There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.
they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make
if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
Generally speaking, that's how hobbies work. You do them for fun or enrichment and do something else for money. People who try to turn hobbies into a day job seem to get this weird idea that they're somehow critical to the hobby when in fact they're just hyper focused on getting attention and crowding out actually sincere people so they can sell stuff.
e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themselves to host their own videos without being beholden to the likes of Google. Absolutely nothing to do with OP. So why is OP criticising them? Where in the README does this free software project discuss monetization (other than mentioning it's ad-free)? Why is the topic even slightly germane?
If it's tricky for people in software engineering (those still holding a job continue to have big salaries compared to most other industries) to have hobbies they are willing to pay for themselves, it's probably them finding excuses instead or living beyond their means.
Nope, there are still people doing this stuff to share what they are excited about, and they will continue to be people like that.
Economy has nothing to do with this — as mentioned, a lot of this comes out of university students and low rung staff, and they were never best paid.
Anything and everything starts costing money when done at a high level. And since you have dedicate yourself full time if you want to be among the best at what you do, you're also forfeiting other sources of income. So you need to make money on your craft. It's not necessarily about getting rich, but getting by.
And there is no audience interested in seeing average things online.
Something I didn’t see mentioned was that this unequal memory access time also affects pcie I/O. If your thread on CPU A needs to get data in or out of a nic on CPU B, your throughput/latency will be impacted.
We have to explain this to customers of our software all the time, it’s something that’s easy to miss.
When building Edera (product from article), I also had the added problem of the virtual networking gap where I was bridging a 10Gbit NIC over a virtual interface, and I had weird performance bouncing between 3Gbit and the full 10Gbit. Luckily I had built networking drivers before and knew the complexities of it, and managed to profile it down to the virtual interface getting worst-case NUMA occasionally.
The part 2 is going to cover how we actually solved it, which involves every part of the system having knowledge. It's so easy to ignore but it has a massive impact on perf.
Was going to mention this too, as it burned me once. Not cause I didn't know about it but because I was accidentally running stuff on the wrong node, and it wasn't obvious which slot was which node.
I use acme.sh for certs on my personal server and was a little surprised when it started using ZeroSSL by default. Despite being more "corporate" I decided to roll with it and it's worked just fine.
You can sort of do this today with iCloud. Add a custom domain and enable the catch-all forwarding, and you can receive anything@domain.tld and it’s forwarded to you.
What you’d lose is the reply-to forwarding feature.
I have over 300 so far. In addition to knowing where spam is coming from, and being able to block it, it also helps prevent correlation across accounts and websites as data leaks occur.
This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.
I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.
I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.
Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work, copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested, maximum visibility achieved.
It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.
I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life.
On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.
I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.
The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.
Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during more casual AI discussions, I always refer to “study guides” in college.
I don’t know how many of y’all did these, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only person. At my undergrad it was very common for a group of students to all to get together, compare notes from lectures and readings, and basically come up with a group study guide of sorts. People were given specific sections to share, you didn’t just send all of your notes - usually 2 people per section’s take on that portion. You could always tell who just copy and pasted their shorthand (usually indecipherable) and who actually took the time to edit it/clean it up. This was at a time when almost everyone did it on laptops.
The people who took the time to make their portion(s) digestible for others were asked back, the others weren’t.
> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.
The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take for example the interview process (copied by almost any company out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent example of “token usage as sign of productivity”.
So, it’s getting tremendously difficult to simply switch jobs that offer something different
My experience couldn't be more different. The tech companies I've worked for in the past 10 years have been so completely different from each other, from interview process to company culture, that I can't agree that all tech companies are the same.
You can also look to change to different roles (product management, even sales) or jump to a different career completely.
There are options if you look. You're not going to find a dream job that pays $600K for 4 hours of no-pressure work per day and perfect coworkers, but there are a range of job options with tradeoffs along the compensation-effort pareto front.
Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.
I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts. Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added that", then tell obvious lies to my face.
Sure, some people have no self awareness. In that case you can change your approach, if you are a manager or otherwise invested in the company you can put pressure on them to increase the quality of their work and to own the things they submit. Bring up specific examples of poor quality work, errors in documents/messages, etc.
Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.
I got sent a 6-page spec document with a footnote that says "this spec was created with AI, so it may have nonsensical sections. Feel free to fix them."
And that's the point where you can stop to hide your true opinion, no? "How am I supposed to review a thing the supposed author didn't even read or understand himself?"
I tried this when my skip level boss sent us a wall of text from ChatGPT that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t care. He said it was “just an idea”. He likely spent all of 5 minutes on it, while we spent a collective 15 hours dealing with it, before finally going to him and calling it out.
He’s sent a couple more emails like that since. I don’t even bother to read them once I see the format.
This feels like a BOFH response but I'm strangely not opposed to it; If you generate something, you should own it ... regardless of what tool you used to generate it.
Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to "ignore it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?"
I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it
Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".
Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.
100% agreed. I've shared output I didn't fully understand, didn't feel good good about it, and now I really try to digest, understand, and be able to actually talk about it if I expect other people to do the same. I hope in time your coworker comes to similar realizations.
Another idea to slow down the stream of slop of big PRs: request to split big PRs into smaller PRs. This typically keeps the author+clanker busy for quite some time. E.g. I got a 5k lines PR to review; requested to split that into 7 smaller, self-contained PRs. Took them about a week to finish this work.
I can't imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I've parroted. Surely you embellish just a little? Claude's so often bone-headed about things, this horrifies me. Gemini's worse. Even when the model agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I'm not somehow wrong.
GitHub Copilot refuses to do any security testing or proof-of-concepts for exploits. While I understand why, we pay for Enterprise and I’m working on our proprietary code base. It’s incredibly annoying.
I’ve actually had luck taking the analysis from GHCP and pasting it into our M365 Copilot and getting a useful poc to stick into my bug reports.
We’ve had to patch plenty of stupid “security” bugs just to satisfy a paying customer.
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