Look into self-hosting. Start small with only one or two services that have a big impact on your privacy (e.g., backup of your phone's pics with Immich) and expand from there once you gained some experience. Things will go wrong, expecially in the beginning. So set up encrypted backups, I use Kopia for that, one repository on an external SSD and another on Backblaze.
I'm used to being alone due to difficulties socializing and having moved multiple times. I will turn 31 later this year.
Short term I would suggest you going to cafes or other similar places in the weekends. Even if you end up not interacting with people, having them around already helps in itself. Plus, you might actually end up interacting with someone.
To get out of the bad mood, you can also try to call a relative on the phone, I found this to be helpful many times in the moment, but not always.
Personally, especially now that the weather is getting warm where I am, I often go out for walks or runs while listening to podcasts. But beware that using headphones all the time makes it harder to interact with others.
More long term, I would advice looking for a job where you show up in person, so that you get to interact with your coworkers.
I would also suggest talking about this with your psychiatrist, to get some advice that is more tailored to you. One last thing. While I'm not a doctor and this definitely isn't medical advice, I heard about studies showing that physical exercise is as effective as certain anti-depressants. You could discuss this with your doctor as well, as if it works for you, it has more benefits and less side effects than pills. Additionally, if you join some sport class that could be another way to meet people.
> If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times
I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.
I read other people’s code all the time. I work as a platform engineer with sre functions.
Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself tracing through things or testing during runtime to understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better for this.
On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing with other people. No one is going to get everything right all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands or look things up for me, but we’re trying to figure things out together.
> The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.
Probelm is, to be able to do what you're describing, you still need the source code and the permission to modify it. So you will need to switch to the FOSS tools the nerds are using.
There are source-available software one is not permitted to distribute after modification. But what source-available software prevents the user from modifying the source for use by oneself?
> It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos.
Yet, the first impact on FOSS seems to be quite the opposite: maintainers complaining about PRs and vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI hallucinations, wasting their time. It seems to be so bad that now GitHub is offering the possibility of turning off pull requests for repositories. What you present here is an optimistic view, and I would be happy for it to be correct, but what we've seen so far unfortunately seems to point in a different direction.
We might be witnessing some survivor bias here based on our own human conditioning. Successful PRs aren't going to make the news like the bad ones do.
With that said, we are all dealing with AI still convincingly writing code that doesn't work despite passing tests or introducing hard to find bugs. It will be some time until we iron that out fully for more reliable output I suspect.
Unfortunately we won't be able to stop humans thinking they are software engineers when they are not now that the abstraction language is the human language so guarding from spam will be more important than ever.
I am glad I formed an active hacker community on Matrix before the proliferation of bots. I will miss Hacker News but I can tell it's going the way of Usenet in 1993. Much love to dang, I will always remember him and his effort fondly. Today's situation is reminiscent of Russ Allbery's famous usenet rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
> Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).
Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Here's what you should tell your coworker the first day on the job if you get hired to do something you know nothing about :D
That is a very succinct way to describe what it feels like to have a job that is cleaning up vibe code. Maybe (just maybe) I'd understand if this was a prototype from someone with zero budget. But you just know they are going to continue to "prototype" once they being you aboard. And many will complain about how slow everything goes because they are used to their fast iterations off of unscalable code.
Its frustrating in an interesting way. With other aspects like machine language people quickly understand that this isn't sufficient for a proper transition and compromise with it. Code being more nebulous doesn't get that grace.
Isn't it even in the U.S. e.g. enough for some big music firm to claim copyright infringement on a YouTube video for it to be removed and the channel's owner get a copyright strike, no courts and no FBI involved? AFAIK this is what happens with so-called DMCA takedown requests.
The difference is that content creator can put the video on their own website and that domain won't get blocked by my ISP. It might get seized later after some judicial review.
No, they can't. It's why ISP -level blocks are non-existent in USA. And there's no "hosting provider" in this scenario assuming the person self-hosts on their own server.
So, if my understanding is correct, a DMCA takedown request can only be sent to whatever entity is actually storing the data. So the ISP doesn't get involved. If someone is self-hosting, they are the ones receiving the takedown request, while if they're relying on an hosting provider, the provider gets the request. Is this correct?
Exactly, in USA they just remove your videos from YouTube and in Spain in Italy they just block your domains on the ISPs for the exact same reasons and both are sometimes fraudulent.
The USA does not remove your videos from YouTube, Google does because they don't have the resources to evaluate all copyright claims and they are afraid of getting sued. You're welcome to host your own videos.
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