8 ms·
Altoids by the Fistful
- psini 1y agoGreat read, putting into some beautiful prose undigested feelings that have been stewing in my stomach for a while. Maybe I should find a cabinet that's worth painting the back of to me
- bombcar 1y agoThere’s a reason a ton of software engineers (let’s be real that’s 2000 pounds so I only need to find ten or twelve) do woodworking on the side. If you take it diligently and treat it as fun, you can make amazing pieces in only ten times the time it would take a factory - but you do it your way with your attention to detail. And you can make the back out of good wood and paint it, too. Nobody will ever know; it’s your secret between you and God.
- abakker 1y agoIt's a great point. If you are interested, the book "why we make things, and why it matters" really resonated with me for this exact reason.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoAnd if you do hand-tool woodworking it's cheap. More time consuming, but also harder to screw up. I prefer metalworking, but the equipment is larger & more expensive. And you still need a workbench for a bunch of the finishing steps (hand filing, polishing, engraving, etc.) so some basic woodworking is very handy for making said workbench.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ggsp 1y agoHasn't work always been cat turds?
- gwd 1y ago"[C]ursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." - Genesis 3:17-19 EDIT: Whether you believe this particular explanation or not, the fact that it's here is evidence that people have long felt that how unnecessarily hard work is is something that needs an explanation.
- int_19h 1y agoHard work is not the problem. Meaningless work is the problem. The work that only needs to be done because something is already fucked up.
- foofoo12 1y agoYears ago I worked in the hospitality industry with a great group of people. Almost none of the days/nights felt like work. Even when it was crazy busy. The morale was excellent. I "blame" it mostly on the two owners who also worked there. They were exemplary people and managers. Of course you need a nice group of people too, but I think a misfit wouldn't have stuck around for long.
- vel0city 1y agoI consider myself extremely lucky, but for large swaths of my professional career I've actually really enjoyed what I was doing. There have definitely been grindy projects where I'm not working on a project that interests me on a technology stack I don't care for, but especially at the start I always looked forward to going to work in my programming job. It might as well have been the best videogame I'd ever played before. Every day was full of learning new things and I was finally getting paid a wage for something I'd been doing for fun for years. It was a small office a short drive or bike ride away with people I got along with really well. It was a short walk to a few cheap restaurants and a grocery store. I rarely had extremely tight deadlines.
- WorldPeas 1y ago
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- ur-whale 1y ago[flagged]
- burgerone 1y agoI really don't understand why you would deliberately condense a story crafted with intent into a lifeless AI summary.
- ur-whale 1y ago[flagged]
- meheleventyone 1y agoBy reading slop based summaries of random drivel on the internet? Is that a win?
- richrichardsson 1y agoAfter the a couple of paragraphs that weren't really making any kind of point I started skimming; came to this conclusion before I got bored of even just skimming: A jaded Grey-Beard rant; overall negative. Perhaps there was some deeper message I missed due to the boredom.
- saagarjha 1y agoYou spend it carefully by arguing with people in the comment section about your inappropriate use of AI?
- peterldowns 1y agoOne object level suggestion is you shouldn't be doing string formatting manipulation to construct valid YAML objects as part of your ops pipeline; instead, do it all with actual data structures and then just render the result. Yes, I know that Helm directly encourages text templating — it's bad and wrong. Beyond that, this a too-long essay about a deeply poisonous and discouraging worldview. I regret having read it. At least it wasn't written by AI!
- wartywhoa23 1y ago> Deeply poisonous and discouraging worldview That used to be called "honest" back in the days
- isoprophlex 1y agoHave you tried rubbing some altoids on your eyeballs first, to make it go down easier?
