I had some of my own struggles but I really started noticing this more broadly in the last 2-3 years. I'm not sure if Covid did it, the end of ZIRP did it, or what, but there was a shift where suddenly almost every SE I would talk to seemed to be burned out. I can think of a lot of potential reasons but honestly the thing that jumped out at me the most is how almost in perfect sync it seemed to happen across the profession. It's a real bummer, I remember when SE was a pretty fun profession and people seemed generally pretty happy coming to work. (Maybe this was some kind of illusion though or I was just lucky where I worked at the time. I've heard plenty of death march horror stories from the old timers too.)
Readit Newsthisoneisreal commented on Software engineer mental health crisis twitter.com/tomdale/statu... · Posted by u/xnx
thisoneisreal commented on Some C habits I employ for the modern day unix.dog/~yosh/blog/c-hab... · Posted by u/signa11
Regarding memory, I recently changed to try to not use dynamic memory, or if I need to, to do it once at startup. Often static memory on startup is sufficient.
Instead use the stack much more and have a limit on how much data the program can handle fixed on startup. It adds the need to think what happens if your system runs out of memory.
Like OP said, it's not a solution for all types of programs. But it makes for very stable software with known and easily tested error states. Also adds a bit of fun in figuring out how to do it.
I've been looking into Ada recently and it has cool safety mechanisms to encourage this same kind of thing. It even allows you to dynamically allocate on the stack for many cases.
thisoneisreal commented on I changed my personality in six weeks bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/andsoitis
My wife became much more assertive and disagreeable after we had a special needs child in the NICU for nine months and the constant pressure from doctors to get unnecessary procedures like a tracheostomy. They also said we didn’t have to resuscitate her if we didn’t want to. Constant battles and pressure and my wife can be a stone cold bitch now when she needs to be, where she used to just say “okay”.
Our daughter is seven now, she does use a wheelchair, but is normal intelligence and just went in her cute little electric car she got for Christmas with her big sister to a friend’s house down the street. I’m so proud of her, and my wife.
So sometimes these traumatic events improve your personality in the sense that they give you a more realistic way of how the world actually works, and how to achieve your goals (especially when those goals are dearly held, like “I want my child to survive and have the best quality of life possible).
Also, with COVID I’d imagine a lot of the neuroticism going up or down depended on where you were and your philosophy. For me, and a lot of people leaning conservative, living in the Midwest, I think it is less neurotic, perhaps to our detriment. Totally disregarding health warnings, and being insubordinately against precautions rather than becoming more neurotic. Many of these people got covid. One died. Most were fine. There is likely a “correct” amount of neuroticism, although that obviously changes depending on your circumstances.
Extremely high neuroticism would help someone who was Jewish in 1930s Europe decide to get themselves and their family out of there at any cost, but extremely high neuroticism might not be great during the Pax Americana of the last 60 years.
Daniel Nettle gives a great layperson's explanation of the Five Factor model in his book "Personality," and the first thing he explains is in line with exactly what you ended on. We exhibit a variety of personalities because different personalities are useful in different environments. Sometimes it's GOOD to be highly neurotic, or low extraversion. Natural selection doesn't care about your internal conscious experience of life, it will make you miserable if that helps you survive.
On the money. Recently reading has been branded as a 'pill that's good for you' rather than 'way more interesting than everything on TV' which isn't very encouraging.
But let's face it, the reason people aren't reading anymore is because most of us are lazy and there are swaths of less cognitively demanding alternatives. People also can't afford books. Reading has always been a pastime of the wealthy.
Books had their heyday in the 19th century before the rise of computers and when print technology was quite robust.
I'm an avid reader (several dozens of books per year at least), and one of the things that bums me out is all of the morality around my hobby. 3 or 4 times out of 5 when I talk to people about it the reaction is "oh man I'm such a bad person because I don't read enough books."
It's fine! The number of books you read is not a reflection on your quality as a person.
Reading absolutely has positive benefits, but really it's exactly what you said. It's just more interesting than other options out there. The tradeoff is yes, it can require some effort, but that's the same as any other effortful activity. You have to get past the cost, but there's a really nice reward on the other side.
And for what it's worth, there ARE television shows, movies, etc. that have more value than many books. ("The Wire" is a prime example, probably better than 70-80% of the books out there.) The point is just generally that more cognitively demanding avocations can have a higher cost-benefit ratio than cheaper ones like TV. On average, books fall more into this category than other media, but that's just on average.
Anyway this is a long way of saying that feeling bad about the media you consume is counterproductive. The message should be that there is potentially a more rewarding experience out there, but whether you pursue it or not is totally up to you and doesn't make you a good or bad person either way.
thisoneisreal commented on I rebooted my social life takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/... · Posted by u/edent
My father passed away on Saturday. The aftermath drove home the importance of community.
Hundreds of people came to the funeral, even though it was short notice (24 hours) and in the middle of holiday season. They all dropped whatever they were doing, hopped in their cars or on a plane and came. Friends from his childhood. Friends from his middle/high school years. Friends from his university years, and med school years. People he had worked with and done community service with over the decades. His former students from the decades he taught at the local university. Employees at the hospital he worked at. Family friends. Friends of family. People who knew him by only name and yet still wanted to pay their respects.
