There's a really interesting movie called "We Live in Public" that documents one of the early tech pioneers Josh Harris as he sells his internet radio company and then creates an underground CCTV community. It's fascinating and equally frightening how people behaved towards one another while sharing space and constantly watching each other. It reminds me a lot the relationship many twitch streamers have with their viewers. You can find the movie for free on Tubi (in the states at least).
What you're describing sound like the challenges that come from working at a big company. In my opinion you have a few options; each better suited towards different levels of burnout, which I believe you might be experiencing.
1. If you're severely burned out take some time off, as much as you can. A few weeks would be nice but a month or more would be even better. I've found that after spending the first few days (or even the first entire week) being a sloth on the couch I'll begin desiring to program again. Working on personal projects or just learning something new without worrying about work often helps me out of these valleys you're describing.
2. If you're moderately burnt out you may want to consider joining a smaller company or startup. The need for code is much greater and the agency you get at a smaller company is incredible. No need to ask for permission, they want you to code.
3. Finally if you're not quite burned out or if switching to a new company is not an option I'd honestly recommend reading some books like Peopleware, Mythical Man Month, Coders at Work and others. This will give you some respite as what you're experiencing is not uncommon. Learning how others have experienced what you're experiencing and how they push back or fight against cruft like this will embolden you to hopefully make change within and push back intelligently.
I hope you feel better and that the joy of coding comes back. And if it doesn't I hope you ultimately find happiness, wherever that may be.
When you wake up in the morning do you feel rested? Or are you still tired?
Others have already mentioned this but I think it's important to reiterate sleep quality. I learned I was not getting enough oxygen at night due to congestion when I went to the doctor for problems with tiredness and brain fog. Taking nasacort each night before bed completely changed my life.
An excerpt from the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
Status Meetings Are About Status
A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.
When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of one organization, for example, that runs daily two-hour status meetings. When participants are off-site during a meeting, they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and is subject to serious penalties.
I would guess it zeroed in on common interests. Videos you like, comment on, or even just watch for more than one time can all give clues into what interests you.
If you've logged in it can potentially match your login information or email address to other activity on the web. TikTok's servers could also place you geographically somewhat roughly based on ip address.
Outside of that I agree. It's unclear what data TikTok is supposedly gathering that other apps aren't already and why that's a cause for alarm.
If memory serves me, nginx succeeded by relying on epoll primitives for handling many connections rather than spinning up a thread per request by default like apache did at the time. That was the big difference back then. These days I imagine Apache has adopted/honed these same techniques.
How would you characterize the differences between your years working your ass off and your years taking it easy? What did daily work look like during these eras?
Slightly off topic: The New Yorker had a really interesting article about dollar stores and how their presence can potentially harm communities rather than help.
I've had similar experiences as well as times where xhyve made it so my laptop could not come out of sleep.
xhyve is wonderful but still needs some work and it seems like the main dev isn't interested in continuing work on it at this point[1]. Hopefully Docker's usage will spur more work on xhyve.