What are you doing this weekend?
15 points by caius
15 points by caius
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I'll not be doing much, and probably trying to stay off the computer for most of the weekend. This seems like a terribly weird thing to find myself saying; given how much I used to love computers, computing and programming. It's just all so god damn depressing and alienating now.
Instead, I'm going to try my hand at making my very own pencil roll out of some leather scraps. The last couple months I've gotten into drawing (I might make a couple of drawings over the weekend too), and while I obviously can't make my own pencils or paper, I possibly can learn to make things like sketchbook covers and pencil rolls. We'll see how it goes, I have almost zero experience with leatherworking.
One of the things I've taken with me from a life misspent in the software mines is a deep appreciation of making and using my own tools, toys and accessories.
I feel similarly I guess, maybe not as profound and I'm currently using AI agents. With a 2 year old daughter I feel like I need to hedge my family. Despite my feelings for the thing I feel like I cannot fall behind, which is a stressful position to be in. To be honest, they have been very useful in my case to unblock my ADHD brain, I can also understand if they are not useful for a lot of people.
In my case something weird has happened these last few weeks, I've never been spiritual in any way. But somehow, and for some reason, with all the shifting sands under my feet my brain/body has been craving something solid. I guess I understand the process that led people to believe in something bigger than themselves. I still cannot rationally believe on any god or anything like that. But I've been reading about Zen Buddhism and I'm resonating a lot with many ideas. I've been meditating more and more. I've been taking some control of my anxiety through breathing and posture and it has helped greatly.
It's a very weird position for me to talk and to even be thinking this. But it has been helping me.
For better and worse, I don't have any children or other dependents. That's one less thing to be worried about in a world that currently seems like an endless supply of worries - but, well, it's also one thing less to hold on to, I guess?
I recently started reading Hartmut Rosa's book "Resonance". Rosa is the sociologist who first described the condition of social acceleration (which he has also written a book about) as a defining condition of modernity: Social, cultural and technological changes have always happened, but since the industrial revolution the pace has steadily increased. This has led to a "shrinking present": The span of time where one can apply an understanding of the recent past to gain a useful impression of what the near future might be like keeps getting smaller and smaller. In my grandparents' generation, it was the norm to have just one workplace throughout most of your life; in my parents' generation, it was the norm to have one profession throughout most of your life, and now that too is going away. Sources of stability are becoming fewer and fewer; the sands are shifting so rapidly they're becoming quicksand. In "Resonance", Rosa argues that the solution to the alienation caused by social acceleration is by establishing a relation to the world and each other which is not dependent on resources, opportunities or moments (all of which are fleeting and becoming ever more so) - and mentions spiritual and religious practice as one way a society can foster resonance. Rosa himself is a practicing Christian. I haven't gotten very far in the book yet, but I'm pretty sure that a decade ago I'd have rolled my eyes at the premise.
I have some practice meditating (I used to have a friend who was a Tendai priestess, and who taught me meditative practice), but ... well, it hasn't really "clicked", really. (I doubt I'll ever be religious or "truly" spiritual, nor do I have any wish to be.)
I doubt I'll ever be religious or "truly" spiritual, nor do I have any wish to be.
Yeah, I'm on the same boat, but I think there are some nice takeaways from some of these things. I could never believe in a god or anything supernatural (the reincarnation side of buddhism for example). But at least from Zen Buddhism there is a whole part of reducing attachment and working on oneself that I think are good to take from it.
by establishing a relation to the world and each other which is not dependent on resources, opportunities or moments
Yeah, this related to the concept of attachment in zen buddhism I said above I guess (as I understand it now, which is very little)
I think that's roughly where I am. I don't believe in reincarnation, karma, or any of the other supernatural trappings of Buddhism (or all the weird magic in Taoism, or the odd metaphysics of Stoicism, for that matter), but I do believe some of the practices are probably good for mental health. I don't know to which extent the practices can be decoupled from the underlying belief system and still have something coherent.
What's been the tipping point? It sounds like you're burning out.
Enjoy touching grass.
Mostly, having to listen to people who tell me that AI has not only made my skillset obsolete, but have made the entire kind of person I am obsolete. Who needs obsessively detail-oriented meticulous autistic nerds now?