- balamatom 1y ago>it's bad and wrong And, as with so many blatantly bad and wrong things in modern development, someone will show up just to scream at you confusedly if you as much as think of solving it somehow better (e.g. how you describe) because they have mastered the officially endorsed badwrong way (and even that with great difficulty) thus you'd be stealing their cat turds >I regret having read it. It makes me happy that you do!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- abtinf 1y ago> I’m no closer to anything resembling inner peace. I find I’ve grown to despise large swaths of the only thing I’ve ever been able to earn reliable income from. I tire of walking a path that has seemingly shifted beneath my feet to point toward a destination I no longer recognize. I’m embarrassed by the jerk my Younger Self used to be, and simultaneously ashamed of the energy I lost as I matured. I don’t really want to do most of what I have to do, while feeling a deep unsated need to achieve something that I have neither the stamina nor the freedom to pursue. At some point I’m going to reach down deep into the well of ambition to discover there ain’t nothing there to pull out anymore. And then? What advice does one give when confronted with this?
- BoredPositron 1y agoTo answer in his style: The path didn't shift beneath your feet. You finally learned how to see in the dark, and realized you'd been walking in circles around a grave you dug for someone who was never real to begin with. What you're really mourning is the death of who you thought you had to be, and what feels like emptiness is actually the first honest space you've ever had to discover what you might want to become.
- codeduck 1y agoOof. Nicely put, but you cut me!
- balamatom 1y agoEvidently that's known to psychoanalysis as the "idealized image". That's another way to refer to what I'd call "the sum of one's conditioning", i.e. the interplay of automatic reactions to outside stimuli that usually takes up so much of your waking hours, that begin to habitually mistake it for yourself. Moreover that's how everyone else does it, innit? Calling it "idealized image" downplays the mechanistic and implies the inauthentic - these judgments differ, see below. Nonetheless the resulting state of mind is the same: you're stuck somewhere being someone you don't truly know how to be - and it's been so taxing for so long that you've started to forget why exactly you're there in the first place. It's a relatable sentiment. Funny how this surfaced today, after a few other materials inducing delusion of reference on HN frontpage. (I don't remember anyone ever saying how personalized HN's recommender is, but if there's places on the Net where it pays for the recommender to be subtle, here's one.) As this sort of habituation is commonplace, it seems like not long after the stage where different authors introduced varying ontologies of the same alienatory phenomenon, the 20th century psychology community might've suffered something of a schism on the matter of whether it's right for the state of dedicating 100%+ of one's life energies to the "idealized image" to be considered "normal". As a result, the currents in psychological/philosophical/humanistic inquiry most able to produce "technical" insights, i.e. ones which can be genuinely and reliably useful to an introspective person without necessitating the services of a care facilitator, remain underdeveloped and walled off. (You're in for a ride if you look into those, it's no coincidence you find em piecemeal in the oeuvre of a certain sort of literary carny barker.) Anyway, some of them say that as you find ways to let go of conditioned reactive patterns, that results in something like more headspace freed up for your actual volition. Let's see how that one goes then. What I can add is that unconditioning oneself is done by experiencing unhabitual stimuli. If you're even a moderately routine-based sort of person you can drill yourself into a sort of "RNG watchdog" habit. At a random minute of every hour begin to breate manually, and proceed from there.
- icameron 1y agoEnjoyed reading the crude observation that we eat cat turds for work. I like the author who watches the graffiti on the train ride rather than a phone screen. Was the “Spirograph butthole”meant to be a reference to a React app default favicon?
- chanux 1y agoAI apps I believe.
- xcrjm 1y agoYeah it sounds more like a reference to the OpenAI logo to me
- xandrius 1y agoHonestly, if we're speaking of most graffiti (generally just tags in the same boring fashion) visible from a train, I'd rather to be looking at a phone screen. At least the phone screen could be displaying something interesting but most graffitis are pseudo-artistic "I was here" tags. I wish more of that paint was used to actually make a place nicer rather than worse. And don't get me wrong, I'm totally ok with guerilla, technically illegal actions taken by citizens to improve their surroundings but most graffiti are far from that.
- WorldPeas 1y agoThe graffiti on the MTA from CT to NY is pretty nice, a lot of puffy colored tags, I think it's best not to have too many tags, keeps the good ones front-of-mind. Don't get me wrong, the less-is-more ones are nice too, VEO, anyone?
- xnx 1y ago> “Spirograph butthole” Sounds like the Open AI logo
- onionisafruit 1y ago
- iberator 1y agoI was sceptical but this is amazing! >Look at me now, having to Google how to read a text file line-by-line in Python despite having done it a hundred times at this point
- jcims 1y agoI love this hahaha!
