Season 1 Episode 3 of The Last of Us TV show. I was in a similar place as you for a long time, and that episode of all things just absolutely broke me for some reason. It was pretty cathartic.

It’s a bit long, but one of my favorite authors recently gave a keynote speech that focuses on art and AI, and I think it actually holds the answers to your question.

https://youtu.be/mb3uK-_QkOo

Basically, you have to learn to find satisfaction and fulfillment in the process of creating the art. Realize that, by creating the art yourself, the art holds a part of you. Your experiences, your perspectives, your soul. No matter how technically perfect AI art becomes, only art that you create yourself will truly be a reflection of you.

That, and just enjoy the experiential elements of making the art. Whether it’s having fun tinkering with different sounds as you try to write a song, exploring different colors and brushstrokes as you paint, or simply giving yourself time to imagine something truly exciting or meaningful to you as you prepare to write a chapter. The process of creating art has to be fun or you’ll never stick with it.

I think it depends on the context.

Sometimes, friends can say something like this from a somewhat well-meaning place. Not necessarily that they’re mad at the situation, but more as a confidence booster to help that friend potentially get out of a bad relationship. (Sometimes this can be done in a bad way though).

Other times, it’s a jealousy thing. Like, if a guy sees a woman he finds attractive with some other guy, he might start commenting on how she’s “out of his league” (regardless of the other guy’s qualities) either because he’s frustrated he can’t find a partner he finds attractive, or maybe even in hopes of competing with the other guy for the woman. This is mostly a toxic thing and rarely has much to do with how well the couple fits together.

For me, it often just makes me wonder what positive qualities the person might have that make them a worthy partner. As someone who is not conventionally attractive at all and dating someone who is extremely attractive, seeing other couples that maybe aren’t an exact match in terms of looks gives me hope and confidence.

As a side note, I’ve actually had a few well meaning friends tell me that my partner is “out of my league”, which was a bit hurtful, but I think they were just trying to be protective.

TL;DR: Yeah, people say it (and mean it) for a variety of reasons. But it’s usually not that they object to it conceptually, but more that they have their own biases involved. Don’t let it affect your opinions though. There’s a lot more to a relationship than just how someone looks (or how much money they make).

This actually happened with my father. Not only was the missing rent due, but they also had a lawyer argue that by dieing, my father had broken the lease, so we had to pay the fee for that too. The judge reduced the fee a bit, but we still ended up having to pay thousands out of his estate to that shitty apartment complex’s parent company.

So yes, at least in the state this happened, the missing rent was required to be paid out of the estate. Not sure what your role is in this scenario, but if someone died, consider kindness rather than trying to secure every last dollar possible.

Some really important context for anyone who’s not familiar with JW’s practice of disfellowshipping:

Within the church, dissent or even asking questions has often been punished by labeling members as apostates and ostracizing—or “disfellowshipping”— them. As a result, Doe and others choose to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation that could cost them family, friend, and professional relationships.

Watch Tower knows all of this, of course. That’s precisely the point. They’re not sending DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare because they have a genuine interest in protecting their copyrights — they’re using the subpoena process as a surveillance tool with a built-in punishment mechanism waiting at the other end.

This is one of the most powerful tools they have to keep people too afraid to even question beliefs.

To add an extra layer, deliberately “working against God” (which is what they label any criticism) is actually treated with even more severity. It gets the additional label of “apostasy”. Some disfellowshipped people, while ostracized, are at least looked upon with some sympathy and occasionally still get some (limited) communication with the community. Apostates, on the other hand, are treated with utter disdain and hatred and have no real path to ever reconnecting with the community again.

For anyone who’s not been in this situation, I cannot overstate how terrifying this prospect is. JWs are very isolationist, so many people in the religion have no network at all outside of the religion. Meaning that the above ostracization is so much worse than losing a family member or two. It often means losing every relationship in your life all at once. I have watched this process absolutely destroy people’s lives, sending them spiraling into depression, hopeless, and guilt.

no one is illegal

I get where you’re coming from, but that philosophy didn’t work too well for indigenous people, hence the longer saying…

Ghost. They’re the only band I’ve seen more than once. I’ve seen them 3 times so far, and I will definitely go again next time they’re in my area. The main thing that makes it worth it is their stage presence. They go all out on the costumes, choreography, and set design. Even the fans will get all dressed up. And their music is also super solid. Imo almost every song is a banger.

