The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas".
I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."
The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.
The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live.
Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.
The fast food places near me closed all their dining rooms when indoor dining was banned during the pandemic. They converted their front doors into Doordash-only pickup. I was expecting that change to be permanent for fast food joints, but no, they've all reopened their indoor dining areas.
They have reopened them in most (but not all) places. But you also see more new builds designed with no seating, or extremely minimal, uncomfortable seating (e.g. a single high ‘bar’ with a few metal stools against a wall or window. Or even that minus the stools - stand and eat at that bar). The seating is now designed to be more for waiting for a to-go order than for enjoying a meal.
Compare to a 1990s model that might be much larger and have 10-12 booths around the outside of a big square room, with 10-15 more tables in the center. The game plan is clear from where I sit. The act of dining in at fast food is already not popular among anyone outside of high schoolers and homeless, and that’s the exact same set of diners that makes the most work for them. So, they’d like to just cut it out entirely.
If compensation for software devs was in line with other profession there wouldn't be bootcamps. The problem is it's an easy job that gets paid a ton of money
Yeah it's an awful place to work unless you're a far-right bro. My old director used to use slurs and vape in the office. The founder hires pro gamers with no technical expertise because he thinks they're cool.
Because "slurs" is vague and covers a wide variety of utterances that run the gamut from unprofessional to unemployable and I had a tingle of Spidey sense that OP might have chosen the vague phrasing specifically to inflate the sins of the nameless Shopify director in the mind of the reader.
Great question. It's a vague term and a moving target that not everyone agrees on.
For instance, retarded is now considered a slur. If OP is saying "my director said the R word," then I would question whether OP spared the gory details out of concern for polite company or if they're being oblique in service of their point.
And if managers at Shopify are dropping N-bombs, I want to know that too.
The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code.
The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.
The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.
Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.
Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.
Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.
I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.
The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves
That's nonsense. You might not be able to afford to enter the market but that's not at all the same as a physical constraint capping the number of competitors.
You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies
If I want to service 1234 sesame st from my physical location with power lines there are a very limited number of routes I can take. The limited physical space quickly becomes crowded, duplicate physical infrastructure of that nature is highly inefficient, and there's a (completely pointless) negative impact on society to accommodate the constant installation and servicing.
Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".
> Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.
This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).
Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.
The two most significant factors at the physical level are
1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.
2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.
AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.
This is really splitting hairs; the comment you replied to didn't even mention physical space. Yes, a lot of companies could physically run their cables next to each other, but at some point the roads have to actually work, and not be demolished every time a firm enters or leaves the market.
I'd counter the exact opposite. You can purchase GPUs on the open market, they're just expensive. You can install the GPUs anywhere in the world, it doesn't need to be a particular street or a particular house. Suitable land and infrastructure for a large factory is similarly scarce and expensive and might need to be built out at great time and expense but that doesn't make heavy industry a natural monopoly.
Sure, there's currently a supply crunch for a lot of this stuff (ex gas turbines) but temporarily bad market conditions doesn't make something a natural monopoly either.
Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now
Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.
If you think you have long Covid, you should do some research about CIRS (Chronic Inflammation Response Syndrome). It is a condition caused by exposure to toxic mold from water damaged (inside or out) buildings. There is growing evidence that there isn't actually a separate condition for long Covid, but rather it is Covid-triggered CIRS. (Lyme can trigger it too). (Note: only about 25% of people are genetically susceptible to suffering from CIRS)
CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.
Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.
It doesn't necessarily have to be white mold either. Anything that generates a persistent immune response can keep it going once it triggered. Like really bad allergies.
Largely it was a multi-year process trying to find the source of all my symptoms. Eventually, I found someone posting on a Reddit forum about long Covid and they suggested to someone that they have problems with mold exposure instead. I collected dust from my house and sent it off to be tested. The test came back with an UNINHABITABLE result for Aspergillus versicolor (a highly resilient and ubiquitous indoor mold frequently found in water-damaged building materials like drywall, carpet, and ceiling tiles)
You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).
I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.
How kind of you to say.... If you do much research on the topic, you will find that this is the standard advice. It is almost impossible to remove (especially for any porous surface). People with CIRS can by symptomatic even from dead mold spores.
I am just offering a different point of view, not disagreeing with the other experiences on this thread.
I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).
Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.
So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.
I think I may have had long covid or something like that as well.
for something like 12-18 months in 2023-2024 I would only go to work, come home sleep 2 hours and that was all I could manage. I felt so fatigued and tired. I started doing better at the beginning of 2025, and am doing better now. I think it may have been caused by partly illness, and partly the psychological shift to doing nothing social at all for most of covid pandemic.
I had this starting around the beginning of COVID. Was it COVID? Did I get COVID at all? Plausibly, but not definitively. Did I get it at that time? Almost certainly not as I stayed isolated and got tested whenever I wasn't. It could be aging but I think a lot of people chalk things up to aging that are actually due to non-aging-related causes - you just accumulate more past as you age so you're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is. I did go camping several times, once in a region known to have Lyme, without being vaccinated, but that was years after I started noticing chronic fatigue. Conclusion: I really don't know.
At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.
I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."
The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.