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throwawayai2

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Having spent nearly a decade in the San Antonio/Austin area, no. I'd say only recently have San Antonio and Austin even felt connected. But Dallas and Houston are completely different worlds in my mind. It's nearly 5 hours from San Antonio to Dallas, with not much interesting in between.

This is certainly an extreme example, but I feel that most designers believe (and their management expects) in these sorts of design decision justifications. Designers need to sell their designs, and a large majority of the time there isn't enough actual thought to justify anything; it's just preference, or at the end of the day, there are lots of good enough solutions.

There is a significant problem in the design of performative work that provides little to no value. So much time is spent on "process" and "workshops" that yield nothing, yet design management rewards it. I've informally polled peers of designers, and the common view is that, depending on the designer, only 20-60% of what they do is of any actual value. I think the state of the design market reflects this. Designers need to engage in serious introspection and figure out which parts of their work are valuable and which are not. The industry has been discussing "proving our value" and "getting a seat at the table" for years. If we've been working on this for 15+ years but haven't achieved it, I think that shows something about the actual value design provides.

Source: I've worked as a product designer for 10+ years.

Outdoor activities It started with rock climbing, but these days it's trail running, skiing, and mountain biking. I've always loved being outside and being active, so they were natural hobbies to pick up. I've chosen where I live so I can do this 365 days a year.

Piano I can't actually get outside 365 days a year, because I need rest days. I also wanted a non-physical hobby to exercise my brain. I played drums when I was a kid and missed making music. I bought a digital piano and dabbled for 4 or 5 months then started taking weekly lessons. If you have any interest in music related hobbies, I'd highly recommend learning piano.

Cooking This is normally more of a winter hobby for me, but I'll try and cook through a whole (or most) of a cookbook. It's interesting to really get into one cuisine or style of cooking for a while, vs. hoping all over the place every couple of weeks.

Thanks this is a good place for me to start digging into. I have BS/MS in CS/HCI, but I've been working as a product designer for nearly a decade now. I'm planning on moving back towards the engineering side of things though and energy is one industry I'm interested in.

Altra and Topo make "footshaped" shoes. Not all Altra are, but you can get most models with a wider toebox.

Another brand to checkout is Lems are other brands to checkout. They do have some running type shoes, but I'm only familiar with their casual shoes. I reallly recommend getting some Lems for daily use.

I think it's partly that, but I think it's also partly that tech is just becoming just another job. Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating. There is also 80% that just needs to the role filled and could be done by someone decent enough to make CRUD react apps.

I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software.

My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.

It's not just Reddit. Over the past 6-12 months I've noticed that most of the places I "consume" at have all gone downhill due the monetization/commercialization by the content creator. I used to spend way too much time on Reddit and Youtube and would use tools like SelfControl and screentime to moderate my usage. I've noticed that recently I don't have to do that anyone. Everything has turned into a money grab and I'm no longer interested in the content. My current reddit routine is scrolling for a couple of minutes, realizing I haven't seen anything interesting and I lose interest and close the app. I have a 15 min screentime timer for reddit and I don't even hit it anymore. The same goes for youtube. There are just a handful of specific youtubers I follow now, the rest I feel like I'm being sold something or is just low quality content created for the sole purpose of inserting ads into.

A bit off topic, but find OpenAI's branding and visual image so off putting. It has that uncanny valley of "caring about humans, but actual not" feel that destructive tech companies and AI in movies and sci-fi have. It seems like they tried so hard to make it not feel that way, so it ended up feeling that. It's so devoid of anything.

I'm not really sure how to describe it beyond that.

Post-GPT Computing 3 years ago

What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?

There is a product leader at my company that has started generating product documents from ChatGPT and it atrocious. Now we have product documents that are filled with pages of content vaguely related to what we are working on. They don't use it as a starting point to edit, it's copy and paste it in. They regularly "reveal" that this was all AI, when it is blatantly obvious it is. Not sure how we are supposed to be "innovating" when our products docs are just 2 year old AI filler text. People are worried about the internet getting filled with AI produced garbage. My job is already filled with AI produced garbage. It seems like this announcement is going to make that a reality for a lot more people.

I'm not anti-AI. I think its going to have a huge impact and soon. But right now it's not good for generating knowledge work.