> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries. They're starting to learn about the effect consistent noise at that level has on their mental & physical well-being as well.
Reminds me of the first time I got to sit in an Actually Good chair that came with a new job. My back was killing me for the first couple weeks as the decades-old knots undid themselves.
I got to relive it when I went back to crappy office chairs at my next gig.
"Someone else would be willing to ruin this, so I may as well ruin it and get paid for it" is not a direction everyone wants to, or even is willing to go.
I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.
It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
As someone now firmly in the "used to be a developer" part of my career, AI use seems like good old atrophying of the memory muscle of coding. Whether it's because you just don't code anymore at all, or offload that thinking to AI, the effect on you is the same. You start to forget.
Don't have AI do anything you want to stay sharp on.
Only if you think of it that way -- making every human interaction purely transactional.
Conversely, there's something I've used as a guiding principle for a while now that isn't quite the same, but in the same direction: to receive help, be helpful.
Both of these also fall under the greater umbrella of "treat others as you would like to be treated".
I got reeeeally good at producing repro gifs that I could plug straight inline into email replies to "can't repro"; it's forever clear that most developers either don't know how to test the product they are building, or simply can't be bothered to try.
> That emotion is nostalgia, whether real or perceived.
Absolutely. One of my prized possessions is a book I had made from digital pictures I took on a family trip when my kids were 3 & 4 years old. The pictures are of single-digit megapixel quality, but are perfect for what they needed to be: a reminder of that trip, and the memories contained within.
It seems to me that the slightly fuzzy aspect of old pictures better matches our fuzzy memories of that time.
I'm a human who writes like that, because mobile and desktop OSs have made it easy—so easy—to include things like em-dashes and other formerly uncommon punctuation. I also come from an age where people were taught things like proper grammar and punctuation, so go figure.