I just launched a 10-Bit Video Thumbnail Provider for Windows.
Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.
When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.
I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.
I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.
I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.
It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management.
Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation.
> React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
Having worked in both over the years the main technical thing React had going for it over Vue, in my humble opinion, was much better Typescript support. Otherwise they are both so similar it comes down to personal preference.
However 0 of the typescript projects (front and back end) I've worked one (unless I was there when they started) used strict mode so the Typescript support was effectively wasted.
No, I was also around when React was new, moving to it from tangles of jQuery and Backbone. I absolutely know React brought several lasting innovations, in particular the component model, and I do appreciate that step change in front-end development. But other frameworks have taken those ideas and iterated on them to make them more performant, less removed from the platform, and generally nicer to work with. That is where we are today.
I agree that there was a period where many organizations did rewrite their apps from scratch, many of them switching to React, but I think very few did it ”every couple of years”, and I think very few are doing it at all today (at least not because of hype - of course there might always be other reasons you do a big rewrite). We should not confuse excitement about new technologies for widespread adoption, especially not in replacing existing code in working codebases.
I read parent's comment as an assertion that the current "fast-moving JavaScript world" expects everyone to rewrite their app. Personally I've never seen this, but since React became popular ~13+ years ago, I struggle to believe this has actually been true for others in any meaningful way.
Any odd blurring, distortion, or vignetting you might find around the edges could be caused by anamorphic lenses. Vignetting is often also added in post.
Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?
I'm very interested.
In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.
These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts that save me time here and there. That's it.
And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.
That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in less time than it takes to review for expected errors.
That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling codebase feature packed software packages that define the modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any one user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given day. Software is written to accommodate every need every user could have in one package. Then the users just use the small slice that accommodates their specific needs.
I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used daily by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my company is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We are a tiny company that does old school manufacturing.
To give a quick general example, Betty uses Excel to manage payroll. A list of employees, a list of wages, a list of hours worked (which she copys from the time clock software .csv that she imports to excel).
Excel is a few million LOC program and costs ~$10/mo. Betty needs maybe 2k LOC to do what she uses excel for. Something an LLM can do easily, a python GUI wrapper on an SQLite DB. And she would be blown away at how fast it is, and how it is written for her use specifically.
How software is written and how it is used will change to accommodate LLMs. We didn't design cars to drive on horse paths, we put down pavement.
The Romans put down paved roads to make their horse paths more reliable.
But yes, I hope we get away from the giant conglomeration of everything, ESPECIALLY the reality of people doing 90% of their business inside a Google Chrome widow. Move towards the UNIX philosophy of tiny single-purpose programs.
> I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used daily by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my company is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We are a tiny company that does old school manufacturing.
OK, great.
> That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling codebase feature packed software packages that define the modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any one user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given day. Software is written to accommodate every need every user could have in one package. Then the users just use the small slice that accommodates their specific needs.
With all due respect, the fact that you made a few small programs to help with your tasks is wonderful but this last statement alone rather disqualifies your expertise to make an assessment on software engineering in general.
There's a great number of reasons why codebases get large. Complex problems inherently come with complexity and scale in both code and integrations. You can choose to move the complexity around but never fully get rid of it.
A lot of people are deeply invested in these things being better than they really are. From the OpenAI's and Google's spending $100s of billions EACH developing LLMs to VC backed startups promising their "AI agent" can replace entire teams of white collar employees. That's why your experience matches mine and every other developer I personally know but you see comments everywhere making much grander claims.
I agree, but I'd add that it's not just the tech giants who want them to be better than they are, but also non-programmers.
IMO LLMs are actually pretty good at writing small scripts. First, it's much more common for a small script to be in the LLM's training data, and second, it's much easier to find and fix a bug. So the LLM actually does allow a non-programmer to write correct code with minimal effort (for some simple task), and then they are blown away thinking writing software is a solved problem. However, these kinds of people have no idea of the difference between a hundred line script where an error is easily found and isn't a big deal and a million line codebase where an error can be invisible and shut everything down.