(I'm in therapy, I take my meds, I'm doing nowhere near as poorly as a few months ago when I melted down in here, you don't need to worry and I'm not soliciting free Internet therapy (I pay a professional for that). But I still feel like I've wasted my entire life. It was perhaps a bad idea to let programming be the thing I got so passionate about that I ended up spending my youth hacking on an Amiga rather than going to parties, and that programming was where I found meaning in a mostly socially isolated adult life.
It's largely been what kept me sane, it turns out. The AI boom destroyed my motivation to code on my own projects (all of which - about 20 years' worth of personal-project code - I therefore deleted last year), and my mental health has really cratered. I'm desperately grasping for other things to keep my mind occupied, but I've yet to discover anything but programming that keeps enough of my brain active that there isn't something terrible in my hindbrain that spins off into a loop. I can still work (after the latest round of adjustments to the meds), but I don't think I've been quite this depressed and anxious in my entire life, even when I was so plagued by those two things that I couldn't work. I guess the difference is that now I've gotten better at dissociating while I'm on the job.
I try to tell myself that I could just get back to coding for purely self-therapeutic reasons, but it feels meaningless now.)
I've been feeling similarly lately. I don't have nearly the personal stake in coding as you do, I don't think, but I've been struck lately (especially after reading the thread on "Don't Fall For The Anti-AI Hype") by how hopeless it all feels, by how it feels like my career has been ripped out from under me and I am just hanging on until some exec decides to finally put me out of my misery.
I tried explaining these feelings out loud to my partner the other day and they had a bit of a meltdown just hearing about it, which both was validating and disheartening. We've both been in a depression about AI.
I'm happy you're finding other ways to occupy yourself. I think tactile work (drawing, leatherworking) is a great alternative. I started drawing a bit last year and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I've been getting back into reading philosophy lately, and trying to make music, and cubing.
Best of luck datarama, it sounds like you've got it under control but this is a very painful and scary time.
If this is "having it under control", then we really are living in a scary time! I'm basically just flailing around trying to find something, anything, to hold on to.
"then we really are living in a scary time!" Yeah :(, I do believe that's the case. By "got it under control" I really mean that you are aware of your experience and are working to remedy it. You are managing, continuing, pushing through, even though it is hard and feels bad. For me, that is as much control as we can hope to get.
Why are you so convinced you will be obsoleted by AI?
Personally, I don't use AI code assistants for ethical, epistemological, and personal preference reasons. So far, genAI/coding agents does not appear to have launched the productivity of my coworkers who use it into the stratosphere, and it seems very possible that it never really will for the type of work we do. If that's the case, you might be in an existential crisis for no reason!
It's the same I see day-to-day in my workplace, but I'm really not comfortable trying to predict where things will be in a year. And also, I still have to listen to (some of) the higher-ups. And I also follow tech news in general. The misanthropy among some of the most convinced affects me very deeply. I swear, if I ever have another person tell me that people like me "won't be the wagon drivers, they'll be the horses" (yes, that is an actual thing I have had multiple people tell me, including one person who specifically targeted it at people on the autism spectrum) I am going to scream. It feels like I'm spending most of my everyday life under some kind of psychological terror campaign at this point, and I really, really wish I could just escape somehow.
Throughout most of my life, when I've been in circumstances where I wish I could escape (from being a little bullied disabled kid to being a lonely middle-aged guy in pandemic lockdown) what I've done has been fire up the computer and dive into a fascinating programming problem. This now feels meaningless. I'm trying to grasp for other things to do, but ... well, I haven't found anything that works quite as well. It's the only thing I've ever had that managed to engage enough of my brain that there wasn't something terrible in the hindbrain that reached for the controls and sent me into a spin.
To be perfectly honest, certain AI promoters (and corporate executives) doing their best impressions of schoolyard bullies pokes at things in my brain that reliably makes me bad at thinking things through rationally, and I am diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder, so it is quite possible that I am overestimating the threat.
Gotcha. I have also felt fed up with hearing about AI (and a certain amount of accompanying existential dread if the prophecies come true), but that's when I get off Hacker News or Lobsters and touch grass or hack on something specific.
