Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)
Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
Good news: video games are still fucking awesome. Since it costs nothing to make one, weird and smart and cool people from all across the world are trying the craziest stuff. It's true they're purchasable through steam, mostly. But there's spectacularly creative stuff at low or no cost. For example, skimming my steam right now I see:
- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)
- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)
- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)
- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)
- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)
- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)
I despise smartphones (and related), but they're really incredible hardware and software, I SHOULD like them, a lot. Imagine being a nerd in the 90s and getting access to this tiny computer running on 3 volts of battery power that's 10x more powerful than your desktop. Holy crap.
I'm even somewhat resentful of modern games, I feel like they should be... more fun? More often then not I just kind of throw something old in an emulator and play that. My comment might have come across as the opposite but I think it can be interpreted either way.
"I should be enjoying this stuff, why does it suck so bad now?" Is probably the vibe we're trying to get at here.
Different person's POV here: I fully expect from my mind to enjoy video games.
Then I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets, and I'd like to have absolutely none of that please.
It's this cognitive dissonance maybe, that's the guilty displeasure. Because I do keep coming back, we all do.
In the grim darkness of the right now, with former gaming companies focusing on live services and loot boxes and advertising, core gamers' very conception of video games is simulacra, a copy without the original.
With time, this will fade; like when searching for Jesus, you don't really expect to physically find the dude hidden in the corner of the church. Expectations decay.
Maybe I will visit Steam on the Internet Archive and still browse, when everything is gone and dead, and the guilty displeasure feeling will have outlived the displeasure, and the guilt.
Depends on what sort of games you are into, but Baldur's Gate 3 is modern and amazing. Great single player campaign with mod support. No DLCs or expansion packs, you get it all in the base game, finished, done.
With regards to GOG and privacy, though, it's worth noting that GOG write that they "may use Google Adwords, Doubleclick, Sizmek Versatag, Yandex.Metrica, Twitter Pixel or Facebook Pixel and other similar technologies" as well as "Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Matomo, Hotjar", and that they incorporate either the privacy or cookie or ad policy of most of these services by reference into their own cookie policy:
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000498685-Cooki...
So if they really are a privacy- and consumer-oriented company, that must be the slip-up of the century.
It's not a guilty displeasure. I get annoyed by smart stuff. It's grating to deal with a smart TV demanding more attention than a display deserves. Over time we just stopped trusting that technology will better our lives.
Dogs -
I know they are good for humanity with getting their owners for walks, loyalty, etc. But have no idea how people get hooked on them with the picking up hot feces and 25% chance of getting a barking/jumping lunatic that you have to rearrange your life every 6 hours around their bathroom habits...
You need to have one to understand the unconditional loyalty, love, and the bond. You come to appreciate it even more once you lose them. Having a dog is the best and worst thing in the world. Just lost our fur baby a week ago...
A joke I read recently: "A fortune teller told me I was going to experience the most terrible heartbreak in twelve years time. This totally bummed me out, so I got a dog to cheer me up."
The same reason people generally don't regret having kids even though the commitment and overall change of your life are much greater than what you described for dogs.
I'm mixed. I always wanted a dog as an adult because I grew up with dogs. But, maybe because it was a different time, the dogs didn't run our lives. Serially, they lived in our backyard. They had access to a dog house in the garage. And we gave them food and played with them. I was also a kid so no idea what my parents went through but I certainly didn't see them fretting over the dog and we rarely if ever took them for a walk.
But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.
So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.
You don't pick up your dog's poop? You don't take them out regularly? I mean sure, there are scenarios where these aren't true, but for the vast majority of dog owners, it very much does happen like that.
I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
Remember that feeling when you successfully wrote, debugged and ran your first useful program ? I think we are always chasing after that feeling in our own way with our little side projects.
Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.
I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.
I think it can go both ways. I have made things that made me feel bad for not truly understanding what I made and I disliked the process.
But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.
But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.
You're not alone! I love hand-writing code, I love solving the puzzles that come along with it, but I'm having a blast learning how to apply all these new tools.
I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.
Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.
Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.
I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.
The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.
Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.
Oh I understand this one too much as a fan of the Isekai genre. So much slop and poorly done power fantasies. But some amazing content in there. Then I look at something like One Piece and not really vibing with it at all despite being overwhelmingly popular.
