frankie_t

For CS, as in "fundamentals that are behind what a typical programmer deals with every day" there is a good resource: https://teachyourselfcs.com/.

Yes, all that and more. It doesn't feel to me like cheats are available, it feels like a cheater has entered the game and there is no point in taking the game seriously anymore.

I heavily invested into dream of learning throughout all my life and benefiting from it financially and socially. Now it seems that won't come to be true. I've always been taught since childhood that the important things are those that you can carry in your head, because no one is going to take it away from you. I guess now they are wrong, while it cannot be taken directly it can be heavily debased to the point of pointlessness of having it.

On top of that, the enshittification of everything tech-related, tightening grip on privacy. Quality collapse, not just what I am doesn't have any value, but nothing produced by anyone does. For example, I don't consider reading books that came after ~2024. On top of that, fear of bigger changes and turmoils related to redistribution of wealth (always upwards, of course), dystopic vision of the future. On top of that, war in my country with no end in sight and shifts to authoritarianism.

I'm trying to find a way out of this, and I'm finding interesting observations. For example, one shouldn't overinvest themselves into anything - "never keep all you eggs in the same basket", because nothing is permanent. For me that was the idea of continuous self-improvement that would allow me to keep both a fulfilling job and middle-class lifestyle. It was the most important thing in life, and, of course, when it shattered the pain was substantial. It is possible to find and have other important things in life, some of them could be friends, family, community.

Then, no one is going to take away what you do with your mind, especially in free time. You could give up on everything AI related and just enjoy the things you like. Maybe on the worse side of job market there won't be much apart from mercenaries, drug dealers and prostitutes. But in all better cases there's going to be something to occupy yourself with and live relatively serene life. Janitor, any kind of manual laborer that cannot be automated, small farmer, to name a few that came to mind. In free time (or during work even) you could read/listen to anything you like.

And then, this is just the baseline, things could actually turn out better.

Same here. FWIW, you can still absolutely do it, just like you can weave your own fabric. You probably won't be able to monetize it though, as it won't give you as much edge in the workspace anymore. It's just a thing to do in your spare time.

Not sure if it helps with the feeling of futility or not. For me, it doesn't really help that much because ultimately I want the skills and knowledge I gathered to benefit me in some way. For example, previously I would be able to better understand computers and software, be an "overall better" programmer, better thinker (in terms of computation). If the results you get are not used in any way, it's on the same level as memorizing rule sets for some obscure game that no one knows or cares about.

Maybe pivoting to something else like philosophy could make sense as a hobby.

Of course, there's always going to be some demand for knowing computers, knowing programming languages first-hand, etc. Writing or auditing code for critical systems. Teaching the next generations of people that will do critical systems. Some people are optimistic in that they are going to fall into that demand. I'm not optimistic about myself.

It isn't always just phone. If you are in a "bad" state, you'll find something else to ease it. And it's often hardly more productive than doomscrolling: just brooding, switching between activities rapidly, or drowsing.

But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety

Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.

But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.

Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.

It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually:

- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone

- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.

- uninterrupted time

I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.

Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.

Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it

I think AI backlash has less to do with the tech itself and more with its broader impact on society in the current system, if it delivers a quarter of its promises. Those doing the backlashing feel that they are going to lose much more than they are going to gain.

I quit news from around 2015 to around 2019 and it was the best period of my life in terms of productivity, clarity of mind. Of course, other things also were a factor, like I routinely would go offline for days or even weeks, only using my computer. Covid broke me because it was so captivating to read about a thing that will directly affect me. It even felt mildly intellectual in the moment, all the analytics and prognoses. And now with the war raging in my country (Ukraine) my system is completely broken. Going offline for long periods of time is not much of an option anymore, and keeping out of smartphone by sheer willpower doesn't really work.

> AI empowers people with less to do more

I could accept this, although it's not the hard truth yet. But doing is not equal to earning money. If you do more while being employed by someone else, the benefits are reaped by your employer. You only get the expectation to do more. Also, I don't believe that businesses can expand infinitely, so the employment market might not be strictly a zero sum game, it's also not an infinite sum game. Which means the competition in the workforce rises and salaries fall.

Alternatively, you would switch to be self-employed, basically starting your own business. This is what actually requires wealth (and also connections, entrepreneur acumen and ultimately desire to do business). Saying "generational wealth" was perhaps a bit of an overtone. You could substitute some part of the wealth with other factors. But ultimately, the more money you have, the more you can spend on tokens (and other things like marketing too, but that was true before ai as well) to drive your business forward.

> It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.

This might sound good if you live in a country with strong social support, and believe it's going to continue doing so for your lifetime. Or alternatively, that you don't have any people that depend on you and you don't value your health or physical comfort. But most people ultimately work for money, because the base necessities (food, shelter, security, healthcare) and quality of life enhancers (education) cost a lot of money, and some are growing in cost much quicker than the salaries.

