I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated.
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
The lake is not however yours to dictate how others will move along. Imagine if the horse owners decided in such an analogy not to allow cars on the road because they noisy and "totally different experience".
You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
nah. tell him, you're in a race. others are using motorboats. the last to reach the finish line loses their salary.
that's a better analogy, or at least what a lot of people think the analogy is.
My hypothesis around this and other peoples sentiments who dislike AI while citing similar reasons as the post is not simply that they enjoyed arriving at the destination.
Rather the issue is they believe they are GOOD at the "journey" and getting to the destination and could compare their journey to others. Another take is they could more readily share their journey or help their peers. Some really like that part.
Now who you are comparing to is not other people going through the same journey, so there is less comradery. Others no longer enjoy that same journey so it feels more "lonely" in a way.
Theres nothing stopping someone from still writing their own code for fun by hand, but the element of sharing the journey with others is diminishing.
He's not getting customers by rowing them across the river when the motorboats do it faster and cheaper. You compared a hobby to doing something "for a living".
I turned 59 this week. I am excited to go to work again. I use Claude every day. I check Claude. I learn new things from Claude.
I no longer need a "UI person" to get something demonstrable quickly. (I've never been a "UI guy"). I've also never been a guy coding during every waking moment of my life as that would have been disastrous for my mental health.
I am retiring in <=2 years, so I am having fun with this new associate of mine.
One pitfall I've managed to avoid all these 36 years I've been at it is not falling in love with the solution. I fall in love with the problems. Claude solves those problems far quicker than I ever could.
I turn 52 in a couple of months and I’ve only lasted this long from starting out as a hobbyist in 1986 by not being the old guy yelling at the clouds.
I got into “cloud” at 44, got my first job (and hopefully last) at BigTech at 46 and now I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev leading projects at 51.
Every project I’ve done since late 2023 has involved integrating with LLMs and I usually have three terminal sessions up - one with Claude, one with Codex and one where I do command line stuff and testing.
I am motivated by the result, the design and on the system level.
I suppose in a way it's like saying diesel engines killed passions for sailing.
A career sailor on a sailing ship who finds meaning in rigging a ship just so with a team of shipmates in order to undertake a useful journey may find his love of sailing diminished somewhat when his life's skills and passions are abruptly reduced to a historical curiosity.
Other sailors may prefer their new "easier" jobs now they don't have to climb rigging all day or caulk decking (but now they have other problems, you need far fewer of them per tonne of cargo).
And the diesel engine mechanics are presumably cock-a-hoop at their new market.
(This analogy makes no claim as to the relative utility of AI compared to diesel ships over sailing vessels).
because my company is mandating that we use motorboats instead of rowboats.
i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.
I agree, I’m an old dude too. For personal projects I do what I like. I also like carving stone and wood the hard way, just because.
At work though the hype sucks the life out of the last part of the job that some people found enjoyable, because complete control is enjoyable. Personally I think work is just doing what someone else wants, rather than pleasing yourself.
Well, I do.
I do not dislike AI at all: I even find it fun, although different.
The thing is that I am not only enjoying the journey, although it is was I enjoy the most by far. But when everyone is able to reach the destination, the interest in the journey decreases (if this makes sense).
It is not a rant against AI: I use AI daily, it IS useful, it is just less fun since AI is around, and the only way I can explain this is the journey vs the destination.
>It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
This is a real thing that happens and the analogy is clearly working against you! If you paddle a canoe or rowboat on a river or lake, your experience is made MARKEDLY worse by a motorboat zooming by and scaring the fish, rocking you with wake, smelling up the place with 2-stroke fumes, etc. Even when the motorboats aren't there, the built environment that supports them is bigger and more intrusive.
I was like this a few months back. You want to code and solve problems, but the AI can do all that for you. I got over it by moving the problem solving further down the chain. Treat the AI the team you are directing to solve the issue.
If I wanted to become a project manager I would have become one. AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
>AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are engineering solutions to real human problems and who just want to tinker with code.
Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
Haha! Your analogy doesn't work on multiple levels. Firstly, if you're outsourcing your work to AI you're not the engineer anymore. A civil engineer is different from a manager of a civil engineering project. Just like I wouldn't call myself an artist if I got AI to generate me some art, I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me.
Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results. Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck, because you don't have the necessary oversight in the quality of the output unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving.
> Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
Outside of Apartments and gated communities, they’re more rare up in Canada. You don’t see them spring up in a random neighbourhood, it’s invariably in high-density projects that require communal elements that are normally separate that they can be found.
