Live in the past, is mine. I will listen to things over and over because some songs or even podcast episodes, rewind me back to times where I felt comfortable in. I do sometimes poke my head out to see where things are currently in the present, but nothing around really makes me gravitate to anything current-day. But, then I just go back to my hole in living in the past.
People used to tell old people to get over it about them remembering things as they were all of the time. I’m understanding why they do that. Sometimes the present really truly sucks.
Looking at young people and having sad thoughts about their future - feeling we owe them something I can’t give them.
Finally being the Luddite. I’m a software engineer and have always done well by jumping on new technology and making it work. But my company is really pushing ai and as far as I can see, most people are just taking longer to do worse. I end up cleaning up their mess and of course that’s not something LLMs can do
For example instead of taking an hour to upgrade a dependency then investigate the test results, now you can spend half a day screwing with ai to accept its 5 minute change without looking at the tests.
Ans by the metrics, they completed the task in 5 minutes instead of an hour, and no mention about whether the tests still pass. And then they escalate to me to get it working
Even worse, I’m dreading layoffs for the first time in years. Not just because of the economy and policy chaos, not just because I lost my “sponsor”, but ai …… not quite the way you expect though. Reviews are coming up and the people who screw around with ai instead of working have developed agents to go back through all of our online systems to present huge reports on their years activity. While I’m sure no one will read it, how can I compete with that?
Yep - development is not fun anymore. I’d retire 5 years ago if I could.
I went to my friend’s kid’s volleyball game. Those girls had on very short shorts that were tight and it made me feel super creepy and I didn’t want to watch. I was trying to support my busy friends with kids, but I’ll never do it again because “these young girls need to put on some clothes.”
If I was their dad, I wouldn’t let them out like that.
This reminded me of a moment last year when I volunteered to help clean up a historical cemetery. I get there and not only was I the only guy, but all the girls were either high schoolers or like first year college kids all wearing booty shorts. My brain is making me think I look like a creep being a 30 year old surrounded by young girls in revealing clothing and also making me think “why are you doing yard work in stuff that barely protects your legs??? Who told ya’ll this was ok!!!”
Idk this is how I feel with my younger sister but she says it’s comfortable. Idk
Man, maybe she just has a point and I’m paranoid because of all that’s going on.
Yep. You and me both
A good Saturday afternoon for me is driving to a nearby beach via a chippy, and just sitting in the car watching the world go by, and remarking with my partner on all the Very Good Dogs we see while we eat chips.
It’s pretty much one of my favourite things to do.
Last night I went to a show with my college kid. I complained that it was getting late…. The show ended at 7:30
Getting pissed at the noise kids make outside, playing.
Yapping dogs… Loud cars…
People crinkling paper bags on trains.
Telling people younger than me not to worry about things. Like even coworkers I only have like a decade on. No you sweet little child that’s for us adults to deal with please wait off to the side and observe while I handle this bullshit.
Sorry, ima speed runner, so I sequence broke. I used the kidney failure glitch to get a bunch of old person achievements early, but now that I got the transplant achievement (and the cancer beaten one by doing this complicated trick of avoiding a specific virus almost no one has to get cancer from said virus via transplant) I’m back on some of the young people achievement farming.
Same, 18 yrs post Tx here. Life feels like a weird time travel episode
Jeebus you rolled like ten ones in a row on the ole d20.
Can you go out and buy a lotto ticket, like right now. You got a 20 comin up any day now.
Gauging upcoming activity options for the day based on their likely effect on my lower back.
I started to pickle things and make basicly all in my kitchen myself.
Me sitting in a restaurant right now at 3 pm eating dinner: Can’t think of anything
Telling my son we need to go out. Its such a nice day, we can’t spend in front of a screen…
Back in the day, I just assumed the adults were saying that because they were old and had no idea what joys were waiting patiently, calling from the keyboard, controllers, etc.
Now, I know that they had seen far more than I could imagine, and that they knew all too well that those sun-dappled, happiness-brimming days outdoors were a rapidly diminishing resource… 😭
sun-dappled, happiness-brimming days outdoors
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.-Yeats
I am hopelessly fond of the romantics my self. Thanks for reminding me
Yeats has just got a sound, man. Some of his phrasing is so hauntingly lonely, but there’s a hint of hope.
eg
all disheveled wandering stars
live alone in the bee-loud glade
She stood in desperate music wound
The fury and the mire of human veins
etc
I grew up just as the 9-bit nintendo became widley available (and affordable) in Norway in the late 80s/early 90s. And got my first pc (a 486 DX) in 1994. Not a misspent youth, as we had a viciously steep footpath perfect for snow racers and a frozen area for hockey.
