thorin

Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.

Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.

What I found was that there was a lot of repetition in the questions that were asked and so once the knowledge base was built up, less new stuff was being added.

There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.

If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.

It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.

I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!

Agree with the other reply. Working for enterprises the actual initial writing the code part is probably 10% of the cost or less. Several times larger is the working out what the business requirements might be, which is mainly talking to people and writing stuff down. The support and maintenance part is also massive and if you assume a 5-10 year lifespan costs much more than the initial build.

I think what probably has improved is the ability of the business to prototype ideas for new systems and products quickly and throw them away if they don't work as expected.

The Saga of Eric the Viking - Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame)

Not really obscure, but I have a copy of a couple of Indian printed (pirate!) copies of books I bought in a bookshop in Kathmandu:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

My Dad has a lot of old late 1800s early 1900 books including a huge 2 volume dictionary, which is actually more of an encyclopaedia. It has topic sections like "How to defend yourself from savages" or "How to dig your own coal mine" etc.

Wordle occasionally

Connections daily

Lichess most days

I've seen one of those little robots before. My friend found what looked like a hand grenade while breaking up concrete/brick work in a house renovation. We called the police and fortunately we live right near to a Royal Engineers base with a bomb disposal team. They came out in their van and brought out the robot to have a look then picked it up and took it back with them in the van.

What I remember reading to my kids aged 5-10

The Hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring (more for me but they liked to snuggle up and fall asleep to it)

Harry Potter 1-5 (the hardback versions with lots of pictures)

Eric the Viking - Terry Jones - a personal fav of mine

Various compendiums of Greek and Norse Myths

Dr Seuss books

What do people do all day - Richard Scarry

My son started reading the Beastquest books very early by himself and was happy to read independently from there. After that at around 8 he started reading diary of a wimpy kid and the 13 storey treehouse type books.

Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:

My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%

I also like mild which is often <=3%

0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.

How will they know if you're using AI or not?

I would say as a developer you absolutely need to be comfortable using the tools and understanding the possibilities but how much you use it should be up to you within any token / licensing limits.

I remember back in the 90s when people were starting to use IDEs and other developers would use vi or emacs for everything. There was always a suspicion that each camp wasn't doing it properly! Management didn't care as long as the work got done.

I'm interested in how addiction is so much more likely in some people than others. For over 20 years I loved to drink all sorts of different things. Once I had kids and hit 40+ it was so unpleasant in the morning so I decided to massively reduce. In the UK drinking is so pervasive. I limited my intake to <=2 drinks per night and never had an issue and would only break that maybe once a year. Recently I decided to reduce it even more. I will have a pint of ale in a pub if I go, but hardly anything else. It really didn't feel that hard.

Again at uni I found lots of people smoked cigs and mj and so I did it too a little bit, but decided after a year or 2 to stop and I've never really done it since. My dad was the same.

I've had the same realisation with certain foods recently and coffee, massively cutting down on sugar, salt and coffee.

Probably my only addiction at the moment is too much scrolling on my phone.

I totally accept this is a huge issue for many people, but no real idea why...

My primary motivation for work has always been to earn money for myself and my family. This enables me to do things that I want to do outside of work time. I have tried to align this with work that I find interesting or working with people I like, but this is not always the case.

If this is not an issue for you, then by all means find something else to do. Maybe look to move into a business domain you already provide IT/software for, or retrain to something else.

It's highly likely that many domains currently will be looking to maximise use of AI e.g. medical professionals, accountants, lawyers will not escape completely. Moving to something practical may be a better short term bet.

Would you rather fight one chicken sized robot or 100 robot sized chickens?