cableshaft

Oh, I thought I was trying to figure out some sort of layout by drafting individual rooms for some reason. The instructions were pretty confusing.

Yeah this has to be some of it. No coincidence certain industries in the market always shifts up or down significantly just before and after each election, as people try to read the tea leaves of how a shift in political power will affect them.

I have played 70 hours of Blue Prince and I still don't know what I'm doing in that game.

Still working for me. You might have to be logged in, though.

> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.

The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?

I work for a consulting firm that rebranded itself as an AI solutions firm. So yeah, I'm pretty much expected to use A.I. pretty heavily to keep working here, and so I do.

So I'm guessing that experience will help me get whatever my next job is, but I also think my next job might end up being my last job in the field.

I'll either go into management, or just semi-retire and work on my own projects, or leave the field entirely and start working in the board game industry, I don't know, something.

If I switched fields I'll probably take a major pay cut though (if I go into the board game industry I'll probably be lucky to make a quarter of what I'm making right now). But paycuts might be coming anyway to the software engineering field as a whole before too long anyway.

Keeping up the motivation was already difficult before A.I., I'd already dealt with so much startup, small business, and corporate crap over the years it was starting to pile up. I might need to take a sabbatical at some point, or at least a couple of months off.

I've been working in software engineering in some form or another for a little over 20 years now.

I did let myself get sucked up into it for a while, mainly because I found a group that wanted to develop their own projects and felt it would be interesting to join them and learn how to code smart contracts (and I did learn a decent amount about it).

I was never a direct part of any launched projects though, I mainly just sat in on their calls and helped the devs debug a few things when people got stuck on something.

As they got excited about various NFT projects, I usually got something to be part of the group and show my support, usually a cheap one (like $30 here or there), but a few times I did spend more than that stupidly (like $100-200). Thankfully nothing too crazy though.

I spend more on my board game hobby every six months than I did the entire time I was paying attention to NFTs. Other people in the group did go full degen sometimes though, and spent way too much on it. I tried to dissuade them from the worst of it, but there were some true-believers in the group, thought everything was an investment.

I also never put any new money into it, it was always with Ethereum I had already bought long ago cheaply, so while the coins were worth $1000+ at the time, they were like $40 when I bought it originally.

I still have all the NFTs I bought, I never sold any, and whatever I bought all went to zero probably. That's usually what I do, I just buy things and never sell them, unless I have to make space, and usually then I sell for a massive loss (like my board games, why do they have to take up so much damn space?)

I still maintain that smart contracts are interesting technology, and would like to see something more interesting done than using a Collectible Card Game model with pictures that tries to get people to spend obscene amounts of money for pretty much nothing.

At the time it did seem like more than that though, it wasn't just buying a picture like people like to claim, it was like buying a membership to a club. My local Pickleball club wants people to spent $1500 a year for their memberships also. But as it turns out most of those NFT clubs were more promises and vibes than execution (Bored Apes did seem to be one of the rare ones to actually pull off something that felt more like a VIP club, and do various in-person things with owning the NFTs). But I never owned any Bored Apes, just followed the news about them for a while.

At one point I wanted to create a decentralized game achievement system with it, kind of like existing achievements but you don't need to rely on a console system or the game itself to track it, you just have a digital and system agnostic trophy, generated and signed by the game so you know it's official, that you can keep as long as there are smart contracts, but like every idea that pops in my head, I eventually get distracted by other ideas.

> Basically, people use them for photos, kitchen timers, quick recipe lookups, quick questions, and "can a dog eat the thing I just dropped".

Accurate. I ask about the dog eating thing at least once a month. Most recently it was cilantro and tomatoes.

I don't have much. I wasn't involved with the company for very long. He just reached out to me, said he wanted to make games based on Lord of the Rings, he gave me some parameters, and I teamed up with Rob, an artist I'd worked with on my Clock Legends game previously, to make the game. I think we got like a whole $250 for it (total, not each), it wasn't much, but it was the first time I got paid for a game I made.

Then he wanted to do a second game, a game like the classic arcade game Tapper set in the Prancing Pony Inn, and we got it about halfway finished (playable, but missing some art and music/sound), but then Rob lost interest in doing the art so it remained unfinished. I probably have the unfinished game somewhere on an external hard drive somewhere.

I remember that at the time I got pretty good at playing the actual Tapper arcade game because I played it a bunch to get a good feel for how it played and to use for reference.

At that point we drifted out of touch and I don't know anything more about the company that's not publicly available.

I think I remember that later he asked me to help him get the leaderboards working for the Save The Ring game on the ArmorGames site, and he gave me some code as a reference that I could embed into the Flash game. But that's pretty much everything.

Probably other people worked with him a lot closer and for a lot longer.

I thought harder, but it was about more trivial things, like how to get this stupid library written by someone else to do what the business requirements say I have to make it do.

Something that doesn't really benefit me in the long term, unless I want to specialize in working with that library.

Like for example, I spent so much time over five years fighting and figuring out a bunch of the quirks of AG-Grid while working for a wealth management client, and now I'm on a project for a different client (and a different industry) that doesn't use it at all, so all that knowledge is mostly useless.

#1 is a big reason for our house. The house (and garage) badly needs a significant declutter, but we are both working professionals and don't have the energy to make a significant enough dent, especially since we both have hobbies where we accumulate more stuff all the time as well (especially me, I impulse buy board games and don't cull the ones I'm not playing often enough).

It doesn't help that I design board games too, and have too much of an easy excuse to want to get these games so I can 'research' them.

And because I'm mentally tired all the time after work, that also seems to lower my willpower. And clicking the 'buy' button online is way too easy to do.

We did used to host a monthly game designer playtest night before the pandemic, but our house had a lot less stuff back then. And being stuck in the house during the pandemic with nothing to do but play solo board games and video games (and also the uncertainty if I was even going to make it through the pandemic, since I already had respiratory issues from asthma) definitely accelerated the bad impulse buying habits I already had.

We have made slight dents in it, but the significant declutter probably won't happen until the next time I'm in between jobs, assuming there's at least a month in between jobs.

There's more to big moated software than just code.

It's full of the results of millions of meetings, decisions, and feedback from users over the course of many years. A.I. can't just one shot all of that in an afternoon.

I'm working on software that's highly driven by A.I. development right now, and while we're going faster than we would if we were developing it by hand, there's still tons of discussion happening between us and the client, disagreements, decisions to be made about UI and layouts and architecture and other things going on, gaps that don't necessarily be caught by A.I. in the moment, etc. It's still taking 6+ months to put together just Phase 1 for a new corporate web application, with a team of 15+ people.

And we also have to be somewhat careful how many AI tokens we are using because it's not cheap (but we're still using a lot).

Just because models are getting better, that doesn't mean we're getting to AGI anytime soon. It will likely require more than just 'a better model' to get to AGI, and it might not even be fully possible.

That being said, companies have to make their money back on this eventually and they're already jacking up their prices, even if we get to AGI I'm not sure most people will be able to afford to use it to handle everything in their lives, at least not for quite a while (and companies won't be able to afford to replace every human with an AI counterpart).

It's already getting expensive to go too heavy with something like Claude, to the point where my company hosts internal seminars on how to reduce token count (for the company's employees) and also runs out of tokens before the end of the month for the company every month, and we're going pretty heavy on A.I. usage within the company.

And I highly doubt companies are going to just leave servers running AGI models going just so it can do some sort of hostile takeover. It's still ultimately reliant on electricity and massive compute power.