- retired_account 1y agoA saddening block of prose well worth the read, thanks for sharing.
- lc64 1y agoArticle written by a fan of The Office, no doubt
- hornetdynamics 1y agoGreat
- brador 1y agoAnyone who read that: How do you justify the life spend once you see the scroll bar turning that small? Like rolling a dice on wasting 30 minutes, but maybe maybe it’ll be interesting or mildly amusing, best case. There’s just no way that use of time could be worth the squeeze when your takehome is $500/hr. 8% of your waking day spent reading an article. Come on?
- Dilettante_ 1y agoWeird flex about the income, but the answer is: You don't have to read the whole thing. You can just dip in and if the first 2, 5, 10 minutes hook you, you read the rest. You could also skim, that's a practice that has really done a lot for me when it comes to not-so-information-dense literature that might still have worthwhile nuggets in it, like a good chunk of nonfiction.
- qskousen 1y agoDo you determine the worthiness of all your activities by how much money you could make in the time they took? I read the full article and found it well worth the time. A somewhat sobering essay, prompting some self-reflection, while also being beautifully written. I appreciated the art displayed. How can you put a price tag on something like that?
- ricardobeat 1y agoBooks must be very expensive for you to read.
- floren 1y agoI don't think that's a problem for him.
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- rini17 1y agoAfter first page I guessed it's obvious where it goes and stopped reading. The discussion confirmed it. If it was not obvious to anyone, then they needed to read it all perhaps. Not having any big feelings for people who do or don't anymore, I have been avoiding all kinds of cat turds most of my life, not bad decision but it's very lonely.
- LandR 1y agoWonderful
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- bravetraveler 1y ago> Well. When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me. My type of humor, cathartic read
- gcanyon 1y agoIn The Long Kiss Goodnight, Samuel L Jackson says at one point, "When you make an ASSUMPTION, you make an ass out of you and... <realizes the mistake> ... and UMPTION!"
- wry_discontent 1y agoFool me once, shame..shame on..you. Fool me twice.......a fooled me can't get fooled again.
- balamatom 1y agoThat was a smart one; an American president must never produce the soundbite "shame on me" or the spell will be broken.
- 7jjjjjjj 1y agoOur enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we!
- nenenejej 1y agoRare mix of writes really well and codes. So enjoyable!
- ricardobeat 1y ago> I’ve grown to despise large swaths of the only thing I’ve ever been able to earn reliable income from Shout out to fellow frontend devs. Rough times.
- yapyap 1y agothe airmchair psychologist in me says: don’t model your life after what your father did, whether he cared at work or not doesn’t solve your problems. the rest of me says wow, this was a well written story
- djoldman 1y ago> There’s this very real sense that I don’t… I don’t want to solve this problem. There is no intellectual reward at the end of this journey. It’s not interesting to me. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed, because it’s not a situation that ever should’ve been permitted to happen in the first place. This is just a bunch of contrived nonsense that I must work through because the broader situation dictates it. It doesn’t matter if the solution is good or elegant. It doesn’t matter if it barely works. It doesn’t matter if it causes another problem that I stub my toe on in three weeks. It’s just… what I have to do. As a tech person, this is the essence. All we want to do is make an amazing fast/efficient/performant/cheap/insightful/optimized/smart/something-else thing. But then we have to deal with organizations like governments, businesses, customers, and people like managers, co-workers, and clients. And ultimately, human irrationality of preferences. It's why RMS and Edsger are so appealing to so many. The above makes one want to say screw this, I'm gonna do it my way and damn the consequences.
- mmillin 1y ago>I briefly try to think of which chucklefuck I could blame this design on, but truth be told I rubber-stamped enough questionable pull requests in my time here that a fair amount of this situation is a mess of my own damn making. This one really rings true. Every individual change you don’t push back on makes things slowly, incrementally worse until you end up with a pile of garbage. But do you really want to block someone’s change because they wrote some awkward, hacky code? After all, they’ve solved some problem for the business and it might only take an hour to clean up later. Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that. After few rounds of this you start to become the type of person who blocks changes for code clarity and things others view as nitpicks. Now you’re the asshole stopping people from getting work done. You ask yourself if it’s really so bad to let it slide this one time. Repeat.
