> It finally hit me how much time I wasted on that game.
I don't agree that leisure is inherently wasting time, which I think is a pretty common belief across North America in general and within Tech specifically. I don't know if that's what you're asserting, but it does seem to be the thesis of the backing site ("if you spent all this time that you spent on a leisure activity elsewhere, you could have XYZ 'better' skill!")
Of course, all things in balance; gaming addiction is a thing, and I've absolutely been guilty of using Titanfall 2 to farm dopamine rather than taking my dog for a walk or tidying my room.
I'm glad this helped you, but I already feel like my life is under enough pressure to be more efficient, more productive, have more of an impact, when I'd really just like to slow down and enjoy things more.
(I'm also a little sad, I originally thought this would map time spent in a game to a _corresponding_ skill, e.g. "400 hours in space engineers" -> "level 5 systems architect," or something. That's on me, it's not a criticism, but it's influencing my disappointment.)
Fair points honestly, and ones thats been going through my mind constantly,
and like Alan Watts says, we are human-beings not human-doings, and I dig that.
I think that for me, creating this site was about making myself uncomfortable to the point of, if I game, it's about relaxation and lesiure, and not something I do because I have no way other way to spend the weekend, going out and making friends gives me anxiety so I'll just spend the entire weekend at home gaming all day for 2 days.
I still game with my kids, but we play coach none addictive games on nintendo, over the course of years I realised I can't really balance stuff like dota.
as for your last point, that's actually a really really cool idea! might add it =]
> Even if you're just reading an e-book the phone contributes to the perceived loneliness of those around you.
This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
> If you really want to read a book in peace, try a library.
I've quite enjoyed the times I've taken a book to a restaurant and read over a meal. I do not appreciate you, or people like you, dictating how I ought to act in public in a way that doesn't affect anyone else in the slightest.
I don't want to start conversations when I'm alone at a table with my book. The fact that you find it somehow less social for me to be on my phone instead of reading a book when I am minding my own business at my own table seems like a tremendous failure in your own boundaries and expectations of other people.
>This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
I asked a friend who doesn't use a smartphone about how it feels walking into a room full of people with phones and he told me the same thing. I have a smartphone but I don't take it out reflexively. I don't even consider myself a very social person or an extrovert, yet it always has to be ME to start a conversation in a room full of people because they would rather stare at a screen that say a hello.
I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting? Imagine entering a coffee shop and finding it dead silent. I would just go home and make some food. If you have a problem with me talking to you, go ahead tell me how much you don't appreciate it or whatever, I don't care.
Maybe this is a cultural difference, but i would generally consider it incredibly rude for a random person to interupt someone trying to enjoy their meal. A resturant isn't a singles mixer.
Depends on the layout. If its a large, sit-down restaurant with wide gaps between the tables, then yes it would be weird for me to go up to you and say "Hi, Stranger!". But at a coffee shop you might be sitting right next to me. We might even be sitting at the same table waiting for our food. Am I not allowed to talk to the person sitting right next to me? I ordered some food the other day and realized there were no free tables, so I asked a stranger if I could sit at his table and had a conversation with him and his buddy.
All of this is contextual and it doesn't take a screen or a book for someone to give off clear vibes of not wanting to chat. "Mind if I sit here" in a crowded shop is the expectation. Anything beyond that such as having a conversation with a total stranger depends on the subtle behavioral cues given off by the other party.
It's not my intention to be rude but based on your responses on this topic I'm guessing you're fairly oblivious to the relevant social cues. There's nothing wrong with that per se but adopting an attitude of "not my problem" is probably just going to aggravate the people around you.
I understand social cues. I am just more than willing to push the envelope. And I have nothing to lose by possibly causing some mild discomfort to a stranger by "gasp" talking to them like a fellow human being.
> I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting?
You seem to have a strange definition of what's a social situation. Maybe I want to be around people without talking to them; if I wanted to strike up conversation with strangers, I'd sit at a bar.
