Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)
Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
Depends on what sort of games you are into, but Baldur's Gate 3 is modern and amazing. Great single player campaign with mod support. No DLCs or expansion packs, you get it all in the base game, finished, done.
Good news: video games are still fucking awesome. Since it costs nothing to make one, weird and smart and cool people from all across the world are trying the craziest stuff. It's true they're purchasable through steam, mostly. But there's spectacularly creative stuff at low or no cost. For example, skimming my steam right now I see:
- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)
- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)
- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)
- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)
- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)
- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)
I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
Remember that feeling when you successfully wrote, debugged and ran your first useful program ? I think we are always chasing after that feeling in our own way with our little side projects.
Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.
I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.
I think it can go both ways. I have made things that made me feel bad for not truly understanding what I made and I disliked the process.
But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.
But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.
You're not alone! I love hand-writing code, I love solving the puzzles that come along with it, but I'm having a blast learning how to apply all these new tools.
I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.
Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.
Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.
I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.
The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.
Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.
Oh I understand this one too much as a fan of the Isekai genre. So much slop and poorly done power fantasies. But some amazing content in there. Then I look at something like One Piece and not really vibing with it at all despite being overwhelmingly popular.
Dogs -
I know they are good for humanity with getting their owners for walks, loyalty, etc. But have no idea how people get hooked on them with the picking up hot feces and 25% chance of getting a barking/jumping lunatic that you have to rearrange your life every 6 hours around their bathroom habits...
The same reason people generally don't regret having kids even though the commitment and overall change of your life are much greater than what you described for dogs.
You need to have one to understand the unconditional loyalty, love, and the bond. You come to appreciate it even more once you lose them. Having a dog is the best and worst thing in the world. Just lost our fur baby a week ago...
I'm mixed. I always wanted a dog as an adult because I grew up with dogs. But, maybe because it was a different time, the dogs didn't run our lives. Serially, they lived in our backyard. They had access to a dog house in the garage. And we gave them food and played with them. I was also a kid so no idea what my parents went through but I certainly didn't see them fretting over the dog and we rarely if ever took them for a walk.
But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.
So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.
You don't pick up your dog's poop? You don't take them out regularly? I mean sure, there are scenarios where these aren't true, but for the vast majority of dog owners, it very much does happen like that.
Came here to say the same. At first I couldn't even relate, but then another phase of my life came flashing back to me. All the angst around the pretense, wondering why I like somethings in a particular space but then not others that I was supposed to like...
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.
+1 but I don't see that as a guilty displeasure to be honest. I also formed most of my musical taste in the 90s and to this day Dirt, Sap and Jar of Flies sound just as good as they did back in the day.
I was obsessed with a handful of Deftones songs back in the day. But outside those, I just couldn't get into them wholesale. I think they just weren't heavy enough for me. Now I'm old, and one of my mates is a huge Alice in Chains fan, and he showed me their ropes (I didn't know much prior). I'm very into them now. It's the same with a lot of bands that were before my time. My dad loves Dire Straights, and I thought they were OK when I was younger. I appreciate them at a different level now.
In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
I mean, sure, but I still think it's kind of hypocritical for me to act like weed should be legal and no one should be arrested for it and all that stuff, only to get mad at them for doing the things that I said they should be allowed to do.
French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.
I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.
> I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.
Yeah, in high school I had a pothead acquaintance who got mad at me when I said that I knew more about physics then he did, because I had actually taken physics classes, and I too had seen the same Carl Sagan videos he had. He didn't know any of the math behind physics, and as far as I'm aware he wasn't some kind of Ramanujan savant (considering he wasn't in any advanced classes), but I guess he felt that he was so smart because he would get high and watch Cosmos or listen to Alan Watts.
He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics
I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.
Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the desire to find and fit in with "your" social group. Once you've found it and feel established in it, a lot of the pressure to fit in disappears.
Where then does the old man yelling at clouds meme come from? Seems like it's just as likely to become even more further entrenched and crotchety as you age.
I don't see a contradiction. The old man yelling at clouds certainly could have given up on trying to enjoy the "right" things and having the "right" opinions.
I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.
On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.
