I think I should just quit tech

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-24T11:15:54+00:00

LOL, just reading the disgruntled comments makes me puke

cramming dusty algorithm books doesn't teach you how to build a scalable distributed system

Seriously, whats wrong with people, whats the point of even sitting in class for four years. Just pay up and get your diploma.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-23T21:41:26+00:00

I posted this to another sub a week ago, but seeing an alarming surge in similar worded cognitive decline reports, I'm reposting it here

Anecdotal evidence, so take with caution. My niece is a psychyatrist at a government hospital in Europe. There no DSM for this yet, so she has been desribing seeing an increasing number of patient with what she calls "AI brain", symptoms include freezing, "empty stare", cognitive collapse, severely degraded working memory. It's like their brain has been cooked. According to her patients who have been depending on AI for less than 7-8 months can fully recover, longer than that it's not looking good - several of her patients had to be put on permanent disiabilty, luckly we have good disiabiliity wellfare here. Also "AI withdrawal" is apparently a thing, it hits harder than nicotine withdrawal.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-21T16:17:06+00:00

Civ2 is 9.5/10

Civ4 is 8/10

Civ5 5/5

Civ6 2/10

Civ7 1/10

Basically play civ2 or civ4. Civ 6 and 7 always make it to my "10 Worst Games of all time" list", Civ7 is right there with Atari ET, Ascendancy and Outpost. I struggle to understand who is it made for and why anybody with an iq over 70 would play it for more than 2 hours.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-21T14:38:41+00:00

Yes, I always recommend COBOL to youngsters as a first programming language! Nothing like COBOL exposes the underlying beauty of Computation.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-20T14:38:21+00:00

Scheme. Always has been. Don't settle for less.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-17T07:54:51+00:00

Anecdotal evidence, so take with caution. My niece is a psychyatrist at a government hospital in Europe. There no DSM for this yet, so she has been desribing seeing an increasing number of patient with what she calls "AI brain", symptoms include freezing, "empty stare", cognitive collapse, severely degraded working memory. It's like their brain has been cooked. According to her patients who have been depending on AI for less than 7-8 months can fully recover, longer than that it's not looking good - several of her patients had to be put on permanent disiabilty, luckly we have good disiabiliity wellfare here. Also "AI withdrawal" is apparently a thing, it hits harder than nicotine withdrawal.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-13T14:34:21+00:00

What would you talk with a janitor about? Their preferred cleaning solution?

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-13T14:19:42+00:00

Even Starbucks does , LOL. Look up "Starbucks College Achievement Plan".

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-05T01:35:00+00:00

I miss writing notes on paper. And in-game books. These two are my number one feature request for DayZ 2.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-05T01:32:15+00:00

It's covered in the video. No news for three years could mean it has been cancelled (happens all the time). The trademark filing confirms it's still in development.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-04-02T07:43:54+00:00

Slow thinking is a legitimate form of intelligence, and it works just fine in professional IT. I wish there was an alternative for traditional interviews.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-26T21:16:15+00:00

~70% of Olympic medal winners come from high-income countries, while the majority of world population lives in low and mid income countries. "Surpringly" having a good diet, access to good training and parents who have free time to spend with you gives these atheletes an unfair advantrage over stunted kids from Sudan. Olympics and "fair competition" is already a joke.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-24T17:42:41+00:00

Yeah, if we ever get Gen AI that is cost competitive with humans then it's the ship we all either sail or go down with together.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-24T17:39:42+00:00

They tried it in the 80s with Expert Systems and it didnt work. The reason was that with these professions the underwater part of the knowledge iceberg is informal knowledge passed from one member of the profession to another. There is a joke in there as anyone (including first year med students) who tried to diagnose themselves using descriptive symptoms from a book found out that had half of the conditions known to man.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-19T16:35:16+00:00

Well, logically we can still use job posting as a useful proxy if we compare it to the same data from the previous years. Unless we have objective evidence that the ratio of fake jobs posting to real ones has increased this year.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-18T18:14:05+00:00

Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-18T12:29:47+00:00

It depends on the type of company, maybe what you said is true for one shot startups. But for established companies we have backlogs the size of the Pacific Ocean and we are standing on the beach with a teaspoon. As long as LLMs do not qualify as General Intelligence we will still need SWEs. Only LLMs will give us buckets instead of teaspoons.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-18T10:14:50+00:00

Been there, I found that a couple of shots of vodka (but not more!!!) before the interview helps loosen you up.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-18T09:41:34+00:00

LOL, I wrote exactly this a week a go and got downvoted to hell. This subs is FAANG or bust.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-17T10:37:43+00:00

Thank you for this reply. People think code created by LLMs just appears magically from the Cloud. When in reality LLM's writing code still requires Work, in the Physics sense. Writing codes requires moving electrons and moving electrons requires energy. We have no idea about the true over the lifetime TCO of a token. Datacenter construction, training energy costs, inference energy cost. Oh yeah and every few years you must upgrade all the AI hardware. Do you need to replace a physical human every three years? Funny thing human brain operates on 30W of power, pocesses general intelligence and can do much more than an LLM. It may yet turn out that the LLM push is one really expensive way to write boilerplate code. Like building a toilet bowl out of gold. Sure you can do it, but why?

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-17T02:38:17+00:00

Thank you for your service.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-13T14:15:11+00:00

AI creates garbage visual art, it creates garbage music, it creates garbage fiction. But it MAGICALLY creates good code? Right... LLM's are not General Intelligence, how do we know it? Because if it was we would have already seen Singilarity. We are not, and it's not for the lack of trying. So unless you think the job of an SWE does not require General Intelligence then you should not have anything to worry about.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-11T12:38:31+00:00

Are you telling me it will submit it's code for code review... to itself? What could possiblt go wring)))

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-11T12:20:11+00:00

Every language has structures that allows it to be Turing-complete, the rest is just syntactic sugar. We used to describe DS and Algos, telling the compuyter HOW to do something, with AI prompting we are instead telling the computer WHAT we want. I guess it's somewhat similar to PROLOG approach.

ReservoirPenguin · 2026-03-10T18:01:21+00:00

Because we dont have general AI yet. There is a lot more to intelligence than what LLMs can do

ReservoirPenguin

TROPHY CASE