My advice is to bid her farewell and mourn a little. If it’s any consolation, the person you have a crush on only existed in your head, assembled by frenzied brain chemicals out of the few things you were able to learn about her. The real version has her own flaws, quirks, strengths, eccentricities, and loves. She is far more human than the person your brain shuffled onto a pedestal and she’s living her own life. The crush was fun, but let it go now. It’s the kindest thing to do for yourself.

As an introvert on the spectrum, talking to strangers is hard. It’s uncomfortable. On bad days, I feel like I’m trying to crawl out of my own skin when I end up talking to someone I don’t know (and on really bad days, even with people I do know.) But sometimes we have to do uncomfortable things to grow, and the more you do the thing the easier it becomes. Start small and realize it’ll feel weird. Work your way up. Talk to girls and make some friends, not because you eventually want to be involved with them but because you want another friend. A wonderful thing happens as you make friends: you start seeing other people’s perspectives. You start feeling more comfortable. And you open yourself up to more experiences. Some of these experiences are even fun!

Having said all that about crushes… I met my wife, many years ago, at a Halloween party. I was instantly smitten and yeah, I had a crush on her. A big one. I went to a drag show with some friends a few weeks later and she was there! We snuck out for a cigarette and talked, awkwardly, for a few minutes.

The next time I talked to her, it was at a show she was playing at a dive bar. She played an instrument?! I had no idea. I was a terminal case at that point. I remember standing in the audience, going over what I should say to her when the set ended. As it turned out, she announced that this would be their final show and she was moving out of state with her boyfriend a week later. I was devastated.

It took a little while, but I let go and moved on. We both had very interesting lives for the next few years and met up again at another party. We ended up talking a lot, texting, going to shows. We started a band with a mutual friend, learned some obscure asian card game together, and eventually said “what the hell, we should probably be dating.”

She didn’t end up being anything like the girl I had a crush on, and we’ve been happily together for almost a decade. I don’t think any of that would have been possible if I’d brooded over her and never gotten over the crush.

Lol

On the other hand, I understand the utility of knowing how to do these things for ourselves. There are a number of “black-box” libraries that were just an absolute mystery to me until I tried implementing them myself and began to see these libraries are usually not complex so much as they are thorough in covering edge cases that 90% of users will never care about.

Yeah, that’s one of my big fears. Not necessarily losing my job to an AI, but AI exacerbating existing bad practices.

When I started my current job, we had one rock star coder responsible for a fairly fiddly piece of our product. He went heads-down for two weeks and churned out pages of densely-written python without comments. It did what it was supposed to do, flawlessly. He left the team shortly afterward to work on a bigger project, and we got word from the higher-ups that we had to support a new feature upstream in that code. And then another. And so on. Nothing’s commented. Everything’s over-optimized. We eventually ended up just cross-compiling the upstream logic and using that in our stack because it was easier than using his impenetrable stuff.

In the end, we had to fix it with menial, boring, aggravating manual work anyway. We got ourselves into that situation without AI, but I could see something like that becoming more prevalent. And that was working code. Imagine getting a SEV, and everyone on the blame list shrugs and says “idk, I had CoPilot do it.”

It would definitely be a shame if these tools caused new developers to bypass fundamental skill development. My only hesitation is the number of developers who should’ve developed those skills and never did before AI. There’s something wrong either with how developers are learning or who is getting into development.

Yeah, this is part of it. There’s maybe the science of programming and also, for lack of a better term, the craft: writing maintainable code, handling a SEV, thinking in terms of uptime, setting things up to be reverted easily, shutting down neurotic code reviewers, testing your code… stuff like that. Universities are good at the science part. Internships, theoretically, handle the rest. This isn’t an AI issue, but I could see AI making this problem a lot worse.

It’s not interesting, there’s no puzzles involved… It’s basically data entry

So? Show me an industry that’s 100% interesting all the time. Artists still have to stretch and gesso their canvases. Rock stars still have to deal with band drama and touring logistics. Directors have to work their budgets and wrangle big egos. Why should software, which is basically using fancy math to tell the dumbest guy in the room exactly what to do, be any different?

There’s this awful idea that everything should be fun and nobody should struggle with anything or be forced to do anything menial. We want to be instant experts without going through the boring or hard stuff. And we’re willing to offload more and more of this onto proprietary black boxes in exchange for… what?