Lately I've been working through Crafting Interpreters and am enjoying it. Once I've worked though at least the first half of it, I'm planning on writing my own programming language for fun.
It's important to remember that, for all the breathless talk about AI disrupting our industry, it can't replace actual knowledge and understanding. And there's tremendous value in doing everything yourself from scratch because that's how you learn.
Programming language hackery is what I miss the most, to be honest. It's what ended up being my academic specialty back when I still pretended to be a respectable academic.
(My journey was basically "I want to make games" -> "making game engines to make games on top of is more fun" -> "making programming languages to make game engines on top of is more fun" -> "making virtual machines to make programming languages on top of" -> "crushing existential dread".)
Just wanna say that I feel you. Same boat and same even pathway. Just hang in there
I believe you need to understand why you decided to learn programming in the first place, it was just writing code or solve problems? In my situation was the last, and that's why I decided to pick games as first learning tool when I was just a kid
My advice: be with your love ones, touch grass, take a sabbatical (if financially possible), go hike, at some point if everyone keep this train on, we would need to understand (pretty much all developers in the world), that as much as any other professions, our field is now as pretty much any other: it will be just a job, and not anymore who we are or a thing that "define" us
I'll say with the current state of open source and AI contributions it's exploding everywhere, and it's not only you. Even myself, I was in this mindset a couple of months ago so I decided to challenge myself and start new hobbies (economy reading, history learning, etc)
How're you finding drawing? I struggle with it quite a lot. I want to improve primarily to decorate pottery I make, but also to understand things in a different: if you can draw something, you know a bit more about it than if you cannot.
I don't really "enjoy" it because I'm not really able to experience joy at this particular time, but it is a good distraction and the state of mind I'm in when I'm drawing keeps at least some of the terrors lurking in the hindbrain from spinning out of control. I don't really have any particular aim for what I want to be able to do with it.
Here is a manta ray I drew, and here is a sunset reflected in the surface of Sputnik 1. Both are mostly coloured pencils, with contours in ink.
I find that regular drawing exercise changes the way I see. I notice things that I normally wouldn't, and in a sense this ties into what I loved about programming (and what I was good at): It makes me very appreciative of detail and how things relate to each other.
I dig the Sputnik!
I hear you about it changing the way you see. I think this is true about most things we make into deliberate practices: they expand our view on the world, and enrich it. Anyway, even if it's not joy, it is a quieting of anxiety. I'm glad you've taken it up.
Getting married!
Sort-of. We had a small courthouse-ish wedding at my wife's favourite restaurant in December 2024 with a few close friends, but this Sunday we're throwing a larger celebration for our wider friends-and-family circle to attend (including my sister who's flying across the pond to join us).
I'm about to finish the C backend of my programming language's reference implementation! Hoping to merge it in a day or two.
The main motivation was I needed a few features (mainly value types) for the self-hosted version (I don't want to implement it in a simple way and then rewrite/refactor for efficiency, do it mostly right from the beginning), and I thought it should be about the same amount of effort to write a C generator instead of refactoring the interpreter to handle value types and other things. It was also too slow, and optimizing it would take quite a bit of time as well. And then there are less important but still motivating things like, with a C backend I can easily implement some simple FFI features to talk to C libs and and make real apps.
Long story short, it's almost done. Once the backend is merged I'll implement value types, and then back to the grind continue implementing the self-hosted compiler. I might also implement some simple terminal games or tools maybe.
I am thinking of what's the best approach to open source a project I have been working on for long : https://voiden.md.
It's an api client like Postman with specs, tests, and docs in one Markdown file.
I intend to exercise my First Amendment rights by recording ICE activities here in Minnesota, to deliver groceries to people afraid to leave their homes, and to go to church.
Migrating all my photos out of Google photos onto my home server running immich and setting up restic to back them up.
Go for a surf, if the wind drops, or kiting, if the wind picks up!
I'll continue working through Pre-Calculus Made Difficult by Seth Braver and trying to study DS&A. As a self-taught sys admin, my coding skills are not where companies think they should be, and I have regularly found my lack of math education to be a hindrance, so I am picking math back up from where I left off (algebra 2 in high school) and spending time with DS&A resources.
I'm also reading Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege right now, so I'll try to finish that, and write a new blog post.
