When you don’t care about the truth you don’t have put so much energy into maintaining quality

Got me there

I think that when you “poison” your brain with easy dopamine like candy, fastfood, alcohol, drugs, endless scrolling, etc you will shift the internal goalpost of when something feels good. Compared to these easy sources of “joy”, life just isn’t that interesting. The scale changes to the point that normal things cannot longer provide enough jou to be worth it.

Personally I’ve been trying to constrain myself a bit on these easy sources of “empty happiness”. Things that do give me joy without ruining my brain are, among others: running, music festivals, listening to nice music, looking back at something cool I made, making something cool, playing videogames, chilling with friends (though this usually involves alcohol). These things definitely don’t reliably provide joy, Most of the times they’re just “nice” but definitely not amazing. But every now and then I get hit with that dopamine rush and it’s all worth it.

That’s probably not too hard to detect based on IP. They only do it for some content though. The only content I watch that has this block is official Formula 1 content on YouTube. It’s probably something that creators can enable when they want to region lock content or something

Up until now it was my student time, though I think this depends on personal circumstances and is different for everyone. Childhood was nice, but obviously limited in terms of freedom. Teens where decent, but not 100% great. Student life was easily the best for me, I’d constantly meet like-minded people, there were so many cheap or free activities, and people constantly said shit like “you guys are our future” etc. I also loved having well defined work and goals, limited scope, and lots of depth and interesting challenges. Now that I’m working it’s usually very shallow work in terms of complexity, but with lots of communication and interdependencies. And it goes ever on because agile, no clear quartile or semester goals like university.

Now that I’m working I have the money, but I lost the easy access to like-minded people and fun activities. Organizing something with friends turned from “let’s grab a drink this afternoon” into “let’s align our agendas to find a free spot somewhere in 6 weeks”. And programming turned from “here’s a algorithm someone came up with that you can implement” to “the customer wants this button to do X, hi spend the next week implementing/testing/finding out its meant to work differently”.

I’m a bit biased though, because I’m currently burnt out. Work life was decent for a bit, it just temporarily got worse and kinda pushed me over the edge. If anyone has tips I’d love to hear them :3

I mostly agree, though there is a biological clock to consider. Evening people can be evening people because of many reasons. It can be relative to the normal day schedule, defined by societal norms and the timezone, it can be relative to when other people are around, but it can also be relative to the natural clock which should be in sync with sunset/sunrise. This factor definitely matters, we just moved the clock one hour backwards here and it’s completely fucking me up.

Do you think these massive companies will add even a single line of code for something and insignificant as this? Also that one string replace maymess with Icelandic text which actually uses it.

I think these 2 factors actually make it sort of useful. As long as not too many others do this exact thing, it makes the comments with the thorn in English enough of an anomaly to probably do more harm than good to the training of the LLM. And therefore the comments are not being used in any useful way for “AI” training.

There are some accessibility and readability concerns tho, and it’s also a bit of a weird thing to do. But it might just kinda work

Then at least it’s their own fault

Having a career. At home though, nothing :3

I bought an analog camera (Canon EOS 300) for like 15 euros at a thrift store a year ago and luckily it worked. It has kinda kick-started my interest in photography. Analog photography is quite expensive tho, so a better recommendation would be to buy a cheap used DSLR. Personally I bought a Canon EOS 40D at MBP for like 80 euros, but anything like it would probably be fine.

A camera from 2008 doesn’t sound like something that would still be relevant today, but honestly it’s a great device. It’s kinda like an old manual car in camera form. If you know what you’re doing you can absolutely take amazing photos with it. It has all the buttons and options you might need, just not the fancy new stuff like face tracking autofocus, sensor stabilisation, EVF, etc.

My dad (who is a more professional photographer) let me use his professional grade lenses on this thing and the results are absolutely stunning. But even something like Canons 50mm lens is very decent. Will it beat anything modern? Probably not. But you sure can learn and take stunning pictures with it. Since then I got a more modern camera as well, but honestly the 40D still keeps surprising me. It takes a bit more effort to get something good, but it is also super rewarding.