- bravetraveler 1y agoI think about this a lot, 'normalization of deviance'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance Paid to, supposedly. Utterly frustrating to be hired for Reliability and told endlessly to lower quality. 'Controlled opposition' it is, then.
- Muromec 1y ago>This one really rings true. Every individual change you don’t push back on makes things slowly, incrementally worse until you end up with a pile of garbage. But do you really want to block someone’s change because they wrote some awkward, hacky code? After all, they’ve solved some problem for the business and it might only take an hour to clean up later. That depends on whether hacky code is nicely contained or spreads it's bad influence all over the place. I would totally ask to add a reference to the tech debt ticket right there to the code so it's clear it's not a good practice to follow and to make sure that the ticket is actually created and not scheduled to be created by adding an async job into a memory hole. Half the time, just asking for that is enough for stuff to be straightened out right there, as it's easier than creating a ticket. >Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that. But that's sometimes okay, it's a lifecycle of software. If business doesn't schedule maintenance, then maintenance schedules itself. The job of a good engineer is to make business types in the know about and let them decide.
- chatmasta 1y agoI read to the end desperately hoping for the comforting reveal that the coworker’s meal was just a metaphor, but it never came. For those who haven’t read the article… it’s wonderful, but make sure to finish what you’re eating before you begin reading it. The imagery of that sugary altoid flavor is a bit of bait and switch. As to the topic… the slop washing and compounding effort it creates is awful. At work we use Gemini as part of Google Workspace. I wish Google would have an enterprise option “share all prompts” for full prompt transparency between everyone in the organization. I believe this will go a long way toward solving the root problem, which is one of disrespect and laziness. If I can see your prompt history, maybe you’ll think twice before asking me to review the slop it produced.
- jcims 1y agoThis was some of the most viscerally relatable reading I've experienced in years. It's like Stand By Me for 'computer' people.
- homefree 1y agoPeople are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at. There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both. More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people. Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.
- jonstewart 1y agoElon Musk, Alex Karp, and the tradlife, in one post. Please touch some grass. If you’re complaining about secularism and committed to Judeo-Christian religion, how do you reconcile Elon and Karp being the embodiment of everything that Jesus condemns?
- homefree 1y agoI suspect nothing you believe about either of them is remotely true. I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community. You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.
- jonstewart 1y agoIt’s not so much my belief but plain established fact that they’re both very very rich. What’d Jesus have to say about the rich getting into heaven? Camels, eyes of needles…?
- jonstewart 1y agoAfter reading through this long piece, I am going to assume that Jim is not real or he is that he does not in fact eat cat turds.
- cratermoon 1y agoJim is as real as Tyler Durden.
- boogieknite 1y agojim is real and eats cat turds. i eat cat turds and you eat cat turds
- mbfg 1y agoFun fact, Altoids tend to be one of the better treatment for dismotility, meaning folks who have esophagus's that don't operate correctly to help swallow down food.
- mbfg 1y agopeppermint altoids, to be specific (sorry). they use a good quality peppermint, as opposed to other cheap peppermint candy (typically).
- fooqux 1y agoOne of the best, most thought-provoking things I've read in a long time. It near-perfectly describes what I've been struggling with myself. Thank you for sharing.
- replwoacause 1y agoBeautifully written. My litter box is filled with turds from my cat scrum (sometimes we call him agile).
- ezekiel68 1y ago"Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age." -Albert Einstein
- mikestew 1y agoI feel bad for the people who worked on teams where Younger Self was the senior engineer. I was full of ideals and convictions back then. “No, we’re not doing that. We’re going to Do It Right instead.” I was full of piss and vinegar. “Here, give me that; I’ll just do it myself.” I was full of shit. Ouch, right to the heart. I do wish I could say that being an asshole was restricted to Younger Self, as I carried some of that way later in my career than I should have.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoI'm sorry, eating cat turds as a metaphor for coding isn't bad, but that article was WAY, WAY too long. OP needs to learn how to edit and cut at least half that nonsense out.