You're obviously conscious of the fact that you may be doing something that people don't want, which makes it all the more confusing to me that you're upset about people possibly preferring their phones to books: if you're going to interrupt them either way and potentially invade their space, why do you care how they're signalling? (For the record, I don't think people inherently are signalling, but you seem to--it's the inconsistency in your own stated approach that's confusing me.)
I think your idea of a social situation is too limiting and contributes to the loneliness epidemic. I moved to a completely different state where I didn't know a single person so I can't leverage an existing social circle to make friends. So I'm not going to refrain from talking to you just because you might want to be left alone. If you don't want a conversation, just say so. It's not hard.
Sure, I might be doing something you don't want, but that's also true of asking a girl out (and I mean in real life, not on snapchat). She might say yes, she might say no. Either way, you I never get anywhere unless I ask.
Here are some places I think its perfectly acceptable to talk to strangers:
- A class (barring when the professor is speaking).
- On a bus or at the bus stop.
- A coffee shop
- Airplane ride
- DMV
- Waiting for a table at a restaurant
Maybe you disagree. I can't read minds.
As for what makes phones particularly bad, its because they discourage social interaction. Why talk to people when you have endless stream of dopamine in your pocket? In economic speak, phones dramatically raise the opportunity cost of actual social interactions. So everyone just stares at their phones, and this negatively affects even those who choose to opt-out of technology because we are deprived of human engagement because we are unable to compete with those little dopamine machines.
Oh, and unlike with books, everyone has a phone at all times, and when things get boring (even a little), then the phones come out and you're left talking with yourself.
Yes, possibly. But they also don't talk to each other. It's pretty unlikely that nobody in that room likes anyone else. It's more likely that they just don't know how to socialize. And when I start talking, people tend to open up and laugh at my jokes. So I wouldn't say anybody dislikes me.
people at my org were gleeful when they learned they could hook LLMs into Slack. Even if we had some reliable, well-used signature system, I think people would just let AI use it to send emails on their behalf.
If the AI age has taught me anything, it's that most people do not care what their output is. They'll put their name on anything, taste or quality does not matter in the least. It's incredibly depressing.
Enshittification never stopped we just stopped talking about it because it became normal. Quality does not matter anymore. I agree its depressing, seeing AI Slop being pushed and no one even putting the time or effort in to say this is bad and you should feel bad.
what's account creation on an esp32 running micropython? or an arduino? what happens when the law is expanded to require biometric enforcement of what the user reports?
Also, I don't want my OS to report my age range to every website I visit anyway.
Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, <5k employees) is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year. We have all the same successes and failures as everyone else, there's nothing special about our case, but our technical leadership is fundamentally convinced that this is both viable and necessary, and will not be told otherwise.
People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.
Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if you're not shipping features, if you're not driving the income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign the paychecks.
Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that argument.
It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude towards our incidents has been "just write better code," which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team? That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like they can tell the difference.
Hi thanks for this brilliant feature. It will really improve the product. However it needs a little bit more work before we can merge it into our main product.
1) The new feature does not follow the existing API guidelines found here: see examples an and b.
2) The new feature does not use our existing input validation and security checking code, see example.
Once the following points have been addressed we will be happy to integrate it.
All the best.
The ball is now in their court and the feature should come back better
This is a politics problem. Engineers were sending each other crap long before AI.
Engineers also wrote good code before AI. We don't get to pretend that the speed increase of AI only increases the output of quality code - it also allows engineers to send much more crap!
..so they copy/paste your message into Claude and send you back a +2000, -1500 version 3 minutes later. And now you get to go hunting for issues again.
In the past I’ve hopped on a call with them and where I’ve asked them to show me it running. When it falls over I say here are the things the system should do, send me a video of the new system doing all of them.
The embarrassment usually shames them into actually checking that the code works.
If it doesn’t then you might have to go to the senior stakeholder and quietly demonstrate that they said it works, but it does not actually work.