Okay but does that matter? I recently saw a video from Veratasium about teflon and there they mentioned that teflon is too large to be absorbed by the body, it just comes out on the other end. It’s the smaller compounds used for producing teflon that are poisoning our water, bodies, and everything else with PFAS. Companies just dumping this poison into our water supply. If this is false I’m open to learn ofc.

I have the same. I’ve been considering using my “dumb” alarm clock as my primary alarm and moving my phone to the other side of my room or something and use it as a backup alarm. I usually spend that time scrolling around while lying in bed, might as well have slept longer. Sometimes I just keep on daydreaming which will not be solved by this fix tho.

Wtf. How did they not at the very least build in a reasonable safe state whenever the thing gets disconnected. Something like “keep current position, disable heating” or return to flat position.

But the more pressing question is: why does a bed have an internet connection? Who does this help? And why does it NEED an internet connection? Surely a few Back-up buttons for when the service eventually goes down isn’t too much to ask? Who would buy such a thing?!

I’m part of a union and I work 36 hours a week (and would like to go 32 once I have a bit more financial headroom). But 8 hours a day is pretty typical right? I don’t know anyone who works less than that. I use the hours I don’t have to work relative to a normal 40 hour workweek to take days off, not work less per day. On a 6 hour workday I’d probably be as productive as an 8 hour one, but that’s my employer’s problem and not mine.

Yeah okay but OP is asking why it costs money to become smarter. The answer is: it doesn’t. But it does cost money to get help with getting smarter and to get a certificate that you did get smarter. And that does indeed cost more than it should in many places

Uhhhhh you don’t? 8 hours are normal pretty much everywhere. Maybe I misunderstood you

No definitely not. Like, it’s fine if you don’t care for some uncle who’s kind of a dick and who you see once a year. But if you care for no-one but yourself then something is out of the norm. Might not be something you can help, but it’s probably a good idea to run this by a professional.

Personally I’m kinda extreme in the opposite direction. I can feel intense empathy towards inanimate objects. I’ll feel sad for the slightly fucked apple at the supermarket because no-one will buy it. I struggle to watch movies with too emotional plots because I start to experience those emotions myself intensely.

Yeah that’s a bit much tbh. Personally I find the train to be way too loud usually. Other people talking, train noises, maybe a screaming baby or something. I’ll just listen to some music and stare out of the window (if it isn’t dark).

Two minute papers has really gone down the drain. Or my perspective changed. I used to love the channel, but it got increasingly clickbaity and shallow. Rather than explaining the contents of the papers the videos became hype talks that made it all sounds way more impressive and revolutionairy than it was.

Unfortunately too little coding and too much random busywork. Updating random documents, fixing small bugs, updating versions in like 4 higher projects to make sure my new feature actually shows up in the final software. But when coding, it’s indeed quite often just adding a random new button or something with all the backend logic as well. And the testing of course.

I’m currently burnt out because we spent months on end doing preparation work, creating all kinds of UML diagrams to prepare for a big rework, only to be put on a different project and do it again. Although I was probably already on my limit before that…

It all sounds a bit negative, but when we’re in the normal flow it’s still mostly just coding and debugging, two things that I do enjoy. Spending a whole week hunting down some obscure bug that only happens in certain conditions sounds like hell to some, but to me it’s like a murder mystery and I love that shit. With complex and large corporate systems there are so many suspects for a bug, it’s a real challenge to uncover the mystery and by the time you find it you’ve learnt a lot about some random part of the application.

I tend to write Java. Many people don’t like Java, and honestly it’s also not a fancy language. It isn’t Rust, Julia, or Haskell, languages that I find very interesting. But at the end of the day I’m not sure I’d pick any of them over Java for building a large application like this. Java is boring because it’s quite well designed for large enterprise work. It keeps people from doing too many flashy things that are understood by no-one. It just works ™. It’s fast enough, has great tooling with Maven, does everything pretty well, has lots of libraries to use, and almost everyone can write it.