According to this research the opposite is true:

"The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...

I made a big effort about 12 years ago to go to a bunch of these (like three meetups a week and trying out a variety of different meetups), but now I mostly stick to a couple of them as I don't have as much time or energy for it anymore. But I've met most of my current friends through those meetups.

Find one you like and keep showing up until you're a regular, and get to know people slowly, and if they like you they start inviting you to things outside of the meetup, and then eventually you end up being friends.

I've done this with three different groups over the years and despite naturally being shy and an introvert I've ended up making friends at each one.

At the height of me doing this (like ten years ago), it got to the point where I'd go about my daily life and about once every other month I'd run into random people I've met at meetups also out and about. Like go out to dinner and spot someone I knew from a meetup also showing up to the same place, or run into them shopping at a Best Buy or something.

Meetups where you do a shared activity seems to be the best, like hikes or movies (+ dinner afterwards) or board games, since you can always focus on the activity if you don't feel like being social, and you have that activity you can always talk about as a subject.

So over the course of the game you'll get the exact same tiles, just in a different random order.

Now to be fair, I didn't make that clear to the player that's what was happening, they were just seeing numbers come up, but it was still amazing to see how they perceived themselves as getting lower numbers overall compared to the opponent all the time.

Meanwhile on the base game difficulty I was beating the computer opponent pretty much every game because it had such basic A.I. where it was placing its tiles almost totally at random (basically I built an array of all possible moves where it would increase its score, and it would pick one at random from all those possibilities, not the best possibility out of those).

My Dad used to play a lot of online poker, and he used to complain when other players got lucky with their hands, be like 'I know the chances are like 5% of them getting that! They shouldn't have gotten that!' and it always reminded me of those people.

I just create an issue and assign it to Copilot and then hop into its session and sometimes redirect or give feedback after it reaches a stopping point and I've had the chance to pull it down and test it. I'm closing out 2-3 semi-complicated features a day on it in my off work hours right now for my personal projects and I didn't even get close to hitting the cap for the $10/month I'm paying for it right now (although each month it is creeping up as I start doing more and more with it). And I'm still getting way more done than I was when I was coding it all manually before these models.

One of the things I'm making with it right now I can't even sell (or probably even make public), I just want to play my favorite deckbuilding card game (that has lots of different cards with different effects) on my mobile and there isn't a good version of it, so I'm trying to vibe code it into existence (and have gotten pretty far along on it, most of the core game rules and about a quarter of the card effects are implemented right now). I'm pretty close to able to play a full game of it with a limited set of cards already. The presentation is mostly text but it gets the job done.

Work uses Codex within Visual Studio Code and that I got close to hitting the monthly limit on, but I haven't yet.

It's especially nice after work, as I tend to be pretty low energy after work lately, and have a hard time sitting at a computer and coding even more.

With agent-based I can write up some medium-level detail specs (I'd do more if I need more, but it seems to be fine with what I give it most of the time), fire it off, and do something else away from the screen for a while, before checking in on it and reviewing it.

About the only thing I've been coding on my personal projects recently has been creating and checking in assets or putting in data.

Like I'm working on a card game and it was able to come up with something data-wise that was good enough for placeholders, but now it needs to be accurate, so I'm going in and changing it manually.

I'm already assuming I have maybe one more job change in me as a software engineer and then it might be extremely difficult to find any future jobs in the field.

Especially considering I'm old enough that at least some companies were likely going to be discriminating against me because of my age.

Doubly so now that they probably assume I'm too old or set in my ways to handle the shift to coding with A.I. agents, which isn't the case.

Doesn't make me eager to jump back into the job search even though I probably should start looking for something else soon, I've been at my current role for almost five years now, and have been getting the itch. But I suspect it's going to be a pain to find something new.

I don't even trust myself to make purchase decisions >$100. I'm probably going to make a bad purchase decision >$100 tonight.

Probably involving a board game.

At least right now I don't see myself going over the standard limits for my personal projects. I'm not implementing more than 2-3 features a day at most, so only a handful of prompts.

I have come close to reaching the limit at work this month, but I don't have to pay for the extra requests so I'm not super concerned. I also hit it pretty hard this month with a pretty gnarly upgrade that required a lot of back and forth, which is what accumulated a lot of that usage.

Not sure how you're using so much that you're getting big bills out of this.

Pico-8 is a bit simpler and is also based on Lua.

There's also the Playdate console. Anyone can make games for it, and it's also based on Lua (and has its own low-code Pulp engine you can make games with also). That would be a fun way to make games and have a console to play them on.

The console isn't cheap though, and it's easy to break (I dropped it on accident from about 2 feet up and its liquid crystal display cracked and leaked and had to be replaced, at almost the full cost of the console again), so they'd have to be careful with it. But it's fun!

I've done that before A.I., gone through lists of interview questions on a Google Search (or what I remembered being asked in previous interviews) and thought about how to answer them with the benefit of time to think about it, and even wrote it out so I wouldn't forget. I might only take a brief moment to scroll to the corresponding question (or close enough to that question) and answer (some people might prepare so much they can just respond instantly and not refer to something they prewrote, too).

If I don't do this, I will forget, and will stumble and awkwardly pause in the interview (I still do this sometimes, I don't always prepare that much for interviews, it can be a pain and I might not be given enough time to do it).

The preparation is not unlike a politician or a talk show guest (or especially a comedian) when they go to an interview. Have stories and talking points preplanned, and make sure they go into them and how to say it.

Using A.I. might be the more likely scenario nowadays, but are we really going to assume that people who can give a good and confident answer must be terrible candidates now? That used to be considered a positive thing in interviews (granted, I don't always come across as well polished myself, so I may benefit if less polished becomes what's desired now).

When I feel like doing it (for my own projects), I do, if not, I don't.

I spent almost all of 2025 without touching any of my personal projects, although I've started working on them again this year.

While I'm on the clock at work, I do, when I'm not on the clock, I don't.

Same as before A.I.

I don't sleep that well but that's because of other reasons (I often fall asleep on the couch with the lights on, like a dummy, and then wake up several hours later and go to bed properly).

But if it's not, it's insulting to the poster, and if it is, then who cares if people are engaging with the post.

Does the world need more software? No, not really.

Does the world want (and demand) more software? Absolutely, all the time.

You won't always be able to get ahold of someone at 2am. You won't be able to get ahold of me at 2am, for example. It'll throw some notification on my screen and I won't see it until I wake up.

I experimented with it a bit a couple weeks before that on my own personal projects as well, but I don't feel that same push when I'm doing my own projects, obviously (well, if I do, it's because I choose to).