The basis of these apps is pretty simple: you have to adjust your calorie target based on changes, you have to re-calculate as you go.
What I've found is that tracking activity via calories burned is horribly unproductive as there are large variations on how many calories were "burned" depending on the app, device and activity. Are there any scientific studies on how to calculate calorie burn for any activities? Anything in a controlled environment to understand something simple like adult walking 1 flat mile at 3mph. It seems like this would be really hard to nail down compared with say average calories in an apple. Anecdata: as soon as I stopped tracking activity, the scale started moving.
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring.
I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
> I chose this career mostly due to monetary reasons
I saw similar cases during the dot com boom and then bust. My opinion is that people that don't have an intrinsic interest in their work won't last a career length in it. Do you think some of the burnout is that you aren't really pulled into the work by interest and its just a slog/grind?
> I dread just getting the next job and continuing the corporate grind
Find something that interests you. I don't mean find your "passion" because if your passion is watching snails climb on logs its probably not going to pay well. Given what you read online about the job market, if you start looking now you might find something in 6 months so if you wait 6 months then expect to be out of work for a year.
I think the advice here is the reverse of someone trying to break into tech: find an industry that interests you, get a tech/software job there and then learn that industry and break out of the tech role into more industry specific roles at that place.
How often are people that are paid by their content attracting eyeballs correct? Isn't this a universal thing that people in these roles are constantly stating all sorts of things that never happen. This happens in sports media, politics, tech reporting, stock market predictions, etc.
Shouldn't society have a clever name for people playing these roles by now? Something catchy, insulting and based on truth might help call this out easier. I would throw influencers in there too, they are writing/video-loggin/podcasting for the same money outcome.
Most refrigerators in the US have automatic ice cube making and water dispensing. At least ones in homes, rental properties tend to skimp on this unless they are labelled "luxury". Its connected to the water supply of the house, typically with a smaller diameter plastic hose.
There's a carbon filter inside the fridge, they cost about $50 to replace. For any drinking water I usually use the fridge.
Funny thought - what if we had filters on our computers, digital filters, that needed cleaning. Oh we kind of do! Its cookies and tracing pixels and digital footprints. You should clean those out too.
Fridge water dispensers are usually quite flimsy and the first thing to break. I can fully understand why rental properties would disable them or get ones without the feature.
If you've played video games you're familiar with the dopamine hit you get when defeating a big boss, solving some hard puzzle or finding rare loot. In some ways, solving problems with software is the same way. Its the same feeling and using AI in the last 6+ months has accelerated the pace at which you can get those dopamine hits.
That feeling is what's addictive. To use the video game analogy, if you could skip the grindy elements of repeating a boss fight over and over and just get more chances at the rare loot you probably would. Some call this a cheese, the community finds a cheesy way to defeat the boss easily so you do that and its a 5 min fight vs. 30. That's what AI is helping with: the grindy elements of coding.
I think you can still reach burnout (both in games and software) even if the grindy parts are getting automated. You can certainly ignore AI and hand code but statistically speaking you will probably be "left behind" from your peers.
Does your employer incentivize contributions individually and can you advance with this pace of work? If there are financial incentives it might make sense to put in extra effort. If your employer is in more of "its a marathon, not a sprint" mode and your contributions are to the greater good then put down the work at the end of the day and find something else to do. Set aside AI and ask yourself if its worth it putting in 2 extra hours per day.
I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.
Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.
Great comment, I like the "managing up" part, I'll share that with her. I think this is actually a solid piece of explaining part of the puzzle. Her entire focus was on her team, she's always been taking care of that part first. The dude who ran the train off the rails has zero interest in her and her peers (part of who have also been let go now), so it's likely he's been doing a great job managing the story from his level upwards. The Gervais principle was just posted a moment ago by someone else, I enjoyed reading that!
The term is "corporate psychopath". These are people that just do not see other people as people. I was a director (via an acquisition) for a global-mega-corp and it's literally a fucking game for the people at the top.
Interesting to hear managing up as an overall negative trait. I can’t help but applaud almost any internal promotion at companies since so many from upper management, directors, etc. are hired outside and so rarely promoted up from within.
I’m not sure it’s true that being a bad middle manager makes you a bad director or exec.
I definitely agree that the most effective upper management (directors and execs) would mostly make terrible middle managers.
Idk how you “prove” you’re anything beyond middle management anyway as an external hire outside of network tbh which is maybe why some of those positions go for over $1M/year which equally boggles the mind - to cite an example, why is an HR director at Netflix making $1.2M/year
I don't necessarily mean that managing up is negative in all cases. Its negative when that is the person's main focus - to manage up for that next promotion, make their mgmt believe everything they do is great, nothing is their fault. Its a very selfish point of view and where internal toxic politics breeds because in my eyes that person is putting themselves ahead of all others, the org, deliverables, the people that report to them, etc.
I see upper mgmt the same as middle mgmt. What is your distinction between the two? Budget control? They are both in the middle of the organization and are sort of generic jobs in a way.
> even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
The reason this is so important, both in government and in private business, is that these people decide nothing, until you get to the very top. And the ones at the very top are terrified of actually making any decision. They're at the top and what they're currently doing obviously brought them there. A change? Seriously? They carry out decisions from above them. The reason they want people who deflect blame from the decisions is, yes, to protect themselves, but also to make sure the person they work for can protect themselves, after forcing the wrong decisions downwards.
