brailsafe

Not trying to insult here, but my takeaways are:

Your websites are sloppy, vague, generic. Sloppy in both the AI sense and in terms of quality (buttons aren't consistently sized, excessive use of lists of roundrects, beige/light-beige/cyan colour scheme is a bit rough). I don't know what your pitch is, whether you're offering a service or a product or what they are, or why you're worth picking over anything else.

It looks like you wanted to make a consulting website or something and then picked the most confusing, least compelling way possible to convey that. It's just a bunch of numbered sections and tag clouds with nebulous meaning and obviously AI generated.

> But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.

The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside

> Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?

You mean the kind of development that powers nearly the entire web?

It may not be verbose, but it's still faffing around by using an idiom

> White collar can always move up the value chain.

Only if you can. People in trades move up into the white collar aspect of the work all the time. It's much harder to do the reverse when you're in your late thirties and your career goes away.

Pfft, Sask is easy mode.

Try starting at the east side of pooass Manitoba if you want to contend with sketchy road conditions. By the time you get back to Regina your cortisol levels will be telling you to back out of the trip altogether

;)

> Do you know what gets me excited? Have you seen the new Porsche Mission S?

It's a glorified Beetle.

Sure, seems like it would be a standard path in another time. The real personal crisis in that position these days is probably being forced to find a new career instead of or alongside raising a kid. Unless you get quite lucky, things can get dark very quickly. Job loss creates stress, prolonged unemployment might break up your relationship, lose access to the kid maybe, and suddenly you're destitute. It's hard to see prospects for normal people getting better, and it makes more sense to avoid the kid and the house.

Different kind of difficulty level.

> I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person

Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.

The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.

That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.

I would think those with kids at that age that wanted them worked backwards from that mission, and if they have a midlife crisis it's some version of having spent too much time working and on their kid and start spending their money on low-impact possibly expensive hobbies they'd have liked to do in their younger years, somewhat in denial of the fact that they sold their whole life to the man despite raising a kid.

> 1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.

If you do this, then at the very least there will be one more member of the community who knows how to do it and is willing to accept the liability for their contributions, if any actually make it in. It's an intrinsically valuable asset, as long as your time is available and deemed useful.

> 2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.

If you do this, then it solves your immediate problem, and the scope of liability is limited to your own results or those of people you make it available to. QGIS or similar projects, imo, only gain anything when people are contributing something that lends to the long-term stability and quality of the project, anything else is basically high-risk and noisey. A lot of that comes from nuanced technical discussions between people with a depth of domain and codebase specific knowledge about how to approach a problem and decide whether it's even a problem.

The project survives by people and companies investing in it's long-term survival. If it's not worth a potential contributor's time to understand why they've submitted what they've submitted and why it's correct, then it's not the place for them.

It's my view that worthwhile software products are artifacts of good, durable, and stable processes that are intended outlive them, in the same way that stable economies and governments are artifacts of suitable long-term policymaking that's resilient to rapid fluctuations and malicious actors. One-off rebuilds and fly-by-night features are neat party-tricks, but that's not what I'd encourage a professional to rely on as a tool, because it's unclear what skin the maintainer has in the game.

> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk

In many places they made it more difficult to walk. Not the existence of the machine mind you, but the intent to supplant every other method of transportation.

Some don't even bother to use more than a conventional microwave, which I've sometimes just sent back and asked for a refund.

God I hope we (Canada) never drop to such a low standard for civil rights as our southern neighbours.

It's a minimum of academically average, but no worse.

> Applicants must meet minimum academic eligibility and satisfy English language proficiency requirements for entry into the ADAP program. Academic Eligibility

Year 12 HSC (minimum ATAR 50 or equivalent); or other equivalent qualifications such as:

    AQF Certificate III
    Certificate IV
    Diploma
    Advanced Diploma
    Bachelor or higher degree
    vocational experience
    bridging/preparatory courses  (UPPAP)
    para-professional, and
    other post-secondary qualifications

The actual appearance is less important than the sentiment towards quality, to me anyway; who is it for? I wouldn't buy a house unless I could buy one that I'm happy to live in and that the builder can be happy for me to live in. It's a statement about intent, design, and care. The fact that it actually looks gnarly may not be important, but when nearly all of the houses built in the last 50 years do look like nobody put any thought into it, I start to wonder who's thinking about anything but putting up arbitrary walls to sell without thinking much about what the process yields. Quality feels foreign, there's always this inkling I have that whatever I buy, at any cost, is going to disappear next year or break or have some obvious oversight that got kicked to the side because a deadline came up. It's the focus on horizontal scalability without having attempted to make it better first.