Me too, everyone around me is into board games, video games, nerdy movies etc and they always assume I'm into them too. It always sucks when I reveal I don't like these things and you see the enthusiasm going off their faces :/
I love hearing about people's vivid dreams. Especially weird ones. I feel guilty for hating it when people talk about sports. I just walk away because I cannot participate in the conversation, even if I want to. Which I don't. But it feels rude.
what is "mainstream global anglo pop music"? Anglo apparently means "white"? Is there such a thing as "mainstream global anglo pop music"? I certainly can't separate many mainstream global pop music by the race of the person singing.
I love TMBG, and I tried to get my wife into them, but it never really vibed with her, which is fine.
That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.
I listened to TMBG early on in my music life and eventually came to "not particularly enjoy" them. Talking Heads, on the other hand, have only gotten better and better in my opinion.
I have gotten into watching Street Fighter tournaments online and recently found out about Tool Assisted gameplay for emulators. Not sure I have time for hacking ROMs but do enjoy those tournaments
Oh. That's definitely my ~6 years old kid. I should spend >= 90 minutes of high quality time with him every weekday after he comes back from school, but nowadays I'm only spending 45-60 minutes. And I'm not reading much to him these months. The "good" news is that grandparents will go back next month, so I gotta pick up more time with my kid. Not sure about the quality, though. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing things he enjoys to do, so I fake for about 15 minutes and call a break. I can't wait for the him he reaches 6 -- I'll gift him a RPi loaded with DOSBian, sit with him every Wed evening to code QBASIC games. I'll ask him to do the design and I'll code it before him. He doesn't read yet, but maybe by then he can read some simple words.
The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.
So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.
[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.
Opera is a pretty widespread guilty displeasure I actually also share. When I read "poetry" I immediately was like "yes, here, me!!!" I even remember the moment in my life when appreciating poetry was destroyed. Two instnaces. First was when I was forced to learn a poem by heart in early school. And the second one my german teacher (a few years later) gave me a poem about my disability, for interpretation. Mind you, written by a person not sharing that disability. All I could do for one hour was to stare at the lines and plain hate the author for being so pretentious, and hating my teacher for assuming that topic would be open for grabs...
The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.
Yeah, I'm not American and haven't been to Arizona. But from my understanding it can and regularly gets hellishly hot there, no?
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
I love hiking, but I always encourage people to start with short walks in nice places. You need a solid foundation of nice, normal, fun times before you start thinking about walking 17km a day through a freezing leech-infested mud pit, and more importantly you need time to work out what you actually enjoy.
I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
Meh at best. Even in ideal conditions say, skiing in the Alps on a -5C sunny day feels like a bit of a chore. When I'm out there I sorta, kinda can convince myself that I like doing it but the chore of getting the gear packed, lining up for lift tickets, changing into the clumsy gear and all that other ceremony makes it on balance, not worth it. Same goes for all other outdoorsy stuff.
No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?
But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.
Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.
> and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool
Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.
TIL. Well that shows how little I know about the domain of my metaphor I guess.
I’ll amend my uninformed comparison to be the 150th lap but the point is the same: watching world-class talent do a clearly difficult thing in a way that is repetitive and unengaging to me.
It’s the IT career requirement to keep abreast of everything in tech while being cursed to know most of it is various forms of unnecessary for the supermajority of IT/Enterprise use cases. A few highlights:
* Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doesn’t support it. Kubernetes is amazingly awesome but the equivalent of using nuclear weapons to go duck hunting for most folks.
* AI, for all its power and capability, is too unreliable for wholesale automation - especially when you can just use it to generate the code or software to run the same automations infinitely with deterministic outputs. Your entire org doesn’t need Claude Code Pro Max 20x subs, you just need to get better at getting the code needed for infinite repetition without the AI sub
* Your fridge, oven, microwave, coffee maker, toaster oven, furnace filter, and dishwasher don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or Cloud Connectivity. They just don’t.
* Public Cloud didn’t let you reduce your infrastructure headcount, but it did make it easier for shadow IT to consume more spend, make your headcount more expensive and specialized, and put your infrastructure eggs in the same basket as millions of others, which surely will never become a problem. (/s)
* If you can run basic infra (compute, VPCs, storage, networking) for one public cloud provider, you can run them all. If you’re requiring Architect certs just to run VMs in a landing zone, you’re spending way too much for way too little.
