thisoneisreal

Bought a Kobo and decided I'm just going to stick to Ebooks.com DRM-free section from now on. Tired of not owning what I buy.

I did the same with music, using an Innioasis iPod knockoff + buy MP3s from Amazon Music, cheaper than Spotify and I never have to worry about my music becoming unavailable. I also prefer the experience of single-use devices.

Hadn't heard of this book. Picked up a sample based on your comment and I'm really enjoying it, thanks.

I'm not buying into this vision at all, but, hypothetically, they could use money to optimize whatever reward function they're trained on. They could perceive it like any other resource to achieve those ends. You can also imagine a universe where it "reasons" something like, "I do work, people who do work should get paid, I should get paid" irrespective of its goals.

Just yesterday one of my junior devs got an 800-line code review from an AI agent. It wasn't all bad, but is this kid literally going to have to read an essay every time he submits code?

I had some of my own struggles but I really started noticing this more broadly in the last 2-3 years. I'm not sure if Covid did it, the end of ZIRP did it, or what, but there was a shift where suddenly almost every SE I would talk to seemed to be burned out. I can think of a lot of potential reasons but honestly the thing that jumped out at me the most is how almost in perfect sync it seemed to happen across the profession. It's a real bummer, I remember when SE was a pretty fun profession and people seemed generally pretty happy coming to work. (Maybe this was some kind of illusion though or I was just lucky where I worked at the time. I've heard plenty of death march horror stories from the old timers too.)

I've been looking into Ada recently and it has cool safety mechanisms to encourage this same kind of thing. It even allows you to dynamically allocate on the stack for many cases.

Daniel Nettle gives a great layperson's explanation of the Five Factor model in his book "Personality," and the first thing he explains is in line with exactly what you ended on. We exhibit a variety of personalities because different personalities are useful in different environments. Sometimes it's GOOD to be highly neurotic, or low extraversion. Natural selection doesn't care about your internal conscious experience of life, it will make you miserable if that helps you survive.

I'm an avid reader (several dozens of books per year at least), and one of the things that bums me out is all of the morality around my hobby. 3 or 4 times out of 5 when I talk to people about it the reaction is "oh man I'm such a bad person because I don't read enough books."

It's fine! The number of books you read is not a reflection on your quality as a person.

Reading absolutely has positive benefits, but really it's exactly what you said. It's just more interesting than other options out there. The tradeoff is yes, it can require some effort, but that's the same as any other effortful activity. You have to get past the cost, but there's a really nice reward on the other side.

And for what it's worth, there ARE television shows, movies, etc. that have more value than many books. ("The Wire" is a prime example, probably better than 70-80% of the books out there.) The point is just generally that more cognitively demanding avocations can have a higher cost-benefit ratio than cheaper ones like TV. On average, books fall more into this category than other media, but that's just on average.

Anyway this is a long way of saying that feeling bad about the media you consume is counterproductive. The message should be that there is potentially a more rewarding experience out there, but whether you pursue it or not is totally up to you and doesn't make you a good or bad person either way.

I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds like your father was a great man. No need for apologies, I think what you said is very poignant and relevant to the topic at hand. We should all be so lucky to live such full lives.

My take (no more informed than anyone else's) is that the range indicates this is a complex phenomenon that people are still making sense of. My suspicion is that something like the following is going on:

1. LLMs can do some truly impressive things, like taking natural language instructions and producing compiling, functional code as output. This experience is what turns some people into cheerleaders.

2. Other engineers see that in real production systems, LLMs lack sufficient background / domain knowledge to effectively iterate. They also still produce output, but it's verbose and essentially missing the point of a desired change.

3. LLMs also can be used by people who are not knowledgeable to "fake it," and produce huge amounts of output that is basically besides-the-point bullshit. This makes those same senior folks very, very resentful, because it wastes a huge amount of their time. This isn't really the fault of the tool, but it's a common way the tool gets used and so it gets tarnished by association.

4. There is a ridiculous amount of complexity in some of these tools and workflows people are trying to invent, some of which is of questionable value. So aside from the tools themselves people are skeptical of the people trying to become thought leaders in this space and the sort of wild hacks they're coming up with.

5. There are real macro questions about whether these tools can be made economical to justify whatever value they do produce, and broader questions about their net impact on society.

