Am using Claude to attempt to do refactoring and find bugs. Sometimes its fantastic, finding issues instantly that'd take a lot of trawling or insider knowledge otherwise. Other times it gets obsessed about irrelevant things, makes suggestions that for some other obscure but non obvious reason don't work in practice. The generated code sometimes has excellent ideas I wouldn't have thought of. Other times it has places for bugs to lurk e:g if a directory isn't there, make it. Er, no thanks I want you to blow up if the dir isn't there because if it isn't , something else major went wrong. The trick is knowing when its going to be good and when hopeless and take you down a rabbit hole. Perhaps that is a meta skill on the part of the human developer. But I'm not optimistic about things improving, its the nature of how it is. The AI doesn't know personally the previous devs on the team, their programming tastes, the discussions they had at planning etc. Its got no context.
Follow the above advice as its great :) People need each other. Volunteering, apart from being worthwhile for its own sake, is one of the best ways to meet people and put your own life in perspective. There's a ton of stuff in the world that needs doing, that capitalism leaves un-done as there's no money to be made in it. It can either be directly helping people such as providing food, resources, support for homeless, supporting people with disabilities to participate in activities, generally helping others in some sort of need. Or things like tree-planting which helps everyone. Some of, either the people you help, or fellow volunteers, or both, will become great companions. Can also be a great way to find another partner ;) Some of the most happiest most stable couples my wife and I know, met volunteering - its a good foundation for a relationship, that both people sought to go out and help others even before they met each other.
If they're struggling for ideas to put in homilies, they could always ask for some input from people that are one or both of (a) female or (b) married. Might get a fresh perspective ;)
Indeed! e:g - looking after elderly and/or disabled people, to give their family carers respite. Which is a minimum wage job seen by many as "drain on the taxpayer", ignoring that apart from being worth providing for its own sake, it can enable the family carers to be also economic contributors and pay tax themselves.
Being completely car dependent is to me a fundamental problem in much of both countries, and the advantage USA has is that the cost of running a car (or often 2 especially for a family) takes a smaller part of a middle class salary. In UK , Europe, many countries outside of N America you're just not forced to own a car in the same way. That's not just extra costs when you've got a family, but a source of isolation for people that are old or disabled. (Not to discount the many other wonderful fantastic things about life in N America. :) )
If its any consolation, perhaps there might've been a few other highly intelligent capable sensible people in existence over the last few... shall we say, millennia, who, weren't really listened to either ? ;)
Cautionary tale from here in UK. We had a Neff (same company as Bosch and Siemens) dishwasher which we used heavily for 10 yrs then it started to leak because they'd used plastic in the base which got warped with heat. So, ditched a perfectly running machine due to a design flaw. Replaced it with a Miele in the hope that'd be better. So got a nice-and-simple base model, about £750 I think (as opposed to £400ish you can pay for another Neff). Turns out its made in Czech, not Germany. Although apparently Germans are cynical about their own factories these days, and it may be same quality. So far, it has a design fault that the drain detector is over sensitive. If bits of food fall on the base it interpets that as its still got water in and perpetually keeps trying to drain unless you pour a jug of water in to disperse food bits. Also depending how you close the door sometimes it seems to not engage, have to open and re-shut to make it work. One of the solenoids somewhere sounds a little rattly / not totally healthy, but that may be nothing. Quality of cleaning, and ease of stacking, appears less good than the Neff was. Suffice to say, I reserve judgement on whether paying extra for a Miele is worth it. They claim they're good for 20 yrs but if you read the small print that's at only 5 runs a week or something , not every day. So it may not actually be much better than the Neff in the end. But the Neffs now look cheaper and tackier than the ones from 10 yrs ago. Not an easy decision. Our best appliance purchase ever was a "Tesco value" microwave, which is Chinese cr*p that's still running fine almost 20 yrs later. ;) Good luck with your purchase ;)
This is something I wrestle with. Objectively, it'd seem true that say, a Henry Moore sculpture is of "better taste" than Disneyland. ;) But I 100% wouldn't wanna criticise anyone who preferred Disneyland. Its up to them, they don't have "poor taste" for preferring that... its arrogant indeed to make such a judgement, but then again... surely.. Henry Moore, Disneyland... there's no comparison? ;) so I go around in circles... ;)
+1 to limiting braggadocio. Maintaining code written by someone with humility, and consideration for the subsequent maintainer (including themself, as they don't assume they're super(wo)man and will understand their own code immediately after time away) is much easier than code written by someone with a large ego who likely thinks anyone who doesn't understand their code is "dumb" / "a wimp" etc
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