Summers were perhaps more misspent
While on a road trip if it’s raining hard or the weather is otherwise bad, I have to turn my music down or off so I can see better.
I cackled the first time I read about something like that but now I’m that person 🫠
Also had an 8:30 bedtime for at least 10 years. I’ll be 40 next year.
Lowkey though, mornings are way better than nights. I’d rather get coffee with someone at 6am than a drink with someone at 10pm.
The rough thing with me is I’m neither a morning nor a night person so 6am is too early, 10pm is too late 🫠
Bro, level up: try coffee at 10pm.
It literally makes me sleepier. Might not be using enough caffeine though.
Or, you have adhd, and a neurodivergent response to stimulants.
Possibly, I might be biasing my feelings with thoughts about sleep. The whole, “if you are trying not to think about something then you are thinking about it” thing. I fall asleep very easy now though, and I dont have much to gain from staying up later than I do now.
Give me a double bleach neat and a shot of Draino please….
Thinking a lot of new technologies are stupid and unnecessary. Of course, at least in big tech, lot of them objectively are.
My favorite example: Copilot to read your emails for you and send responses automatically. Get two people with Copilot sending each other emails with neither person actually involved. Efficient!
Maybe this is why I constantly feel like no one is reading my emails at work anymore. I can put multiple points of information into an email and only get a response that acknowledges the first one.
People have been doing that long before LLMs, so i wouldn’t be too sure haha
That sounds to me like human behaviour, an AI would probably respond to each element separately. A lot of people when faced with multiple pieces of information or questions will usually respond to at most half, and often only one thing, in my experience.
Worked in a lot of service desks where I asked multiple troubleshooting related questions, getting a reply to only one of them is really common, the norm even I would say.
That’s almost unequivocal proof that a human did it. AI will restate each point and provide an answer, no matter how correct or useful. A human will get distracted, or omit or ignore points that they think are obvious or too difficult.
I think it’s more “Copilot can steal the contents of your emails to train its LLM.” (and maybe leak it when someone write a suitably crafted prompt.)
Or sold to advertisers…
Or your insurance company…
Or law enforcement…
Yeah, this is me too. Although, to be fair to my younger self, back then a lot of new technologies actually were notable improvements over the previous tech, and older people were missing out by not trying them. I’m talking about going from cassette tapes to CDs, things like that.
Nowadays the new thing really is just worse than the old thing. E.g. going from a desktop environment to “the metaverse.” Those of us who didn’t embrace the metaverse were not just sticking to our old cassette tapes; the metaverse really was stupid as hell.
The meta verse has 500 users, total, worldwide. Out of 8 billion people. It’s not exactly a popular new tech.
AI on the other hand, fits the description much better. It is very useful, and people who reject it out of spite are missing out. Sure, it’s being shoved down our throats in literally every product, whether it makes sense or not, I get the sentiment. But rejecting it completely makes you miss it’s useful applications.
What’s your use case thst you find it useful?
Boilerplate code, translation, text grammar correction, taking and summarizing meeting notes, debugging of network issues, interview role play…
I have some experience but my attempts at using it for network debugging have been less than iimpressive. It’s able to give a great history/summary of the issue but when it comes to generating troubleshooting steps or an actual resolution it just spits out a one-size fits all generic answer.
Our attempts at using it for summarizing meetings haven’t been particularly great either but that may just be very boring, repetitive meetings lol.
Gemini in particular helped me greatly debugging a Thread (IPv6) issue with RA and SLAAC, giving exact commands and diagnostic requests.
For meetings work really well, I can concentrate on the content and not on taking notes. Of course if there is something really critical I will note it down on a paper. Then I need to spend just 5 mins reviewing the AI notes to make sure nothing is hallucinated, generating a summary and sending it over. What used to take me maybe 30 minutes now takes 5. With 4 to 6 meetings a day it add up fast.
It also helps my writing in foreign languages sound more natural, suggesting changes and expressions that I know exist but they don’t come naturally for me.
Anything “supervised”, to prevent hallucinations from doing too much damage. I save 2h per working day, easy.
What about kids who edit videos on a phone. Laptops exist too you know, and the editing process would be a lot more enjoyable.
GenX and Millenials are the only two generations who are technically literate to know that. Your average GenZ or Alpha or whatever never learned to use a computer so it’s less scary to do it on a phone.
And then there’s also the extra friction. You would need to transfer the video files to the computer before you can even start. If you edit on the phone, all the files are already there, which is nice.
You could wait a few hours for the cloud to finally sync, or you could just go through all the USB-C cables that don’t support reasonable data transfer rates… either way, there are some serious bottlenecks in the process. Once you get past those, it gets better, but I guess all of that is enough to deter many people from trying.