You don’t want to get into a situation where “integrate” means write the feature while others get credit.
There is an alternative way make the necessary point here.. Let it go through with comments to the effect that you can not attest to the quality or efficacy of the code and let the organization suffer the consequences of this foray into LLM usage. If they can't use these tools responsibly and are unwilling to listen to the people who can, then they deserve to hit the inevitable quality wall Where endless passes through the AI still can't deliver working software and their token budget goes through the ceiling attempting to make it work.
I am absolutely certain the world isn't just. I'm also absolutely certain the world can't get just unless you let people suffer consequences for their decisions. It's the only way people can world.
IME that simply doesn't work in professional environments. People will either misrepresent the failure as a success or find someone else to pin the blame on. Others won't bother taking the time to understand what actually happened because they're too busy and often simply don't care. And if it's nominally your responsibility to keep something up, running, and stable then you're a very likely scapegoat if it fails. Which is probably why people are throwing stuff that doesn't work at you in the first place. Trying to solve the problem through politics is highly unlikely to work because if you were any good at politics you wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.
I understand how people can get into these fatalist outlooks from experience. I just refuse to lock myself into them. And because I've refused to do so, every once in a while I have success and make the work environment just that little bit better. So I'll keep doing it.
> My org [...] is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year.
> People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.
So either they're right (100% AI-generated code soon) and you'll be out of a job or they'll be wrong, but by then the smart people will have been gone for a while. Do you see a third future where next year you'll still have a job and the company will still have a future?
"100% AI-generated code soon" doesn't mean no humans, just that the code itself is generated by AI. Generating code is a relatively small part of software engineering. And if AI can do the whole job, then white collar work will largely be gone.
I agree, but it seems like if we can tell the AI "follow these requirements and use this architecture to make these features", we're a small step away from letting the AI choose the requirements, the architecture and the features. And even if it's not 100% autonomous, I don't see how companies will still need the same number of employees. If you're the lead $role, you'll likely stay, but what would be the use of anyone else?
> ... I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it ...
These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Claude, Codex, et al are terrible at innovation. What they are good at is regurgitating patterns they've seen before, which often mean refactoring something into a more stable/common format. You can paste compiler warnings and errors into an agentic tool's input box and have it fix them for you, with a good chance for success.
I feel for your position within your org, but these tools are definitely shaking things up. Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
> These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Very reasonable nowadays, but those were things I was doing back in 2018 as a junior engineer.
> Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
Absolutely, and I've found tremendous value in using agents to clean up old techdebt with oneline prompts. They run off, make the changes, modify tests, then put up a PR. It's brilliant and has fully reshaped my approach... but in a lot of ways expectations on my efficiency are much worse now because leadership thinks I can rewrite our techstack to another language over a weekend. It almost doesn't matter that I can pass all this tidying off onto an LLM because I'm expected to have 3x the output that I did a year ago.
Unfortunately not many companies seem to require engineers to cycle between "feature" and "maintainability" work - hence those looking for the low-hanging fruits and know how to virtue signal seem to build their career on "features" while engineers passionate about correct solutions are left to pay for it while also labelled as "inefficient" by management. It's all a clown show, especially now with vibe-coding - no wonder we have big companies having had multiple incidents since vibing started taking off.
> Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams.
I buried the lede a bit, but my frustration has been feeling like _nobody_ on my team prioritizes quality and instead optimizes for feature velocity, which then leaves some poor sod (me) to pick up the pieces to keep everything ticking over... but then I'm not shipping features.
At the end of the day if my value system is a mismatch from my employer's that's going to be a problem for me, it just baffles me that I keep ending up in what feels like an unsustainable situation that nobody else blinks at.
That's a different situation than the one I had in mind. I was assuming a sane culture that balances shipping features and quality work. What you're describing sounds like a serious value function mismatch.
> I have never seen one of these ridiculous looking bikes in any city or anywhere.
>
> Where do y'all live, a Dr. Suess book?