What would you tell a CS student to use an LLM for?

So who do you hire if all you'll see is a wall that is up? The one that seems to care whether it'll stay up after they're gone, or the one who's objective it is to get it up for the price you want to pay?

"You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect." — Paul Jobs

I'd love to find myself a situation in which I can work like you describe and have it now be side-eyed by normies. That's exactly how I want to live/work, and I've never really found a place that will let me do it, so I just keep rolling through these completely incompatible arrangements that eventually kick me out.

> And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.

As long as there's a tangible reason the deadline is urgent, then I feel the same way. If it's just an arbitrary demand then I don't respond like they'd hope. My brain knows when something is truly urgent and when it's not.

Lol, brilliant. I tried the exact opposite of this and got fired for essentially not being awake at 9am EST while I live in PST

Completely agree, and tend towards the same schedule. I don't even mind working in-person with people, but this idea that everyone should just be uniformly aligned to operate on the same hours is alienating and humiliating at times.

The 30 hour day feeling resonates. If I have no external schedule or I'm just living as I see fit, I end up gravitating to 3am bed, ~12pm wake sorta schedule. The only real problem is that it's functionally incompatible with jobs and many other services, even fully remote

Right, that's a balance that I can engage with, but I just have limited enthusiasm for wishing things into existence and then being responsible for them.

Which is perfectly fine, and I find that somewhat gratifying as well, but if the work involved amounted to wishing it into existence, than I may as well take a helicopter to the top of a mountain instead of climbing it. It's not not fun, but it's there's no meaningful process involved, and I'd be cool doing that only once in a while. Granted the processes you describe, and I've also experienced, are horribly bureaucratic and unsatisfying as well, but those do seem like a false dichotomy; either you're involved in the mechanics of the work and have tons of bureaucracy or you're not involved at all and have none. More than likely, process always accumulates to bureaucracy, but there are sweet spots that I hope stick around.

Yes I just meant that Signal's operations in Canada may be vulnerable to the bill.

It's not about the pay, it's about the expectations. Turnout time and business outcomes are the expectation. Pay me an amount I'll accept (modest) and I'll give as many shits as I can, unless the expectation is that I'm doing things on a wildly compressed timeline where a checkmark is more important than data leak that might never come up. I care as long as I'm not punished for doing so.

I lost my job at the beginning of summer and since then, I've applied to maybe 3 jobs. I've had the feeling for years that whichever next job comes along, it'll probably be the last. So far I've been wrong, but now there's this feeling that even if I landed a new one, it's going to just be kowtowing to another super AI pilled narcissistic CTO pushing arbitrary product and arbitrary hot tech to solve it. Even if writing the code wasn't the last thing I was clinging to, the best it would go towards is... just bullshit. That may be burnout speaking, but I've received at least one invitation to apply to something like this, requiring that I be "all in on ai", and I just can't summon the energy to grind through another inane 5 step interview process to basically spend my days making throwaway crap while someone watches how many tokens I'm using. It's hard to reason about what the outcome I'd hope for is, and for now I'd rather just pay from savings to not bother.

That said, I have no idea what else to do. Going back to school and attempting a degree program seems like kind of a crapshoot even if I could convince myself I'd succeed. All of that is very depressing, but on the other hand I'm actually quite happy to have spent all summer basically doing whatever the hell I want; wasn't that the promise of AI anyway?

How is it possible to go zero to commercial pilot in 1.5 years!?

> I'm not saying this email client is not secure (although I'd bet 5$, it is). But it seems beyond silly to assume software is automatically safe just because a new piece of tech can potentially find vulnerabilities. Intent still matters. And the 99% would never have the intent to write secure software.

Hard agree, especially the apparent 99% of AI boosters on HN who seem to basically only care about shipping arbitrary products as fast as possible and skipping the whole middle part where someone sweaty person is grinding through the details intimately, all day, and while they should be sleeping.

At my last place, it was a battle to convince the narcissistic idiot CTO and even one of our senior engineers (both in age and experience) that it was important to encrypt customer data before it transited through third-party cloud service providers. People don't—and aren't incentivized—to give the slightest shit about quality, security, you name it.