d--b

We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organize and modify them. It’s a bit indecent for a developer to complain that LLMs took away the pleasure of molding a clay made of bits, while the robots we enabled to build took the actual clay off of potmakers actual hands.

And what the author forgets to mention is that we got it good. Oh boy. As a software developer, I can work in any field I want. I started on video compression. I moved to finance. I make games in my spare time. I make plugins for music. And I get to be paid way more than my neighbor who’s a heart surgeon. I can work remotely 100%. I can go to a nice beach in Thailand, work 2 hours in the morning and enjoy the rest of the day, and still make more than the median salary in France, where I live.

The grief is not the loss of the craft alone, it’s the loss of that craft that paid for your house.

As they said: software is eating the world. Well, it is now eating itself. It’s only fair.

The author is right though, human societies need to ask themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice all the crafts on the altar of productivity and convenience.

The Amish decided they didn’t want to. It’s a bit of a weird choice, but it is a choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so

That is simply not true. There is a ton of litterature around inherent vs accidental complexity, which in an ideal world should map directly to spec vs code. There are a lot of technicalities in writing code that a spec writer shouldn't know about.

Code has to deal with the fact that data is laid out a certain way in ram and on disk, and accessing it efficiently requires careful implementation.

Code has to deal with exceptions that arise when the messiness of the real world collides with the ideality of code.

It half surprises me that this article comes from a haskell developer. Haskell developers (and more generally people coming from maths) have this ideal view of code that you just need to describe relationships properly, and things will flow from there.

This works fine up to a certain scale, where efficiency becomes a problem.

And yes, it's highly probable that AI is going to be able to deal with all the accidental complexity. That's how I use it anyways.

At least they had a purpose, a vision.

Now Zuckerberg is going to be all sour about it and even more cynical about everything.

They’re going to go back to what they know how to do: optimize for attention and sell personal data.

Conveniently, the way they designed the phone allows them to charge 30% of every transaction that happens on the device…

But that’s beyond the point. The point is that the iphone is a capable device, that probably can run macos, and it’s a waste that we’re not allowed to.

It is kind of silly that people buy raspberry pis to run their NAS, while they trash ther infinitely more capable iphone every couple of years.

Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235

https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_season_28

I mean what degree of alienation does it require to setup a website that claims to be about an advocacy group for children safety, while it is in fact a fake site for an org funneling lobbying money into passing laws that makes their boss more money. How can they live like this?

And then I remember the Monsanto lobbyists, the Sacklers' enablers, the cigarette people and the oil lawyers. I guess there is just a ton of people who are natural born minions.

https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...

I often use things like: “I’ve told you no a bilion times, you useless piece of shit”, or “what goes through your stipid ass brain, you headless moron”

I am in full Westworld mode.

But at least when that thing gets me fired for being way faster at coding than I am, at least I’d haves that much frustration less. Maybe?

mostly kidding here

This is bank fraud case, for god’s sake, not an armed robbery. I don’t know the scale of it, but still, no one said she was a danger to anyone. She was a suspect, not a convict, and she was held at gunpoint while babysitting young children. What in the fucking world?

The US is so fucked up lately. People should chill the fuck out.

sigh

I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways.

The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.

$200 worth of actual computation is an awful lot of computation.

I think a lof of the advice is well-thinking, but it's not very good as things aren't that easy.

I believe that the easiest is to get into something geeky, but not competitive. Maybe it's 3D printing, or treasure hunting, or setting up fish tanks, or board game design, or fan fiction writing, or cosplaying, these kinds of stuff. If it can be physical, it's good. Like, bouldering is fairly geeky. It's also very hard if you're on the heavy side.

I think the geeky competitive hobbies are not good. Like chess is not great to meet people, as you'll need a lot of time to build up the skill required to even talk to someone without sounding dumb.

You need something that:

1. You can spend long periods of time doing on your own.

2. Has a strong ONLINE community (it's a lot easier to get into online stuff)

3. Allows to occasionally meet up in person.

The main thing is that geeks are nice people. They are way more welcoming than the average couple who's usually tangled in kids' education, paying the mortgage back, seeing their friends and family. And you can meet people online, which in itself is social contact that's good for you.

If I was in your shoes, my plan would be:

- try geek stuff that requires some advice. More ideas: clay sculpting, jewelry making, woodworking, and find one that I like.

- seek online communities and chat to people there. This would allow me to build up my skills, show off my stuff, get feedback, and start creating friendships. I wouldn't worry about being online too much at this stage. I think I'd try to find different coomunication channels, like IRC and discord. I don't know if things like second life are still a thing, but this used to be good too.

- Become "someone" in these communities. Like people know who you are. At some point people don't talk about the hobby, but conversation easily go more intimate.

- Meet people up when you can.

On top of meeting people, this has a great benefit: you have something to talk about to other people.

Like if you get into treasure hunting (like I did for a while), it's a great conversation starter. People think you're a bit crazy, but they love to hear that you went in the woods with your pickaxe and your shovel.

Anyways, I know that's what I'd do.

Good luck

1% spread is in fact, pretty small, so yeah, it probably isn't very risky.

I once hacked a spreadsheet in a week that was good enough to not embark on a multiple-months 3-devs project.

In the same team, I tweaked a configuration file for distributed calculations that shaved 2 minutes of calculation on an action that the user would run thirty times a day.

I got paid all right.

People don't give a shit about complexity or simplicity. They care about two things:

1. Does it work

2. How soon can you ship

There is a third thing that stakeholders really like: when you tell them what they should be building, or not building.