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I am retiring from tech to live offline

openpath.quest

211–220 of 617 posts

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#211
post #36

Lol, had to tell the internet on his way out huh. He'll be back of course as he clearly values the internet and makes it part of his ego.

As an open source maintainer, it was important not to just drop off the planet and have people think he died or something. He's got torches to pass.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#212

I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…

I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades. But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I lo…

I will admit, when it came to brainstorming sources of crashes with threads, AI has helped me find sources I hadn't considered (as a systems guy, multi threading real experience is something I am sprinting through)

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#213

I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…

It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.

Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again

“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”

- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#214
post #75

This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him. Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside b…

What's worth stealing, to a dude with a robot? Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.

Wait till there are organ harvesting bots. Only half joking, I am afraid.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#215
Damn, I am a beginner in my coding journey, and even I fell the fatigue - the fear that no matter what I do , it can be easily replicated with AI, I now have to think extra hard to make sure that a new project I am embarking on cannot be easily vibe coded in a weekend, it exhausting - I feel the spirit of coding, building together is dying as everyone wants to monetize and sell to PE firms, everyone wants a million or billion $ valuation, is open source and community dead ?

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?

If you just like talking and some program comes out (aka "business problem solving") you might like it. If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap. And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap. (Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).

Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then? I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses, and am having a great time. In the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen. But I guess its a bit scary that we don't know how much more it will improve...

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#217

Very nice performative piece. The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it. AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.

Having the ability to "retire" has nothing to do with AI. *Wanting* to retire has a lot to do with AI.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#218

I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…

Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find AI to be very effective. It can do nearly all coding tasks many OOMs faster than I can. And I'm able to get it to produce high-quality code in the process. Using AI, our codebase actually has less tech debt than any time I can remember. I would be less effective if I wasn't using AI and if I wasn't finding new ways to leverage it.

That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.

I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.

Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#219

I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…

Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?

While the tinkerer in me would love to, the pragmatic side of me cannot ignore the speed boost, specially for prototyping programs.

If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#220

While I definitely respect the choice to live an offline life, as someone that grew up orthodox christian in an orthodox country I can't shake off the vibe this dude gives: very LARPy and sounds like an evangelical. Orthodox never tell you that they're sinners and to pray for their sins. That's an americanism.

Every convert to Orthodoxy I've seen in the US is like this. Converts to Catholicism, too, but definitely not cradle Catholics.
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