I see cursive writing brought up a lot in these conversations and I don’t think it applies. Firstly, the cognitive load of writing code is higher than writing your letters so they join up. You’re not just making sure you write the letters correctly, you’re also following the syntax rules of the language you’re writing. And while you’re writing, you’re reinforcing those rules in your head. Yes, initially it’s hard and boring.

And yeah, sometimes you get it wrong or forget to capitalize. That is a feature, not a bug. The more you do it, the easier it gets. I spent a couple weeks trying to use CoPilot and at the end I still had to correct its shitty code, which either hallucinated features I wasn’t implementing, or hallucinated syntax rules I wasn’t using. It was like spending a sprint trying to get a subpar intern up to speed. At the end of those two weeks, my manual coding accuracy took a noticeable hit.

I complained to higher-ups and they told me “oh it’s definitely a skill getting the prompt written correctly”, which was patronizing and irritating. Would I rather spend time getting good at asking the proprietary magic thinky box to maybe write good code this time, or would I rather get better at coding?

I mean I’ve spent a lot of time writing regex to automate large sets of changes. Sometimes it can be a bit fiddly to get the regex just so. Like replacing direct field access with > getters where you have to find the field access and change .foo to .getFoo() and the capitalization can take a couple of tries to get just right.

At least you’re learning more about regexes when you do this. Yes, there’s menial bullshit in coding. There’s menial bullshit in every field. Some of it gets abstracted away (syntax highlighting to help with comprehension), some of it gets kicked around and ultimately does not impress (VB’s drag-and-drop coding), and some of it stays because it’s necessary. Nobody likes doing manual stuff, but sometimes it’s preferable to trying to automate it.

Also, I’ve never heard of anyone paying $20 a month for the privilege of not writing in cursive, or being unable to write because they don’t have internet. Something to think about.

Yep. It’s gonna be $20 forever, too. Have fun!

But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom

Get better at it, manually, or you’ll suck at it forever. It’s a skill like anything else.

If you have everything and believe you deserve it, you’re entitled. If you have nothing and believe you deserve it, you’re miserable. If you have everything and think you don’t deserve it, you’re a fraud. If you have nothing and think you don’t deserve it, you’re bitter.

This is tremendous.

<3

“You love the boats. I do not, but I love what they mean.” sweeping gesture toward the window

Imagine being the ruler of that city and letting him get “cured” instead of having him infodump / give daily reports about this.

it is just the principle that people should abstain from reproduction.

Which is griping about reproduction followed by trying to shame people when they don’t take the same principled stand. And a quick visit over to the sub shows a few people taking principled stands for themselves and a whole lot blackpilled edgelord “I hate breeders” horseshit. And sure enough there’s a different post on the top page ranting about parents with disabilities having kids. Which sounds like… what?

The people that have hard opinions about reproduction are acting like eugenicists in that sub.

The people that want to restrict reproduction are acting like eugenicists? I’m shocked. This is my shocked face.

I had zero plan beyond “live on my own, away from my parents, and try to sustain that.” The churches I went to as a kid emphasized getting married as soon as you’re old enough and having a ton of kids, so I did the opposite and was a feral stoner nerd/wook for a decade and a half. One day I was doing a hungover stumble from my apartment back to my car and saw a guy my own age playing with his small daughter at the playground. She’d fallen off the swing and he was hugging her until she stopped crying. I still can’t fully describe the feeling I had there, but I shrugged it off immediately as “that ship sailed. I’ll just dedicate myself to hobbies and non-serious relationships.”

Now I’m married, have a kid, and live in a house. Life’s weird.

Larry Ellison from Oracle had a cameo too. It was gross.

Yeah, they’re pipes / jars / whatever. You have to find a potion, throw it so the pipe is available when you go through the door, and then go down the pipe.

Yep, world 5-3. I dimly remember being able to Luigi superjump onto the birds in 7-1 and short-circuit a bunch of that level.

American here: we have a big “this side faces street” on the side opposite the handle. We also have trucks with hydraulic arms that lift the bins up, so the two things might be related: the bin has to be in a certain orientation so the arm can grab it easily.

You could always call the service and ask. I’m guessing they don’t care about which way the handle faces as much as they care about things like overfilling or lots of liquid in the bin.

That utter bastard made one side of Lazaretto play backwards: you have to put the needle in the center of the record and it spins out to the edge. First time I tried to listen to it I was very high and it was hell.

“I should make sure my software architecture mirrors our org’s communication structure.”

Conway’s law exists

“Holy shit I am already so good at this.”