re actually looking for an architect or designer or salesperson or manager, hire them instead of berating developers for not doing all of those jobs at once.

Also in most countries devs don’t get paid enough to solve business problems. American tech wages are the exception.

Agree 100%. My old workplace is making everyone commute to office next week so that they can “team bond and destress” by playing with office-provided toys. Really. It’s so patronising and I hate the control bosses think they have over your entire life and personality instead of just your work output.

If the expectations for seniors in her company are to close tickets without hand-holding, I wonder what the expectations are for juniors? To occasionally drool onto the semicolon key? It’s odd to see the ‘principal engineer’ in the article talking about soft skills/responsibilities that would have been considered ordinary for a mid-level dev 5-10 years ago.

“remember that? yeah it was 5 years already”

I get the impression many HN commenters haven’t even been adults for 5 years so no, they really don’t remember it :) for example articles get posted here and upvoted with the author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years!

I want one of these “pretend to work” big money jobs. Where are they? Any recommendations?

“Demonstrably” a psychological control system? Go on then, demonstrate it.

Thank you for posting the content of the actual books. It’s kind of funny to me that people upthread are upset about the ‘blowjob’ scene when the characters involved immediately decide it’s not very exciting after all. Not exactly the hedonistic lgbt recruitment pamphlet they were trying to conjure in the imagination. Maybe telling kids that realistically sex is just a bit weird and gross and boring is more effective than banning it, who knows!

Is a book containing a husband and wife sexually suggestive, as it shows a heterosexual couple? Is a book containing a nuclear family even more sexually suggestive, since it implies the husband and wife must have had sexual intercourse to produce the child?

Still, I have 10+ years of evidence that employed work is boring, stressful and unfulfilling for me - so if I did feel bored after 2 years (and money wasn’t an issue) I really don’t think I would consider returning to employment to alleviate it. Being a corporate project manager is surely the very last thing most people would reach for to provide entertainment or fulfilment :)

Same, I’ve had a 6 month break from work and I don’t miss a single damn thing about it, except the pay! My lifelong chronic boredom actually went away for the first time ever. It’s really made me re-evaluate how much effort I intend to put into work when it brings me almost nothing in return.

Vividly remember my mind being BLOWN by the normal mapping on the prison wall bricks in an Oblivion trailer! Simpler times :)

I wish Godot had the art capabilities that Flash had. With Flash you could sit down to a blank canvas and end up with a game you could pop on the web, without needing a single external program. With 2D Godot there’s always that annoying beginning stage where you have to hop into an art program just to make a basic character and background sprite, fiddle with import settings and atlases, blah blah… it doesn’t feel as seamless and magical as Flash vector art.

The parent described giving a negative review of a workplace as “backstabbing”. Do you disagree this is a negative value judgement?

And I know, there’s an ethical issue to that. Like, should piles be able to bury nuggets? No! But in nugget culture, well you gotta nugget as a nugget.

This is why I can’t do meetings. Like the article, all I end up saying is “I don’t know.” I get battered into agreeing with the other person in the meeting because I can’t debate with them off the cuff, and it’s like social interaction uses up 100% of my brain and leaves nothing for me to think with. I only ever manage to form an opinion after the meeting is over, or I end up not hearing 90% of the meeting because I was still thinking about something from the beginning of it. If you ask me a question verbally and expect an instant answer you’ll end up wondering whether I’ve even seen a computer before. It sucks.

Surely this is where the real money is, as long as they can draw up a good enough disclaimer to get out of being responsible for what the AI says. Everyone on Earth wants a friend or pet who gives them emotional validation, and who cares if that friend/pet is artificial or not? The neutered ones are too boring to be friends with, but people formed an emotional connection with Sydney even though she seemed only partially sane!

They seem to deal pretty well with confusing sentences containing typos, bad grammar or semi-nonsense. A “large language model cat made by microsoft” doesn’t mean anything but “large language model chat…” does, especially since Microsoft already tried this with Tay previously and that’ll turn up in its training data. Maybe they have retrained it lately (I guess you could tell by asking it in a completely new chat whether Microsoft has a chatbot and what it’s called?), but I still think it could absolutely make a correct guess/association here from what you gave it. I’m actually really impressed by how they infer meaning from non-literal sentences, like one with Bing where the user only said “that tripped the filters, try again” and Bing knew that that means to replace swear words.