Came here to say the same. At first I couldn't even relate, but then another phase of my life came flashing back to me. All the angst around the pretense, wondering why I like somethings in a particular space but then not others that I was supposed to like...
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
Young Me, a voracious reader, was defeated several times by the LOTR books. To this day, I doubt I could force myself to read dozens of pages of Tom Bombadil singing about trees.
Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.
I've never been interested in contrived puzzles like Rubik's cubes or even crosswords - but an actual real puzzle like "why does this call fail 1% of the time" could keep me enthralled for days/weeks until I either found the cause or was told to stop... Sadly no longer in that kind of work.
In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
I mean, sure, but I still think it's kind of hypocritical for me to act like weed should be legal and no one should be arrested for it and all that stuff, only to get mad at them for doing the things that I said they should be allowed to do.
French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.
I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.
> I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.
Yeah, in high school I had a pothead acquaintance who got mad at me when I said that I knew more about physics then he did, because I had actually taken physics classes, and I too had seen the same Carl Sagan videos he had. He didn't know any of the math behind physics, and as far as I'm aware he wasn't some kind of Ramanujan savant (considering he wasn't in any advanced classes), but I guess he felt that he was so smart because he would get high and watch Cosmos or listen to Alan Watts.
He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics
That's not NIMBYism or hypocrisy. It's just liberalism. You don't like something, but you think it should be legal. That is exactly what liberalism is about. You do not have to like everything and in fact, if you only want to allow things that you like, you're not liberal. It's precisely the acknowledgement of other people's right to do things that you do not like that defines liberalism. But at the same time you have the right to not associate with people who do these things. You give them their freedom and they give you yours. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
Also some of the things you describe are just addiction and coping, euphemizing it.
Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.
+1 but I don't see that as a guilty displeasure to be honest. I also formed most of my musical taste in the 90s and to this day Dirt, Sap and Jar of Flies sound just as good as they did back in the day.
I was obsessed with a handful of Deftones songs back in the day. But outside those, I just couldn't get into them wholesale. I think they just weren't heavy enough for me. Now I'm old, and one of my mates is a huge Alice in Chains fan, and he showed me their ropes (I didn't know much prior). I'm very into them now. It's the same with a lot of bands that were before my time. My dad loves Dire Straights, and I thought they were OK when I was younger. I appreciate them at a different level now.
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Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)
- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)
- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)
- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)
- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)
- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)
The article defines guilty displeasures as things you don't like but you hope you like. I don't think you hope yourself to like modern AAA games.
I'm even somewhat resentful of modern games, I feel like they should be... more fun? More often then not I just kind of throw something old in an emulator and play that. My comment might have come across as the opposite but I think it can be interpreted either way.
"I should be enjoying this stuff, why does it suck so bad now?" Is probably the vibe we're trying to get at here.
Then I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets, and I'd like to have absolutely none of that please.
It's this cognitive dissonance maybe, that's the guilty displeasure. Because I do keep coming back, we all do.
In the grim darkness of the right now, with former gaming companies focusing on live services and loot boxes and advertising, core gamers' very conception of video games is simulacra, a copy without the original.
With time, this will fade; like when searching for Jesus, you don't really expect to physically find the dude hidden in the corner of the church. Expectations decay.
Maybe I will visit Steam on the Internet Archive and still browse, when everything is gone and dead, and the guilty displeasure feeling will have outlived the displeasure, and the guilt.
I think we should support people who are uncomfortable about this stuff, don't ridicule them with "tinfoil hat much?" type sentiments
By the way, GOG.com treats you well wrt cloud/privacy/etc. All games they sell are drm-free and can be downloaded, installed and played offline.
Deleted Comment
But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.
So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.
I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.
But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.
But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.
I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.
Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.
Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.
I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.
The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
Dead Comment
- The Lord of the Rings (try being a geeky Catholic who finds LotR tedious)
- Fantasy stories generally (though I love sci-fi)
- Chess
- Scrabble
- Rubik's cubes
- Video games
- Listening to music (I sing in a choir, but I don't like listening to music--any of it--even the kinds of music I like to sing)
Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.
I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.
Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.
He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics
Also some of the things you describe are just addiction and coping, euphemizing it.
Not sure what my point is.