And then they’re called Stratas, and have no significant power beyond those communal elements. Like, an apartment strata can ban live Christmas trees if there have been too many needles dropped in the hallways, but otherwise cannot prevent you from building a particle accelerator in your living room unless other residents start complaining about the high levels of radiation and fluctuating power levels as capacitors charge (oops).
"As of the 2021 Census, approximately 15.0% of all occupied private dwellings in Canada were condominiums, up from 13.3% in 2016, with the vast majority located in major metropolitan areas. In primary downtown areas, the concentration of condominiums is significantly higher, with roughly 39.9% of homes being classified as condominiums..."
HOAs are a legal framework designed for condominium (and other) domains where some parts of the property are owned in common. Without HOAs, I fail to see how condominiums could thrive. And condominium domains are everywhere! So there is no possibility whatsoever of them being eliminated in our current legal system.
The problem in this instance was that running a generator creates fire and/or electrical hazards. Those dangers are mitigated by the condominium domain's insurance. The insurers may not provide coverage if a single owner violates the policy. Two examples:
a) Snow is falling, accumulating and melting on an area which the generator wires are laid. One side of the circuit wiring is bare and a tenant, while holding onto a (grounded) steel banister, steps into a puddle of water that the generator wire crosses. No one else is present: the tenant is electrocuted and his semi-frozen body found half a day later, still leaning on the banister. Who is liable?
b) The generator malfunctions and catches fire. B/c it is inside a back porch area, the fire spreads quickly to the condominium unit and thence to surrounding units. Due to a higher than normal volume of calls and the icy roads being difficult to navigate, the fire department is slow to respond. Once they do respond, they find some water supply lines are frozen, further slowing them in their attempts to contain the fire and requiring extra units to be fielded, even further increasing their response time. Who is liable?
In both cases the legal liability probably lies with the condominium unit owner who runs the generator. If the HOA fails to notify the unit owner or fails to takes steps to shut the generator down, the legal liability may include the HOA.
Not surprisingly, very few people buy additional insurance that covers them when they make mistakes (a so-called "umbrella policy" does this sometimes, among other things) in judgement as happened here. Normally one would install such a generator ahead of time and provisions for safety as well as responsibility and liability insurance would be made well ahead of time.
The correct (and IMO easier) thing for the woman to do would have been to move to a hotel/motel/warming center/etc. After all, she had the wherewithal to procure and install a generator on her porch, a task that surely took hours or days to complete.
In sum, this is simply another condo owner sob-story. Condo buyers sign a legal agreement and, as soon as they break that agreement and are notified by the HOA, they cry to the media.
Having once been president of an HOA in a condominium, my own ideas, which include public hangings by edict as punishment for HOA agreement violations, might seem archaic, but they would do a lot to tame the madness of condo owners and calm the economic path of most HOAs.
Using the email to trigger a password recovery is a good solution. But in the end, you are just outsourcing your "self-care" problem to the email provider.
That works as long as you to know the email you signed up with and have forgotten the password. But what if it's the other way round?
I'd imagine most web savvy people these days have several email addresses and lots of us will use disposable emails or tricks like adding '+something' to our emails when we sign up.
I've recently run into this problem on a couple of sites [I'm thinking Trustpilot and Mastodon but could be wrong], whereby my password manager had saved my login name and password but, when I returned to the site, it wanted me to login with my email address and password. [inconsistent naming of form fields twixt registration screen and login screen, no doubt].
I couldn't remember which of my half dozen or so email addresses or "+"-added variations of them I'd used, or if I'd used a disposable email like Mailinator to sign up. So I clicked on the "forgot login" link --which then asked enter my account email address, in order to be sent a password reset link!
I agree because it is incongruent to target symbolism towards "Christmas" when every day of our week is a reference to Norse religions. So in this case we don't know if someone was offended by recognizing Christmas symbolism at all due to the Santa hat on the gear, or if someone that likes Christmas was offended because Santa's hat has nothing to do with their Christian God - we'll never know! But something like this happens every season leading into the end of the year, while other religious symbolism equally as prevalent in our society is completely ignored. This makes me lean towards not reacting to "random offended person" at all.
> "even a single person being offended is one too many"
> "An amazing thing took place at Carmel High School’s graduation. One of our students Jack Higgins was presented with his diploma. Jack graduated after 8 years. He is a wonderful member of our student community. Jack has autism and with that comes sensory issues. At graduation the student body and several thousand individuals were asked to not clap or cheer so Jack could participate. What followed was nothing short of a miracle. We shot for the moon but instead reached the stars." - Principal Lou Riolo
I would recommend Elementary OS (Based on an Ubuntu).It is closer to an OsX experience imho. However, make no mistake, it won't replace OsX and its rich ecosystem… https://elementary.io
reply