I heavily invested into dream of learning throughout all my life and benefiting from it financially and socially. Now it seems that won't come to be true. I've always been taught since childhood that the important things are those that you can carry in your head, because no one is going to take it away from you. I guess now they are wrong, while it cannot be taken directly it can be heavily debased to the point of pointlessness of having it.

On top of that, the enshittification of everything tech-related, tightening grip on privacy. Quality collapse, not just what I am doesn't have any value, but nothing produced by anyone does. For example, I don't consider reading books that came after ~2024. On top of that, fear of bigger changes and turmoils related to redistribution of wealth (always upwards, of course), dystopic vision of the future. On top of that, war in my country with no end in sight and shifts to authoritarianism.

I'm trying to find a way out of this, and I'm finding interesting observations. For example, one shouldn't overinvest themselves into anything - "never keep all you eggs in the same basket", because nothing is permanent. For me that was the idea of continuous self-improvement that would allow me to keep both a fulfilling job and middle-class lifestyle. It was the most important thing in life, and, of course, when it shattered the pain was substantial. It is possible to find and have other important things in life, some of them could be friends, family, community.

Then, no one is going to take away what you do with your mind, especially in free time. You could give up on everything AI related and just enjoy the things you like. Maybe on the worse side of job market there won't be much apart from mercenaries, drug dealers and prostitutes. But in all better cases there's going to be something to occupy yourself with and live relatively serene life. Janitor, any kind of manual laborer that cannot be automated, small farmer, to name a few that came to mind. In free time (or during work even) you could read/listen to anything you like.

And then, this is just the baseline, things could actually turn out better.

Not sure if it helps with the feeling of futility or not. For me, it doesn't really help that much because ultimately I want the skills and knowledge I gathered to benefit me in some way. For example, previously I would be able to better understand computers and software, be an "overall better" programmer, better thinker (in terms of computation). If the results you get are not used in any way, it's on the same level as memorizing rule sets for some obscure game that no one knows or cares about.

Maybe pivoting to something else like philosophy could make sense as a hobby.

Of course, there's always going to be some demand for knowing computers, knowing programming languages first-hand, etc. Writing or auditing code for critical systems. Teaching the next generations of people that will do critical systems. Some people are optimistic in that they are going to fall into that demand. I'm not optimistic about myself.

But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety

But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.

Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.

- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone

- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.

- uninterrupted time

I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.

Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.

I could accept this, although it's not the hard truth yet. But doing is not equal to earning money. If you do more while being employed by someone else, the benefits are reaped by your employer. You only get the expectation to do more. Also, I don't believe that businesses can expand infinitely, so the employment market might not be strictly a zero sum game, it's also not an infinite sum game. Which means the competition in the workforce rises and salaries fall.

Alternatively, you would switch to be self-employed, basically starting your own business. This is what actually requires wealth (and also connections, entrepreneur acumen and ultimately desire to do business). Saying "generational wealth" was perhaps a bit of an overtone. You could substitute some part of the wealth with other factors. But ultimately, the more money you have, the more you can spend on tokens (and other things like marketing too, but that was true before ai as well) to drive your business forward.

> It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.

This might sound good if you live in a country with strong social support, and believe it's going to continue doing so for your lifetime. Or alternatively, that you don't have any people that depend on you and you don't value your health or physical comfort. But most people ultimately work for money, because the base necessities (food, shelter, security, healthcare) and quality of life enhancers (education) cost a lot of money, and some are growing in cost much quicker than the salaries.

But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.

The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.

I wonder, what prevents better support for 'regular' apps? Are they using some windows API that is hard to implement in Linux?

I would only be happy if in the end the author turns out to be right.

But as the things stand right now, I can see a significant boost to my own productivity, which leads me to believe that fewer people are going to be needed.

I have been using emacs for around 7 years, but it never worked for me as the main editor, it just sucked too bad compared to IDE-like features of other editors and actual IDEs. So I only used it for org-mode, doing an attempt to use it for something else every couple of years.

I'm currently in the process of trying this again, and I have to say things feel very different this time. By adding native tree-sitter and LSP support, the IDE-like features are outsourced to where they should be done. It wasn't perfect, but I had issues of the same degree or worse with other editors. A proprietary IDE still would beat it in stability and features, but the experience is _crazy good_ for free software.

What I like the most is the hacker mentality it encourages. When I see something I don't like, I don't go like "I wish they did it differently", I ask "well how do I change that?".

The only thing that feels truly outdated is single-threaded nature and blocking UI when long-running operation (like an update) is happening. And maybe non-smooth scroll (there is a package but it makes text jump).

With AI, the future seems just so much worse for me. I feel that productivity boost will not benefit me in any way (apart from some distant trickle down dream). I expect the outsource, and remote work in general to be impacted negatively the most. Maybe there's going to be some defensive measures to protect domestic specialists, but that wouldn't apply to me anyway unless I relocate (and probably acquire citizenship).

>Is your company hiring more/ have they stopped hiring software engineers

Stopped hiring completely and reduced workforce, but the reasons stated were financial, not AI.

>Is the management team putting more pressure to get more things done

with less workforce, there is naturally more work to do. But I can't say there is a change in pressure, and no one forces AI upon you.

I keep seeing the same point that argues against how "not fun, depressing, worse a has gotten these days". The most recent incarnation of that is how programming with AI feels worse than programming on your own.

I don't think the problem is inability to find a way to derive fun, the way you could previously. The problem is deriving fun while still getting paid for it.

To reiterate on the web-dev, you probably can make it fun again, given that you were able to have fun with it previously. But it probably will have to be done in your spare time after job.

There is a curious thing with this "branch", I'm not sure if it's the same in the Celtic one. The last time I talked to people researching this, I was told that: a. The findings are mostly unique, it's hard to find two copies of the same coin. Sometimes obverse of one coin could be found on another, but reverses don't match. b. These coins are not cast, they are minted through "hammering", which requires a stamp. However, not a single stamp has been found so far. A much easier way to make currency out of existing one would be to just slap existing coin into some clay, make a casting mold and just pour molten metal into it.

This of course is more of a curiosity/rumor level, I don't have any qualifications to back it up.

[1]: http://barbarous-imitations.narod.ru/ (apologize for a .ru website, but it's the best catalogue to my knowledge.)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernyakhov_culture

Similarly here, I can't understand for example _who_ is the owner. Is it a stack frame? Why would a stack frame want to move ownership to its callee, when by the nature of LIFO the callee stack will always be destroyed first, so there is no danger in hanging to it until callee returns. Is it for optimization, so that we can get rid of the object sooner? Could owner be something else than a stack frame? Why can mutable reference be only handed out once? If I'm only using a single thread, one function is guaranteed to finish before the other starts, so what is the harm in handing mutable references to both? Just slap my hands when I'm actually using multiple threads.

Of course, there are reasons for all of these things and they probably are not even that hard to understand. Somehow, every time I want to get into Rust I start chasing these things and give up a bit later.