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The happiest I've ever been

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Re: The happiest I've ever been

#21

Post by arjie »

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.

Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.

Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.

Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

internet2000 wrote: post #11

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#23

Post by reconnecting »

DougN7 wrote: post #18
reconnecting wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.

There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was…

The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#24

Post by Remnant44 »

jnovek wrote: post #5
reconnecting wrote: post #3

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults. I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline. Thank you for sharing your inspiring exa…

I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

There's a whole lot of us out there. I don't know if there's still a future in the thing that I love, which is where all the malaise comes from.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#25

Post by DonThomasitos »

dgritsko wrote: post #6

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do…

One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#27

Post by NickNaraghi »

Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#29

Post by antonvs »

fortzi wrote: post #13

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft. Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?

The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#30

Post by logicprog »

voxl wrote: post #20
internet2000 wrote: post #11

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.

What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible?

Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?

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