I generally agree with you. As a recent father with a toddler, and two parents with a full time job, I’ve found that the only way I can make time for those personal side projects is to use AI to do most of the bootstrapping, and then do the final tweaks on my own. Most of this is around home automation, managing my Linux ISO server, among other things. But it certainly would be more fun and rewarding if I did it all myself.
This feels like the same moment for me when I realized I couldn't keep using Gentoo and needed to move on to a Linux distribution that was ready to go without lots of manual effort. I have a family and kids I need those hours. I had the same feeling as OP of losing a fun learning activity. No longer progressing on Linux knowledge just maintaining. Granted it was good enough level to move on but it's still a loss.
I do the same as you with AI now, it's allowing me to build simple things quickly and revise later. Sometimes I never have to. I feel similarly that I'm no longer progressing as a dev just maintaining what I know. That might change I might adapt how I approach work and find the balance but for now it's a new activity entirely.
I've talked to many people over the years who saw coding as a get shit done activity. Stop when it's good enough. They never approached it really as a hobby and a learning experience. It wasn't about self progression to them. Mentioning that I read computer books resulted in a disgusted face "You can just google what you need when you need it".
Always felt odd to me, software development was my hobby something I loved not just a job. Now I think they will thrive in this world. It's pure results. No need to know a breath of things or what's out there to start on the right foot. AI has it all somewhere in it's matrix. Hopefully they develop enough taste to figure out what's good from bad when it's something that matters.
I’m at $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_SAAS and I agree. There is a mass psychosis going on around what these LLM tools (which I use daily) are capable of *at scale*. The amount of business processes and tasks these software suites can, and must perform at near 100% correctness every time is massive, across an insane number of domains, accounting for an insane number of laws, countries, languages, browser configurations, business requests, legal teams. The list goes on, and while you can bootstrap a front end that appears to do 80% of a large dinosaur competitor like ours, the reality is it can’t, and the context windows to get there are in the orders of magnitude larger than they are today.
The weird part is that people at our company also fail to see this. “This vibe coder is going to recreate 20+ years of code, use cases, business processes and integrations for thousands of companies across hundreds of domains!” is uttered every day and just simply isn’t true.
It's certainly not true yet, but LLM abilities now vs two years ago leads really makes you think. It may not be easy to replicate all you do, but new entrants could easily just go after the highest margin parts of your business. Why try to tackle All the countries and browser configs when you can get 90% of the profitable ones, and just address that part of the market?
i.e. Apple does a ton of work to ensure I'm paying taxes and complying with laws in hundreds of places I'll probably never make a sale in. Sure, some high paying people might need all of that, but I'd be happy with just USA. I only utilize the other parts because it was a few clicks.
Most companies only need a subset of the features that these mega-platforms offer, as they operate within single industry, targeting specific customers many times in a single country with a simpler legal landscape.
I have no idea for sure, but odds are 80% of the revenue of these current saas providers is generated from 20% of the features they offer. Lightweight newcomers can just focus on that 20% and ignore the other 80%.
I haven't read much into it, but The Simpsons to me became terrible around the same time Family Guy came out. I don't know if trying to be like Family Guy made the show worse, or if the type of humor The Simpsons championed for so long became unfashionable.
A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.
There's probably a term of art for it, but that Family Guy style cut to some previous reference hadn't really been done before, certainly not to the extent that Seth McFarlane did it. Simpsons copied it, but it never felt good when they did.
If you watch The Simpsons DVD commentary on the very first season DVDs, they talk about how Matt Groening's team would draw the key frames and then they would ship them to an asian animation studio to provide the animation frames. The very first time they did this, they got an animation style that was all over the place - not just the quality of drawing, but the actual animation style was jello-y and way more wobbly than they wanted. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk
The main reason that they sent it back was that the style and physics represented in the cartoon wasn't the one they were going for, and it changed how the show felt. I feel like the rapid cut references they adopted from Family Guy did a very similar thing. It changed the flow of the show, which, maybe (?) is actually more of a sign of the times and attention span than animated show style, but still, I wasn't a fan and I didn't feel like The Simpsons did it naturally or that it fit, and it takes me out of the narrative every time they do it.
There seems to have been a big turnover of writers in 98-99. As in very few people who were there in the beginning were left by that point. You're not considering that the original charm of the show was lost with the original creative force.
Family guy debuted in 1999. It's hard to say Simpsons tried to copy family guy's style. Family Guy is really known for its cutaways (usually to some non sequitur) & somewhat crude humor. A lot of the jokes at this time hinged on Stewie not being understood by anyone but Brian, Brian himself being a dog. There were also a lot of references to musical theater. The Simpsons was different from this.