First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker. The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.

But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.

If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though.

The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.

I'm not sure what 'most apps' constituted in their case, but I've been playing all my games on Linux for the last 3 years and can't be happier.

I wonder, what prevents better support for 'regular' apps? Are they using some windows API that is hard to implement in Linux?

Just like the pro-AI articles, it reads to me like a sales pitch. And the ending only adds to it: the author invites to hire companies to contract him for training.

I would only be happy if in the end the author turns out to be right.

But as the things stand right now, I can see a significant boost to my own productivity, which leads me to believe that fewer people are going to be needed.

It is true, but it's also not the case. The steep learning curve is flattened quite a bit by available "starter pack" configs and the amount of fresh articles. So you can get a functional editor and then gradually bend it to your needs. Also, LLMs turned out to be quite good at generating working elisp and helping out in general.

> lags behind in features of modern editors

I have been using emacs for around 7 years, but it never worked for me as the main editor, it just sucked too bad compared to IDE-like features of other editors and actual IDEs. So I only used it for org-mode, doing an attempt to use it for something else every couple of years.

I'm currently in the process of trying this again, and I have to say things feel very different this time. By adding native tree-sitter and LSP support, the IDE-like features are outsourced to where they should be done. It wasn't perfect, but I had issues of the same degree or worse with other editors. A proprietary IDE still would beat it in stability and features, but the experience is _crazy good_ for free software.

What I like the most is the hacker mentality it encourages. When I see something I don't like, I don't go like "I wish they did it differently", I ask "well how do I change that?".

The only thing that feels truly outdated is single-threaded nature and blocking UI when long-running operation (like an update) is happening. And maybe non-smooth scroll (there is a package but it makes text jump).

My morale is extremely low. But I have different circumstances: I live under war, with my future life perspectives unknown. Software engineering, apart from being enjoyable, provided the sense of security. I felt that I could at least either relocate to some cheap country and work remotely, or attempt to relocate to an expensive country with good jobs.

With AI, the future seems just so much worse for me. I feel that productivity boost will not benefit me in any way (apart from some distant trickle down dream). I expect the outsource, and remote work in general to be impacted negatively the most. Maybe there's going to be some defensive measures to protect domestic specialists, but that wouldn't apply to me anyway unless I relocate (and probably acquire citizenship).

>Is your company hiring more/ have they stopped hiring software engineers

Stopped hiring completely and reduced workforce, but the reasons stated were financial, not AI.

>Is the management team putting more pressure to get more things done

with less workforce, there is naturally more work to do. But I can't say there is a change in pressure, and no one forces AI upon you.

Sorry for writing something a bit tangential, I'm mostly replying to the heading not the content.

I keep seeing the same point that argues against how "not fun, depressing, worse a <thing> has gotten these days". The most recent incarnation of that is how programming with AI feels worse than programming on your own.

I don't think the problem is inability to find a way to derive fun, the way you could previously. The problem is deriving fun while still getting paid for it.

To reiterate on the web-dev, you probably can make it fun again, given that you were able to have fun with it previously. But it probably will have to be done in your spare time after job.

There is a parallel to this Celtic imitations that is found primarily in modern Ukraine[1], attribute to Cherniakhov culture[2]. The theory for them is that once the trade with Roman Empire ceased, the locals needed bigger supply of coins and started minting their own.

There is a curious thing with this "branch", I'm not sure if it's the same in the Celtic one. The last time I talked to people researching this, I was told that: a. The findings are mostly unique, it's hard to find two copies of the same coin. Sometimes obverse of one coin could be found on another, but reverses don't match. b. These coins are not cast, they are minted through "hammering", which requires a stamp. However, not a single stamp has been found so far. A much easier way to make currency out of existing one would be to just slap existing coin into some clay, make a casting mold and just pour molten metal into it.

This of course is more of a curiosity/rumor level, I don't have any qualifications to back it up.

[1]: http://barbarous-imitations.narod.ru/ (apologize for a .ru website, but it's the best catalogue to my knowledge.)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernyakhov_culture

Maybe it's my learning limitations, but I find it hard to follow explanations like these. I had similar feelings about encapsulation explanations: it would say I can hide information without going into much detail. Why, from whom? How is it hiding if I can _see it on my screen_.

Similarly here, I can't understand for example _who_ is the owner. Is it a stack frame? Why would a stack frame want to move ownership to its callee, when by the nature of LIFO the callee stack will always be destroyed first, so there is no danger in hanging to it until callee returns. Is it for optimization, so that we can get rid of the object sooner? Could owner be something else than a stack frame? Why can mutable reference be only handed out once? If I'm only using a single thread, one function is guaranteed to finish before the other starts, so what is the harm in handing mutable references to both? Just slap my hands when I'm actually using multiple threads.

