Luckily I needed a new laptop and I bought an M1 Max secondhand from a friend quite cheaply because it was fast enough to recompile something else I am interested in.

So for me, there is no additional hardware cost; it was acquired in replacement.

I run the AI models at home on this kit because I want to; I'll use openrouter if I need to.

I accept the economics of this article are right. But I feel so incredibly sad about this outcome that we're now just to be people caretaking machines that do the job we loved that actually I am not sure that exercising this nuance is going to matter in the long term.

It turns out it is a mistake I have made in my life — now really unfixable because I am a bit too old — to believe that I will always find enough fulfilment in my work to offset the absence of personal fulfilment elsewhere; I have always enjoyed being able to help people directly by doing a thing I love and I am good at, and that has kept away the sadness of finding it difficult to build a conventional family life to enjoy.

I assumed I would always find some new way to find that enjoyment, but even the slim enjoyment from being able to explore this stuff on my own kit in my own terms will not be enough if the pendulum does not swing back towards human effort.

It is a dismal world we have made for ourselves. Lately I have found myself dreading growing too much older in it.

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Barbing an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You sound awesome. Just venting? (b/c curious if friends can fill your heart abundantly, & we know we're never too old to make new friends!)

> dreading

Even avoiding political headlines (OK, at least articles), plenty of cause for dread, so I keep re-focusing to avoid despair. Easier said than done innit!

Can't kill my hope for the future though. One day, all the good stuff shall prevail (morality, intelligence, love & kindness)... maybe not permanently, but a Star Trek future is there somewhere (& they had their troubles but it wouldn't be a dreadful situation overall). Sharing with you in case it's even slightly contagious!

	▲	dofm 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I must say I am not quite just venting. I have been struggling severely with burnout for a couple of years and as I work to fix it by myself ultimately, and get back who I was, the awful thing is finding out that the industry is so utterly and completely different anyway. So in my fight back I decided that I needed to re-centre myself; learn how these tools can help me personally return to productivity, try to get that deep self-teaching back, reanimate myself consistent with my principles, learn and make things. Take it head on without losing who I was. I haven’t been a “big projects” developer since the dot com era (when I worked on some pretty cutting edge things). I have been a small projects developer: building things that matter for small businesses and schools, supporting designers, teaching people stuff along the way. I have been productive, I have very diverse skills and I have been valued. What I have come back to is an industry that has abandoned craft principles or discussions about developer discipline, code quality, efficiency, robustness, resilience, etc., and fully organised itself into a headlong rush towards a kind of nihilistic Metropolis machine-cranking. And because I am a freelancer (more of a contractor in practice), my competition is already the machine itself. I am one of those developers who is eliminated in the last sentence of the article. I am not needed on big projects and in many small jobs — the kind a burned out small business developer needs to get back to work — I will never be needed again. It is very odd, trying to learn how to understand the tools that others are using to make you irrelevant. And when all your friends are obsessed with AI, either clients desperate to use it or friends (in the creative culture I am surrounded by away from work) angry and resentful of it, I find I have just nobody to talk this through with. In many ways I would rather not have returned to actively using HN (because articles and despair, and because being by oneself it’s possible to get drawn into online arguments) but in recent months I have noticed in the comments that perhaps this is the only place where these discussions among “craft” developers are happening at all. I am over fifty and safe financially, and if my last day were for some horrible reason out of my control to be tomorrow, that’s OK; I have enjoyed my life and on good days I do still enjoy it. I have friends who I see when I can get myself out of the house, I have distractions I can enjoy, all that. I am now much more troubled by what it is going to be like to continue to live it. I struggle every day to see where I have value, especially as burnout has left me with less energy to spend. Like I say, I am safe and very aware I have been blessed; it’s not a cry for help. But I think a lot of us who found value in our work wonder what the fuck we can do to keep ourselves alive the way we were. ETA: holy shit that was an essay.

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kaffekaka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hope you can find joy again. People like you, who value the human side, are needed in this world. I agree that in recent years it has been going the wrong way, but to change it we have to work together.

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jjdjdjtk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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