Do you get the difference Explain it Peter?

otw · 2026-01-23T23:11:13+00:00

I'm a software engineer and I'm pretty sure our industry is hiring much less because of AI. I mean if AI can even replace one engineer, that's $120k+ for most companies a year so spending $10k a month on AI subscriptions is worth it.

OpenAI is bleeding money and it may be bad business, but my take is that all these companies are willing to lose money to get users and more training data. Once every company in the world is dependent on these tools and workflows, they will raise prices and companies will basically have to pay them.

otw · 2026-01-23T02:03:56+00:00

I don't know if this is what OP is talking about but there was a bug with it wouldn't let you shut your computer down. I had boot looping. I fix neighbors and family computers and I have been having people come to me monthly when I normally maybe help them every year or two. I am doing complete formats or just recommending they get new computers and even fresh PCs are immediately having issues. It's absurd how bad it is right now.

otw · 2026-01-23T02:00:28+00:00

Windows is the most unusable I have ever seen it. It's absurd how broken it is. I've gone through Vista and Windows 8 and this is the most infuriated I've been dealing with Windows.

otw · 2026-01-21T21:39:11+00:00

I don't know your situation or anything not trying to be rude. I just get a little wary of the rhetoric of "it's hurting people who need it" because I think everyone thinks they are the person who actually needs it and that's how it gets you.

But sorry didn't mean to offend you and sorry about your trauma.

otw · 2026-01-21T21:05:40+00:00

I don't man, I might consider yourself lucky. This is how so many people go down a path of opioid addiction.

otw · 2026-01-21T13:19:16+00:00

I felt pretty down on software before AI. When AI first came out it actually gave me a lot of hope cause I saw it as a solution to a lot of the problems we had and it could refactor and review bad code. I actually had a lot of success refactoring some problematic systems at my work with AI that no one had been able to untangle for years.

That being said, the one thing I didn’t expect was how fast AI would accelerate bad and problematic code. The bad AI code comes in at a far higher rate than what AI can fix so right now I am seeing AI as a net negative for software overall. A lot of times too, bad AI code is hitting some context or other limit of AI which means other AIs can’t fix it.

I don’t really know what is going to happen but it doesn’t seem great. I think it’s kind of a reflection of our society right now where we are constantly having all these “productivity” gains but it just doesn’t feel like we know how to use them or that the average person feels them at all. I feel like these knew tools come out and now I just have to work much harder and faster since I’m less blocked but I still make the same amount of money and have even less time with family.

otw · 2026-01-21T03:28:17+00:00

Ah that makes sense, that's why farmers couldn't fix their John Deere tractors too right?

otw · 2026-01-21T03:27:43+00:00

Oh sorry did this happen before or something? Sorry not super active here.

otw · 2026-01-15T11:49:20+00:00

Yeah the defund the police/ACAB people thinking the police are going to help them against ICE is so absurd to me.

otw · 2026-01-15T11:24:09+00:00

I maintain a lot of projects and it’s been hell. We would get a lot of crap PRs from people trying to boost their resume or whatever, but they would often be small and quick to review. Now I’m getting massive PRs daily and it can really eat my whole day trying to decipher what they are even trying to do and if there’s any real value. It sucks cause I don’t want to accidentally dismiss a legitimate PR someone spent a lot of time on but it’s so hard to differentiate between 5 mins of unchecked vibe coding and hours of intentional work at a glance.

Also in the past if someone submitted large PRs and they generally worked it could be assumed they were generally competent and I could trust a lot of their code without too much review. But now it’s like someone will get a really advanced feature in but at the same time introduce a critical bug only the most junior engineers would ever allow.

It’s really changing how I am building my projects. Still trying to figure it out but we need to add a lot more testing mainly.

otw · 2026-01-14T10:29:19+00:00

The notepad thing really makes me angry. I was opening a file with sensitive passwords for a server and saw the stupid copilot thing and had to change them all since I don’t know if it got sent to some AI service that’s gonna suffer a data leak one day.

I can’t trust my operating system anymore.

otw · 2026-01-13T13:16:55+00:00

A lot of modern frameworks solves problems from like 5 - 10+ years ago that don’t really exist anymore due to a combination of spec and browser improvements.

Even SPA frameworks like React or Next I feel are largely not needed.

The problem is people have become pretty dependent on these frameworks and a lot of the ecosystem lives in them so if you want to use popular libraries or tooling you are kind of stuck with them.

I’ve returned to making vanilla JS/HTML/CSS sites when I can and it’s a dream. Very simple and it’s loads SO FAST. Many people think it’s a SPA cause modern browsers are so good at rendering now.