The Zombie Simpsons explanation paints it (fairly convincingly) as a combo of deaths, turnover in the writing room, and the influence of The Simpsons and other “subversive” shows affecting the mainstream so much that it was no longer distinctive, with the result that the show became a heightened, silly, absurd, but basically straight, and (more, at least) earnest, version of the family sitcom it had started off lampooning.
Under this explanation, the early show is basically a totally different thing from what it became by somewhere around season 10. Even if it didn’t “get worse” (I think it definitely did also do that, but it’s not necessary for this explanation to work) it became something so different that it’s not surprising that a lot of people who liked the early show, don’t like what it has been since the change.
I remember reading years ago that in the early days the executive producer had a two year tenure, then from season 8 or 9 it's been the same guy with no change.
Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)
You make it sound like dual shoulders were standard, but PS(2) was the odd one for having that. None of N64, Xbox nor Gamecube had them. It wasn't really until the Xbox 360 that you'd see it outside of Sony.
Now that you mention it, maybe I'm thinking more of the dual analog sticks than the shoulders. But yeah, Gamecube at least had a Z trigger in addition to the shoulders.
If anything Microsoft will give up their advantage by making Windows 11 a UX dumpster fire. If Windows 11 had an official way to turn off all of the garbage and opt out of their monopolistic PM-brained “features” a lot of us who switched to Linux probably wouldn’t have happened.
i was using wsl2. and got weird slowness and high cpu. appeared it was their built in antivirus(av). i disabled av, but it autoenabled later and did same.
it is possible to secure windows other way without active protection btw.
i used git on wsl2. it got weird issues with git connectivity over wifi.
github ticket not solved. one of most popular and essential dev tools is not stably working in wsl2.
many rust crates supported only mac, bsd and linux. nobody cared windows.
so even without ux of recent version, i had to leave.
for my wife is still run windows.
but. she had fully official surface laptop with official office. not 3rd party or pirated things.
and... office became very very slow just typing... it was 3 years ago.
i have run script disabling all things. it good for 3rd year now.
but how they managed to make their laptop new one, with all their things so bad?
Yes, but at least humanly possible. Likely not with all the gear, but at least as a player you feel more like a running person than like a flying pilot.
Doom offered very nice gentle "bobbing" that added to the illusion of a real person's gait. Of course, only when you played single-player and switched off the "always run" mode. (Regarding this, I wish there were a popular FPS that would explore the notion of stamina, so that running mindlessly would be wasteful, but sprinting at critical moments would be an extra game mechanic. It worked reasonably well in Diablo, released in 1996.)
Escape from Tarkov is popular and explores stamina heavily. You can't sprint for long, or you exhaust your stamina and wheeze audibly to other players which gives away your positioning at minimum.
Further, the more you carry, the slower you can sprint, the faster stamina drains, and the faster your energy and hydration meters deplete. Since this is a game at least partially about scavenging, if you're carrying too much, you can only take a few steps before your stamina is depleted and you are unable to even walk unless you toss your immensely heavy backpack or gear on the ground and wait to recover.
None of this is to suggest that complex stamina mechanics are common in gaming, however...EFT is an exception to the mainstream.
And EFT has gone through some hilarious patches where stamina was very unrealistic. Some things are still very silly.
If you load up too much stuff in your backpack, you go from normal to overweight to tankmode. Overweight penalties are reasonable and progressive from normal weight. Tank mode is not. Walking, at a snails pace, now costs stamina. You cannot recover stamina unless you are standing still. OR, unless you go prone and crawl forwards at roughly the same speed as walking.
Idk if you’ve ever put 25 lbs + in a backpack and prone crawled, but that’s very much the opposite experience In real life. Same with crouch walking not costing any more stamina in the game.
Fortnite, one of the world's most popular FPS games, has the notion of stamina. In my opinion it has been poorly implemented and it's incredibly frustrating at the best of times.
Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas.
Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as irrelevant for gameplay. The stamina supply easily ramps up to more than you ever deplete so you just always run. And players wanted it that way since no one wants to walk slower, and the monster speeds were later increased to be balanced against players always running.
Not all gameplay mechanics need to last for an entire game. Stamina as an obstacle that you overcome plays into the power fantasy aspect of the game very well. Arguably it goes a long way to offset the feeling you’re slowly falling behind the power curve which is how they get people to grind without complaining about poor balance.
It never posed a meaningful challenge in gameplay, though - just an annoyance. If you run too much, you have to stand still for a bit for your stamina to build back up, or chug a stamina potion if you have one. There's a reason it didn't make a return appearance in subsequent games.
Arguably the true successor of Diablo 2 is Path of Exile 2, but PoE 2 doesn't have a stamina mechanic for running as well. It's just an anti-fun mechanic nobody asked for
I can vouch for this as someone who works in a 1.6 million line codebase, where there are constant deviations and inconsistent patterns. LLMs have been almost completely useless on it other than for small functions or files.
