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The happiest I've ever been

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Re: The happiest I've ever been

#301

Post by littlexsparkee »

cheema33 wrote: post #75
lm28469 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c. But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!

> We're retiring later and later, working more per week That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no. > purchasing power is going down That is not a new thing. > quality of goods is going down Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ... > life expectancy is decreasing On the whole, this is…

We've passed 7 of 9 climate tipping points so there's that. What kind of view do you expect a person to have if they pay any sort of attention?

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#302

Post by layer8 »

harrall wrote: post #250
tadfisher wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with i…

There’s a third group of people: people who did it, got good at it, and got bored. I do both carpentry and programming and both activities have long since become repetitive. There are only so many dovetails or distributed systems you can make. That’s why I don’t care if AI can replace those parts. I’m in it to do the designing, not the crafting.

That would assume that the AI is as good at the repetitive parts as you were, which isn’t my experience. You still have to review and correct it, which is more boring and repetitive than implementing it yourself.

But I also disagree about the getting bored on the “crafting”. It may depend on what you do, but there are always new design decisions and trade-offs to make all the way down. This isn’t a solved problem, and AI doesn’t change that.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#303

Post by kj4211cash »

lr4444lr wrote: post #147

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#304

Post by [deleted] »

lukan wrote: post #232
tokioyoyo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, everyone I know who doesn’t have a child/not planning to have zero connection to Reddit or anything online. Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays. And as they watch other going child free or 1-2 children, they realize that life is possible nowadays.

"Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays" Do they? Or have most just become too distorted to feel allright filling their emptiness with empty online debates and netflix? I know people who are really happy without kids (and who will never have them), but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade. And with many, there isn't even a facade.

[deleted]

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#305

Post by tokioyoyo »

Gareth321 wrote: post #253
lukan wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays" Do they? Or have most just become too distorted to feel allright filling their emptiness with empty online debates and netflix? I know people who are really happy without kids (and who will never have them), but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade. And with many, there isn't even a facade.

Kids are a cheat code to finding fulfilment. Some rare people are able to make it themselves, but they are the exception. I think most people who post on social media about living their best DINK lives are either lying to us, themselves, or have never experienced fulfilment and confuse it with margaritas on the couch with Netflix.

No DINK I know posts anything about their lives ever. Probably the most "quietly enjoying their lives" people ever. Most people get jaded through social-media as it's just pure hate-rage baited content from all the sides. Most people are normal, they're just living. It's not up to you, or me to dictate what they're supposed to find fulfillment in.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#306

Post by mjdiloreto »

Archer6621 wrote: post #299
mjdiloreto wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis. Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void…

What makes you think that AI cannot become significantly better than humans at "understanding" and modelling the world? If the AI is always more likely to be right than you or me due to being able to take more variables/knowledge into account by default, then why ever listen to a human, or even to yourself when it comes to an economic decision? My honest and rather pessimistic take is that in the long-term any craft…

It's not that it won't be better at understanding, it's that there's too many possibilities to understand. This is true for humans too, but I can use the output to make money in a particular scenario.

Take even 1 simple example - software applications on a smart watch. How many dimensions of reality are relevant? Maybe I'm a busy person, so I need a personal assistant for my calendar. Maybe my wife needs access too. Maybe I'm a bird watcher and I'd like to track the birds I see. Maybe I'm a bird researcher and those observations need to integrate with my research.... ad nauseum forever.

AI will write all the code, and make all the meaningful decisions, but the backstop of the whole thing has to be some non-virtual reality with a paying user, otherwise there is no value to extract.

I personally only care about the outcome, I don't even really care if I understand how anything else works, or any of the decisions made. My dollars go in, working code comes out to suit me.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#307

Post by mr_toad »

bengale wrote: post #35

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement jus…

> That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.

This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#308

Post by cobbzilla »

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.

keep programming and learn to use AI.

it’s just another tool. lots of people didn’t want to use compilers and got left behind. the world moved on.

i’m older than you and doing fine. it’s just another tech upheaval, we’ve been through plenty.

yes it gets tiring and at some point you find your way off the treadmill. but it’s really not that hard to stay on, especially if you have the experience.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#309

Post by throwaway1492 »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #282
joshkojoras wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it. I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when…

Plenty of time left. Create a tinder account, or adopt a child. Adpoting a child is the most self-less thing you could do. There are countries where single men are allowed to adopt. If you are rich, move there, become resident, adopt, and move back. Problem solved! As a bonus, being a single father then makes it more probable for you to meet a woman.

This, I got married at 40 to a 36 year old. We both wanted kids and a family but for reasons it hadn’t worked out for either of us. This wasn’t a Disney romance by any means but we get along and we put in the work to make it work. We had two kids back to back and I can say without a doubt what we have built is greater than any one of us.

Trust there are some really great women in their thirties, they may not have been your first choice, you probably wouldn’t have been theirs either, but from where I sit it was worth it.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#310

Post by throwaway1492 »

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…

At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!
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