Society is lacking people that stand up for something. My efforts to consume less is seen as being cheap by my family, which I find so sad. I much prefer donating my money than exchanging superfluous gifts on Christmas.

A quick way to make me not respect someone's economic opinion is to mention the "Efficient Market Hypothesis." This should be buried 7 palms underground.

Microsoft products are decreasing in quality at an astounding rate. You can clearly see that sales people took over the whole company.

Its accelerated slopfication of Microsoft. And what are they are doing to fix it? More AI. The thing what is clearly making it worse. I think every division except Azure and Office are losing money at this point.

This is a fatalistic attitude, but I can totally get behind. It has become harder to associate my job with contributing with society.

I agree and I am far from being a senior engineer. I'm only in the market since a few years and started out just before the whole LLM stuff started to pick up. So I have been grinding a lot (2nd job I've learned, am in tech since ~2020) only to be confronted with permanent existential fear of having to possibly learn a 3rd job (which takes 3 years of full time work for neglectable pay in my country). I dont want to start from zero again and I am tired of corporations that are shitting out money to be cheap on their employees. Starting from zero is never fun, going back into debt is never fun and having to leave a job/career you like also is never fun. I'm 30 now and only ever have been making (noteworthy, still below median) money since 1.5 years now. I cant afford starting anew and there is little I can do about it which is extremely frustrating.

I work with/am friends with many junior-ish developers who are in the same place as you (got into programming in their late 20s around the 2020 hiring cycle). I'm very sorry for the stress you're dealing with.

I don't know if this describes your situation, but I know many people who are dealing with positions where they have no technical mentorship, no real engineering culture to grow in, and a lot of deadlines and work pressure. Coupled with this, they often don't have a large social group within programming/tech, because they've only been in it for a few years and have been heads down grinding to get a good job the whole time. They're experiencing a weird mixture of isolation, directionless-ness, and intense pressure. The work is joyless for them, and they don't see a future.

If I can offer any advice, be selfish for a bit. Outsource as much as you want to LLMs, but use whatever time savings you get out of this to spend time on programming-related things you enjoy. Maybe work the tickets you find mildly interesting without LLMs, even if they aren't mission critical. Find something interesting to tinker with. Learn a niche language. Or slack off in a discord group/make friends in programming circles that aren't strictly about career advancement and networking.

I think it's basically impossible to get better past a certain level if you can't enjoy programming, LLM-assisted or otherwise. There's such a focus on "up-skilling" and grinding through study materials in the culture right now, and that's all well and good if you're trying to pass an interview in 6 weeks, but all of that stuff is pretty useless when you're burned out and overwhelmed.

Yea I never had real mentorship and I am responsible for 6 projects as solo developer. I am heavily against using LLMs for my tasks as thats just passionless mind numbing back and forth with a machine trying to get it to spit out stuff I actually understand.

I also learned that I absolutely hate most programmers. No offense. But most I've been talking to have a complete lack of ethics. I really love programming but I have a massive issue with how industry scale programming is performed (just offloading infra to AWS, just using random JS libs for everything, buying design templates instead of actually building components yourself, 99% of apps being simple CRUD and I am so incredibly tired of building http based apps, web forms and whatnot...)

I love tech, but the industry does not have a soul. The whole joy of learning new things is diminishing the more I learn about the industry.

I've heard once that Americans distrust their government and trust their corporations, while Europeans distrust their corporations and trust their government. I honestly think that governments already has a huge role in shaping people's understanding of the world, and that's GREAT on good democratic countries.

What I find really weird is that I am stopping believing in the whole idea of free press, considering how the mainstream media is being bought by oligarchs around the globe. I think this is a good example of the erosion of trust in institutions in general. This won't end well.

Your idea of letting it be run by a non-profit makes me believe that you also don't trust institutions anymore.

I can’t say I have no trust for any institutions.

But my trust depends on each institutions choices. Just as my trust in people varies based on their records.

Mostly, I trust everyone to be who they show themselves to be. Which can lean one way or the other, or be very mixed across different dimensions.

But, yes, governments and corporations which are steadily centralizing power are inherently untrustworthy. As they at best, are making us all vulnerable and less powerful as individuals. Meaning they are decreasing our freedom, not increasing it.

I remember my first programming class, where the exam required students to solve problems in Pascal on paper. I see no problems in this approach.

I still think pen and paper is king among students.

At the university, you are supposed to learn the foundational knowledge. If you let the LLM do the work, you are simply not learning. There are no shortcuts.

And learning how to use LLMs is pathetically easy. Really.

We have to train ourselves to not be pissed off at headlines. They are most of the time bait.

That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.

Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.

"Is it possible" is the conservative choice if you don't want to get an explanation of something that in fact, cannot be done.

But it seems "is it possible" also leads it into answering "no, it can't" probably modelling a bunch of naysayers.

Sometimes, if you coax it a little bit, it will tell you how to do a thing which is quite esoteric.

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.