u/Dreadsin

I worked one company that was ultra strict. I mean as in, they’d comment on the grammar in your pull request descriptions and grade it like a school assignment. They’d barrage people less than a minute (this is literal, as if the manager was just sitting there watching) after submitting code reviews with tons of nitpicks on slack

Often reviews were unclear, slow, or even contradictory. They’d ask you to do something one day, only to say the exact opposite the next day. Trying to figure out what you should be working on with your manager was like pulling teeth, almost like they didn’t want to give an answer

I asked about HR, they said we don’t have it then didn’t direct me anywhere about it

I assumed this was bad management, but is it something more than that? Maybe conspiratorial but it kind of seems like they were trying to set up everyone for poor performance to justify letting go of anyone

A common theme on this show is that tech isn’t really as “exciting” as it used to be. A lot of that is due to Harvard MBAs running things in such a way that totally ignores the product. With shareholder supremacy, they basically just care about making a nice looking spreadsheet at the end of every quarter with nice looking financials

In turn, they often overlook the “soft side” of the business. Layoffs absolutely trash morale, especially when they seem unfair, not merit based, or random. It shifts the paradigm of employees to survival mode. This causes a complete drop in creativity because no one wants to be responsible for taking a risk and failing. So, the entire company is basically in a functional freeze… except c suite

So then it becomes c suite making every decision on software, and that’s how you get a metaverse or Apple Intelligence situation. It’s just c suite basically asking “idk man what do people who like tech like? Virtual reality or something?” Then making the most directionless and bland implementation of that

So now you have these out of touch businessmen trying their best to simulate what people used to like from tech. They fail to make something appealing to consumers, so they do layoffs to balance the books. This just repeats in a vicious cycle

That’s been my observation at least

Currently live in Massachusetts. I think it’s a lovely place, it’s just too expensive and the weather is far too cold for my taste

The only place I felt really “at home” in the USA was New York City, I love it there. But I currently have a car and would prefer to be without one if I live there. I guess I could sell it but… eh? Sounds like a lot of effort

My brother is trying to convince me to live in Southern California. I generally like how much culture and diversity there is, I just mostly hate how car centric it is. I’ve lived here for months at a time and it’s comfortable, but not exciting

Then long shot here: considering moving to Brazil because I have a remote job and it’s in the same time zone

What’s yalls opinion?

Im sort of a layman when it comes to this so im just gonna say what I’ve heard, which is almost certainly clickbait

Basically what I’ve heard is that a lot of the economy seems to be growing, yet consumer sentiment is low and consumer spending is tightening in the bottom 90% or so. The reason it seems to be growing is circular financing. Nvidia pays OpenAI $1b, OpenAI spends $1b at nvidia, so it looks like the GDP has gone up 2 billion

I’ve heard some more extreme sources say that this means corporations will be able to continue on their current trajectory for a longer time than expected. They don’t really need working class consumers anymore and will just use this strategy to stretch financials

I find it a little unbelievable, but I’d like to hear some economists input

They all end up tasting like flour, butter, and sugar after two or three bites. I genuinely don’t get what’s so different between a scone and a bearclaw or something, they’re just sugar dough

For breakfasts, they’re very dense while not being satiating at all. You eat a croissant and all it does is raise your blood sugar and weigh you down, only to be hungry like an hour later

For desserts, cakes and things like that are too sweet and kind of sickening after the first two or three bites. Pies are… meh. Plain fruit and cream would taste better and not be as heavy

Bread is also pretty bad. There’s almost always an alternative that’s better. Dumplings are decent but cabbage rolls are much more satisfying

Anytime I go into a store with any sort of baked goods, I can’t find a single thing worth getting. Only exception to this is pão de quiejo

I mean this genuinely, like what is the actual goal?

