That’s why I always flip my keys off and call them a motherfucker when I put them down somewhere.

Ok, not really. But the real story is negative enough that it probably qualifies. I locked myself out of my college apartment and had to wake the building manager up to get a spare key. She was super pissed and I really didn’t want to go back there to drop the key off. Later that morning I ran into her husband in my statics class and just handed him the key. “Hey, you’re already going back there so you should just take it now.”

He gave me the dirtiest look and a couple days later I saw him moving some boxes out of the apartment. I didn’t really process it until two weeks later, when I was out mountain biking with my Russian buddy and caught husband and another girl making out on the trail.

Yeah. Apparently she’d caught him cheating and I accidentally made him go back to her apartment and probably get screamed at more. I mean he deserved it, but I felt so awkward and weird about the while situation. So yeah, that was emotionally charged enough that I force myself to always know where my keys are.

I mostly lurk in here, but I got my official diagnosis this week. Autism + both flavors of ADHD. It explains a lot. Dunno if I feel any differently, but I’ve got a therapist now.

I fired my last one because every time we’d get close to a breakthrough he’d say something like “so you don’t need to be stressed” or “tell your inner monologue to fuck off” and I’d just stare at him. Gee, that’s easy. Why didn’t I think of that? Don’t be so stressed? Tell the voice in my head to fuck off? You’re well worth the small fortune I’m shelling out every month.

The new therapist has largely been explaining how the autism makes me want routine and the ADHD wants to blow up all routine and be chaotic and I end up stressing myself before I do anything productive. Then plans change and my tightly-wound chaos arc fails and I crash hard. So right away, 100% better than talk therapy guy.

I’m still processing it. The ADHD is a surprise. We’ll see if i can develop some good coping strategies instead of the many bad ones I’ve picked up over the years.

LOL

Wow.

He (Linehan) only wrote for the first season, too. They parted ways after that.

Counterpoint: I’m already expected to spend a third of my life working with these people.

I’m not an ogre and I definitely don’t live like I need to get the most work possible done before I die. I just take an extreme approach to work/life balance: work stays at work, private life stays at home as much as possible. For one thing, I’ve overshared with bosses and had things used against me in department meetings or reviews. For another thing, how much do people really want to know about my daughter or my crazy z80 assembly project? Because I’ll bet it’s way less than I’d want to share.

To that end, what’s the most important thing for me to know? Connor is “crazy into craft beers” and took his whole family to Sandals last July, or Connor goes to pieces when there’s a SEV and hides his mistakes until they become problems? One of these things can be learned from corporate icebreaking exercises. The other comes from the 33% of my life I already spend with him.

I have work friends, and try to be as friendly as the circuits allow with everyone. I’ve worked with a few of these friends across multiple companies. I’ve road tripped to festivals with a couple of them. I try to keep things cordial with the ones I don’t hang out with after hours because work’s already hard enough without me being an asshole. And I know one fun fact about everyone on my team (likes to run, D&D / cosplay guy, also likes to BBQ); I learned exactly zero of these things through corporate exercises.

Besides, everyone’s just nodding their heads waiting for their turn to talk.

“Place 1 is my chair at home. It’s comfortable and everything I need is within reach. Place 2 is also my chair at home. I hope to travel there soon.”

Yep. An entire childhood of my dad always calling me a spazz, my mom abusing me, kids in school avoiding me because I was weird, always feeling like the only person not in on the joke in college, getting cussed out and – in one case – physically assaulted in the workforce… I started devoting most of my energy to just reacting and hiding. I spent most days just getting to the end of all the social bullshit and obligations.

Whatever you do, don’t tell me to relax. Every time I relax, everybody hates it. I suspect there’s a good, interesting person with the capacity to be happy in here somewhere but I get so little time to actually be them.

Laughs in Arduino blinky lights and gameboy ASM

That’s admirable, especially with the constant stream of new Trump appointees they have to rubber stamp.

My advice is to bid her farewell and mourn a little. If it’s any consolation, the person you have a crush on only existed in your head, assembled by frenzied brain chemicals out of the few things you were able to learn about her. The real version has her own flaws, quirks, strengths, eccentricities, and loves. She is far more human than the person your brain shuffled onto a pedestal and she’s living her own life. The crush was fun, but let it go now. It’s the kindest thing to do for yourself.

As an introvert on the spectrum, talking to strangers is hard. It’s uncomfortable. On bad days, I feel like I’m trying to crawl out of my own skin when I end up talking to someone I don’t know (and on really bad days, even with people I do know.) But sometimes we have to do uncomfortable things to grow, and the more you do the thing the easier it becomes. Start small and realize it’ll feel weird. Work your way up. Talk to girls and make some friends, not because you eventually want to be involved with them but because you want another friend. A wonderful thing happens as you make friends: you start seeing other people’s perspectives. You start feeling more comfortable. And you open yourself up to more experiences. Some of these experiences are even fun!

Having said all that about crushes… I met my wife, many years ago, at a Halloween party. I was instantly smitten and yeah, I had a crush on her. A big one. I went to a drag show with some friends a few weeks later and she was there! We snuck out for a cigarette and talked, awkwardly, for a few minutes.

The next time I talked to her, it was at a show she was playing at a dive bar. She played an instrument?! I had no idea. I was a terminal case at that point. I remember standing in the audience, going over what I should say to her when the set ended. As it turned out, she announced that this would be their final show and she was moving out of state with her boyfriend a week later. I was devastated.

