thesamethrowawa

Still up here a few hours later huh, despite clear propaganda that is nothing to do with TFA.

What has your comment (and the GP comment) got to do with the featured articles?

meta_gunsligner is just going back through Elons X posts to find us some examples.

It is interesting that any US-centric article causing political flame wars immediately sinks here, but anything generating similar "debate" on UK issues is allowed to sit on the front page, accumulating hundreds of comments. I don't think the conversation here is evolving in way that HN tries to foster, so hopefully this one is shadow-flagged (or however the internal mod tools work) soon.

lol.... but they are still data driven decisions, everyone loves those, especially when you lose millions of dollars and need to justify it.

OOI, and my own total ignorance, what does a mathematician by trade do if they are not doing formal research? What does corporate modelling entail?

> I know a bunch of Orthodox folks in the US and their idea of a reasonable lifestyle doesn't include two Teslas and three holidays, they do just fine on less than that without a tech cushion.

I'm not talking about Teslas and holidays. Where I am, an equivalent job would really be living on the edges in terms of the basics: rent, groceries, healthcare, energy, saving for retirement.

> It does seem a bit tiring to me whenever seeing articles about people moving out of tech...

It's tiring to me that tech workers really have no idea how well they live compared to people working retail full time - to the extend that it gets romanticised like this. It's incredibly patronising. Which is why I would be interested in a follow up on wether the reality matched the "dream".

Good luck to you. I did something similar, with a big list of projects on my backlog (including a game) and just burned out in a totally different way after 8 months. I found for me, I cannot do things in a vacuum, it has no meaning. There needs to be a deadline, an urgency, a customer problem... otherwise it all just felt pointless.

I ended up coming back as a contractor, but have repeated the cycle 3-4 times since then. It's a strange one.

Impressive to take such a stand, doing something they believe is the right thing. The home depot line says a lot though. I guess tech has been good enough to provide some kind of economic cushion that you can retain a reasonable life style as home depot as your only source of income.

I would (genuinely) be interested in a follow up on how that works out for them. I've "threatened" to do this many times, but my partner points out that if I thought tech management was full of BS, wait until I am getting ordered about by retail industry management while working the shop floor, dead on my feet, penalised for taking too long a toilet break. I think reality could come down hard here.

This is honestly terrifying and a perfect example of where AI can end up leading us.

HN self-loathing distilled in a pointless thread.

Thanks. I'm going to take that as a compliment.

Yes.

If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.

If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.

If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.

The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?

A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.

It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.

Flowers for Algernon has something to say about this.

> That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.

With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.

Early, very early, in my career unit testing was becoming a thing. A few middle managers (non technical) read some articles and decided this was going to fix all the quality problems with the product so decided to enforce it from the top down, even to the point of requiring developers to present their planned unit tests to management before starting on new features! It was completely absurd, but I was too junior to really understand and articulate why.

I'm lucky enough to be in a great company right now, so I decide when I think AI will help me and use it accordingly - but reading about forced AI adoption reminds me so, so much of that earlier time. Non-technical people who don't trust their engineers to use the tools in the way they see best - in their ignorance, and ego, they think the answer is obvious if only those strong headed tech weirdos would listen.

And amongst all this, there is a class of manager and executive that I'm convinced utterly despise engineers. They hate the fact they focus on details, analyse, make predictions grounded in reality. On a personal level, they can't comprehend that some people take deep satisfaction and contentment from building software, from simply learning things, and they don't understand it, it scares them. Why don't they just pursue normal people things in life? Like super expensive cars, massive houses, golf memberships. I think it scares them that they don't have control over technically minded people they way they might do with others. AI is, in their mind, a way to get rid of these people forever, to just "get stuff done" without objections, and they are pushing extremely hard for that to be true, simply because they want it to be true - not because there is any evidence for it.

Rant over.

Oh 100%, and that's the brilliant thing about running, it's a very personal sport and you take what you want from it, which can also change as you get older or life changes. But-

A 2:30 runner giving a more recreational runner advice about improving times is trying to be helpful and supportive sharing their learnings and expertise, even if misguided.

A HN-er that has never ran before throwing out stuff about barefoot running since they read Born to Run a few years ago is just plain ignorance.

It's eye-opening when a subject you have first hand deep personal knowledge of is posted on Hacker News. You realise how confidently people post about topics they know absolutely nothing about.

Yes, you've read born to run, well done. It it's a good story, not a handbook of practical advice. Telling 2:30 marathon runners doing hundreds of miles a week that running shoes are bad and they should be going bare foot. OK.

> Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.

You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.

Are you able to share your prompts to Claude Code? I assume not, they are probably not saved - but this genuinely surprised me, it seems like exactly the type of task an LLM would excel at (no pun intended!). What model were you using OOI?

I feel very similar. I'm not sure if it's all the issues you listed, or just being at a specific point in my life and career, or a combination of both. Nothing is enjoyable to me anymore, and I find there is nothing I am looking forward to. There seems to be so much evidence for the "everything is getting worse" line of thinking, food prices, housing prices, wealth distribution, the job market. I think all the commentors noting "it doesn't affect you, go talk a walk" are really missing the point. On one hand I feel privileged and lucky with what I have materially but on the other, a really deep feeling of despair that is getting harder to hide day to day.