> but you need to amortize in all the infrastructure and training and energy costs

The average American human consumes 232kWh of all-in energy (food, transport, hvac, construction, services, etc) daily.

If humans want to get into a competition over lower energy input per unit of cognitive output, I doubt you'd like the result.

> Better? Lol no

The "IQ equivalent" of the current SOTA models (Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1) is already a full 1SD above the human mean.

Nations and civilizations have perished or been conquered all throughout history because they underestimated and laughed off the relative strength of their rivals. By all means, keep doing this, but know the risks.

> putting a lot of blind faith in an algorithm that's proven time and time again to make things up

Don't be ridiculous. Our entire system of criminal justice relies HEAVILY on the eyewitness testimony of humans, which has been demonstrated time and again to be entirely unreliable. Innocents routinely rot in prison and criminals routinely go free because the human brain is much better at hallucinating than any SOTA LLM.

I can think of no more critical institution that ought to require fidelity of information than criminal justice, and yet we accept extreme levels of hallucination even there.

This argument is tired, played out, and laughable on its face. Human honesty and memory reliability are a disgrace, and if you wish to score points against LLMs, comparing their hallucination rates to those of humans is likely going to result in exactly the opposite conclusion that you intend others to draw.

100 years ago people like Rob Reiner's drug addict son's dealer would probably have been hanging from a tree.

note: this is not commentary on drug legalization, just commentary that "community efforts" were more involved in addressing negative social externalities than they are now - for better or for worse.

Not likely at all, most likely the drugs wouldn't have even been illegal, but an addict would certainly have been housed and institutionalized. More than half of mental patients were alcoholics and addicts.

That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.

So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.

Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create

Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.

FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.

I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.

(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)

I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.

Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?

Never put it this way before, but it's exactly why I started blogging. I was fed up with how bad Python content was online.

It isn't entirely that.

Somewhat, sure.

It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance.

And why are you being laid off?

Your duties are being offshored.

_You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are.

Ostensibly this saves money.

Why does having different values imply intolerance?

For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.

Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.

This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.

On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.

Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.

I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.

I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money

I also do third party software development, and my approach is always: bill (highly, $300+/hr) for the features and requirements, but do the manual refactoring and architecture/performance/detail work on your own time. It benefits you, it benefits the client, it benefits the relationship, and it handles the misunderstanding of your normie clients with regard to what constitutes "working".

Say it takes 2 hours to implement a feature, and another hour making it logically/architecturally correct. You bill $600 and eat $200 for goodwill and your own personal/organizational development. You're still making $200/hr and you never find yourself in meetings with normie clients about why refactoring, cohesiveness, or quality was necessary.

> cheaper housing would help the kids more, but that has more entrenched interests opposed to it (almost every homeowner)

I hear this often, but as a homeowner, I don't understand it. Assessed value tracks market value, and the last thing I want is property taxes rising.

The only homeowners who would prefer rising prices are those looking to sell or over-leveraged landlords.

What you say makes sense, and yet what I find in reality is that almost no one thinks this way; they want their house to go up in value. Perhaps everyone assumes that they will sell sometime in the next few years?

The vast majority of courts award spousal support for this exact reason.

Post-divorce, the vast majority of stay-at-home moms with limited recent work history are supported by court edict.

Great. What if the spouse dies? Or they just stop paying and move to a different country because they’re a jerk? Or they lose their job and can’t support you in the future?

There’s a dozen ways relying on the courts can go wrong. Something to consider in a pro and con list.

Unrelated, if during the marriage the primary breadwinner loses their job and struggles to get back on their feet, the stay at home mom won’t be able to help pay a mortgage with 10 year old skills, as an example.

I have zero problems with stay at home moms. My mom was one and i LOVED spending lots of time with her growing up. But i think many people don’t have an HONEST conversation here that considers the worst case. It’s worth talking about. That’s all i can say. And it might be different if you have a village to support you if needed. Not everyone is blessed with that.

In my immigrant mom’s tragic case, she never really got her foot into the workforce because she wanted to stay home. Because of that her english skills never truly developed. My father became somewhat abusive toward her when i was a young teen. Even threatened to withhold her “allowance” sometimes. Could she have left if she wanted to? No. Legally yes, but practically? Nope. Chained to the marriage basically.

Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.

Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.

This is a strange claim.

In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.

I think that a lot of the assholes behaved that way because they were naturally charismatic and people wanted to be their friends despite their being assholes. They were never socially punished for their behavior because they could turn on the charm at will. In other words, they were assholes because they could afford to be.

Anecdata, but I am extremely addicted to nicotine lozenges.