* VLANs and a firewall are enough for 90% of use cases. The only reason you need a NGFW for layer 7 filtering is because vendors stopped publishing what IP ranges, FQDNs, and ports their stuff uses, and that’s less a justification for NGFW’s and more a damning indictment of shitty security practices industry-wide.
* VMs are fine. Containers are nice and efficient, but VMs are still perfectly fine. I am tired of having this conversation with folks who don’t know what containers do but think they’re God’s answer to the myriad of faults of VMs (that they also can’t identify)
* You don’t need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to “automate” workflows. Oftentimes all you need are cronjobs and webhooks, rather than another whole-ass set of sludgepipes.
* You don’t need a data lake, you need to do a better job identifying which data points are meaningful in a context and capturing them efficiently.
I love technology. I love learning about technology. I love solving problems with technology.
I hate the insistence that everything be maximally technological in nature and that every product must be adopted in order to not be left behind.
I hate the lack of discipline, is what I’m saying.
Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)
- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)
- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)
- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)
- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)
- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)
The article defines guilty displeasures as things you don't like but you hope you like. I don't think you hope yourself to like modern AAA games.
I think we should support people who are uncomfortable about this stuff, don't ridicule them with "tinfoil hat much?" type sentiments
By the way, GOG.com treats you well wrt cloud/privacy/etc. All games they sell are drm-free and can be downloaded, installed and played offline.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.
I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.
But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.
But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.
I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.
Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.
Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.
I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.
The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.
But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.
So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
Not sure what my point is.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.
I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.
Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.
He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics
Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.
On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.
( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.
I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )
That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.
I mean COME ON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xphLY5ucIpQ
Their lyrics are very clever and interesting.
But their music is terrible. What the world needs is for someone with musical talent to redo the music to TMBG's corpus.
The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.
So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.
[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.
Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.
Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyES63Rgvg
I’ll amend my uninformed comparison to be the 150th lap but the point is the same: watching world-class talent do a clearly difficult thing in a way that is repetitive and unengaging to me.
* Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doesn’t support it. Kubernetes is amazingly awesome but the equivalent of using nuclear weapons to go duck hunting for most folks.
* AI, for all its power and capability, is too unreliable for wholesale automation - especially when you can just use it to generate the code or software to run the same automations infinitely with deterministic outputs. Your entire org doesn’t need Claude Code Pro Max 20x subs, you just need to get better at getting the code needed for infinite repetition without the AI sub
* Your fridge, oven, microwave, coffee maker, toaster oven, furnace filter, and dishwasher don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or Cloud Connectivity. They just don’t.
* Public Cloud didn’t let you reduce your infrastructure headcount, but it did make it easier for shadow IT to consume more spend, make your headcount more expensive and specialized, and put your infrastructure eggs in the same basket as millions of others, which surely will never become a problem. (/s)
* If you can run basic infra (compute, VPCs, storage, networking) for one public cloud provider, you can run them all. If you’re requiring Architect certs just to run VMs in a landing zone, you’re spending way too much for way too little.
* VLANs and a firewall are enough for 90% of use cases. The only reason you need a NGFW for layer 7 filtering is because vendors stopped publishing what IP ranges, FQDNs, and ports their stuff uses, and that’s less a justification for NGFW’s and more a damning indictment of shitty security practices industry-wide.
* VMs are fine. Containers are nice and efficient, but VMs are still perfectly fine. I am tired of having this conversation with folks who don’t know what containers do but think they’re God’s answer to the myriad of faults of VMs (that they also can’t identify)
* You don’t need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to “automate” workflows. Oftentimes all you need are cronjobs and webhooks, rather than another whole-ass set of sludgepipes.
* You don’t need a data lake, you need to do a better job identifying which data points are meaningful in a context and capturing them efficiently.
I love technology. I love learning about technology. I love solving problems with technology.
I hate the insistence that everything be maximally technological in nature and that every product must be adopted in order to not be left behind.
I hate the lack of discipline, is what I’m saying.