Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)
- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)
- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)
- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)
- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)
- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)
The article defines guilty displeasures as things you don't like but you hope you like. I don't think you hope yourself to like modern AAA games.
Then I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets, and I'd like to have absolutely none of that please.
It's this cognitive dissonance maybe, that's the guilty displeasure. Because I do keep coming back, we all do.
In the grim darkness of the right now, with former gaming companies focusing on live services and loot boxes and advertising, core gamers' very conception of video games is simulacra, a copy without the original.
With time, this will fade; like when searching for Jesus, you don't really expect to physically find the dude hidden in the corner of the church. Expectations decay.
Maybe I will visit Steam on the Internet Archive and still browse, when everything is gone and dead, and the guilty displeasure feeling will have outlived the displeasure, and the guilt.
Sure, there are games with repackaged Unity assets on Steam. But it's on you if you just open steam and browse the new releases. Go by proper game reviews or recommendations by friends with similar taste, which has always been the right way to go, even three decades ago.
I'm even somewhat resentful of modern games, I feel like they should be... more fun? More often then not I just kind of throw something old in an emulator and play that. My comment might have come across as the opposite but I think it can be interpreted either way.
"I should be enjoying this stuff, why does it suck so bad now?" Is probably the vibe we're trying to get at here.
I think we should support people who are uncomfortable about this stuff, don't ridicule them with "tinfoil hat much?" type sentiments
By the way, GOG.com treats you well wrt cloud/privacy/etc. All games they sell are drm-free and can be downloaded, installed and played offline.
- The Lord of the Rings (try being a geeky Catholic who finds LotR tedious)
- Fantasy stories generally (though I love sci-fi)
- Chess
- Scrabble
- Rubik's cubes
- Video games
- Listening to music (I sing in a choir, but I don't like listening to music--any of it--even the kinds of music I like to sing)
> The same reason people generally don't regret having kids even though the commitment and overall change of your life are much greater than what you described for dogs.
They're definitely saying people don't regret having kids even though it's harder, meaning it's relevant/comparable to having a pet. But it's not, since your child isn't an animal you've chosen to have.
But now I see any of my friend and family that have dogs re-arrange their lives around them. One friend will never stay out more than 2 hours because "gotta get back to the dogs". So, dinner and a movie is out since that would be more than 2 hours. A family member is similar, gotta get home for the dogs. This family member would also not be ok to check them into a dog hotel for a longer family vacation so we haven't had one in 10 years.
So, seeing examples like these and others, I haven't been able to convince myself to do it. I kept waiting until I had a house with a yard like I grew up in but that never happened.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.
I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.
But I’ve also been really wanting to make my laptop’s NixOS config into a flake and make it nicely modular. I’ve watched some YouTube, read some posts, but never properly made the jump. There was always something wrong.
But now. Claude code has helped me over the hill, explaining every edit. Every step. And I’m really happy with the result. I see that I was just stuck on some small things now.
I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.
Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.
Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.
I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.
The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
Rust: I simply don't like the syntax
Go: It just feels "wrong". There's something off about it. I feel as if it is an evolutionary dead end.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
French arthouse cinema is indeed something I also dislike, but that's also something that's pretty passive so if one opened up a block from me I wouldn't really care. When a dispensary opened up a block for me (after I voted "yes" on the legislation that legalized weed), I was genuinely pretty annoyed. Now a large chunk of my neighborhood perpetually smells like marijuana, and while a lot of people claim they like that small, I am not one of them.
I dunno, I feel a bit hypocritical about this. I have gotten drunk (though not in several years) but I've never done any other fun drugs, so maybe this is some internalized jealousy on my end.
Also some of the things you describe are just addiction and coping, euphemizing it.
Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.
He might have been smarter than me (not too high of a bar to cross), but I stand by my point that in order to be good at physics you have to, you know, actually learn physics
Not sure what my point is.
> A younger version of myself felt guilty at disliking reading scientific papers. Then I realized I just didn’t want to be a scientist, and stopped caring. (Also, I realized that nobody really enjoys it, so it’s kind of a moot point; when I realized this I tried to solve the problem for everybody, and now work for a startup that is making real progress against this problem.)