I'm Turkish, and community has always played a big role in our culture. But the past few days made me realize that, ever since immigrating to the USA 20+ years ago, community had been supplanted by individualism. Like the author, I work from home. I do have a bit of a social life, and there's a couple of meetups I organize, but the size of my community is nothing compared to my parents. It makes me sad.
Reading this article gave me some hope. It reminded me that ultimately it's a matter of putting in the work, which I am determined to do. Not because I want to maximize the number of people who come to my eventual funeral or anything like that, but because I do want to live a richer life and the best way to do that is to share it with others.
Sorry if the above was all over the place. Things are still raw.
I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds like your father was a great man. No need for apologies, I think what you said is very poignant and relevant to the topic at hand. We should all be so lucky to live such full lives.
I can’t get over the range of sentiment on LLMs. HN leans snake oil, X leans “we’re all cooked” —- can it possibly be both? How do other folks make sense of this? I’m not asking for a side, rather understanding the range. Does the range lead you to believe X over Y?
My take (no more informed than anyone else's) is that the range indicates this is a complex phenomenon that people are still making sense of. My suspicion is that something like the following is going on:
1. LLMs can do some truly impressive things, like taking natural language instructions and producing compiling, functional code as output. This experience is what turns some people into cheerleaders.
2. Other engineers see that in real production systems, LLMs lack sufficient background / domain knowledge to effectively iterate. They also still produce output, but it's verbose and essentially missing the point of a desired change.
3. LLMs also can be used by people who are not knowledgeable to "fake it," and produce huge amounts of output that is basically besides-the-point bullshit. This makes those same senior folks very, very resentful, because it wastes a huge amount of their time. This isn't really the fault of the tool, but it's a common way the tool gets used and so it gets tarnished by association.
4. There is a ridiculous amount of complexity in some of these tools and workflows people are trying to invent, some of which is of questionable value. So aside from the tools themselves people are skeptical of the people trying to become thought leaders in this space and the sort of wild hacks they're coming up with.
5. There are real macro questions about whether these tools can be made economical to justify whatever value they do produce, and broader questions about their net impact on society.
6. Last but not least, these tools poke at the edges of "intelligence," the crown jewel of our species and also a big source of status for many people in the engineering community. It's natural that we're a little sensitive about the prospect of anything that might devalue or democratize the concept.
That's my take for what it's worth. It's a complex phenomenon that touches all of these threads, so not only do you see a bunch of different opinions, but the same person might feel bullish about one aspect and bearish about another.
thisoneisreal commented on The future of software development is software developers codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
I nodded furiously at this bit:
> The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
> That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer's IP address). And it's the hard part when they're prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.
> The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.
I don't agree with this:
> To folks who say this technology isn’t going anywhere, I would remind them of just how expensive these models are to build and what massive losses they’re incurring. Yes, you could carry on using your local instance of some small model distilled from a hyper-scale model trained today. But as the years roll by, you may find not being able to move on from the programming language and library versions it was trained on a tad constraining.
Some of the best Chinese models (which are genuinely competitive with the frontier models from OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini) claim to have been trained for single-digit millions of dollars. I'm not at all worried that the bubble will burst and new models will stop being trained and the existing ones will lose their utility - I think what we have now is a permanent baseline for what will be available in the future.
The first part is surely true if you change it to "the hardEST part," (I'm a huge believer in "Programming as Theory Building"), but there are plenty of other hard or just downright tedious/expensive aspects of software development. I'm still not fully bought in on some of the AI stuff—I haven't had a chance to really apply an agentic flow to anything professional, I pretty much always get errors even when one-shotting, and who knows if even the productive stuff is big-picture economical—but I've already done some professional "mini projects" that just would not have gotten done without an AI. Simple example is I converted a C# UI to Java Swing in less than a day, few thousand lines of code, simple utility but important to my current project for <reasons>. Assuming tasks like these can be done economically over time, I don't see any reason why small and medium difficulty programming tasks can't be achieved efficiently with these tools.
thisoneisreal commented on Thin desires are eating life joanwestenberg.com/thin-d... · Posted by u/mitchbob
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.
EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.
thisoneisreal commented on OMSCS Open Courseware sites.gatech.edu/omscsope... · Posted by u/kerim-ca
I once considered applying, but I gave up because collecting letters of recommendation was a major hurdle. My academic advisor from university has already retired…
How do you all deal with this?
I hit the same roadblock unfortunately. My academic references were all in a different field and I hadn't really stayed in contact except with one professor, who sadly has died. I did see that there's an option to use professional references, so even though I haven't done this myself, one route you could consider taking is to get references from managers, colleagues etc. who can speak to your technical knowledge. I agree though with your general point that after being out of an academic environment for a while that requirement becomes challenging.
thisoneisreal commented on What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)? · Posted by u/gooob
Was it written by one person?
The majority of it, yes.