- nice_byte 1y agoyou understand the concept of creative writing, yes?
- boogieknite 1y agowhat a resonant piece. incredibly constructed. issues ive grappled with and, like the author, kept to myself because ive learned most people in my life dont care about the same things as i do. rare piece of writing that changed my perspective a bit this is glib but i couldnt keep myself from intentionally misinterpreting the end: "and on top of these existential crises he has covid now!"
- falseprofit 1y agoCan you explain the correct interpretation? Asking for a friend.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoHe had a cat turd in his box of chocolates.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rhines 1y agoI could be mistaken, but my read is that years of dealing with cat turds day in day out has numbed the author to their stench. His once prized chocolates now have become themselves cat turds, and he lacks the senses to even realize it. Note how dusty the container was - the author didn't care to maintain his chocolates, and now here he is. The forgotten side projects, the tech we wanted to learn... things we lost the motivation for or now execute with the same cat turd quality as we've grown accustomed to.
- dreamcompiler 1y agoAh, the 2020s. Back when they thought delimiting code sections with whitespace indentation was a good idea.
- WorldPeas 1y agoand we thought XML was bad?
- cestith 1y agoPeople hated s-expressions in Lisp, so instead of parentheses we ended up with angle brackets. Now there are programming languages built with XML syntax. There are at least a few things with YAML syntax that’s tied to implicit semantics, including the YAMLScript language. I kind of have to wonder what was so bad about s expressions after all.
- WorldPeas 1y agothe complaint I recall is that people don't like the way they nest, but I've had to write regex for xml and lisp, and I must say the lisp is much more pleasant. Perhaps the only difference on the post-parsing end is that in xml, there is a special place to nest children, that's really the only benefit I can think of even though you have to go through more trouble.
- partomniscient 1y agoXML with tabs, or XML with spaces?
- Doxin 1y agoThe problem is not the significant whitespace. It's producing serialized data using a templating language. That's never going to be a good solution to anything.
- RankingMember 1y ago> It feels like I am performing surgery using a scalpel held by a boardwalk arcade claw machine, complete with the constant squawking and shitting of project management seagulls. Haha, this is a great way to describe the feeling of writing code you can't test locally, instead needing to wait while it makes its way through numerous pipelines before pooping out for an error that might not even be related to your code itself, but sometimes as simple as an intermittent infrastructure issue.
- balamatom 1y agoCat turds imply the existence of a cat. Is that the same one they're looking for, in the dark room?
- WorldPeas 1y agoit might still be there, if nothing's changed since the last time we looked in its box..
- bravetraveler 1y agoWe can infer the liveliness of the cat based on the volume - and persistence - of shit
- balamatom 1y agoWe're even able to infer the cats' names and addresses!
- 7jjjjjjj 1y agoIn America today, the top 1% of cats product 52% of all cat turds.
- msteffen 1y agoIt’s nice to know that other people out there are as grumpy as I am (or can be), but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. Something I think about sometimes: the abstractions in math can be awfully elegant. Learning about them is probably 60% of the fun of studying math. But they took hundreds of years (or thousands in some cases) to conceive and refine. All that time was spent writing weird—often awkward and often wrong—proofs and trying every other idea that doesn’t work as well, and throwing them out (and still getting stuck with some of them, like pi instead of tau). Software is less than a hundred years old. Eventually software will be quite elegant and make a lot of sense. Until then, we’re trying every idea we can think of (yaml templates) to see what’s good. Once AI can invent a programming language and reproduce decades of software development in it to test its design ideas, we can skip to the end.
- amelius 1y agoIf AI invents a programming language it will probably be targeted at AI, not humans ...
- zahlman 1y agoI'm glad I got past the opening section instead of just wondering how it had anything to do with HN. I extended the charity that it had to be setting up something, and it was. And I relate to that something so, so much.
- lacoolj 1y agoI reallllllly wanted to finish that article. Then i realized after 10 minutes I was only 1/10 through it. I'm a slow reader, sorry. I'm guessing he wasn't saying "cat turds" and probably had an accent saying "carrots" or something
- wrycoder 1y agoIt looked like it was going to be a real downer to the end, but.... and then it was.