6. Last but not least, these tools poke at the edges of "intelligence," the crown jewel of our species and also a big source of status for many people in the engineering community. It's natural that we're a little sensitive about the prospect of anything that might devalue or democratize the concept.

That's my take for what it's worth. It's a complex phenomenon that touches all of these threads, so not only do you see a bunch of different opinions, but the same person might feel bullish about one aspect and bearish about another.

The first part is surely true if you change it to "the hardEST part," (I'm a huge believer in "Programming as Theory Building"), but there are plenty of other hard or just downright tedious/expensive aspects of software development. I'm still not fully bought in on some of the AI stuff—I haven't had a chance to really apply an agentic flow to anything professional, I pretty much always get errors even when one-shotting, and who knows if even the productive stuff is big-picture economical—but I've already done some professional "mini projects" that just would not have gotten done without an AI. Simple example is I converted a C# UI to Java Swing in less than a day, few thousand lines of code, simple utility but important to my current project for <reasons>. Assuming tasks like these can be done economically over time, I don't see any reason why small and medium difficulty programming tasks can't be achieved efficiently with these tools.

My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.

EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.

I hit the same roadblock unfortunately. My academic references were all in a different field and I hadn't really stayed in contact except with one professor, who sadly has died. I did see that there's an option to use professional references, so even though I haven't done this myself, one route you could consider taking is to get references from managers, colleagues etc. who can speak to your technical knowledge. I agree though with your general point that after being out of an academic environment for a while that requirement becomes challenging.

The majority of it, yes.

The best system I ever worked with looked incredibly simple. Small, clear functions. Lots of "set a few variables, run some if statements." Incredibly unassuming, humble code. But it handled 10s of millions of transactions per day elegantly and correctly. Every weird edge case or subtle concurrency bug or whatever else you could think of had been squeezed out of the system. Everything fit together like LEGO blocks, seamlessly coming together into a comprehensible, functional, performant system. I loved it. After years of accepting mediocre code as the cost of doing business, seeing this thing in a corporate environment inspired me to fall in love with software again and commit to always doing my best to write high quality code.

EDIT: I think what made that code so good is that there was absolutely nothing unnecessary in the whole system. Every variable, every function, every class was absolutely necessary to deliver the required functionality or to ensure some technical constraint was respected. Everything in that system belonged, and nothing didn't.

This was in fact exactly what he cited, that they had adopted a corporate culture at the expense of the university culture he so loved.

I had the pleasure of working with a handful of Pivots for about 2 years, and I have to say that felt like the closest I ever got to a healthy engineering culture. Delightful people, superb engineers, always focused on working and learning together. I feel really privileged to have worked in that environment.

I had the same experience and also dropped out after my MA. It's pretty sad. One of my professors told me, "You should have been here in the 70s, you would have loved it."

I am a contract-drafting Em,

The loyalest of lawyers...

You didn't ask me, but I can respond as someone with a similar background. I grew up in a religious household. I spent about a decade from ages 18-28 studying philosophy both academically and casually, then entered a technical field and got reaquainted with science.

Many philosophical problems informed my view of religion, but probably the most profound were Carl Sagan's invisible dragon and the problem that there are so many differing and incompatible religions. Many religious people will freely admit their beliefs have no evidence, and yet from my point of view, if that's true, how can anyone claim their particular religion is correct? Why should I believe in Hinduism instead of Catholicism? I never got a satisfactory answer to that in any of my philosophy classes or reading. (The problem of evil is another strong one, but didn't have as big of an impact on me as the first two.)

As far as science goes, the two main contributors to that were biology and physics (although there are some countervailing forces there: the order of the universe truly does seem miraculous). Jay Gould's essay "non-moral nature" where he describes parasites that lay their eggs on paralyzed victims, then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat the victims alive, was probably the first thing I read that had bearing on religion. But if you look at nature generally there is obviously an overwhelming amount of suffering. Kids who die from random genetic mutations, animals that get eaten alive crying. I could never square any of that with God.

