You’re not wrong. Having to figure out which element is borked in a yaml file is not great. And the implementation using yaml is all over the place, so even though tools do exist, they’re mediocre at best.

But, to be fair, Python has always done the same to me. As a fellow Neuro-spicy (and with a background in Java and C# and JavaScript), although the tools are better to point you in the right direction, significant white space (or indentations) are significant white space (or indentations).🤷‍♂️

.xml

Not sure whether fantastic troll or just no exposure to Python.

Either way…I’m here for it.

Like the SEAL who became a doctor and then went to space. Don’t feel like you have to limit yourself, you know?

I watched it in Vim, mostly because I don’t hate myself enough.

Not to spoil the ending either, but the nuclear device goes off because Oppenheimer smashes a bunch of keys and then finally remembers :wq.

Tech doesn’t really self select for well balanced, socially confident, neurologically normal folks.

I’m sure those people are in tech and have success as well, but the stereotype of the “hacker nerd” didn’t spring out of nothing. The obsessiveness and desire to be right and know everything that make IT geniuses can also make those same folks really, really hard to be around.

People that are ostracized for their socially aberrant behavior usually (not always!) have sympathy for other outcast groups, whatever the reason.

And you’re right, too - writing code is sort of one of those ultimate bullshit tests - either it works, or it doesn’t. Computers don’t care about your pedigree or your appearance or even your personality. Nice guys who write shit code might have management or product team in their future, but they don’t usually write code for very long. But good devs are hard to find, so even the most straight laced companies are willing to bend a bit when it comes to talented developers.

My $.02, and worth every penny 😂

Just because it’s ‘the hot new thing’ doesn’t mean it’s a fad or a bubble. It doesn’t not mean it’s those things, but…the internet was once the ‘hot new thing’ and it was both a bubble (completely overhyped at the time) and a real, tidal wave change to the way that people lived, worked, and played.

There are already several other outstanding comments, and I’m far from a prolific user of AI like some folks, but - it allows you to tap into some of the more impressive capabilities that computers have without knowing a programming language. The programming language is English, and if you can speak it or write it, AI can understand it and act on it. There are lots of edge cases, as others have mentioned below, where AI can come up with answers (by both the range and depth of its training data) where it’s seemingly breaking new ground. It’s not, of course - it’s putting together data points and synthesizing an output - but even if mechanically it’s 2 + 3 = 5, it’s really damned impressive if you don’t have the depth of training to know what 2 and 3 are.

Having said that, yes, there are some problematic components to AI (from my perspective, the source and composition of all that training data is the biggest one), and there are obviously use cases that are, if not problematic in and of themselves, at very least troubling. Using AI to generate child pornography would be one of the more obvious cases - it’s not exactly illegal, and no one is being harmed, but is it ethical? And the more societal concerns as well - there are human beings in a capitalist system who have trained their whole lives to be artists and writers and those skills are already tragically undervalued for the most part - do we really want to incentivize their total extermination? Are we, as human beings, okay with outsourcing artistic creation to this mechanical turk (the concept, not the Amazon service), and whether we are or we aren’t, what does it say about us as a species that we’re considering it?

The biggest practical reasons to not get too swept up with AI is that it’s limited in weird and not totally clearly understood ways. It ‘hallucinates’ data. Even when it doesn’t make something up, the first time that you run up against the edges of its capabilities, or it suggests code that doesn’t compile or an answer that is flat, provably wrong, or it says something crazy or incoherent or generates art that features humans with the wrong number of fingers or bodily horror or whatever…well then you realize that you should sort of treat AI like a brilliant but troubled and maybe drug addicted coworker. Man, there are some things that it is just spookily good at. But it needs a lot of oversight, because you can cross over from spookily good to what the fuck pretty quickly and completely without warning. ‘Modern’ AI is only different from previous AI systems (I remember chatting with Eliza in the primordial moments of the internet) because it maintains the illusion of knowing much, much better.

Baseless speculation: I think the first major legislation of AI models is going to be to require an understanding of the training data and ‘not safe’ uses - much like ingredient labels were a response to unethical food products and especially as cars grew in size, power, and complexity the government stepped in to regulate how, where, and why cars could be used, to protect users from themselves and also to protect everyone else from the users. There’s also, at some point, I think, going to be some major paradigm shifting about training data - there’s already rumblings, but the idea that data (including this post!) that was intended for consumption by other human beings at no charge could be consumed into an AI product and then commercialized on a grand scale, possibly even at the detriment of the person who created the data, is troubling.

You know what I don’t like about them? They’re kind of a symbol of American arrogance and bullying.

It’s only useful where there is zero AAA and zero threat from enemy fighters. It’s a cargo plane - it packs a wallop, of course, but you use it when “the other guy” is a bunch of dudes running around on the ground with no chance to fight back.

The fact that we have them in inventory says a LOT about the types of wars we’ve been fighting for the past 40 years.

(Super unpopular opinion - the A-10 is not much better, but at least it has some genuine anti-armor capabilities.)

Maybe this is because I’m still relatively junior (2ish years), but my favorite question to ask is, “What are some of the characteristics you’re looking for in someone in this role?”

I use it as a vibe check, especially at the end of interviews. If they start reading my resume back to me, or listing the things we’ve talked about during the interview…well, that’s a good sign. If they start describing a bunch of stuff that we didn’t talk about, it’s a chance to throw a ‘Hail Mary’ pass and show them how that’s me, as well - maybe we didn’t talk about something that was important to them, but I have relevant experience or a background.

If they start describing somebody else…well, that’s not great.

This was my first thought.

I do this for a living and it’s literally built into Linux.

Set their permissions carefully, ensure that the permission set does what you want (and not a bunch of stuff you don’t want), and keep on keeping on.

This kind of implies that you’re crunching and then ‘recovering’. That may or may not be something you have any control over - there’s a lot that goes into creating an unsustainable ‘sprint’, and probably 99.8% of it is not related to actual developers or code - but ideally you would be using these ‘lulls’ to try to pull stuff out of the next crunch so maybe it won’t hurt so bad.

In reality, if I’m coming off of a bad crunch, I do anything I can do to avoid burnout. Sometimes that’s ‘fun’ backlog items or research for future features or something else I’m excited about, sometimes it’s studying for certs, sometimes it’s cutting slack (@cianuro@programming.dev watching Netflix feels familiar!). But again - whatever it takes to recharge my batteries and feel less bitter and shitty.

The most ‘sure’ sign that I’m coming off a crunch, though, is that I start reinforcing work/life boundaries. “It’s 5p and I’m logging off and I’m not going to think about work shit willingly until tomorrow.”

Yes.

Although I was also of an age when I was diagnosed (40), where it not only threw my whole life up to that point into a different light….it also threw my parent’s lives up to that point into a different light. Because part of why I was sure I was ‘normal’ for 40 years was because my whole family did the exact same things….🤦🤷‍♂️