I grew up in a multi-family apartment as a child (3 floors) with my grandparents, and aunt/uncle/cousin, along with my family. I'm half Sicilian as well, big family dinners on Sundays were a tradition and some of my fondest childhood memories.

Yes, they require planning and energy but they're well worth it if you enjoy the company of other human beings. :)

I've always found Finder to be insanely awkward in comparison to Windows Explorer. Another oddity. . . the red/yellow/green icons for resizing windows. What the hell is that? Green is enlarge. Red is close. Yellow is. . . I never remember and I'm often annoyed that Apple makes me think about a mundane desktop operation so much.

I cannot afford to raise a family in Boston now however. I live in a different, cheaper (but still great in many ways) city and it's mostly automobile oriented. I would LOVE to live in a European style city, hell I'd love to live in actual Europe but that just isn't feasible for me.

Please know that not every American is war mongering monster truck driving redneck. I am aware of what the oil and auto industries did to the US in the 20th century. I can't simply wish it away by snapping my fingers.

Don't do that. Just ship it. Yes, good tests, linting, etc will help but if you really believe you don't need humans in the loop at all, at least for the time being, you are fucked.

But go ahead, buy the hype. Your agent swarm can build an operating system in 15 minutes and everything will just work. Cool.

It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments".

So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years.

I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.

The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.

You might think that everyone has FOMO or is an anti-AI Luddite when of course there are a LOT of us somewhere in the middle, just trying to get our work done and trying to figure out what our careers will look like in 5-10 years.

One big thing that no one seems to talk about - GenAI is unlocking many new (and oftentimes "small") business ideas that were not practical just a few years ago. I have witnessed this firsthand. . . however, it will also take away jobs. How many, who knows?

tl;dr everyone is full of shit or selling something or terrified to the point where they can't think straight. And no one has a crystal ball.

We'll see.

I'd say that AI tools make good engineers better and more productive and makes bad engineers appear to be more productive but ultimately makes them shoot themselves in the foot more thoroughly and quickly, while also piling up more work for everyone else.

We are in a golden age for discovering art that you really wouldn't get to see otherwise. I would not even call myself a hardcore art enthusiast but I stumble upon great art all the time on Instagram, as you mentioned, from around the globe.

It's really cool.

Because of course, LLM calls in a for loop are also not applications anymore.