As far as physics, what really gets me is the sheer immensity and seeming indifference to human scales. Because of the speed of light, we are basically trapped within our own universe. Space is mostly an enormous empty void, and there is no sign that any other planet would be especially hospitable to our species. On a more mundane level, human beings have been killed in incredibly stupid ways, like the guy who was irradiated to death because of a software bug in the x-ray machine. So you put all of that together and it just doesn't suggest any sort of divine guidance to everything going on around us. (Which isn't to say there aren't counterarguments, but that's the sort of evidence and thought processes I imagine the parent was referring to.)

I think you're hitting on the fact that there are multiple variables that contribute to "quickness." Having digested a lot of background material is definitely part of it and ties to the higher up posts about e.g. Churchill. Also a way intelligence can correspond to it, in the sense that more intelligent people have often digested more topics. But there also seem to be people who are less distractable, more tuned in to what is going on, and more able to tie current happenings to their body of knowledge and make a joke or whatever.

A great book in this vein is "Language vs. Reality." The main thesis of the book is that language evolved to support approximate, ad hoc collaboration, and is woefully inadequate for doing the kind of work that e.g. scientists do, which requires incredible specificity and precision (hence the amount of effort devoted to definitions and quantification).

This strikes me as a perfect description of the core problem. Whenever I think about this, what sticks out to me is that other animals do all sorts of things that look like "intelligence," or at least cognition, and they do it totally without language. My cat clearly recognizes objects, assigns them different values ("scary," "tasty," "fun to play with"), interacts with them in some kind of loop, even predicts their behavior to some extent and acts curious about them (it was really fun to watch her try to figure out the construction guys when I had some work done on my house over a period of a few days). These strike me as much more foundational aspects of intelligence than language. Language has of course immeasurably contributed to what makes human cognition and intelligence, but it's almost certainly built on these pre-linguistic foundations. Another very good hint in this direction is all of the non-verbal thinking that humans have done. Einstein has a famous quote about thinking visually and physically, without using language at all. All of these are powerful suggestions that something else is going on, and most likely some aspect of these things are necessary for true intelligence.

That thought randomly hits me all the time when I'm taking out the trash or whatever and just happen to look up. That and the fact that the Bootes Void and Phoenix A* exist out there.

That's why the XP book arranges itself into values, principles, and practices. The best line in the book is about how practices without underlying values are dead, while values without practices are wishy-washy abstractions. What he's really advocating for at the highest level is skilled teams, who are given ownership, that are actively defining their own processes, and executing them with discipline to produce well-designed and reliable software. The book is a "grab bag" (very legitimate point) because those are the sorts of techniques that those kinds of teams use.

"Future Shock" by Toffler. It was published in 1970, but the predictions are remarkably accurate and (most of) it could easily have been written today. The core idea is about how the rate of change in industrialized societies is accelerating, plus the implications of that and strategies for dealing with it.

"The Unaccountability Machine" does a great job summarizing the thought of Stafford Beer, who explained basically exactly what you said as the only viable strategy for designing and managing complex systems.

I don't know you personally and can't offer individual advice, but there are some general things about our culture and general psychology that might be helpful to people like you dealing with those sorts of feelings (and yes I have been/am one of them):

1. A lot of social status is attached to productivity. This makes it really easy to feel like you "should" be doing things that you don't actually care about because society convinces you that you should. If your self-worth or self-image gets wrapped up in these things (and that's very easy to happen to any of us as social creatures), it's can be an easy recipe for unhappiness and feeling like you're not driving your own life.

2. Doing complex projects is challenging, and it's easy to lose motivation quickly when your initial enthusiasm wears off and the slog kicks in. You may have high aspirations and not be comfortable / willing to pay the cost they actually require.

I highly recommend Dr. K's (Healthy Gamer) videos about motivation, especially internal vs. external motivation. Not a panacea or anything but I think they give you a good foundation to work through those feelings. Obviously you may also want to consider professional help if you suffer these sorts of feelings extremely or persistently.

To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.

Great reflections. Like Kent Beck said, "Software is a leverage game."

Stafford Beer would also agree with you by the way. His whole thing is that the computational complexity of any decently sized organization is mathematically overwhelming, and the way to cope with it is via organization (or as you called it, architecture). "Sphaghetti code" is basically what you get when you allow every signal the system produces to become embodied in your code base, which inevitably creates so much noise that it becomes almost impossible to modify efficiently.