I would think that it would be fairly obvious to investors that AI is not all that it’s hyped up to be. The numbers don’t really work out for this as an investment. I read stories every day about AI doing chaos in business, such as deleting production databases or causing huge outages. This is paired with the fact that AI is not particularly inexpensive at the moment. A rudimentary 4 hour course on AI will reveal some glaring limitations of the technology. Shouldn’t these “shrewd businessmen” be a bit skeptical when someone is basically selling them a machine that can do literally anything? Seems kind of too good to be true doesn’t it?

Data centers in particular seem like the worst place to position yourself in the current market. DeepSeek surprised the world by showing everyone you could train with far fewer GPUs than anyone previously thought possible. What if a similar innovation were to happen again? Then you’d have all this compute and nothing to use it for, cause it’s specialized for AI. So if that happens, what will you do with a data center? It’s relatively hard to sell. Also, who are you going to sell GPUs specialized for AI to, when now AI needs far less compute? Currently, GPUs and such are in high demand and very expensive, and they also wear out quickly. Data centers will have massive recurring costs with a huge upfront investment

It also seems like they’re showing their hand way too much and almost unintentionally causing class consciousness to form. Many of these very large data centers are opposed by local residents, regardless of political preferences. No one wants a loud, energy consuming, heat causing, gigantic eye sore in their town. Despite their opposition, local governments force through these data centers, at the beheast of these wealthy investors. It almost feels too blunt, like do they think we’re not seeing what they’re doing? They’re making it so obvious they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves

I think it might be as dumb as that they think artificial intelligence literally means artificial intelligence, and putting more points into it just makes a smarter computer. It would be like, if after the first rocket into space, people started putting all their money into rocket ships to be the first one to find a rich alien planet and get its resources. They make a lot of implicit assumptions that they should question: can current rocket technology get us farther than space? How far away is the nearest alien planet? Do we even know if there is an alien planet out there? Yet with AI they’re like “oh so you’re saying me it make computer smarter? how much money before it smarter than steve in accounting?”

The neighbors of a data center in Georgia are steaming after they discovered the facility had sucked up nearly 30 million gallons of water — without initially paying for it.

Outrage started bubbling up last year when residents of an affluent subdivision named Annelise Park in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed their water pressure was unusually low.

When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.

I’m genuinely curious. I work in tech and am very aware of the process of enshittification, which I feel has altered my consumer behaviors, but are most people behaving in similar ways?

When I’m using some sort of software product, unless it’s purely open source (things like Linux), I assume that enshittification is an inevitability and act in accordance. If a new streaming service comes out with suspiciously good prices and catalog, I assume that this is temporary. Those shows will go away, the price will be raised, quality will drop, and if this company gets big enough, it will start infecting the broader industry like Netflix does

I weigh that against buying physical media. If I own the physical media, who cares what happens to the streaming service? I can watch this show any time. Not only that, the quality of a 4K UHD disk is incomparably better than any streaming service, which will inevitably deliver lower quality to save costs. I could also simply go to my local library and rent a copy for free, which helps fund public services by increasing demand

For movies, I almost always prefer to go to an actual theatre because that’s also an activity I can do with friends and I like supporting my local artsy cinema. You can tell the people at these cinemas truly do love movies and want to share them with everyone. I don’t want to give my money to weird, antisocial, misanthropic, greedy tech billionaires who just saw movies as an “industry with potential for optimization”

One thing that really turned me on this was finding out that Kevin O’Leary wanted to use AI for marty supreme to “save money”. My dude, you are in an A24 movie, are you literally stupid? We can’t let these people near anything good cause they’ll try to burn it down to make more money for themselves, then they’ll call it good

So long story short, for me, knowing these tech billionaires and their playbook makes their products seem that much less appealing. It would be like if you found out your favorite restaurant was serving ground rat meat instead of chicken, you probably would never go there again. That’s how I feel about these enshittified tech products

Just wondering if I can add terms to a LICENSE file. I specifically don’t really want it to be used by certain industries

When I feel comfortable in an environment and with the people I’m with, people tell me I’m very easy going. I really don’t take too many things too seriously and I’m able to make the best of most situations. My attitude towards most things is “I’m just doing it cause I’d be bored otherwise”

However, I’ve often met people who were very intense, high strung, and type A. In my family, my dad and my brother are. I notice my easy going attitude often comes off to them as unserious, I think one of them described it as “ditzy”.