Worst of all is when the two sides of tech-giants and non-programmers meet. These two sides may sound like opposites but they really aren't. In particular, there are plenty of non-programmers involved at the C-level and the HR levels of tech companies. These people are particularly vulnerable to being wowed by LLMs seemingly able to do complex tasks that in their minds are the same tasks their employees are doing. As a result, they stop hiring new people and tell their current people to "just use LLMs", leading to the current hiring crisis.
TBH, this website in the last few years has attracted an increasingly non-technical audience. And the field, in general, has attracted a lot of less experienced folks that don't understand the implications of what they're doing. I don't mean that as a diss-- but just a reflection of reality.
Indeed, even codex (and i've been using it prior to this release) is not remotely at the level of even a junior engineer outside of a set of tasks.
Occasionally. I find that there is a certain category of task that I can hand over to an LLM and get a result that takes me significantly less time to clean up than it would have taken me to write from scratch.
A recent example from a C# project I was working in. The project used builder classes that were constructed according to specified rules, but all of these builders were written by hand. I wanted to automatically generate these builders, and not using AI, just good old meta-programming.
Now I knew enough to know that I needed a C# source generator, but I had absolutely no experience with writing them. Could I have figured this out in an hour or two? Probably. Did I write a prompt in less than five minutes and get a source generator that worked correctly in the first shot? Also yes. I then spent some time cleaning up that code and understanding the API it uses to hook into everything and was done in half an hour and still learnt something from it.
You can make the argument that this source generator is in itself "boilerplate", because it doesn't contain any special sauce, but I still saved significant time in this instance.
I've built a number of personal data-oriented and single purpose tools in Replit. I've constrained my ambitions to what I think it can do but I've added use cases beyond my initial concept.
In short, the tools work. I've built things 10x faster than doing it from scratch. I also have a sense of what else I'll be able to build in a year. I also enjoy not having to add cycles to communicate with external contributors -- I think, then I do, even if there's a bit of wrestling. Wrangling with a coding agent feels a bit like "compile, test, fix, re-compile". Re-compiling generally got faster in subsequent generations of compiler releases.
My company is building internal business functions using AI right now. It works too. We're not putting that stuff in front of our customers yet, but I can see that it'll come. We may put agents into the product that let them build things for themselves.
I get the grumpiness & resistance, but I don't see how it's buying you anything. The puck isn't underfoot.
I think it all depends on your platform and use cases. In my experience AI tools work best with Python and JS/Typescript and some simple use cases (web apps, basic data science etc). Also, I've found they can be of great help with refactorings and cases when you need to do something similar to already existing code, but with a twist or change.
What you're missing is how to use the tools properly. With solid documentation, good project management practices, a well-organized code structure and tests, any junior engineer should be able to read up on your codebase, write linted code following your codebase style, verify it via tests and write you a report of what was done, challenges faced etc. State of the art coding agents will do that at superhuman speeds.
If you haven't set things up properly (important info lives only in people’s heads / meetings, tasks dont have clear acceptance criteria, ...) then you aren't ready for Junior Developers yet. You need to wait until your Coding Agents are at Senior level.
ChatGPT is good for asking questions about languages, SDKs, and APIs, or generating boilerplate, but it's useless if you want to give an AI a ticket and for it to raise PRs for you.
This is where you need agentic solutions like Codex which will be far more useful because they will actually have access to your codebase and a dev environment where they can test and debug changes.
They still do really dumb things, but a lot of this can be avoided if you prompt well and give it the right types of problems to solve.
In my experience at the moment there's a sweet spot with these agentic coding platforms which makes them useful for semi-complicated tasks – assuming you prompt well they can generate 90% of the code you need, then you just need to spend the extra 10% fixing it up before it's ready for prod.
Tasks too simple (a few lines) it's a waste of time. You spend longer prompting and going back and forth with the agent than it would take to just make the change yourself.
