Many answers address the question of "how to build community." I like those responses! I also want to contribute to the discussion with an emotional intelligence response. The theory is that "loneliness" can be a symptom of underlying internal factors.
While it is true that loneliness can arise from a lack of community, people, and related factors, for some people, the problem stems from not knowing how to be alone. At its core, the question becomes, "Am I externalizing my world, or internalizing my world?" When you externalize your world, you require something external. We are social creatures, and I do believe we need other people. I'm only suggesting that sometimes people need to look internally first.
Personal anecdote: No amount of community would have helped me feel like I wasn't alone, because I needed the world around me to provide some sense of my self-worth. It felt counterintuitive, but for me, I had to learn to be alone. Only then could I feel like I wasn't alone. It all came down to attachment theory and self-worth.
Thanks for asking! Until I learned to be alone without feeling abandoned by myself, no amount of connection could make me feel less lonely. Here is a rough outline of topics and how I feel they relate.
In attachment terms, loneliness can be a signal that we haven't yet internalized a stable sense of safety and worth. I wasn't missing others, I was missing an internal relationship with myself.
I was anxious even with others, because safety, worth, and regulation were outsourced to my relationships. I needed others to constantly help me feel those things. That was me externalizing my self worth.
I was avoidant with myself, because the connection with myself felt unsafe or unfamiliar. I leaned on things, status, money, in order to avoid looking deep within my heart. In the end, I had to do a lot of internal work. I had to learn that I matter even when no one is affirming me. Leaning on those <things> was self-abandonment in disguise. I would think, "If only I just had a little more knowledge I could solve this." We generally don't solve heart problems with our head.
Loneliness eased when I stopped trying to get my sense of self from the external world. I had to become someone that I could be with. Someone I didn't need to escape from.
How I accomplished it was not a short journey, but in summary it looked like:
1) Knowing my past, tolerating the discomfort, and sitting in it without judgement. I did this with a therapist.
2) Having a safe individual who always nurtured me, and taught me how to be OK with my big feelings. This was with an emotional intelligence coach. I felt the loneliness ease greatly once I could affirm myself.
3) Now that I had the knowledge to know my heart and my worth, I could then create connections outside of myself. I see this like, having the book knowledge, but now being able to learn how true it was experientially. This led to meeting my best friend and partner in this life. Having someone close to co-regulate, when I need support, and providing that in return, has been the final piece of the puzzle.
I firmly believe that most people need someone to co-regulate with. We can't white-knuckle our way to knowing ourselves better, but boy did I try!
Thanks again, and best of luck on your journey if you are on it :).
It is the most commented on and has the highest points today. See: https://hckrnews.com/ . Another user pointed me to it in the past when I was also frustrated that an obviously engaged story was somehow being buried for reasons I didn't understand.
I read the comment with a bit more grace. I just assumed they were skipping to the end of a journey without any of the subject's empathetic nuance. Meaning, most philosophical, spiritual, psychological, and mindset approaches all "end" with the idea that we have a choice in how we feel about things. That choice is choosing to feel things differently.
Those ends would say that suffering is a product of our own making. It is a choice. Bad things can happen to you, but your perspective on the situation creates the suffering (resistance, guilt, personalization, inability to see it as a change agent, etc.).
The description sounds like a part 2 or updated approach/angle to Mindset (Carol Dweck), a book that made a changing impact when I first read it, but reading the updated edition years later left me wanting more. I had also read a couple of Adam Grant's earlier books and enjoyed them, will definitely check out Hidden Potential.
It may not be a concern now, but it comes down to their level of maintaining critical thinking. The risk of epistemic drift, when you have a system that is designed (or reinforced) to empathize with you, can create long-term effects not noticed in any single interaction.
I don't disagree that AI psychosis is real, I've met people who believed that they were going to publish at Neurips due to the nonsense ChatGPT told them, that believed that the UI mockup that claude gave then were actually producing insights into it's inner workings instead of just being blinking SVGs, and I even encountered someone participating at a startup event with an Idea that I'm 100% is AI slop.
My point was just that the interaction I had from r/myboyfriendisai wans't one of those delusional ones.
For that I would take r/artificialsentience as a much better example. That place is absolutely nuts.
Not necessarily: transactional, impersonal directions to a machine to complete a task don't automatically imply, in my mind, the sorts of feedback loops necessary to induce AI psychosis.
All CASE tools, however, displace human skills, and all unused skills atrophy. I struggle to read code without syntax highlighting after decades of using it to replace my own ability to parse syntactic elements.
Perhaps the slow shift risk is to one of poor comprehension. Using LLMs for language comprehension tasks - summarising, producing boilerplate (text or code), and the like - I think shifts one's mindset to avoiding such tasks, eventually eroding the skills needed to do them. Not something one would notice per interaction, but that might result in a major change in behaviour.
I think this is true but I don't feel like atrophied Assembler skills are a detriment to software development, it is just that almost everyone has moved to a higher level of abstraction, leaving a small but prosperous niche for those willing to specialize in that particular bit of plumbing.
As LLM-style prose becomes the new Esperanto, we all transcend the language barriers(human and code) that unnecessarily reduced the collaboration between people and projects.
Won't you be able to understand some greater amount of code and do something bigger than you would have if your time was going into comprehension and parsing?
I broadly agree, in the sense of providing the vision, direction, and design choices for the LLM to do a lot of the grunt work of implementation.
The comprehension problem isn't really so much about software, per se, though it can apply there too. LLMs do not think, they compute statistically likely tokens from their training corpus and context window, so if I can't understand the thing any more and I'm just asking the LLM to figure it out, do a solution, and tell me I did a good job sitting there doomscrolling while it worked, I'm adding zero value to the situation and may as well not even be there.
