KeepassXC
2,798 karma · joined November 22, 2014
Most of what passes for "software" these days is basically some niche hardcoded workflow that falls to pieces if you try to do anything even the slightest bit different.
Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.
Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.
It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.
Everyone just wants do to what they're very good at. Sometimes, it turns out nobody wants to pay you for that though, so they make the decision to do something else instead that pays better, so they can live somewhere nice, and eat.
AI comes at quite a different time, when tech adoption was already pretty mature / saturated to start with.
If you are going to be in and out, not 100%, etc... you are better off erring on the side of taking medical leave, asking for accommodations as needed, rather than trying to "soldier on" and have any unavailability used against you or characterized as a performance issue.
Aside from that, treat your new boss as a new job / new company that you need to prove yourself too. Your new boss didn't choose you, and may have a desire to "make changes", bring his own people in... etc.
Email has morphed into something quite different from when it started, and was a good way for humans to send messages to each other. That use case has mostly been supplanted by SMS, whatsapp, the social media app of the day, etc.
These days, it's really only used for that purpose mainly inside organizations, and "public" email seems to be overwhelmingly marketing material and automated notifications, with only the sporadic message from a human being. It's kind of functioning as what people wanted RSS to be.
The cynic in me would say that it survives because it is an effective tool for marketing, and the subscriptions / recipients are controlled by the sender.
If there were a hypothetical "marketplace" that was operated by, say, a consumer co-operative, funded by subscriptions from consumers, then it would operate with different incentives. It would be something like... Consumer Reports. But, it turns out, people would rather scroll through ads than pay for that kind of service with money, so that's why we have what we have.
Even a traditional marketplace owned by a municipality, or an association of vendors, or a shopping mall, is a bit more consumer friendly because they impose some standards on the tenants/vendors. A true "marketplace", like a stock market, or a fruit and vegetable market, needs to be vendor neutral, and there aren't any "marketplaces" like that on the internet.
If you're comparing option A and option B, and comes down to 48% A vs 52% B... if it's toilet paper or car insurance, fine, choose option B, but if it's moving countries buying a property or something, then the right answer is do nothing, keep waiting for option C, option D, etc to come along.
I've done the expat/migration thing myself, there are some upsides for sure, but it can also be quite draining being a bit of a social misfit, not having a much of network/connections, dealing with the linguistic/cultural/administrative issues of visas, etc... in many ways you're just forever at a disadvantage to the locals.
I also don't see Portugal as being a big step up from Turkey in the grand scheme of things. Both basically europe, mediterranean, decent standard of living but kind of second-tier economy, etc. If anything, Turkey is obviously bigger, has some bigger cities, more of a range of lifestyles, etc.
I think migration/expat life can be worth it if you're moving to silicon valley, tokyo, new york, shanghai... or somewhere that is a centre of gravity for your industry (like australia for mining, texas for oil, shenzhen for hardware manufacturing, etc...), and the income/growth potential is many multiples of what you can get at home, but I wouldn't be doing it for a modest, largely sideways move.
As for your 10k EUR... obviously, beware the sunk cost fallacy. Also, these things aren't permanent, if you want you can do it for 6 months or a year, see how it is, if it's great, stay, if it's not... go back (or somewhere else).
Either way, they get the upside, and apparently now it's your job to sort the AI slop from the reality, for some reason.
A few times, I have pointed out to people that their AI slop is wrong, and they said "yeah, it's wrong sometimes, but humans are also wrong sometimes, so it's no better/worse". It's the same logic as self-driving cars that kill people being fine, because after human-driven cars also kill people. It's true, but that's a _problem_....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.
As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.
Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.
I think it's totally legit to ask, and specify that you are looking for new insights, proposals, etc. and not regurgitated AI summaries.
Even though I don't personally find AI terribly useful for my own actual work, I keep people happy by talking about it where possible. If someone has a suggestion involving something something fairly repetitive, I tell them "that sounds like a great use case for an AI agent", even if it is, in fact, a great use case for a shell script.
