channel_t

Joined 10 years ago

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Jun 6

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Comment · 3 months ago

While I managed to avoid it for a long time, using generative AI to drive my day to day work life while resisting the pressure to become a meat proxy, I will admit that since joining an "AI native" startup I have become one. Whenever I'm trying to triage 20 different urgent things all day, every day, the economics of personalizing every message just isn't there anymore. It's not realistic. I do still try to way to filter down every AI-generated message into something digestible, but I feel like I'm in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where I can only survive the tidal wave of slop with more slop. I think we're in uncharted territory here in terms of the kind of workload generative AI can drown you in, especially when it's being used without strong discipline.

I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.

Comment · 3 months ago

I had one of these and loved it, taking it everywhere. I vaguely remember it running some flavor of Linux that was pretty usable at the time. Sometime in 2012 the display started having issues and then it stopped powering on shortly thereafter. I would spend the next decade trying to recreate something resembling the experience through Chromebooks but never really getting there, eventually surrendering to the 13-inch MacBook Air.

Comment · 4 months ago

Yes, and possibly a constellation of little cuts and bruises on your shins.

Comment · 4 months ago

Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.

Comment · 5 months ago

I also feel like giving a shout out to the PDF version of the official PostgreSQL manual. It was one of the most enjoyable and engaging tech books I've ever read, and seems like pretty much the gold standard in what official documentation can look like. It took me a while to figure this out though, because the UX of the standard HTML version of the manual is pretty clunky.

Comment · 10 months ago

100%. I would also say that this broadly applies to pretty much all of the AI subreddits, and much of AI Twitter as well. Very little nuanced or thoughtful discussions to be found. Looks more like a bunch of people arguing about their favorite sports teams.

Comment · 10 months ago

Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.

Comment · 1 year ago

Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.

Comment · 1 year ago

I agree, I think it makes most sense to add them up to be the true #2.

Comment · 1 year ago

I also find them very developer-centric — testers get forced into upfront design work that doesn’t fit how they naturally test, and many struggle with it. I’ve had better results by expressing behavior directly and keeping UI concerns thin, instead of using a wrapper around page structure.

I'm sorry, but if your testers are not comfortable getting involved in the early design stages of your software in a 21st century world, then there's at least a 90% chance that their primary role at your company is perpetuating organizational dysfunction.

Most of my career has been defined by cleaning up the gargantuan messes the culture of "throw tickets over the wall to QA" created, and it has been very, very ugly. It defies common sense how culture around tools and processes for dev and ops roles continues to evolve over time, but for some reason testers are still trying to test software off in a silo, like it's released once or twice a year on CD-ROM.

Comment · 1 year ago

Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.

Comment · 1 year ago

Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.