This is something that would really frustrate me if I was still on reddit. It feels nice to not care at all.

Unfortunately, the person who deliberately prompted AI to write this blog post and publish it is getting exactly what they want. Attention. And all of the gullible people acting like this is somehow an example of “dangerous levels of AI intelligence” or whatever bullshit are playing right into it.

AI agents are becoming your biggest API consumers, and they can’t always DM other teams. If you want to be productive with AI, if you want your codebase to be a place where agents can actually work, you need to think of your codebase as an application that the agent is interacting with.

So what you’re saying is: mis-type everything! 👉😉👉

What an exciting time to be building software! With AI, we’re able to achieve production outages with unprecedented frequency!

“Oh Sandra, you dumb bitch.”

- https://youtube.com/shorts/VHBON5XKqMw

The pattern of demoing stuff like this and then responding to the glaring issues and failures with, “but just wait until the next model bro, eventually this will work bro, just need a larger context window, maybe some recursive prompting, we’re basically already there bro,” is so embarrassing. If I claimed to have written this myself and presented it at a tech conference (or hell, even turned it in as an assignment in a CS course), I’d be laughed out of the room when it failed to compile hello world. The fact that people see this and get excited is so bizarre.

If it can’t compile hello world, can you even imagine all the easily exploitable security issues, the unhandled edge cases, the major performance issues, etc. that are buried in that dumpster fire of source code. That this is what passes for software “engineering” now is so sad. Too bad they don’t start using this compiler at Anthropic.

I can’t wait to see how RFK Jr. manages to turn this one around! /s

I’m not so sure the “open source” part is working either when you think about how AI tools were trained.

It’s really sad, because the accessibility of developing software and collaborative nature of the open source community is a big part of what drew me to software engineering as a career, and it’s always been one of the first things I mention about why I love it. But, of course, these fucking evil companies found a way to take every individual part of something good and twist it into something awful.

It’s stuff like this that leaves me completely hopeless that the AI industry will ever see the crash that it 100% deserves.

The most frustrating is when someone asks me for help because they’re stuck then hits me with a barrage of “chatgpt said xxx” complete nonsense while I’m trying to assess the situation

That is the absolute worst. I’ve even gotten “Because Claude said so” in response to code review comments asking why they made a certain design decision.

they let off the gas

Man, I’m so jealous. My company is too large for me to have any sway, and they just added AI tool adoption as one of the key performance indicators on our performance reviews. 😔

I am staunchly anti-AI, but the company I am working for unfortunately pushes AI tool adoption extremely aggressively. A lot of the things in the post are similar to sentiments I have. Specifically the sections around vibe coding offloading the burden of work to the reviewer and how to mitigate that by pushing back against those sorts of PRs.

I agree with you, though, that the post ignores the simplest solution of just not using AI tools. It may be the case that the author doesn’t have the ability to enforce that, but it should still definitely be listed as the first and most logical solution.

I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering creating a blocklist of certain engineers at work that spam out vibe coded trash PRs and informing my manager that I will not do code reviews for anyone on the list.

Mainly just piano. I like playing chords with my left hand and the melody with my right hand. I’m not great at keeping steady rhythm. If I or anyone else starts singing along, I immediately lose focus. I mostly just play for myself for stress relief.

I’m trying to learn guitar, but it’s slow going for the time being.

There’s some deep irony in the fact that his whole post-Phantom-Menance character arc was “too angry to die” and how Disney is too greedy to let him die. They’ve brought him back so many times. I realize this is before his final death on Tatooine, but still crazy how determined they are to revisit these already over-explored characters rather than take a chance on something new and exciting (like an Old Republic era TV show).