(my emphasis)
I did enjoy reading papers, a lot. I wish I had had more time for it. I don't think your mental model is substantiated.
My problem stems from being very good at speedreading, being hyperlexic, and since I was a kid I devour books very fast, and I cannot transfer that skill completely to math and this disappoints me.
I know very good mathematicians who have problems reading both literature and math, and because there is no discrepancy, they don't experience it in a "I hate math" way as I do.
I actually managed to apply my "superpower" by reading a lot of what smart people say about math (e.g. introductions to papers, long mathoverflow answers, blog posts) and thus I internalized a lot of math thinking processes without actually doing the work (I know people say "there is no royal road to geometry" but for me it worked).
Upon reading I felt identified (hyperlexic having trouble reading math as if it was prose). I still tell myself “I like math”. But it's true that when I think of “doing math”, I envision a study situation with the stressors removed.
I also had a similar experience with meta readings, funny.
Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.
On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.
( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.
I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )
That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.
I mean COME ON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xphLY5ucIpQ
Their lyrics are very clever and interesting.
But their music is terrible. What the world needs is for someone with musical talent to redo the music to TMBG's corpus.
The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.
So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.
[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
The Mojave in the summertime at night (if and only if the sun is 100% behind the horizon) is really, properly, exquisite. My knowledge of its existence makes me irrationally angry whenever I have to be outdoors any other time/place, which is the aforementioned 99.999% of the time. The only other exception is the Sea of Crete, just before dawn or just after sunset, in May or September exclusively. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the overall lifelong experience of being forced to deal with Earth's atmosphere.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.
Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.
Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.
I’ll amend my uninformed comparison to be the 150th lap but the point is the same: watching world-class talent do a clearly difficult thing in a way that is repetitive and unengaging to me.
I really, really hate being outdoors. I don't like jazz. I really enjoy Lady Gaga. Oasis is a great band, despite their fanbase being mostly wankers. MCU movies are for the simpleminded. ebooks on an e-ink device offer a much better reading experience than paper books. Dogs and young children are terrible to be around.
Live your life. You don't have to go around advertising how weird you are, but don't be afraid to live authentically.
* Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doesn’t support it. Kubernetes is amazingly awesome but the equivalent of using nuclear weapons to go duck hunting for most folks.
* AI, for all its power and capability, is too unreliable for wholesale automation - especially when you can just use it to generate the code or software to run the same automations infinitely with deterministic outputs. Your entire org doesn’t need Claude Code Pro Max 20x subs, you just need to get better at getting the code needed for infinite repetition without the AI sub
* Your fridge, oven, microwave, coffee maker, toaster oven, furnace filter, and dishwasher don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or Cloud Connectivity. They just don’t.
* Public Cloud didn’t let you reduce your infrastructure headcount, but it did make it easier for shadow IT to consume more spend, make your headcount more expensive and specialized, and put your infrastructure eggs in the same basket as millions of others, which surely will never become a problem. (/s)
* If you can run basic infra (compute, VPCs, storage, networking) for one public cloud provider, you can run them all. If you’re requiring Architect certs just to run VMs in a landing zone, you’re spending way too much for way too little.
* VLANs and a firewall are enough for 90% of use cases. The only reason you need a NGFW for layer 7 filtering is because vendors stopped publishing what IP ranges, FQDNs, and ports their stuff uses, and that’s less a justification for NGFW’s and more a damning indictment of shitty security practices industry-wide.
* VMs are fine. Containers are nice and efficient, but VMs are still perfectly fine. I am tired of having this conversation with folks who don’t know what containers do but think they’re God’s answer to the myriad of faults of VMs (that they also can’t identify)
* You don’t need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to “automate” workflows. Oftentimes all you need are cronjobs and webhooks, rather than another whole-ass set of sludgepipes.
* You don’t need a data lake, you need to do a better job identifying which data points are meaningful in a context and capturing them efficiently.
I love technology. I love learning about technology. I love solving problems with technology.
I hate the insistence that everything be maximally technological in nature and that every product must be adopted in order to not be left behind.
I hate the lack of discipline, is what I’m saying.