Sometimes people will find it kind of insulting in contexts like working or studying, cause they think I’m not being serious or I’m slacking or I’m making their “grind” look like a joke.

People will get worked up about things, I won’t see the big deal. I’ll try to calm them down, sort of let them know it’s not worth getting super worked up over, then they’ll get very mad at me for not taking it seriously. Like my dad always gets mad at commercials before movies, I’m like “eh it’s kind of fun though, I like being reminded of what’s coming out” and he’ll get mad cause that’s invalidating

So since I have a hard time reading social cues, I’m always kind of afraid to naturally be myself. I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell if people are offended by my casual attitude about things, so I always make sure to average it out to whatever most people would say

So frequently, I say that I tried to use AI tools and felt like the result was not good. What ends up happening is I have to dig into code myself and explain it very explicitly to the AI to get the result I'm looking for, and at that point, it feels like it's just typing faster than me, not thinking for me

I tell people this and they're like "oh, bro, there's your problem, you gotta learn how to AI!", then they recommend classes on it, documentation, tons of different tools... ok cool

So then I try setting it up the way they said. I watch all these courses on it explaining how to use it, I must have gone through four of them so far. I go to youtube channels, open source, and steal whatever worked for other people. I figure out all these weirdly specific prompting tools like "oh if you threaten to kill Claude's family and send it an AI generated photo of robots with bags over their head, it will give you a better answer" or some bullshit

I realize, I'm spending so much time getting this harness working, that it's just supplanted coding. I'm spending more time writing AI bullshit than I would be if I wrote code myself. It's also constantly changing, literally day by day. For example, opus 4.7 had a bug in it last week so you had to know to use 4.6

Then it got me thinking... wasn't this supposed to be easier? Wasn't the premise that some middle manager would be able to type "make me an app, make no mistakes" at one point? Which one is it, is it automating everything, or is it just more work?

Obviously, I don’t want kids _at all_, but when I think about how much money it would take to offset having a kid…

Ok. Instead of living in a 1br apartment, I’m gonna have to upgrade to a 2br, but more realistically 2br + den (I work remote). I want my child to grow up somewhere walkable, and it should have at least decent public schools and be somewhat safe. So basically… that’s an additional $500k right from the get go in my area (Massachusetts)

I live in America so I operate under the assumption that healthcare won’t even work (maybe it’s trauma from not being able to get a hip replacement approved). I’m just gonna assume that there’s a potential $100k bill for having a child, _at all_. Also, I really don’t feel comfortable having kids in a country where healthcare isn’t guaranteed, not even to children, so honestly I’d still want a $50k buffer just in case cause out of pocket healthcare is insane. I know that sounds insane, but I’ve been fired from jobs in the middle of getting medical care

Okay now I work a job as a software engineer and it is fucking stressful, like I’m crashing out now even without a kid. Expectations are that you’re available 24/7 and that work is your top or only priority. If I had a kid, I would need frequent daycare, which is like $50k/year. Also, there’s no maternity or paternity leave, so I’d probably have to add even more for one parent potentially being out of work for months or even a year

Okay so what are we at now? Like $900k? The kid isn’t even 4 years old at this point. Now, we gotta add saving for college. Gotta add basically $30k/year for child related expenses. And I gotta pray to god my job doesn’t just decide one random day to fire me for “efficiency”

I honestly think $1m might be _light_ for asking for someone in America to have a kid. The alternative is simply abstaining and living a normal life and saving $1m+ and a whoooole lot of stress