If someone has an inane question, I tell them "Have you tried asking copilot about this?" - it's the new "Let me google that for you...".
If someone has a request to add a new feature that seems useless and counterproductive, I tell them "That's a great idea! How about you do that, using AI?", instead of getting into a debate about why it won't work in practice.
I'm finding that mentioning AI in these contexts keeps people happy enough, without extensive personal use, for now at least.
I'm not opposed to new things, but I guess I want incremental improvement on the old thing, and more on the timescale of years than weeks.
But, I don't like hype or having things forced down my throat, and there's a lot of that going on.
Psychologically, the part that seems depressing is that everything just seems totally disposable now. It's hard to even see the point of learning the latest and greatest AI tools/models, because they'll be replaced in about 3 months, and it's hard to see the point in trying to build anything with, or without AI, given the deluge of AI slop it will be up against.
I like the idea of spending a bit of time to learn something, like how to use a shell, how to ride a bike, how to drive a car, how to program in C or C++, and use the skill for years or decades, if not a lifetime. AI seems to have taken that away now everything is brand new and disposable, and everyone is an amateur.
So, it's better to have 20 1x engineers, with significant slack in the system, who are all interchangeable cogs in a machine that takes tickets in one end and pushes mediocre software out the other end. That way, if 5 or 10 of them leave, they can be replaced, and nobody will tell the difference. If there's a lean quarter, you can lay off half of them, and then rehire a bunch of average randos off the street a few months later, and again, nobody will be able to tell the difference.
Also, the mayor will visit the grand opening of the new office, and the media will write a lovely story about how many jobs have been "created", and the company will be able to negotiate some tax breaks for creating so many mediocre jobs.
You might find things are better at a mom & pop, or startup, or maybe outside of a big city.
things/thing/2026-02-02-shipping-tracking-number.pdf
things/thing/2026-01-12-before-photo.jpg
things/thing/2026-01-10-scan-of-diagram-sketch.jpg
... etc, just capture all the artifacts this way, be they photos, scans of handwritten notes, print-to-pdf of website orders / confirmation numbers, invoices / receipts, instruction manuals, whatever.
99% of the time, its not needed in the future, 1% of the time, it's a big deal, and in those case you can then analyze what was captured into some more useful summarized notes, spreadsheets, as needed.
Understanding this asymmetry is important, you want a system where it is mostly effortless to capture and store raw artifacts as-is, and it doesn't matter if it takes a few hours to analyze things from one place later as needed. If you have the original artifacts that's a few hours of busywork, if the artifacts don't exist... it's impossible.
Maybe that works in markets with big moats, switching costs, barriers to entry and stuff, but for commodities, not so much.
There are also plenty of code generation / templating tools available. Maybe there are other tasks where AI offers novel capabilities, like interacting with humans, but at least for those two examples I think a lot of people are really just distracted by the novelty of AI, and perceiving the results of non-deterministic / black box system as "magic" or "creative".
1) just shut up and listen and do everything their way for the first 3-6 months, bite your tongue questions about _why_ it's like that, or improvements, just learn _how_ they do it now first. then, after that, suggest your improvements once you have built up some credibility/rapport.
2) chesterton's fence - understand why things are done wrong first, then you will be able to make positive improvements. if you skip that stage, you're likely to just run into the same problems that lead to the original "wrong" choices (again).
I think it's pretty simple - sellers pay to list properties via agents. Agents pay Zillow for leads. None of those revenue streams would benefit from hosting free/comments from randos.
Also, if the comments are anonymous... it seems inevitable that neighbors, people wanting to buy at a discount, sellers, etc. would post misleading garbage on there to further their own interests. It's pretty much inevitable that any information rom third parties would be dubious garbage. e.g. "this house has a leaky roof/mice in the basement/mold in the bathroom..." well, sure, most housed do at one point at another, doesn't mean it wasn't fixed/already priced in etc.