And here I was thinking this was going to be about a schism from Holy C [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS#HolyC

It's hard to separate for some people. Unfortunately those people tend to be the worst on both sides

In general, I think (or at least hope) your experience is the more common one. But fwiw I do have a Jewish friend who was personally cussed at and threatened by his own coworker explicitly for being Jewish (well, and probably because they were from Florida if I'm being honest, but there aren't as many slurs for that). The guy who did it was fired (whole thing was recorded iirc), nobody sided with him, he was clearly off his rocker in some way - but it doesn't take much to get shaken up - it sticks with you. And my friend was understandably, shaken up.

I know that because I used to live in Seattle, and unfortunately I had a really scary experience of being threatened (he yelled "I'm going to kill you b****") and chased down by a homeless man for nothing other than being a woman on the same street as him. So I saw my own perspective shift when it happened first hand. I was no longer excited about living downtown in a big city after that experience.

So what I'm saying is, neither me nor my friend took the experience and made it a defining thing. He still lives where he does, didn't blame the community or anything. And I'm back to taking public transit, talking to strangers on the sidewalk, and all the other stuff that comes with spending time downtown in a big city. But this time the city is Charlotte, my home city. It's probably not any safer than Seattle (maybe worse), but experiences shape perception, and I've always had really good experiences on Charlotte, including with homeless people. I could say it's because Charlotte has more police presence lately, or because there's not visible tent camps or open drug usage. But deep down, I know, crazy people are always gonna be out there, and the most trivial thing can make you a target.

So I really get the pull by people who have experienced victimization like that to talk about it. You feel kinda crazy if you don't, because you are surrounded by people who say it never happens because they've never seen it. That was such a big part I think of the Floyd protests - a lot of white people lived in a bubble and didn't know how pervasive overly violent interactions with the police can be (though the ironic part is that a lot of white people still don't realize that they can also be targeted by police with just as much malice). Most American black people already knew first or second-hand that police brutality was real and not uncommon - but until it was undeniable on video, it was treated by others as if it never happened.

So there's some honest middle ground somewhere, but the extremists are the one who have the most to gain from convincing people to believe otherwise.

There’s definitely antisemitism out there. Criticizing Israel is not part of it. The people that run to that ever. single. time. ought to be ashamed of themselves for crying wolf. They have no right to abuse the term and rob it of legitimate meaning because they don’t have a good response on the merits.

Hey, First things - I used to work for AWS, unless your job is more of an evangelist thing, or unless the policy is changed, you need get approval to share side projects. So don't get in trouble over this!

Personally, I am not comfortable with cross-account access from a stranger, even if it's read only. I feel like I should be able to run something locally on my side to gather the data so I can pick and choose what actually needs diagrams

Sounds fun though!

Hey! I did get approval, so fingers-crossed I'm good here :)

Yea, that cross-account trust is a good call out. I'll need to spend time thinking more about it. Is there anything i could do such that you could say: 'Well, in this case I'm fine with cross-account access from a stranger like you'?

Curious why you have to have permission to share something done on your own time... certainly that is only related to programming but if you do your own thing on your own hardware on your own time how do they have any say in what you do or don't do?

Why would AWS have any say in what someone does in their own time?

Yep, I've been using a local vm-centric agent setup for about 3 months, and it works great. I think there is also value in the fact that with a local VM, you can have the same public IP address, so you're not relying on an EC2 EIP that may be blacklisted somewhere.

Yes, running locally certainly helps if you want your sandboxed AI to be able to use the internet without getting blackholed by Cloudflare

Filtering out is my guess.

About 20 years ago, I remember getting my hands on an answer key for the personality screener used to work at Target. This was just for a $7/hr cashier position, but it had a very low pass rate. To them, the ideal candidate for them was: always positive and optimistic, preferred being around people than being alone, never complained, frequently sought approval from peers and authorities, always followed every rule no matter what.

So it wasn't explicitly designed against people with disabilities, the rule-following aspect may be more present in autistic people - but for a lot of these, I can't see many people passing if they answered honestly.

> I can't see many people passing if they answered honestly.

You're not supposed to answer honestly, you're supposed to answer in such a way as to convince them to hire you.