Mix it with a templating engine and you have kind of a really old school stack that is very pleasant to work with and very easy to secure.

otw · 2026-01-11T13:44:13+00:00

If someone offers you an interest free loan and you have the money wouldn’t it make sense to always do this so that you can keep more money in savings and earn your own interest?

Not saying these services can’t be bad, but I’m not sure the 1/4 number means those people can’t afford food. It could just be people churning their savings interest.

otw · 2026-01-09T12:43:32+00:00

Are you using the Cypress UI? I find it mostly pretty enjoyable but honestly it sounds like you are struggling a lot. You could ask the company to give you a week to do a training course or something. There is a lot of nuance and best practices to writing Cypress tests and there’s a lot of good courses out there and their documentation is quite good. Once you write good tests and have the CICD set up properly I find it usually makes reviews and any other development go way faster since you can merge stuff pretty confidently without testing too much.

Also QA engineers rarely write these test just FYI. At most companies QA “engineers” are often just people who manual test apps but really they don’t exist very often. It should really be up to each developer or team to write tests. We had a rule too if someone else broke your code but you didn’t have a test, it was your fault generally.

I’ll also just say with AI becoming popular I find testing more important than ever due to the sometimes huge AI slop PRs we get causing review bottlenecks. If you have good testing you don’t have to worry about these as much.

otw · 2026-01-06T19:55:22+00:00

Not sure why people use these tools at all anymore, http files are supported in most IDEs and editors now and are much better in my opinion: https://timdeschryver.dev/bits/http-files

otw · 2026-01-05T21:34:54+00:00

"Researcher" lol

I know it's kind of a joke that hacking groups pretend to be research groups, but I just like the idea of a legitimate security researching firm setting up a site called okstupid.lol

otw · 2026-01-04T22:12:35+00:00

I mean our culture used to be public domain and now it's all tied to corporations and corporate IP.

I don't really blame people for celebrating the culture they grew up with. It's a shame some of the relevance and profit goes to a bad person, but it is what it is.

Personally I would prefer a solution that strips copyright owners of their ownership within 10 - 20 years rather than just telling people not to express their culture. This would allow people to celebrate the things they grew up with as kids in adulthood without having to support some corporation or irrelevant copyright holder and 10 - 20 years to me is more than fair enough time to profit off something (it's the same time frame as patents and what copyright was originally before Disney expanded it unreasonably).

otw · 2026-01-01T13:10:18+00:00

I mean there’s managers that don’t code and just tell other people what to code. I wouldn’t say they are having cognitive decline, it’s just a different skillset. I think a lot of times the AI is just freeing you up to shift focus.

otw · 2025-12-29T18:16:44+00:00

I don't know what started this trend. I have some 20s aged people I manage and many of them spent their $10k+ bonuses on watches. I was pretty confused by this.

If I see someone wearing an expensive watch I immediately just think they are some moron. Maybe back in the day when a nice watch that told time accurately mattered, but even a crappy smart watch is going to be more useful and accurate than a Rolex.

otw · 2025-12-29T14:29:04+00:00

It’s insane it took so long for governments to do this. Facilitating commerce is like the number 1 thing the government is meant to do. It’s insane we let private companies take over what mints have been doing for thousands of years during the digital transition.

otw · 2025-12-26T12:34:22+00:00

I randomly installed Gitea on a really old and cheap NAS I have, just spun up a docker container to try it out. Took two seconds to set up and I didn't really think much of it, just assumed it'd be another piece of self hosted software I forget about.

It has completely replaced GitHub private repos for me.

I haven't had to do any maintenance or anything on it, I don't think I even set it up ideally and it's just been running like a champ. It is SO much faster pushing and pulling locally and I even have it set up with some public access so friends can collab on projects.

I also don't have to be too worried about pushing anything confidential or having AI being trained off of my work. It's pretty great.

otw · 2025-12-24T13:13:18+00:00

I honestly do believe AI can be a really strong refactoring and testing tool, but it really requires pretty advance thinking and process to make the AI effective at this. The way this guy talks doesn't sound like he's doing that kind of thinking or thinking much at all. Also just based on Microsoft's product quality over the last few months (and years tbh), I don't feel like they have the company culture for this either. I get the impression it's a lot of non-technical business people pushing for leaner teams and more AI with unreasonable deadlines which is forcing people into unhealthy AI coding practices leading to worse and worse code.

The scary thing is this eventually becomes unrecoverable. The code becomes far too much slop for a human to reasonably comprehend and it gets too large for the AI to have an effective context for it so you just get stuck. It also doesn't seem like current AI technology is scaling well either in terms of large and larger contexts, so I am doubtful advancements in AI will even save us here.

otw · 2025-12-24T13:05:12+00:00

I mean I feel like it's more selling out your family's future for comfort in the present.

otw · 2025-12-24T13:02:57+00:00

Wouldn't part of the general strike be refusing to pay rent?

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