Of course, there are reasons for all of these things and they probably are not even that hard to understand. Somehow, every time I want to get into Rust I start chasing these things and give up a bit later.

I wonder if doing classical processing of real-time data as a pre-phase before you feed into NN could be beneficial?

If you use a type like `map[string]any` then yes, it's going to be the same as Context. However, you can make a struct with fields of exactly the types you want.

It won't propagate to the third-party libraries, yes. But then again, why don't they just provide an explicit way of passing values instead of hiding them in the context?

The author gave a pretty good reasoning why is it a bad idea, in the same section. However, for the demonstration purposes I think the they should have included their vision on how the request scoped data should be passed.

As I understand they propose to pass the data explicitly, like a struct with fields for all possible request-scoped data.

I personally don't like context for value passing either, as it is easy to abuse in a way that it becomes part of the API: the callee is expecting something from the caller but there is no static check that makes sure it happens. Something like passing an argument in a dictionary instead of using parameters.

However, for "optional" data whose presence is not required for the behavior of the call, it should be fine. That sort of discipline has to be enforced on the human level, unfortunately.

can you elaborate on typing out for didactic purposes, please?

Sounds like a good advice.

Unfortunately, my feelings tell me otherwise. What is it that we humans are better at? Is it a chore of managing people, sitting on meetings and aligning stakeholders' interests? Feels to me more like a politician job than an engineering.

Frankly, HN has moderate with the amount of AI spam compared to other technical sources I happen to brief through. And comments often are refreshing in keeping the hype mood somewhat down.

I bought a used one, the battery life is quite sorry. It can live for maybe 2h using their linux with powertop improvements. Maybe linux is part of the problem and windows would perform better (heard an argument that linux driver writers are not privy to the hw details and so cannot write energy-efficient drivers).

I hate to say it as a linux fan, but if battery life was any important I would buy a mac. I have mac pro 2017 which is probably of the same age, if not older, and the battery life is just so much better.

I've used both of the languages previously for my own fun and private mini-projects. From a perspective of an clueless outsider, OCaml was so, so much better to start with than Haskell. I've always been fascinated with Haskell, but it took me around 5 years of attempts to finally get the tooling to work. Some parts always failed me, especially language server and vscode interaction (hardly something to put blame on haskell itself though). Finally I braced myself and with some hacks (like bash code in haskell comments in Setup.hs) made it all work. Still, to the day HLS would repeatedly hang or not start, and the only solution is to restart vscode. Of course, there could be a problem with my setup etc, maybe I configured it "slightly incorrect" way, I'm just rating my experience.

OCaml was everything opposite. I made two Ocaml tours in recent years, and both times it literally just worked (tm). Granted, I've been using it less than haskell, but the experience of starting out is just heaven and earth. The only issue I have with ocaml tooling is that ideally I'd like to run the language server for real-time hints from the compiler, but also be able to invoke my program interactively. Unfortunately it seems you either have to run "dune build watch", or you can build and run, but not both as there is some locking happening.

As far as the languages themselves go, I'd say haskell is more "fun", in a way that it has a lot of features, and it reads a lot nicer (unless it's point-free code). Monads are pretty fun, although when I finally got through Monad transformers I started feeling "I wish we had no monads tbh" Ocaml feels much more barebone, syntactically less appealing and somewhat clunky. On the other hand there is a kind of spartan appeal to it.

Honestly, I like both of the languages a lot and wish for them to continue their development. I can certainly see myself using both in the future.

I had to buy an Ecoflow river 2 max because of outages, it was quite good for some time. But as it turned out you have to fully discharge and charge it back every 6 months (if you don't do it, you lose the warranty). I didn't do it, and apparently something happened either with one of the batteries inside or with the sensor that gauges the charge level. I cannot charge it, because it thinks it's 99%, and I cannot discharge it because it's actually 0 and it dies immediately. Previously, I was able to discharge it slowly (it would die but after a while I'd get it to 98, 97 etc) but not anymore. I can't say I wouldn't do it again because I didn't have much choice at the time.

Another thing I bought which I regret is a used system76 laptop. I originally planned to use it during said outages, but battery life is very far from what I expected (I guess it being old and me using linux doesn't help too).

I guess it's a matter of taste, for me reading the generics and big picture first is more important than the details. Maybe it's my programming skills, but my files start with some five or ten string manipulation utilities and helpers. I honestly do not even care about their implementation, a name would suffice. Which is why I also like `where` approach much more than `let ... in`: it allows you to read the general idea, postponing the details to later (if you want to go into them).

However, I agree on laziness, operators and point-free.