Exactly, you are supposed to have the know-how of how to answer this and, that too, screens away pesky neurodivergents.

"I know the rules of the game and what it will take to continue to be employed in this position."

---

One employer I had gave a test that included such questions as "It is ok to get into fights behind the store if you are not on the clock" and "It is ok to take inventory as long as it costs less than $5."

There are people who failed that test.

You don't see how a customer facing position in a retail chain would reasonably want all these personality traits in their hires as a matter of operating a good business?

Wanting those traits and asking about those traits in a self-reporting questionnaire are two different things.

If it’s a questionnaire you are functionally just screening for liars or people who don’t know how to use the full spectrum of a distribution and put in 5/5 or 0/5 for everything.

I didn't choose to have kids, but I have a friend who prioritized doing so, and she talked about hoping to have a larger family. She got married and had her first child not long after graduating from college. So biologically a very healthy age.

She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.

In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.

Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.

The familial support really is key - it is possible to have a large family "on your own" but it's significantly harder than if you have cooperative family in the area, or are already in multi-generational living situations.

Only mentioning this because the OP did - but for me (also ADHD) it's kind of the opposite. I'm finishing side projects for the first time ever because I can actually get them working before I get bored of them. My projects are more infra-leaning, and not all of them get much use, but some do. Others let me explore certain ideas and then sometimes serve as a reference point later when I run into something that reminds me of that.

Diagnosed with ADHD, ultimately does not change anything for me even through i had the same idea as you. Reason is that i can now start even more stuff in parallel. And some part of them get finished more before i can just prompt more when in focus, but instead of finishing i add more features.

I feel the same. I not sure if I have ADHD, but I always have 2 mode of focusing on something, first one is shot burst of focus and other one is real locked in mode where I forgot to eat or drink water. While second one is much better at delivering value it mostly activated on management/strategy games that I love :D But with AI assisted coding now I can really work on my side project while having first focus mode. Im just writing or designing the parts I excited about, and then I let AI to handle boring task.

Honestly it’s been amazing for me for similar reasons. Also diagnosed ADHD.

Starting projects has always been easy. But once I figured out the hard stuff and then had everything figured out and only saw the long road ahead of drudgery and pipe laying my motivation fizzles out unless my paycheck depends on it.

Now? I still get to figure out the fun hard part and then go send a cheap fast working dumb minion to do the tedium.

I’ve finished 3 things in the past month that have been on my hobby list for years with no progress. It’s been really freeing.

The real moment of truth will be if it’s still worth the cost for tasks that have human value and users but aren’t profitable, which is where most of my side projects live. At current rates it is for me, but once the VC subsidies evaporate then maybe not.

> I’ve finished 3 things in the past month that have been on my hobby list for years with no progress. It’s been really freeing.

For me, rather than cling to the notion that these are things I need to complete and should feel guilty about not having done so, I just started accepting that they either will be completed when the time is right if they're worth my focus, or they weren't meant to be completed and there's probably something better that's come along since starting. I usually keep them all in an archive as a timeline of tinkering and a record of how much time I didn't waste on trying to complete them

I guess I'm between you and OP.

I've definitely spent too many sprints where LLMs told me that something would be easy and they could definitely do it, and then... 2 days later I'm still debugging their crap before it dawns on me... WTF am I doing with my time?!

Overall, I've built a memory safe programming language that solves a lot of problems I personally have - predominately in my spare time over 8 months - and I've learned A TON in the process.

I'm close to a release stage, and on top of that - I've built a lot of good tooling for Ruby that I think other people will find helpful once I polish it (especially if anyone plans to vibe code something non-trivial in Ruby - which I honestly wouldn't recommend).

But... I'm not really sure this is what I actually wanted to do with my time, and I'm constantly questioning how much time I'm sinking into this and why...

It started off as utter amazement of what LLMs can do, and then incredible frustration at what they can't do, and my unending desire to figure out why they're so bad at things so close to what they are exceptionally good at, and if there's anything I can do to bridge that gap.

That's partially what the language is designed for (before I even started using LLMs).

But after all this time... I'm not even sure I've really figured anything out tbh.