Governments offer like $10k

Lmao

This is one thing that always makes me so mad whenever talking about AI

I use AI at work. I have the most advanced thinking model, a huge setup made by multiple very intelligent engineers, all sorts of prompting strategies, etc etc

I ask AI to do something basic like “hey can you fix this bug?” Then it will say “done!” And confidently give a reason that seems… at least rational? I go to test it and it doesn’t even fucking work. I look at the code and it’s nonsense. I tell it to try again. Repeat. Then I have to find the problem myself and explain it to the AI and the AI **STILL GETS THE FUCKING CODE WRONG**

Also now work is paying for an engineer and a _very_ expensive tool. Like imagine MacBooks costed $100k, and you had to get one every year for every employee at your company. Like, yeah, it helps them do their job… but 100k is pretty steep man that’s like half their salary

And it seems to apply to other fields too. I had doctors tell me not to use AI or show them anything that AI said cause it’s almost certainly wrong. Same with legal. I’ve heard of lawyers feeling like clients are wasting their time by looking up things on ChatGPT that are wildly inaccurate

“But what about medical technology like radiology” ok but that’s a bit different cause it’s like what AI is made for. “Does this picture look similar to millions of others you’ve seen” is a pretty hard question for humans but a pretty easy question for computers. “Hey computer, I want you to try a ton of different things until it matches this output” is miserable for a human but easy work for computers

Like how tf are we betting the future on this tech that doesn’t even seem to function at a basic level?

I have been working since 2012, and I’ve been a senior engineer since roughly 2017. I specialize in frontend.

I remembered up until about 2021, it was very much just a normal 9-5 job, with some ebbs and flows. Some days you’d work a little more, others a little less. Nowadays, I feel like work is considered to be a 24/7 thing. I worked at one company where they’d frequently request that I worked at 2AM (to sync up with coworkers in Nepal), another where they told me not to go to the gym because I wouldn’t have my phone and they wanted me to be available all the time

The scope has gotten out of control. I worked at a big company, and I remember I did maybe one feature on the frontend the entire time I worked there. I spent the overwhelming majority of my time doing tasks that were unrelated to my skillset, while being expected to perform as well as someone who had 10+ years of experience in that thing. I’ve never written ruby, but I was told at one job to write an entire feature in ruby in ~3 days

I’m constantly compensating for a lacking team. At one very big company (with a loooot of money), they didn’t have a designer. What do you mean you don’t have a designer? I found it was just more practical for me to pick up figma and do design, on top of frontend, on top of on call, on top of backend work, on top of SRE work, and on top of infra work I was doing there

Frontend engineering in general feels like a particularly annoying field. They’re always cutting back on engineers, and frontends are often the last to be hired and the first to be let go. What this tangibly means is that you have backend engineers writing frontend code most of the time. To be VERY blunt here, they usually lack the domain knowledge to do a lot of the work in a sustainable way. At this point, it feels like 95% of my job is just testing a very flakey frontend. I’m sure backend engineers deal with tech debt, but it feels like the entire frontend is tech debt because people just get it done as fast as possible and doesn’t take it seriously or see it as inherently lesser than backend and therefore not worth their attention

What this means is I’m usually thrown into an environment where the frontend is unmanageable slop. Everyone is afraid to touch it. Managers usually just respond to friction, and they’re also way too overwhelmed, so they just blame the FE engineer and fire them when things take a long time.

Then AI comes along and makes this waaaay worse. “I have never written ruby :\” “just use claude”, okay but how will I confirm my fixes actually work? You want me to just throw slop at the wall and hope it sticks? But then that’s gonna make a problem for you down the road, are you sure you want that? Then I remember everyone is already working at 110% capacity so they don’t even have the bandwidth to think about that, it’s all basically just about surviving this week

With constant layoffs and firings, it feels like everyone is at each other throats because they don’t want to be the one to be kicked. There’s some that seem to be happy about the idea of people being kicked because AI is “good enough” and they don’t wanna deal with another person.