Then obviously very complicated tasks, especially tasks that require some thought around architecture and performance, coding agents really struggle with. Less because they can't do it, but because for certain problems simply meeting ACs is far less important than how the ACs are being met. Ideally here you want to get the architecture right first, then once that's in place you can break down the remaining work for the AI to pick up.
you might be missing small things to create more guardrails like effective prompting and maintaining what's been done using files, carefully controlling context, committing often in-between changes, but largely, you're not missing anything. i use AI constantly, but always for subtasks of a larger complicated thing that my brain has thought through. and often use higher cost models to help me abstractly think through complex things/point me in the right directions.
personally, i've always operated in a codebase in a way that i _need_ to understand how things work for me to be productive and make the right decisions. I operate the same way with AI. every change is carefully reviewed, if it's dumb, i make it redo it and explain why it's dumb. and if it gets caught in a loop, i reset the context and try to reframe the problem. overall, i'm definitely more productive, but if you truly want to be hands off--you're in for a very bad time. i've been there.
lastly, some codebases don't work well with AI. I was working on a problem that was a bit more novel/out there and no model could solve it. Just yapped endlessly about these complex, very potentially smart sounding solutions that did absolutely nothing. went all the way to o1-pro. the craziest part to me was the fact that across claude, deepseek and openai, they used the same specific vernacular for this particular problem which really highlights how a lot of these models are just a mish-mash of the same underlying architecture/internet data. some of these models use responses from other models for their training data, which to me is like incest. you won't get good genetical results
I tried using Gemini 2.5 Pro for a side-side-project, seemed like a good project to explore LLMs and how they'd fit into my workflow. 2-3 weeks later it's around 7k loc of Python auto-gerating about 35k loc of C from JSON spec.
This project is not your typical Webdev project, so maybe that's an interesting case-study. It takes a C-API spec in JSON, loads and processes it in Python and generates a C-library that turns a UI marked up YAML/JSON into C-Api calls to render that UI. [1]
The result is pretty hacky code (by my design, can't/won't use FFI) that's 90% written by Gemini 2.5 Pro Pre/Exp but it mostly worked. It's around 7k lines of Python that generate a 30-40k loc C-library from a JSON LVGL-API-spec to render an LVGL UI from YAML/JSON markup.
I probably spent 2-3 weeks on this, I might have been able to do something similar in maybe 2x the time but this is about 20% of the mental overhead/exhaustion it would have taken me otherwise. Otoh, I would have had a much better understanding of the tradeoffs and maybe a slightly cleaner architecture if I would have to write it. But there's also a chance I would have gotten lost in some of the complexity and never finished (esp since it's a side-project that probably no-one else will ever see).
What worked well:
* It mostly works(!). Unlike previous attempts with Gemini 1.5 where I had to spend about as much or more time fixing than it'd have taken me to write the code. Even adding complicated features after the fact usually works pretty well with minor fixing on my end.
* Lowers mental "load" - you don't have to think so much about how to tackle features, refactors, ...
Other stuff:
* I really did not like Cursor or Windsurf - I half-use VSCode for embedded hobby projects but I don't want to then have another "thing" on top of that. Aider works, but it would probably require some more work to get used to the automatic features. I really need to get used to the tooling, not an insignificant time investment. It doesn't vibe with how I work, yet.
* You can generate a *significant* amount of code in a short time. It doesn't feel like it's "your" code though, it's like joining a startup - a mountain of code, someone else's architecture, their coding style, comment style, ... and,
* there's this "fog of code", where you can sorta bumble around the codebase but don't really 100% understand it. I still have mid/low confidence in the changes I make by hand, even 1 week after the codebase has largely stabilized. Again, it's like getting familiar with someone else's code.
* Code quality is ok but not great (and partially my fault). Probably depends on how you got to the current code - ie how clean was your "path". But since it is easier to "evolve" the whole project (I changed directions once or twice when I sort of hit a wall) it's also easier to end up with a messy-ish codebase. Maybe the way to go is to first explore, then codify all the requirements and start afresh from a clean slate instead of trying to evolve the code-base. But that's also not an insignificant amount of work and also mental load (because now you really need to understand the whole codebase or trust that an LLM can sufficiently distill it).
* I got much better results with very precise prompts. Maybe I'm using it wrong, ie I usually (think I) know what I want and just instruct the LLM instead of having an exploratory chat but the more explicit I am, the more closely the output is to what I'd like to see. I've tried to discuss proposed changes a few times to generate a spec to implement in another session but it takes time and was not super successful. Another thing to practice.
