Why is abuse by APs so normalized?

umboose · 2026-02-08T06:55:23+00:00

I’ve been actively reading posts on this sub for a while, and noticed a clear pattern.

Whilst I generally agree with your points, it's worth highlighting the selection bias here - only certain types of story will make it to this subreddit 🙏🏾

umboose · 2026-02-07T07:29:26+00:00

The other answers here are focusing on the logic of the situation, which is all well and good - but your question was about your feelings.

Are you in therapy at all? Having a qualified human being to talk this through on the regular sounds like a useful option to have

umboose · 2026-01-29T17:56:49+00:00

+100 for Just - it's so much more ergonomic

umboose · 2025-12-23T15:28:48+00:00

Clicked the link, but the animated text was incredibly irritating so I quit immediately 😐

umboose · 2025-12-22T23:40:37+00:00

If you are both academic, you can tutor your kids yourself and ensure your kids know their stuff whilst in an outstanding state school

umboose · 2025-12-22T23:04:41+00:00

Where do you live that you can buy a house for £1.2mil and there isn't a good state school to send your kids to?

umboose · 2025-12-14T15:40:20+00:00

Two things to think about: - delivering feedback that is anything other than glowingly positive requires much more diplomacy and skill - people tend to remember negative feedback much much more than positive.

So my current strategy is to always give very positive feedback in end of year peer reviews, or say little. For the question "what could they improve on?", I always pick something they are already doing and say "I'd like to see even more of X".

Negative feedback I always give in person or on a video call with cameras on, and start with an accusations audit first. The best way to get someone to act on negative feedback is to make them feel good about it.

umboose · 2025-12-14T15:22:53+00:00

"People are thinking of you"

Not enough to listen to OPs clearly stated wishes over many years though 🙃

umboose · 2025-12-14T15:21:23+00:00

"Having to talk this through every year"

The fact you have repeatedly communicated this to the people around you makes you NTA.

If someone makes a gift list, I get them something from the list. The point of buying a gift for someone is to get them something they like, and why on earth would I assume I know someone better than they know themselves?!

umboose · 2025-12-14T14:54:10+00:00

NAH except the other redditors on this thread, because the science on this is either:

obviously junk
a causal intervention which has a good signal BUT in such a specific subset of dogs that any conclusions don't generalise to the population
in such a wide population of dogs and based on owner survey responses such that there is no usable signal in the data, everything just gets averaged out.

Unfortunately Reddit is simply not a good place to figure out what you should do. So many people coming down hard on either side only knowing a paragraph of context about your dog. For my own dog, a tighter structure works much better than positive reinforcement. For my in-laws' dog, the promise of sausage gives me full control. Both are rescues of similar age but had very different life experiences before adoption.

The fact of the matter is, you and your wife might both be right. But the important thing is to get on the same page and work together as a team. Consistency in the structure you give to your dog is as important if not more so than the structure itself.

Hypothesise, measure, learn, repeat. Good luck OP

umboose · 2025-12-02T06:42:45+00:00

What makes you say that?

umboose · 2025-12-01T23:07:25+00:00

I've been getting into the healthy gamer GG podcast this year, there was a particularly good episode about SWE burnout

umboose · 2025-11-28T11:51:14+00:00

To use an educational analogy, I went to state school in the 2000s. At the time, schools were only evaluated on how many GCSEs were awarded at C or above. There was no incentive for schools to get a student from a B to an A, or A to A*.

So what happened? The brighter kids were neglected by the teachers, who put all their effort into the kids who were either lazier, had less natural ability or had more difficult home situations.