I am the same. Most my projects were infra leaning and I had a very general idea of what I wanted, not clear steps. I learned a ton in the process of cleaning up my home networking, understood network topology and restrictions, how to work around ISP imposed bullshit and setup a home network accessible remotely and securely. I also learned about stacks like Portainer/Adguard etc. Setting up Raspberry pi as a general purpose server including media serving via Jellyfin. Until you do it, even with the LLM doing the heavy lifting, you won't learn how to work around the issues.

I setup exactly one personal finance service/dashboard and one Android app for a specific purpose. Then I stopped because my needs were met. I'm sure I will get into it when I need to again.

You can either use it as a PoC testing enabler in which case it will be bunch of unfinished things. Or you can be deliberate and focused about your goals and the results will match that. Of course being a software developer helps.

ADHD here too. So far I've replaced a few tools I paid money for with bespoke ones just for me. If I get a stupid idea of a feature I could add to something, I can just prompt the AI and go do something else. It'll wait for me to come back later.

I moved my docker compose stack to opentofu so that (in theory) I can just run tofu apply on any server and the setup will be 1:1 what I want and need.

Maybe some day I'll see if even AI can figure out NixOS :D

Also diagnosed. It has definitely helped me work on more things. Heck even before I got remedicated, it helped me build an MCP server to help create notes easier for my classes because I struggled with that.

But sometimes, I feel it is too easy to bounce from thing to thing.

How did you get any of that from the comment above? I thought the elitism they were referring to is the the assumption that other jobs don't also have equally deep impacts on a person's identity and way of being.

The part about existing outside of work - that's just reality though. A lot of coders are just doing it to support their families, and a lot of them aren't doing a side hustle or side projects when they're off the 9-5. That stuff gets normalized and glamorized in the highly-compensated-engineering-for-cool-tech-company scene, but there really are working coders who don't do any of that and get by fine all the same. They just tend to live in uncool cities and work in uncool industries.

Yes, and this is something that is routinely overlooked. Work identities run deep, and they are not easily changed.

Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.

Without throwing the gender stuff into it... There are plenty of occupations I have no interest in and can't picture myself ever doing. People spend their childhood and young adulthood figuring out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and you can't expect them to suddenly move to something completely different.

> nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity

In your head maybe?

Some stereotypes are a useful description of reality. You’ve gotta pick your battles.

In the US, 87.3% of nurses are female and 92.3% of truckers are male.

Maybe this nomenclature of yours doesn’t help.

A “computer” used to be a job mostly done by female. Now it’s the opposite.

I'm not going to hold back my description of reality out of fear that it's somehow magically shaping it. Stating most nurses are female is the mildest observation possible, and doesn't sneak in any opinion whether that's good or bad, unlike your comment.

The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.

> In your head maybe?

How do you mean? Trucking doesn’t mostly attract men and gp made it up?

I use tailscale with Orbstack so that my agents on the vm can use tailscale serve to share dashboards I can view on my phone. Works out nicely.

One thing I noticed though, is that even if I set up the VM as a tagged device with limited access rules, if my host machine (the laptop) is connected as my user (which has less limited permissions), the vm uses my host's user permissions, which isn't really what I want. If I disconnect tailscale on the mac and leave the vm tailscale connected it works as intended though - so that's something to look out for.

Also, if you're using orbstack as an agent sandbox, just be aware that they only recently added an option for true filesystem isolation, the default setup doesn't really sandbox effectively.

It sounds like you have tailscale setup in the container with userspace networking — which works smoothly for incoming traffic, but for outgoing traffic to use the container’s tailscale device it has to be routed through a proxy that tailscaled runs, otherwise it goes over the host’s network.

I haven’t tried with orbstack, but it is possible to setup containers to use tailscale with kernel networking by mounting /dev/net/tun into the container. With that setup outgoing traffic will automatically route to the tailnet as the container’s device (and you don’t need tailscale on the host at all).

I have this setup, roughly, with UTM rather than orbstack. I think I have it set up safely, curious how you see it has the wrong permissions?

Good to hear they added true isolation. I had immediately moved to Colima when I was considering options because of this.