I just don't relate to a lot of the upvoted content here, so instead of singing my soul trying to make sense of things, I moved on. Perhaps it's not my place to be any more. These new places I have joined are much easier for me to talk in, and there are no upvotes/downvotes so people tend to be pretty chill and genuine, even if it causes friction sometimes.

I barely spend much time in the comment sections nowadays - once I stopped visiting this website I started following a bunch of makers on youtube and printables, and got looped into some discord groups and meetups. It was a breath of fresh air - would definitely recommend.

AI can produce interesting thoughts just like you can produce meaningless flamewars.

Rust is trying to solve a really important problem, and so far it might well be one of the best solutions we have for it in a general sense. I 100% support its use in as many places as possible, so that it can evolve. However, its evolution seems to be thwarted by a very vocal subset of its leadership and community who have made it a part of their identity and whatever socio-political leverage toolset they use.

In my experience, it has been rapidly going up in price and down in quality since the end of the pandemic. You have very few protections as a passenger, and while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue with the way support lines work with airlines.

To add insult to the injury, look up the history of bailouts airlines have received.

I think in today's world it is easy to become a cynic, and being a cynic is one way to feel safe. Depending on what your utility function about the world is, being a cynic might actually be the most "rational" approach to life - new things are more likely to fail, and if you always bet that something will fail, or is flawed, or worthless, or a scam, you will be right more often that you will be wrong. In the right circles you might be considered a wholesome, grounded, put together person if you are like that.

But perhaps we could get the best of both worlds? Have a little corner of your garden that is entirely dedicated to experimentation with ideas - keep them there, see how they interact with a sampling of your actual garden, and after you feel confident enough, promote them to the real garden, and let them nudge your life a little. If it turns out for the worse, tear them out and throw them,

He makes a pretty detailed argument about why loneliness can be a much bigger and more complex problem than its tame name suggests, and the subtle ways in which AI has the potential to exacerbate it.

I am actually baffled that this is even up for debate... Have you seen/smelled the NYC subway? Yes, it's NYC's most used public utility other than perhaps water and electricity, but people use it despite its qualities.

There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".

This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.

I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.

E.g. https://bellard.org/

To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time.

Great professionals exist. They produce great work that is tough to reproduce. Your "helping" them does not mean they couldn't have done it without you.