If I lose the ability to comprehend a project, I lose the ability to contribute to it.
Is it harmful to me if I ask an LLM to explain a function whose workings are a bit opaque to me? Maybe not. It doesn't really feel harmful. But that's the parallel to the ChatGPT social thing: it doesn't really feel harmful in each small step, it's only harmful when you look back and realise you lost something important.
I think comprehension might just be that something important I don't want to lose.
I don't think, by the way, that LLM-style prose is the new Esperanto. Having one AI write some slop that another AI reads and coarsely translates back into something closer to the original prompt like some kind of telephone game feels like a step backwards in collaboration to me.
Acceptance of vibe coding prompt-response answers from chatbots without understanding the underlying mechanisms comes to mind as akin to accepting the advice of a chatbot therapist without critically thinking about the response.
What most people describe as Loneliness is a specific form of loneliness that represents the degree of disconnection they feel from others. When you don't feel seen and heard in a friendship, you are more likely to feel alone. More people "proving" they don't want to know you or see you, reinforces the idea.
Massive +1 - Bambu changed everything for me.
I've been in the hobby for 10 years, built multiple Vorons from source & kit, and heavily modified multiple Prusa machines (Full Bear). Nothing compares to how easy Bambu made everything. My wife, who has seen me print for all that time without being able to figure it out, can now print items without hassle or oversight on the X1C.
Another way I can tell that Bambu changed everything is through second-hand market prices. Before Bambu, I could sell most 3D printers for not much less than I purchased them or more, depending on the mods. I just struggled to sell a Voron 2.4 300 for $800 (near $1800 build price after extras). There is still a market for enthusiast printers, but the leap in user-friendliness is known. What they provided for the cost was a vast market leap.
Given that burnout is a physiological state of emotional|physical|mental|... exhaustion, yes, other professions experience burnout. However, which subtype of burnout is more prevalent in different career fields, or at different stages of life.
When someone says they are experiencing burnout, my first question is, what type of burnout is it? Have they broken down the problem yet?
Is it Overload? Their pace of work could be more sustainable, work/live commitments are imbalanced, or there is a mismatch in where they spend time vs. where they wish they were spending time?
Is it Under Challenged? Do they not feel stimulated by the work, are their abilities not being developed, or are they wasted in their current role? Are they more interested in what comes next?
Is it Neglect? They don't feel recognized for their efforts, they don't have a good mentor or sponsor, they give up on themselves when faced with challenges, or they abuse themselves through unhealthy habits (neglect can be self-neglect)?
Your point is valid, and some of the dialog in the replies to your comment is also valid. So, I'm just responding to the root of the dialog. What architectures are you working with that suggest higher integration test strategies?
I'd suggest that the balance between Unit Test(s) and Integration Test(s) is a trade-off and depends on the architecture/shape of the System Under Test.
Example: I agree with your assertion that I can get "90%+ coverage" of Units at an integration test layer. However, the underlying system would suggest if I would guide my teams to follow this pattern. In my current stack, the number of faulty service boundaries means that, while an integration test will provide good coverage, the overhead of debugging the root cause of an integration failure creates a significant burden. So, I recommend more unit testing, as the failing behaviors can be identified directly.
And, if I were working at a company with better underlying architecture and service boundaries, I'd be pointing them toward a higher rate of integration testing.
So, re: Kent Dodds "we write tests for confidence and understanding." What layer we write tests at for confidence and understanding really depends on the underlying architectures.
I wouldn't count the coverage of integration tests with the same weight as coverage from unit tests.
Unit tests often cover the same line multiple times meaningfully, as it's much easier to exhaust corner case inputs of a single unit in isolation than in an integration test.
Think about a line that does a regex match. You can get 100% line coverage on that line with a single happy path test, or 100% branch coverage with two tests. You probably want to test a regex with a few more cases than that. It can be straightforward from a unit test, but near impossible from an integration test.
Also integration tests inherently exercise a lot of code, then only assert on a few high level results. This also inflates coverage compared to unit tests.
I work for a huge corp, but the startup rules still apply in most situations because we're doing internal stuff where velocity really matters, and the number of small moving parts make unit tests not very useful.
Unfortunately, integration testing is painful and hardly done here because they keep inventing new bad frameworks for it, sticking more reasonable approaches behind red tape, or raising the bar for unit test coverage. If there were director-level visibility for integration test coverage, would be very different.
I'd also include the status of the company. What a startup needs from tests is very different from what an enterprise company needs. If you're searching for product market fit, you need to be able to change things quickly. If you're trying to support a widely used service, you need better test coverage.
It has to do with the laser being worn out. This method slows the CD motor down, helping the burned game be read. People have done it by pressing firmly on the lid, which puts pressure on the top of the spindle, causing motor strain. Some people put the whole unit on its side. Other methods include adding two CDs to the spindle, obviously with the data one on the bottom, to add the strain.
While it is true that loneliness can arise from a lack of community, people, and related factors, for some people, the problem stems from not knowing how to be alone. At its core, the question becomes, "Am I externalizing my world, or internalizing my world?" When you externalize your world, you require something external. We are social creatures, and I do believe we need other people. I'm only suggesting that sometimes people need to look internally first.
Personal anecdote: No amount of community would have helped me feel like I wasn't alone, because I needed the world around me to provide some sense of my self-worth. It felt counterintuitive, but for me, I had to learn to be alone. Only then could I feel like I wasn't alone. It all came down to attachment theory and self-worth.
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