61 karma · joined July 17, 2025
1% of depression is chronic.
>The good news is that with the right treatment and support, most people with depression can make a full recovery. (https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/depression-in-ad...)
I can't advise for genuine medical cases, but for the average case of anxiety/depression you can over come it. For men I would recommend the following channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ElishaLong
>Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
I mean same principles apply in general.
> If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge.
Amen.
> I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
The official definition of engineering is: "Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific principles to design, build, and optimize structures, machines, systems, and processes." Software development falls into this definition. If there isn't something in this definition you like then you're in the wrong job. I find joy in optimizing processes. No matter what scale, a well designed and optimized system brings me joy.
>My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these
I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer:
>Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No
>Sleeping enough?: Yes/No
>Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?"
>Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself?: Yes/No (Stop playing videogames, reduce phone use, limit drugs and alcohol)
>Is your work environment healthy?: Yes/No (If 'No' how can you leave it)
> Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? : Yes/No
An easy happiness formula is:
1. Eat right: Maintain a healthy diet to keep your physical energy stable.
2. Exercise: Keep active every day to release mood-boosting chemicals.
3. Get enough sleep: Prioritize rest to reset your mental state.
4. Imagine an incredible future: Daydream about grand possibilities, even if you don't fully believe them at first.
5. Work toward a flexible schedule: Having control over your time is one of the highest drivers of happiness.
6. Do things you can steadily improve at: Progress and mastery trigger the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
7. Help others: Once you’ve helped yourself first, giving back provides profound psychological benefits.
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine: Remove mental clutter and decision fatigue by establishing steady habits
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
My best friend lived in a sort of suburb (still very rural) but we'd spend all day biking around, meeting other kids, getting up to trouble, and making grand adventures to the store to buy mountain dew. This was all the way up until high school. After 14 I was too busy with school and sports in the academic year to do anything else, and in the summer I worked at a camp.
I talked to my mom about this recently and she said that 'kids can't just wander around anymore it's unsafe' and I'd argue that a child with a smart phone that constantly pings their location is a million times safer than whatever the hell we were doing.
I think the challenge is that parents are more anxious and video games and social media are way more convenient than anything outside the house, making a perfect storm. I don't remember leaving the house as much as a kid because there was that much to do outside, but rather we had exhausted all the activities at home. I feel like now you have unlimited options for entertainment at home so why bother, especially if your parents would rather you be at home anyways.
Google AI Search Output: 'Got it! Your previous message or email is officially ignored and wiped from the slate. How can I help you instead?'
I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”.
When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19.
I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
Sure you can let Claude have a field day and churn out whatever you want but the question is: a) Did you read the diffs and provide the necessary oversight to make sure it actually does what you want properly, b) Is the feature actually useful?
If you've worked on legacy systems you know there's so much garbage floating around that the bar isn't that high generally for code as long as it seems to work. If you read the code and documentation Claude makes thoroughly and aren't blindly accepting every commit there is not really a problem as long as you are responsible and can put your stamp of approval on it. If you are pushing garbage through it doesn't matter if a junior dev, yourself, or Claude wrote it, the problem isn't the code but your CI/CD process.
I think the problem is expectations. I know some devs at 'AI-native' organizations that have Claude do a lot for them. Which is fine, for a lot of boiler plate or standard requests they can now ship 2X code. The problem is the expectation is now that they ship 2X code. I think if you leave timelines relatively the same as pre-AI then having an agent generate, document, refactor, test, and evaluate code with you can lead to a better product.
Work output shouldn't be any different at home vs. in office. I'm more productive at home and I'm am more inclined to play around after hours with ideas or solutions.
AI is a bit worrying from a developmental stand point. I learned how to code during my first two internships and it was stuff that Claude could probably one shot today. That being said, anyone whose worked with a terrible legacy system can probably attest that it is filled with garbage and an equivalent pass through documented by Claude is way better than some human developers work from ten years ago.
I always like the phrase, "follow the money", in situations like this. Are OpenAI or Microsoft close to AGI? Who knows... Is there a monetary incentive to making you believe they are close to AGI? Absolutely. Take in this was the first bullet point in Microsoft's blog post.
Well, when you have grant money for a project on X most supervisors will not let you do Y. Most students wouldn’t do research on Y if they weren’t going to be funded. I work in a lab where everyone else has to play ball by their grant proposals and you can sense a general lack of genuine curiosity. Which makes sense, they are not really different than a contract employee with a very specific deliverable that was designed before they even showed up. I can’t speak for other fields but especially in biomedical/compsci where your peers are making six figures working for graduate pay for 2 years (MSc) and then another 4-6 (PhD) doesn’t motivate you to engage outside of your exact degree requirements and your project. Add on that “curious” research doesn’t have a guaranteed path to publishing or to success and it suddenly becomes less appealing to gamble your future on such a thing. I would label my own research as “curious” in that I have support from professors at a few universities but on the whole we are facing challenges from academia at large. The only reason I can comfortably pursue something that has a genuine non-zero chance of failing into obscurity is that I am funded by an in-house university scholarship and I have a full time job.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.