Math is always a good investment! Also just reading and doing exercises of a good intro level physics textbook if it gets boring - applies pre-calculus and calculus.
I want to finally get the Heltec LoRa devices I purchased months ago set up as Reticulum interfaces, and get one of them added to the homeserver I set up recently. That might not happen because:
I'm going to make some pottery, climb, and do some yoga.
Celebrating doing good on the apple interview, not to say i aced it because i dont want to jinx it. But it went well, even though the tasks were pretty hard.
A friend of mine got a 36 keys dasbob keyboard and I'm fascinated that he made it work. Now I took away the outer keys of my kyria to see if I can manage as well, and maybe transition to a small keyboard. So, I'm basically learning typing again. So far, emacs is difficult with all the holding of ctrl and alt keys. Maybe it'd be easier if I used evil mode.
Otherwise, I've re-discovered the tup build system and am trying to make it work for my language. I was initially turned off by the lack of dynamic dependencies, but since build files are mostly static anyway, I'm writing a tupfile generator-like for my language.
Hoping to drink tea, listen to jazz, and review the 2025 Web Almanac by HTTP Archive.
Might also put together some more 88x31 buttons and publish them somewhere.
Mostly visiting Portland, OR for the first time.
BUT! Last weekend, I spend quite some time refactoring EndBASIC's compiler to try to address a long-standing performance deficiency and... concluded that the code is not salvageable. So, this week, I started redesigning and reimplementing the bytecode, compiler, and VM from the ground up and I hope to make some extra progress on that too. It's getting close to where I've got the foundations of all three components to a reasonable place, so now it's "just" a SMOP of all previous features.
Dancing! There's a swing/blues workshop day and live music in Cincinnati on Sunday celebrating the long weekend. It's the one community that has consistently been there for me my whole adult life.
I'd like to play with... Apache httpd!
I want to explore:
Then my idea would be to make a Gemini protocol proxy that would proxy everything to httpd configured with multiviews, requesting gemtext documents.
This would you configure mostly everything on httpd, CGI, virtual hosting, whatever, and require minimal configuration to serve Gemini. That I would do because I lack too many skills to write a Gemini protocol mod for httpd :(
I continue to explore setting up a tilde, and the reason for the above is to try to make it easier to host dual HTTP/HTML vs. Gemini sites. I'd like to port my current blog engine to a simple static site generator, to demonstrate a newer approach to do this.
Hopefully I can make something so that people can configure a tilde with very easy web hosting.
edit: playing with old-skool-style hosting is a fun distraction from work, where I do AWS/Terraform/modern things, which is actually fun too- now that I'm understanding Terraform better, I'm liking it quite a bit. I have a mostly hate love/hate relationship with Hashicorp products, but I have to admit they're very good at usability. And Terraform is such a "new" concept that's simple and powerful...
gonna try to deploy a Hytale server to my k8s cluster and trying to stay safe given the federal occupation of my city 😮💨
If you are interested - https://lobste.rs/s/8nv2w5/tale_udp_tracking_hytale_server_auto_stop
Here's a solution to auto stop and start hytale servers since the server still lacks of an internal mechanism to do so
Wrapping up an article about communicating with AI-generated text, which I increasingly find to be tonedeaf and annoying. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are oblivious to the fact that it's tonedeaf and annoying, so I've been exploring the subject for the past month and attempting to formulate convincing arguments against this practice.
Also continuing to look for some kind of remote overseas startup contract, because working through an agency is becoming unsustainable.
Going to continue working on side projects, been particularly invested in my clawd.bot setup that's unlocked coding while on the go in a way that's much more friendly than other alternatives I've tried. Doing a home remodel and it's great to be able to continue making progress on my side projects while I'm over there in the reno.
My wife and I are getting our house appraised in preparation for refinancing our home. We bought our home almost at the peak of interest rates in 2023 (7.88%). This refinance will put us at 5.99%, shaving off over $1,000USD per month.
I'm also hoping to determine which FreeBSD ports commit broke poudriere bulk -a.
Gonna play some games and hopefully tinker with some hobby projects, as usual. Been trying to rewrite a small python script in go.
Continuing working on my personal website, reading the source code of akkoma to learn more about elixir and going to the cinema :)
