A REST/Rustaurant that serves CRUD!

It’s interesting because my dad followed a similar path and I wish I had the smarts he did. He worked as an electrical engineer and was with a company contracted by NASA. He told me how he got to work on some of the stuff in the space capsules back in the 70s/80s. Then at some point he became a full-time kitchen designer and was a carpenter. I asked him once why he left such a high-paying and interesting field. He said it was because all of the people he worked with were uptight squares and he just didn’t like it.

He passed away about 17 years ago. I wish he was still around. I could use his advice as a web dev that feels collectively burnt out and in a rut.

I get the thousand yard stare more often as I get older. I learned that it’s my brain forcing itself to take breaks.

I’ve been in tech since 2005 and I wish I had the means to bail like that. I’ve honestly considered taking a fat pay cut and going back to driving a forklift.

Or the technical challenge being ridiculous like a lot of them are. If you have that many people failing it, that tells me some or all of these things are true:

1. Management, or whoever they hire for handling candidates, is not screening them well
2. The challenge is needlessly complex
3. The challenge requirements are not clear
4. The company expects absolute prod-ready perfection but told the candidates “don’t spend more than 2-3 hours on this,” despite it taking one of their own engineers 6-8 hours
5. The salary is way too low and they’re not getting candidates that fit their demands (e.g. wanting “senior” while offering “junior” salaries)

Seriously, some tech companies think they shit gold and give ridiculous challenges that reflect that delusion.

Source: been in tech since 2005 and in a terminal since I was 12.

Yep. Tell it to lie and it will.

It’s honestly a gamble based on my experience. Instructions that I’ve given ChatGPT have worked for a while, only to be mysteriously abandoned for no valid reason. Telling AI not to hallucinate is apparently common practice from the research I’ve done.

I do feel bad when I have to tell it not to. Hallucinating is fun!

Make sure you ask the AI not to hallucinate because it will sometimes straight up lie. It’s also incapable of counting.

Oh I use Copilot daily. It fills the gaps for the repetitive stuff like you said. I was writing Stories in a Storybook.js project once and was able to make it auto-suggest the remainder of my entire component states after writing 2-3. They worked out of the gate too with maybe a single variable change. Initially, I wasn’t even going to do all of them in that coding session just to save time and get it handed off, but it was giving me such complete suggestions that I was able to build every single one out with interaction tests and everything.

Outside of use cases like that and getting very general content, I think AI is a mess. I’ve worked with ChatGPT’s v3.5-4 API a ton and it’s unpredictable and hard to instruct sometimes. Prompts and approaches that worked 2 weeks ago, will now suddenly give you some weird edge case that you just can’t get it to stop repeating—even when using approaches that worked flawlessly for others. It’s like trying to patch a boat while you’re in it.

The C suite people and suits jumped on AI way too early and have haphazardly forced it into every corner. It’s become a solution searching for a problem. The other day, a friend of mine said he had a client that casually asked how they were going to use AI on the website they were building for them, like it was just a commonplace thing. The buzzword has gotten ahead of itself and now we’re trying to reel it back down to earth.

Ahh the future of dev. Having to compete with AI and LLMs, while also being forced to hastily build apps that use those things, until those things can build the app themselves.

I’ve given up at this point because in the tech industry, there are zero wins. Even if you knock something out in 2 weeks, you’re “too slow” and need to “iterate faster”.

Okay fine.

iterates faster

“Why is this missing X, Y, and Z? Why is this button blue?”

Did you want good or fast? You get one.

Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, pretty much every member of the Knesset and the Israeli Government.

An old 286 (I think) running MS-DOS. It was a pretty tall tower. Had the CD-ROM drive where you put the disc into a cartridge and then shoved the cartridge into the slot. My first foray into the internet was Prodigy.

You just described my life. JS is hell.

I’d like to know too so I can make a donation.

Doctors Without Borders and some Palestine groups.

Mr. Wizard and MacGyver were big ones for me. They hit a curiosity and adventure sweet spot for me as a kid. Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross also helped teach me empathy and kept my artistic side interested.

I’m really grateful for the era I grew up in and the television personalities it gave me. It’s nice knowing that my influences have stood the test of time and I appreciate the foundation they gave my young mind.

If only I could keep that energy and inspiration going. Anxiety coupled with depression can really get you lost.

Christmas Pain in Christmas Town by Chowder Man.

If you haven’t played Hypnospace Outlaw yet, I highly recommend it.

Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.

Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.