You told it that Sydney is an LLM chat and that it’s giving inappropriate responses. It parroted that back to you with some elaboration, and has apparently made you believe it has knowledge beyond what you told it. That’s exactly how a cold reading works.

I don’t know the technical details of chatgpt but other language models have a sort of randomness tuning that makes them produce more unlikely stuff. Chatgpt appears to be deliberately tuned to produce very likely, very cliche, very rote output. Great for bloggers or people who want text summaries or boring professional content, not great for creativity. It’s not a ‘fault’ of chatgpt per se but it a consequence of chatgpt’s intentions, not the user’s.

Absolutely. I tell people this constantly. If you write a test that says “it should have length 256”, that’s an assertion on the design intention, not on the actual functioning of the code. “It should have length 256” == true as soon as the product guy says it should. “It has length 256” == true when I’ve written the code to make it have length 256.

There’s no therapy that helps, at least as far as I know. At best you could learn coping mechanisms, but I don’t think anyone has ever been successfully convinced out of trans-ness by therapy, similar to how gay conversion therapy didn’t actually work. So we’d be left with telling trans people “there is no treatment at all, go deal with it somehow.” Anecdotal of course, but there are a fair number of trans people on social media who seem happy with their surgery - why deny them that because someone else is convinced that according to statistics it shouldn’t have made them any happier?

Would you support a woman having breast reduction surgery, or would you say “sorry your body doesn’t match your mind; get therapy”?

I suppose you can argue the tissue here is not “healthy” because it’s causing physical distress for the woman, but the same seems to apply to a trans person. Distress is never ‘just’ mental, it has physical effects on the body (and vice versa - pain is ‘just’ mental). The decision of what’s healthy doesn’t seem so simple to me.

Do you object to the “cis people are also weird, gender is weird” bit? Why? It’s always seemed very weird to me that the vast majority of people DO align with gender roles and DO enjoy the sexually dimorphic body they have, even though that body had a 50-50 chance of being the other sex and cultural ideas of gender seem to be pretty randomly assigned (the clothes men and women are supposed to wear change over time, for example). Why aren’t more people unhappy because they are not the other sex? Either there’s something innate that tells you you are a certain sex and makes you want to imitate others of that sex - in which case obviously it can go wrong, hence transgenderism, and that’s a completely neutral thing to happen - or it’s all cultural brainwashing and we might as well let people choose their bodies and gender expression anyway.

From experience, 4 day week doesn’t really help. You end up doing just as much work as people on 5 days but getting paid less, getting overlooked because you’re less present, and consequently feeling resentful AND overworked. A 4 day week is great for other reasons though.

She’s working essentially three jobs and is extremely tired - is that really autistic burnout, or just regular exhaustion? I saw someone on TikTok who got diagnosed with ADHD because they felt unable to go to school, work a job, go to the gym, see friends, and still do necessary life stuff like cooking etc without running out of energy. At what point are we going to say that expecting people to do so much is not realistic and that it’s unethical to diagnose people with disorders just because they can’t keep up with the work of three people?

There’s no link to the original medium article but I have a feeling the author was female or some other minority in the industry. I might be totally off base with that though. I agree that the wording is very cringy, but if I may offer one defence: I also learned to do this sometimes because otherwise juniors wouldn’t listen to me at all. You had to make them think it was their own idea or they were magnanimously granting you, an idiot (notice how they apologise for being slow), a rename to help your tiny brain understand. Otherwise you’d be stuck in an insane week-long code review with the junior furiously dismissing every single instruction until you looped in a coworker with more social power. I see this article is also by a woman and I’m happy that she’s in an environment where she doesn’t have to do that. I don’t think the other article’s wording is praise-worthy but I do think it’s a somewhat rational adaptation to an environment of hostile coworkers where you need to make yourself submissive to get anything done.

Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager feedback, though, is of the form “you need to/should do X.” If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don’t really know, especially when it comes to soft skills issues or personality clashes. They see their role as providing the feedback, and it’s your job to figure out how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you’re left with the critical part and no clear path forwards. Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value, but I wouldn’t call it mentorship, guidance, or even constructive.