* A bit of a later realization, but modular code and short, self-contained modules are really important though this might depend on your workflow.
To summarize:
* It works.
* It lowers initial mental burden.
* But to get really good results, you still have to put a lot of effort into it.
* At least right now, it seems you will still eventually have to put in the mental effort at some point, normally it's "front-loaded" where you have to do the design and think about it hard, whereas the AI does all the initial work but it becomes harder to cope with the codebase once you reach a certain complexity. Eventually you will have to understand it though even if just to instruct the LLM to make the exact changes you want.
I feel things get even worse when you use a more niche language. I get extremely disappointed any time I try to get it do anything useful in Clojure. Even as a search engine, especially when asking it about libraries, these tools completely fail expectation.
I can't even fathom how frustrating such tools would be with poorly written confusing Clojure code using some niche dependency.
That being said, I can imagine a whole class of problems where this could succeed very well at and provide value. Then again, the type of problems that I feel these systems could get right 99% of the time are problems that a skilled developer could fix in minutes.
Lots missing here, but I had the same issues, it takes iteration and practice. I use claude code in terminal windows, and text expander to save explicit reminders that I have to inject super regularly because anthropic obscures access to system prompts.
For example, I have 3 to 8 paragraph long instructions I will place regularly about not assuming, checking deterministically etc. and for most things I have the agents write a report with a specific instruction set.
I pop the instructions into text expander so I just type - docs when saying go figure this out, and give me the path to the report when done.
They come back with a path, and I copy it and search vscode
It opens as an md and i use preview mode, its similar to a google doc.
And ill review it. always, things will be wrong, tons of assumptions, failures to check determistically, etc... but I see that in the doc and have it fix it. correct misunderstandings, update the doc until its perfect.
From there ill say add a plan in a table with status for each task based on this ( another text expander snippet with instructions )
And WHEN thats 100% right, Ill say implement and update as you go. The update as you go forces it to recognize and remember the scope of the task.
Greatest points of failure in the system is misalignment. Ethics teams got that right. It compounds FAST if allowed. you let them assume things, they state assumptions as facts, that becomes what other agents read and you get true chaos unchecked.
I started rebuilding claude code from scratch literally because they block us from accessing system prompts and I NEED these agents to stop lying to me about things that are not done or assumed, which highlights the true chaos possible when applied to system critical operations in governance or at scale.
I also built my own tool like codex for managing agent tasks and making this simpler, but getting them to use it without getting confused is still a gap.
Let me know if you have any other questions. I am performing the work of 20 Engineers as of today, rewrote 2 years of back end code that required a team of 2 engineers full time work in 4 weeks by myself with this system... so I am, I guess quite good at it.
I need to push my edges further into this latest tech, have not tried codex cli or the new tool yet.
Its a total of about 30 snippets, avg 6 paragraphs long, that I have to inject. for each role switch it goes through i have to re inject them.
its a pain but it works.
Even TDD it will hallucinate the mocks without management. and hallucinate the requirements. Each layer has to be checked atomically, but the text expander snippets done right can get it close to 75% right.
My main project faces 5000 users so I cant let the agents run freely, whereas with isolated projects in separate repos I can let them run more freely, then review in gitkraken before committing.
You could just use something like roo code with custom modes rather than manually injecting them. The orchestrator mode can decide on the other appropriate modes to use for subtasks.
You can customize the system prompts, baseline propmts, and models used for every single mode and have as many or as few as you want.
It may depend on what you consider boilerplate. I use them quite a bit for scripting outside of direct product code development. Essentially, AI coding tools have moved this chart's decision making math for me: https://xkcd.com/1205/ The cost to automate manual tasking is now significantly lower so I end up doing more of it.
The future of (public) transportation absolutely is driverless cars.
Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.
Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.
This “if cars were synced all would be well” fantasy assumes that the limited gains from scrunching won’t be a rounding error compared to the nearly unlimited additional trips that robots with infinite patience could start making.
Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”
If you want to get rid of the space taken up by 5 lane highways you need to convert roads into walkways for pedestrians, bike lanes, and bus lanes.
There can still exist space for cars but they need to be last in priority rather than the first, second, and third consideration cars have today when it comes to infrastructure.
I challenge anyone who seriously proposes this to first spend a month in a wheelchair. You quickly discover that your sense of scale and freedom of movement is largely a function of your physical capability and financial comfort.
I’m confused by this. Making public infrastructure people first, not car first, in your opinion would make things more difficult and expensive for handicap people?
The town I live in has many streets without sidewalks, and even the ones with sidewalks, many of those are entirely unsuitable for wheelchairs. Designing the streets to have pedestrian needs prioritized over cars would make the streets more handicap accessible not less.
People. As in people walking. My town is not designed in a way that is conducive towards walking. It isn’t safe, there is either no sidewalks, the sidewalks are in disrepair, are not wide enough for two people to pass each other, or set back far enough from the road to not feel like someone could run you over.
But the roads and dozens upon dozens of acres of parking lots? Perfectly fine. Millions spent every year maintaining them while sidewalks are neglected, there are no bike lanes or paths, and it could take twice as long to take a bus as it would be to just walk on the dangerous roads.
I just would think I should be able to walk to a restaurant or the library with my kid safely but I guess because I can do it in a car I should shut up and stop worrying about everybody getting excited about autonomous vehicles making infrastructure even more car centric.
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
Fair enough. But keep in mind cars only solve this last mile problem when there's high throughput roads connecting all possible trip starts / destinations. In American we have this infrastructure (at a great cost in city design and tax payers dollars), but cities in many other countries don't have this and don't want it either.
The future of public transportation is buses and trains. Any other solution that involves wrapping individual humans in a steel bubble 10x the size is woefully inefficient and wasteful. No matter how well they self drive.
You might be right. I saw a survey somewhere (can't find it now), where Americans were asked about working in factories.
Majority said that USA will be better if more people started working in factories, but a minority said USA will be better if /they/ worked in factories.
It's the whole "I got mine" mentality, where people are not willing to compromise on their own comfort for the greater good, yet they expect others to do so.
I don't think this is unique to the US, I think it's just very egregious there at the moment.
I love AVs, but It would do jack shit for traffic and the horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains. You still gotta have spaces for pedestrians, and cars still make cities ugly and unpleasant. Even electric autonomous ones. Tire friction still makes noise and pollutes the air with microplastics.
They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
> They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.
> horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains
This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.
I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.
Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...
Tire noise is still quite substantial - use the NIOSH noise meter app on your phone to compare the sound levels on a city block when an EV goes by compared to just bikes and people – and there’s a growing body of evidence that noise levels correlate with worse health and sleep for residents. EVs help, but it’s only partial.
I guess my question is - will Waymo really cause that much more tire noise vs today? Wherever car tires are making noise, I doubt Waymo is going to generate that much _additional_ noise.
But I think the real challenge isn't just the tech: it's the messy middle. Human drivers aren't going away anytime soon, and mixed traffic (humans + AVs) is where a lot of that theoretical efficiency gets lost
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.
We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.
(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)
If the car ahead of you is sharing visibility and braking data, you can drive on their bumper and stop when they stop.
If the car next to you is receiving route data, they can open a spot for you to get to your exit.
The benefit is large and NOT REQUIRED for normal operation. It's the easiest coordination problem in the world, because it's all upside and practically atomic.
> It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
A price tracker should be more sophisticated than just pulling a single listing from Amazon and dumping whatever price a random 3rd party reseller is listing it for.
The prices here are not indicative of the market at all. They're a single sample from the most egregious offender.
I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic.
Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.
What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.
Just roll with it.
The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.
We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.
It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.
