turn off view history, so you don't see 100 toilet videos after watching a video on japanese toilets.

aggressively click "Don't show me this" in its video suggestions, whenever it strays towards politics or similar bait.

despite the inundation of slop, rage bait, and brain rot, youtube still has a goldmine of good content if you can defend yourself from the rest.

they both suffer from the same lack of dimension and intent.

1. the language and stdlib are written by people who know what they're doing 2. packages in the ecosystem, at the barest level, are written by those who didn't leave after a few compile errors they couldn't reason about

More close is: if there was a table making machine, you just push a button and something like a table comes out, would you still be a woodworker? You haven't planed, nor measured, nor cut, nor jointed, you've only pressed on "make me a table"

those in the first camp are having a great time.

those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are wary and suspicious.

it is somewhat paradoxical, we've watched/read sci-fi/cyberpunk for years and dreamed of this kind of world. after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code? they just asked the computer to "write a subroutine" and that was that. what a world!

but here we are, with the craft in danger, not entirely impressed by the idea of "just ask and walk away".

i, too, fear for my loss of critical thinking, raw skills, and design sense, as do i think about being one of the few (in 2, 3, 5, 10 years) that didn't abdicate their cognition, their craft, to the tech overlords.

but i wonder if it will matter anyway. i wonder if "source code" will be a deep abstraction that nobody thinks about anyway, similar to how 99% of us don't care/need to care what the machine code we're eventually emitting does or looks like.

in any case, i'll keep my thinking for now.

Regime change was NOT the goal, right? Wasn't that the party line?