I’m just so sick of it at this point, the stress is constantly through the roof and burnout seems incredibly common

La La Land has a great example of this. Starts with Seb playing his theme in the night club when he should be playing Christmas music, sort of establishing his character and his character’s issues. He’s a stubborn person who doesn’t budge on his ideas

Then, it plays again when Mia is at dinner with her lame boyfriend, just representing she’s thinking of Seb

Then it plays when he’s at the photoshoot, representing that he’s thinking of Mia

Finally, it plays at the end showing everything that could have been

I fuckin love that trope, are there any other movies with it? I also really like it when they change it slightly to be sadder/happier depending on context

I don’t know about anyone else here but whenever I feel stressed out in an environment, I find it incredibly difficult to succeed. The fact that I can get fired at any moment and lose my income feels like a sword of Damocles constantly dangling over my head

It makes me recalibrate my priorities. It feels worse to lose than it does to gain. Every move has to be calculated, and it’s mostly around politics rather than output. I don’t feel like I’m working towards some goal, I feel like I’m just in survival mode

I always think about if some utopia existed where you didn’t really ever have to think about survival, what would I do all day? And honestly I wouldn’t really mind working on some sort of project with people. Maybe it’s making a video game, or like helping to build homes for people while I’m young and healthy. I think I’d do way better at it, too

And if everyone had that freedom, life would be so much better for everyone. Your boss is being an asshole? Ok leave. What’s the worst that can happen, you have a home and you have food. Go get a job somewhere where the boss isn’t an asshole. Now the miserable boss has to stop being so miserable or he won’t be able to be a boss anymore

Of course all of this is very idealistic, I just wish it was possible 😔

There would be nothing better than taking a good indica gummy, watching my backlog of movies on letterboxd on my iPad, and then falling asleep. It would make every flight soooo much easier and less boring. They allow alcohol on flights, and I’d argue that’s way worse. If there was a store past security that sold them, it would make sooooo much money too

For one, every platform is basically converging on the same thing. Your app is some sort of social media app, store, or some sort of productivity app that follows the same basic design language. There’s rarely anything mainstream that’s daring or new

Content often feels like it’s engagement driven. That just means everything is constantly competing for your attention, and usually using kind of annoying methods to do so. Basically everything is clickbait. I’m sick of hearing some news story that’s heavily distorted, looking up the full context, and finding out tons of it was just lies or misrepresentation

People are just gross. Yeah I know that used to be on the old internet too, but there’s something extra disheartening about seeing a real face and real name attached to someone saying the most racist thing you’ve ever seen. I guess I felt like when it was more anonymous, it was more about shock value

“Oh those are just bots”, yeah, somehow that’s also really bad… like you mean there’s someone so intent on spreading these weird, racist ideas that they’re making a program to comment on instagram??? They’re not even really getting the thrill of getting a rise out of someone, they’re just doing it for the love of the game ig?

Speaking of, everyone is soooo volatile and extreme. I have autism, and I remember watching some tiktok where a girl said it’s exhausting socializing as an autistic woman because you have to constantly monitor yourself. I commented that I identify a lot with what she was saying. Someone else responded with that I shouldn’t feel that way and only autistic women have socialization problems. Bro fucking WHAT? it’s literally part of the diagnosis, do you want to see the paperwork that says I have that problem? Sure, maybe socialization plays a larger part in women’s life, but bro… c’mon. Also, it’s just fuckin weird to lecture an autistic person what they’re allowed to feel, isn’t it? I feel guilty just for existing, you’re really not helping. Glad you feel very vindicated for defending your weird faux feminism though

Man. I miss like ~2005 - 2010 internet. Social media was relatively limited and most people who were online went to random forums. MMOs were one of the most fun places to hang out with other people. Mobile internet existed (kinda), but it was really slow so it wasn’t really common to use extensively. It was the perfect balance 😌