>> What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I've come to this same conclusion, but rarely express it because it's possible I'm just different. And I'd even go one step further, I think what a lot of people say friendship is, isn't actually what human friendship is in practice. I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
Theoretical friendship:
- Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
- No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
- Timeless and immortal
- No effort involved
- Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
- Able to talk about every topic
Realistic friendship:
- Temporary at first, may or may not build into something more
- Often starts with a simple exchange of banter on common interests
- Multiple opinions/topics that are mutually avoided
- One person often tries harder, one person often values the relationship more
- The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
- Many will hit a point where they become more effort than they're worth and end (e.g. moving)
- Some will never grow out of one or two common things to bitch about
These don't represent real or Hollywood friendships at all.
> - Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
Friendships are relationships that stand the test of time and hardship. You work through problems, illnesses including mental health struggles, deaths, employment and money problems, family and relationship problems, legal problems, all sorts.
> - No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
There are obviously always mixed emotions, but generally you won't harbour serious ill will towards your friends. This is something you can work on, though, as jealousy and envy are personality traits that can be controlled. Healthy competition is a positive, though.
> - Timeless and immortal
Friendships change and sometimes have to be ended, even when you like the other person. I think this is quite common and almost a trope of Hollywood movies.
> - No effort involved
Short of family and maybe employment, friendships require the most work in life. This one is particularly baffling from a Hollywood perspective, as going a friend in need is like the all-time Hollywood trope.
> - Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
Obviously this isn't true, but this isn't portrayed either. Flawed characters are the only compelling characters in Hollywood.
> - Able to talk about every topic
Again, changing the uncomfortable topic trope is an ultra-trope.
Your "realistic friendship" section fits acquaintances rather than friends.
>I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
I think some self-reflection is in order here, as this is projection.
The comment you replied to isn't about whether friendships are transactional. They detailed a long list of ways that your theoretical and "realistic" friendships are bad and unrealistic definitions. If you didn't have friends closer to your first definition in most ways than your second, you haven't had a close friend, which isn't something to be shamed over but is something to consider.
> Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on?
Rather than be defensive, it was designed to shock you out of your current thought patterns on friendship, because they are almost delusional. Neither movie idealised friends nor real-life friendships have any of the characteristics you describe, and that is distorting your view of the world.
Pretending real friendship is a Hollywood myth is self-selecting yourself out of one of the most rewarding aspects of life. Don't do it to yourself.
> The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class,
Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends.
No, you're misreading the tone here. It's more gentle paternal nudging.
Don't let confirmation bias mislead you into a lonely life, especially not based on a study on somecollege students.
I know it's more comforting to believe real friendships exist only in fiction rather than admit you haven't experienced it, but in the long run, this belief only hurts you.
>The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
My best friend of 30 years now met me because I distributed warez in Junior High. He hung around because I had something useful and wanted to maintain a relationship with me. This grew into something more meaningful
With respect, I think this is quite a sad and revealing comment, but your Hollywood definition of a friend fits my friends. I wonder if you maybe never experienced friendship but rather just acquaintances.
I’m 40. I didn’t throw down for my friends when I was 19, but I support those same friends through divorces, cancer, deaths now. They’ll do the same for me.
Some friends are closer than family. That’s luck, but also intention.
My best friend asks me what I had for lunch on random days. Sometimes I get drunk and message him how I was reminiscing about the good times together. Things don’t have to be as complex as you think. Just appreciating the simple stuff might go long way.
>The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
The article follows similar lines, but I feel "forcing friendships" just leads to shallow "friendships" with little meaning. In fact so many modern friendships are sustained by small talk, which Carl Jung derides as meaningless..
> If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.
Friendships that started in 20s often include this kind of dynamic. Friendships that started in 30s at least talk the talk. In 40s I can't imagine we would bother. I haven't experienced life beyond that but the trend of "evaluating friendships against the expectations of our 20s" sure seems like a losing proposition.
Have I been watching the wrong movies? Because from my perspective Hollywood's depiction of friends is a rather sorry benchmark - most depictions are of exemplarily bad friends.
I think what everyone wants to do with all this postulating and explaining is avoid the fact that it is hard and takes time and is awkward and there's no clear metric of success. But still worth it, somehow. Like life.
That's pathetic thinking. It's inoffensive until someone turns the keys.
Plane accidents often occur by sabotage or failure of multiple systems.