Companies, and governments, hold on to ideas decades (and governments: centuries) after they've lost their usefulness. You want to get far in education? You find a way to explain why knowledge of Latin determines success in life in 2026, and you learn to make this argument without giving the slightest hint it's not your actual opinion, without insulting Latin teachers, and without insulting administrators.
The problem is, of course, that if you chose the sane option, that Latin is about as important in 2026 as the remaining 2 years in the career of the long-since-senile senior education minister are likely to be ... you will not have any further need to worry about managing up.
Yep, even at the top (I think) people essentially reason: "Doing X is why customers/voters/... brought me to the top. So we're going to do X dammit", and they feel they're also not deciding anything.
People gamble with small companies and upstart political parties. Large companies and big parties don't gamble. Would you?
Huh. First I’ve heard of this. Turns out I’ve been carving out autonomous teams for years and it’s always been successful. So much so, that when I do look at other teams I find myself questioning why they are struggling so much. Now I know why!
Really makes you want to audit ALL communications of the most sociopathic people in your organization and ask an AI to construct the true narrative based on activity and communication logs. Even on any personal devices.
Although those slippery people will just begin to perform for the AI as well.
These folks know that tendency (and in some cases actively did these things to get the leverage they have!), so good luck doing it without getting caught.
Developers en masse do not run Linux as a desktop, about 80% of developers run Windows or MacOS. Your average software developer isn't going to figure out what linux distro to use on desktop, then install and configure everything, its a decision making nightmare for most. I'm not stating that as some sort of derogatory comment, its just not going to happen, most users don't want to spend the time.
Somewhere in the demo of it (its a long demo but there's a lot to unpack), DHH creates a theme from an image, it picks thematic colors from the image and changes the entire UI theme. It looks beautiful, which is not something I could have said in the last 20 years of looking at Linux UIs. They mostly all have just copied Windows or Mac UI elements and call it a day.
I'd like to see where this goes, having a large foundation funding efforts could really make this a viable alternative to a large chunk of personal computer users. My understanding is the funding is mostly going to fund open source contributors to go "full time" and/or get paid for their contributions.
These "it's just a shell script" comments show the exact problem with Linux attitudes. Some people seriously think it's some secret club where you're supposed to pain stakingly install Gentoo, configure a tiling window manager and figure out every glitch and nuance by yourself. And if you don't, you haven't earned it.
Well, is it any wonder that distributions like CachyOS or Omarchy, that appeal to normal people over gatekeeping forum trolls, are popping off? A year ago I hadn't heard of either, but apparently they are quite popular with the kids these days.
> Some people seriously think it's some secret club where you're supposed to pain stakingly install Gentoo, configure a tiling window manager and figure out every glitch and nuance by yourself
Linux mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, and many others are very straightforward in their installation process. And a lot of tools has been added to decrease the reliance on cli tools. It’s not the 90s anymore.
Yet we have a new generation of Linux users that don't care for any of those. Why is that? Maybe Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu are missing something?
For what it's worth, one of the most popular mass market "GNU" Linux devices today is the Steam Deck. Defaulting to old school distros like Ubuntu is a very 2010 mindset.
> For what it's worth, one of the most popular mass market "GNU" Linux devices today is the Steam Deck
Then you might as well say that the most popular mass market FreeBSD device is the PlayStation. Factually true, but unrelated to the conversation.
> Yet we have a new generation of Linux users that don't care for any of those. Why is that? Maybe Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu are missing something?
I don’t think they are as there’s nothing in Ormachy that isn’t readily available in normal distribution other than the “haxor” feeling. I use OpenBSD without any DE because I know all the CLI commands to make things happens, but I would be equally productive with using something like Elementary OS.
Ubuntu evolved a lot, it’s not an old school distribution in any way. Otherwise you would need to also remove arch, which steamOS and DHH‘s distros are relying upon
The reason why small and large companies use github (or any other SaaS) is simple: building and maintaining that service is not something that will help that company move forward. Spending the amount of time to build it, integrate everything, maintain all those integrations is time they could have spent building whatever software their company actually sells.
With the advent of AI, people are probably thinking its easy to clone services like this and many others. Sure a 1.0 might be easy to stand up but you've got to now patch it, maintain it, extend it, integrate more tools into it, and keep it running better than github. People may joke/sneer at uptime metrics but when internal tools at a software company are down or worse, buggy and causing issues with delivery, its more painful than checking a status page to see when its back.
If its a fixed cost on a balance sheet you might as well just use github (substitute whatever SaaS you're going to have AI clone), thats what that is without having responsibility for it.
Lets bring back Java Applets and Flash. I thought WASM was going to get more than niche adoption but it hasn't and there hasn't been anything else that I've heard gaining popularity. I think an element of this is because JS is the easiest language to learn, you don't need to know anything about servers, databases, etc.
Most web applications have RDBMS behind them (aka CRUD apps) so any data from client submitted to server using a text protocol (HTTP) needs to go through validation and casting to the data types of the RDBMS columns. In my opinion there are fewer trade-offs with doing server side programming of the view and more tools available today like hotwire/turbo, liveview, etc. to make it easier.
There are simply too many platforms for native app development to come back and replace web apps in any measurable percentage.
What I've found is that tracking activity via calories burned is horribly unproductive as there are large variations on how many calories were "burned" depending on the app, device and activity. Are there any scientific studies on how to calculate calorie burn for any activities? Anything in a controlled environment to understand something simple like adult walking 1 flat mile at 3mph. It seems like this would be really hard to nail down compared with say average calories in an apple. Anecdata: as soon as I stopped tracking activity, the scale started moving.
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