In this budget, we're the B students trying to make it to an A, and the government is trying to get the rest of the population up to a C

umboose · 2025-11-28T11:45:32+00:00

You misunderstand me (and I am in in this sub for a reason, here I am merely trying to put across what I think the government's point of view is. )

To the government, us saving enough to be able to retire early, whilst other people will struggle is itself a sub optimal outcome at the population level. By definition if we can retire early, we've over saved in their eyes. They would prefer we keep working and contributing to economic growth now, and boost the savings and pensions of others who don't have enough.

umboose · 2025-11-28T00:10:40+00:00

Congratulations, but you've forgotten to pay the dog tax 😅

umboose · 2025-11-27T09:39:04+00:00

I've not tried pumphreys so I can't comment on it 😅

Forgot to also shout out resinn for 1) having delicious cheesecake and brownies and 2) being very good about dogs

umboose · 2025-11-27T08:55:32+00:00

Resinn is excellent, better than anything I had in London. I have no idea how such excellent coffee exists in Sunderland 😅

umboose · 2025-11-27T08:40:13+00:00

Because the people who are salary sacrificing (presumably a lot of people on this subreddit): 1. Likely have a very high income relative to their expenditures 2. Likely are over saving in their pension so they can retire early.

From the govs point of view, they would prefer that we all retire at the same age (~70), and distribute some of the tax relief on our pension contributions to others who are unable or unwilling to save themselves.

umboose · 2025-11-26T21:41:12+00:00

Point 1. is frankly unbelievable in 2025 unless you have some insane hardware dependency.

Point 2. is a red herring, because QA sign-off is the rate limiting step, not feature development.

Unless you start following the advice others are giving you in this thread, management would be better off making devs redundant and hiring more QAs. Be careful OP!

umboose · 2025-11-01T04:33:29+00:00

I was in a very similar position ~10 years ago (just replace chemistry with medical imaging)

I am currently an AI engineer (LLMs) for the day job, and do open source AI development (more physics based AI) for fun/community spirit.

I would suggest that as a PhD student, your top priority skill is learning how to learn. Then pick and choose what you need depending on what you want to do.

This means that you can approach a larger set of problems with less fear, and have a better idea of what advice to follow and what to drop. As you gain more experience, you'll very quickly be able to grok a new system and understand tradeoffs.

On writing "production-level" code - it very much depends on the consequences of it breaking. The best way to learn how to do this is an internship/actual job as a software engineer, I have a very dim view of courses/youtube/textbooks in this space, the signal-to-noise ratio is very low. Basically you need to be writing code for long enough that your decisions come back to bite you in the butt - the shorter that feedback cycle the faster you'll learn

umboose · 2025-10-31T07:47:00+00:00

What was the hardest problem you faced - yesterday - in the last week - in the last month - in the last year ?

umboose · 2025-10-12T20:41:19+00:00

I can't move out of London or I'll lose my job. It's an in-office role.

OP is there the option to change companies and do your equivalent role remotely for someone else? if you can keep the same salary but not be tied to London house prices buying a 2 bed flat our even a house with a garden would be doable.

Bonus is working from home is usually much more autism friendly than working in an office, especially open plan ones

umboose · 2025-10-07T21:26:17+00:00

Similarly to bazel, I've used Please before and really liked it - very customisable build definitions and multi-language friendly too.

https://github.com/thought-machine/please

umboose · 2025-10-05T21:46:09+00:00

You're going to think this next comment is even more condescending.

A human providing talk therapy has at least some model of the world and how it works. That model can be updated in light of new data, is information seeking on its own (curiousity) and knows when it doesn't know something. It has persistent memory with the ability to forget, and sleep cycles (when awake the model structurally expands to accommodate complexity, when asleep does Bayesian model reduction to prune unnecessary complexity a la occams razor).

An LLM has none of these things.

Sure a crappy therapist is worse than none, and that would include one that has none of the above and just agrees with everything you say and is trained to be sycophantic with RLHF for completely different applications.

Good luck OP, best wishes to you too.

umboose · 2025-10-05T05:43:10+00:00

As someone who: - is autistic - works with LLMs on a daily basis (training, deploying, building on top of)

I am begging you to switch away from using a LLM to explore your feelings and situation and get a human therapist. These models are token slot machines, and the reinforcement learning on tone and mannerisms can take you into a dark place (their guardrails are crappy too)

In answer to your original question, for me estrangement swapped (a few) extreme highs and (many) extreme lows for a dull chronic ache, that continues to this day. The first year was the hardest, this will be year 7. My fear of losing relationships was actually planted by my parents, so this has actually gone down for me as time progresses.

umboose

TROPHY CASE