There has been an interplay and "intellectual curiosity" from both movie studios and internet giants on online personas and social groups. They even married recently!
This bait and switch of blaming the other will backfire.
A 30 year old engineer with 6 years of industry experience should know what XML is.
This isn't a generational gap. I would argue that in a large sample of other 30 year old engineers with 6 years of experience that most of them would know what XML is.
45 years old here with a Computer Science degree. I've mostly avoided having to deal with XML, thankfully. Despite having to deal with it on occasion, I'd say I barely know about it.
I've really changed my perspective on this type of thing as I approach 50.
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
But like in art and so also in programming you can definitely strive for perfection.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
As an Artist and an Engineer, too many engineers are perfectionist in a reality where it doesn't exist. To the people here who quote artists and works of art as if they are "perfect"... you. were. not. there. It's only perfect to you in your perfection biased brain. Art is very much imperfect. Concessions were made, pieces restarted, plans changed. Creation is messy and painful. Art or Engineering.
OTOH, I'd say that software perfection doesn't exists because of all the slackers who accept their crap as "good enough", leading to enshittification.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
When I think of "great art under great constraints", I think of the demo scene, not dealing with the legacy cruft in someone else's million-line codebase.
> Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
I'm curious what your career trajectory was like. I'm surprised that your experiences are so different than mine (see my comment below). In the early years, we had tons of time to just play around (e.g. Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters in 2004).
My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too. Hard to fit experimentation into the everything must be a ticket process/mentality and endless ceremony meetings. Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
> My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too.
Right conclusion, wrong origin. Let me explain.
Business management theory has been rooted in the lessons learned from Ford manufacturing for over a century. This has worked well for industries which manufacture goods using physical resources, of which most qualify.
However, software engineering is not bound by those forces. Adding more developers to an effort does not shorten delivery nor increase productivity (quite the contrary, actually, and well documented in "The Mythical Man Month"[0]). But adding "line workers" to a factory, assuming sufficient raw materials are available, will shorten its delivery cycle.
Because assembly line workers have a quantifiable job, easily measured based on physical factors, and fairly easily scalable (assuming sufficient factory capacity).
> Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
IMHO, there is no substitute for understanding the problem needing to be solved. No SDLC paradigm can make a developer which eschews this successful.
Quality has definitely decreased, and I think it's the natural consequences of specialization. Most modern devs I've worked with (even/especially those from big tech companies >1B val) know their on particular niche well, but flounder when faced with a different kind of problem. They have a hammer, so everything is a nail. The power of modern infrastructure and orchestration systems has eliminated their need to understand the full stack in order to "deliver value".
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
I don't think hacker culture is going away, I think it's just drowned out by software eating the world in a capitalist economy. It used to be that software and computers in general didn't pay any better than any other white collar job, and were generally more arcane and less familiar to people, so only those of us with an inherent interest were drawn to it. I believe there are more of us than ever, there's just orders of magnitude more people drawn in for the money and power.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
I always understood that Agile was supposed to reduce the bureaucracy, not increase it. It seems to have been embraced, extended and extinguished by the sort of people who were pushing Waterfall in the previous era.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
There is a large variety between perfect code and code people usually complain about. Not only weak engineers complain about crappy code and stupid decisions.
As I got more senior it wasnt the crappiness of the code that frustrated me as much as it was the intransigence people that created the circumstances that made it happen.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
I low key kind of like it when I describe a harmful archetype or toxic opinion online and somebody responds "b...b...but that isnt bad, that's me!"
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
What you're describing as a harmful archetype is the job you've been hired to perform. The disconnect is between your self-image and reality. Refusing to accept that is intransigent.
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
Morals aren’t always involved in commercial software development, and likely they never have been in any of your workplaces. However, I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that morals and business don’t have any overlap. I work in the health tech industry, and I feel good knowing that patients benefit from using our device. I know I wouldn’t feel the same way if I was working at some fintech optimizing stock trading to the Nth degree.
I never said anything about morals. I just like having agency and have professional pride in my work. Perhaps you dont.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
>Great art is always made under great constraints.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.
When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.
I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.
I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.
I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.
https://ruptureware.com/thumbprovider
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