There are definitely downsides to office work, but this post really implies to me that you don't actually personally know anyone who works in the trades. The amount of body pain/damage, extreme conditions, and ridiculous scheduling (as in, last minute decisions that you must be on site at 5:30am the next day, not as in overall hours) are pretty much incomparable to tech work.
I didn't say they were comparable. But there is a common refrain that every single person who works in the trades has their body basically destroyed by the time they're 40, which isn't remotely true, and that nobody who works in an office (or a number that is essentially a rounding error) has any physical effects directly caused by that, which also isn't remotely true.
Am I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?
I’ve definitely had in the UX side a situation where the PM/Owner types asked me to introduce a delay in the “disabled button with loading spinner” such that the user sees it for a visible amount of time because our API was too fast for their taste.
Yes similar here, async operation that could be quick enough not to warrant a busy state, but not all the time. So rather than show a flash of busy state, that makes the ui look janky when the operation is quick, show the busy state for a minimum amount of time
For one of the supermarket chains I frequent, from me handing over the single item I'm purchasing I can be walking away within 20s. They scan the item, then a loyalty barcode on my phone and finally I tap my iPhone which has my bank card loaded onto it.
Basically, they don't have any significant bottlenecks, POS hardware + software is responsive with an efficient UI for the operator, and the card machine is a wired connection to a router with a fibre uplink.
With the speed of modern internet connections, I'd honestly think something were wrong if it took a couple of seconds. I'd expect almost instantaneous results. What amazes me every time is the amount of things happening in that short amount of time though. The amount of endpoints/channels the signal has to go through to go from "I want to buy this" to "You bought it!".
I agree that purchases on e-commerce sites are virtually never this fast; but I have used some extremely fast physical payment terminals (e.g., Square): sometimes it seems like the transaction is sub 300ms, which I find very impressive given the complexity of payment processing.
That was terrible, I used to always turn it off. It's like speaking one word and the person interrupting you based on the prefix you had uttered so far... every single darn word. Imagine writing "how do I kill" and having it assume you meant a living being rather than a program.
I think it was a poor choice of example, because people will expect payment to be involved. They’re actually just inserting a row into a database for the order; presumably payment is to be handled out-of-band.
What about the fact that "What is the weird band from the early 2000s in Michigan who wore colored ties?" could be a bar trivia question (challenging enough to recall to be fun), while "Who are Tally Hall?" could not
I overall agree with this article. I was mostly raised in the US but spent time from ages 7-9 in Finland, where I took the metro to school alone, so I see myself reflected in this statistic:
> For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.
However, I feel the need to push back against this small addition to the main point:
> It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom.
The article is about parents and parenting-culture _restricting_ a child's freedom, especially during important developmental stages.
Trigger warnings in a college classroom are for adults to casually and quickly let other adults know when content might trigger their PTSD (not simply discomfort) so they can make an informed decision about attending a lecture or not, given that it simply might not be worth their time if they won't be able to listen and learn in a clear-minded state. There are no restrictions to anyone's ability to make these decisions, simply a bit more information being provided up front to allow one to do so.
It feels rare to find authors online who both see the danger of raising a generation of children who are never taught that they are allowed to take care of themselves, but who also recognize the value of being kind enough to warn people when you are going to discuss sensitive topics in a lecture, harming nobody in the process.
edit: In fact, thinking a bit more about it, one of the large points the author makes is that consuming either traditional or social media, which is biased towards showing us negative content related to crime, violence, tragedy, etc, will prime parents to over-protect their children. And in the same article, claims that being warned about content that might provoke an intense emotional reaction is an overstep.
Maybe if these parents were also warned that "hey, I know you're just trying to catch up to the news, but reading about a child abduction 2 states over is actually just going to spike your cortisol and make you a worse parent", it would help a generation of parents self-select the media they consume, and help them avoid this trend?
I looked through and found one rejected video from Montreal. It's crazy to me, to reject someone with a French accent. It's how people talk here! Many consider themselves perfectly bilingual and grew up speaking both languages. Even the more Anglo-Quebecois have a very specific vocabulary and accent heavily influenced by French.
I used to visit French speaking Canada when I was in college. I found it interesting to see people who could switch between an Anglo-Canadian accent and a French-Canadian accent, to my ear sounding native at both. This wasn't everyone obviously, but there were people like that.
It was a not-particularly-amusing joke that people honk because doing so helps the light change. It doesn’t, of course, but I used to work at a building at the intersection of Bush and Sansome (I think), the Standard Oil Building, and every day at 5 PM the honking would put Bombay to shame.
I agree with your comment. While reading the article, I had sympathy for the author, but also unintendedly pictured them as a mix of all of the "wizard" seniors I have worked with over the years. These are the type of people who when pair programming, constantly point out what they perceive as problems with your development setup, IDE, keyboard-macro skills, lack of tiling layout, etc etc. Not to mention what they will suggest on your actual PRs.
At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.
> constantly point out what they perceive as problems with...
Yeah, screw those people. I count myself as lucky that I've only worked with 1 person who was seriously CRITICAL of the way other's worked... beyond just code quality. However, I always enjoyed a good discussion about the various differences in how people worked, as long as they could accept there's no "right" way. That's what the article brought up for me, and I wonder how much that happens these days.
One of my fondest memories was sitting around with a few other devs after work, and one had started learning Go pretty soon after its public release... and he would show us some new, cool thing he was playing around with. Of course those kind of organic things stopped with remote work, and I wonder how much THAT has played into the loss of identity?
> At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.
In every pursuit there are secretly 3 different communities. Those who love doing the thing, those who love tinkering with the gear, those who love talking about it.
HackerNews and the internet in general are dominated by people who like to nerd out about the gear of programming (IDEs, text editors, languages, agent setups, …) and the people who like to talk about programming. The people doing most of the work are off on the side too busy doing the thing to be noticed.
I came from embedded, where I wasn't able to use agents very effectively for anything other than quick round trip iterative stuff. They were still really useful, but I definitely could never envision just letting an agent run unattended.
But I recently switched domains into vaguely "fullstack web" using very popular frameworks. If I spend a good portion of my day going back and forth with an agent, working on a detailed implementation plan that spawns multiple agents, there is seemingly no limit* to the scope of the work they are able to accurately produce. This is because I'm reading through the whole plan and checking for silly gotchyas and larger implementation mistakes before I let them run. It's also great because I can see how the work can be parallelized at certain parts, but blocked at others, and see how much work can be parallelized at once.
Once I'm ready, I can usually let it start with not even the latest models, because the actual implementation is so straightforwardly prompted that it gets it close to perfectly right. I usually sit next to it and validate it while it's working, but I could easily imagine someone letting it run overnight to wake up to a fresh PR in the morning.
Don't get me wrong, it's still more work that just "vibing" the whole thing, but it's _so_ much more efficient than actually implementing it, especially when it's a lot of repetitive patterns and boilerplate.
* I think the limit is how much I can actually keep in my brain and spec out in a well thought out manner that doesn't let any corner cases through, which is still a limit, but not necessarily one coming from the agents. Once I have one document implemented, I can move on to the next with my own fresh mental context which makes it a lot easier to work.
The amount of boilerplate people talk about seems like the fault of these big modern frameworks honestly. A good system design shouldn't HAVE so much boilerplate. Think people would be better off simplifying and eliminating it deterministically before reaching for the LLM slot machine.
I'm not so sure I agree. To me it's somewhat magical that I can write even this amount of code and have this stuff just magically work on pretty much every platform via docker, the web platform, etc. Maybe this again is me having started with embedded, but I am blown away at the ratio of actual code to portability we currently have.