It took a little while, but I let go and moved on. We both had very interesting lives for the next few years and met up again at another party. We ended up talking a lot, texting, going to shows. We started a band with a mutual friend, learned some obscure asian card game together, and eventually said “what the hell, we should probably be dating.”

She didn’t end up being anything like the girl I had a crush on, and we’ve been happily together for almost a decade. I don’t think any of that would have been possible if I’d brooded over her and never gotten over the crush.

Lol

On the other hand, I understand the utility of knowing how to do these things for ourselves. There are a number of “black-box” libraries that were just an absolute mystery to me until I tried implementing them myself and began to see these libraries are usually not complex so much as they are thorough in covering edge cases that 90% of users will never care about.

Yeah, that’s one of my big fears. Not necessarily losing my job to an AI, but AI exacerbating existing bad practices.

When I started my current job, we had one rock star coder responsible for a fairly fiddly piece of our product. He went heads-down for two weeks and churned out pages of densely-written python without comments. It did what it was supposed to do, flawlessly. He left the team shortly afterward to work on a bigger project, and we got word from the higher-ups that we had to support a new feature upstream in that code. And then another. And so on. Nothing’s commented. Everything’s over-optimized. We eventually ended up just cross-compiling the upstream logic and using that in our stack because it was easier than using his impenetrable stuff.

In the end, we had to fix it with menial, boring, aggravating manual work anyway. We got ourselves into that situation without AI, but I could see something like that becoming more prevalent. And that was working code. Imagine getting a SEV, and everyone on the blame list shrugs and says “idk, I had CoPilot do it.”

It would definitely be a shame if these tools caused new developers to bypass fundamental skill development. My only hesitation is the number of developers who should’ve developed those skills and never did before AI. There’s something wrong either with how developers are learning or who is getting into development.

Yeah, this is part of it. There’s maybe the science of programming and also, for lack of a better term, the craft: writing maintainable code, handling a SEV, thinking in terms of uptime, setting things up to be reverted easily, shutting down neurotic code reviewers, testing your code… stuff like that. Universities are good at the science part. Internships, theoretically, handle the rest. This isn’t an AI issue, but I could see AI making this problem a lot worse.

It’s not interesting, there’s no puzzles involved… It’s basically data entry

So? Show me an industry that’s 100% interesting all the time. Artists still have to stretch and gesso their canvases. Rock stars still have to deal with band drama and touring logistics. Directors have to work their budgets and wrangle big egos. Why should software, which is basically using fancy math to tell the dumbest guy in the room exactly what to do, be any different?

There’s this awful idea that everything should be fun and nobody should struggle with anything or be forced to do anything menial. We want to be instant experts without going through the boring or hard stuff. And we’re willing to offload more and more of this onto proprietary black boxes in exchange for… what?

I see cursive writing brought up a lot in these conversations and I don’t think it applies. Firstly, the cognitive load of writing code is higher than writing your letters so they join up. You’re not just making sure you write the letters correctly, you’re also following the syntax rules of the language you’re writing. And while you’re writing, you’re reinforcing those rules in your head. Yes, initially it’s hard and boring.

And yeah, sometimes you get it wrong or forget to capitalize. That is a feature, not a bug. The more you do it, the easier it gets. I spent a couple weeks trying to use CoPilot and at the end I still had to correct its shitty code, which either hallucinated features I wasn’t implementing, or hallucinated syntax rules I wasn’t using. It was like spending a sprint trying to get a subpar intern up to speed. At the end of those two weeks, my manual coding accuracy took a noticeable hit.

I complained to higher-ups and they told me “oh it’s definitely a skill getting the prompt written correctly”, which was patronizing and irritating. Would I rather spend time getting good at asking the proprietary magic thinky box to maybe write good code this time, or would I rather get better at coding?

I mean I’ve spent a lot of time writing regex to automate large sets of changes. Sometimes it can be a bit fiddly to get the regex just so. Like replacing direct field access with > getters where you have to find the field access and change .foo to .getFoo() and the capitalization can take a couple of tries to get just right.

At least you’re learning more about regexes when you do this. Yes, there’s menial bullshit in coding. There’s menial bullshit in every field. Some of it gets abstracted away (syntax highlighting to help with comprehension), some of it gets kicked around and ultimately does not impress (VB’s drag-and-drop coding), and some of it stays because it’s necessary. Nobody likes doing manual stuff, but sometimes it’s preferable to trying to automate it.

Also, I’ve never heard of anyone paying $20 a month for the privilege of not writing in cursive, or being unable to write because they don’t have internet. Something to think about.

Yep. It’s gonna be $20 forever, too. Have fun!

But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom

Get better at it, manually, or you’ll suck at it forever. It’s a skill like anything else.

If you have everything and believe you deserve it, you’re entitled. If you have nothing and believe you deserve it, you’re miserable. If you have everything and think you don’t deserve it, you’re a fraud. If you have nothing and think you don’t deserve it, you’re bitter.

This is tremendous.

I cannot make a top 10 list of anything and I get in trouble for not being enthusiastic enough. When the guy amping up the crowd yells “I can’t hear you!” I’m the one yelling “I DOUBT THAT” back.

Here’s a weird one: Pac-Man World. 3Dish platformer with a lot of neat tricks and surprises. It’s not groundbreaking, but it made me genuinely happy when I played it.

Also, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There’s so much stuff to do in this game, and if you do it right the

and there’s even more stuff to do.