I saw them every day in Chicago. I see them every day in southern Ontario. I saw them whenever I visited Boston or NYC. Where do you live that you don't?
> I will not bike them in the rain, With soggy bags and squishy pain.
> I will not bike them up the hill, When every pedal feels like drill.
> I will not bike them when it’s hot, With sweat that pours and cheese that rots.
Given that other commenters have addressed basically all of these concerns (waterproof bags, electric assist, insulated bags) it seems more like you just want to be contrarian rather than cite specific problems and discuss if they can be solved.
I have an EV as well as an ICE truck. Powertrain is not a concern. It's the load a bike can carry vs a car overall. The bonus of having storage and rain cover is extra. Sure you can do a lite version but why?
I don't want to risk having an injury on a bike either. A car is much safer.
> Powertrain is not a concern. It's the load a bike can carry vs a car overall.
Sure, an automobile will pretty much always win out in raw capacity, but I'd argue it's a policy problem that makes us reliant on automobiles for day to day life. If people only needed a car for their weekly grocery trip but could bike to work or school or the doctor's office that would still significantly reduce our reliance on automobiles, with benefits in health and energy.
> I don't want to risk having an injury on a bike either. A car is much safer.
Also a reasonable concern, but again more of a policy problem: we prioritize cars over pretty much every other form of transportation to the detriment of everyone else in public spaces. If we had more protected walkways / bikeways then everyone would be safer.
In general I don't think we regulate the safe use of automobiles nearly as much as we ought to in the states. Leaving it as an individual concern makes it a race to the bottom, with everyone buying bigger and bigger cars in the name of safety, all other externalities be dammed.
this is one of the core conceits behind why Strong Towns / Not Just Bikes / urbanism discourse in general makes the disctinction between a "street", which is meant for people to walk along, go to stores/restaurants/etc, and "roads", which are meant to efficiently move traffic from one part of the city to another.
Combining them degrades the ability to address either point: efficiently moving traffic is inherently in conflict with being able to access businesses or having pedestrians nearby.
public transport is more efficient at transporting people than cars, public transport makes roads more walkable. If you have subways, trams and buses, you can have narrower and slower roads friendly to pedestrians.
I'm not OP, but; Forgejo is much lighterweight than Gitlab for my usecase, and was cited as a more maintained version of Gitea, but that's just anecdote from my brain and I don't have sources, so take that with a truckload of salt.
I'd had a gitea instance before and it was appealing insofar as having the ability to mirror from or to a public repo, it had docker container registry capability, it ties into oauth, etc; I'm sure gitlab has much/all of that too, but forgejo's tiny, tiny footprint was very appealing for my resource-constrained selfhosted environment.
ad hominem isn't a very convincing argument, and as someone who also enjoys forgejo it doesn't make me feel good to see as the justification for another recommender.
I have about five Fedora desktops running in my house that I share with my partners. Domain-style logins are handled by FreeIPA. Basic login with the KDE Fedora spin works great.
I've been meaning to set up auto-mounting network shares and such, but haven't gotten around to it; but the login management is very convenient and we use every day.
I don't agree that leisure is inherently wasting time, which I think is a pretty common belief across North America in general and within Tech specifically. I don't know if that's what you're asserting, but it does seem to be the thesis of the backing site ("if you spent all this time that you spent on a leisure activity elsewhere, you could have XYZ 'better' skill!")
Of course, all things in balance; gaming addiction is a thing, and I've absolutely been guilty of using Titanfall 2 to farm dopamine rather than taking my dog for a walk or tidying my room.
I'm glad this helped you, but I already feel like my life is under enough pressure to be more efficient, more productive, have more of an impact, when I'd really just like to slow down and enjoy things more.
(I'm also a little sad, I originally thought this would map time spent in a game to a _corresponding_ skill, e.g. "400 hours in space engineers" -> "level 5 systems architect," or something. That's on me, it's not a criticism, but it's influencing my disappointment.)
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