Kind of ironic that TFA came after their previous piece.

>I Literally Don’t Know

>TL;DR: You don’t need to pick my brain, or probably anyone’s brain, for general life advice. It won’t help.

Overall the Optimism piece is just long-form LinkedIn garbage. What insights does it present? Complaining bad, optimism good, not all complaining is bad, but complaining is mostly bad? OK..

Improvements rarely start with "I'm satisfied with this". Writing off complaining because one conflates complaining with misery is silly.

Improvements start because someone has a better solution to a problem, not just complaining about the current solution. We should implement x because it fixes these problems with current solution. Rather than just current solution is bad.

> Improvements rarely start with "I'm satisfied with this". Writing off complaining because one conflates complaining with misery is silly.

I've found improvements rarely start with complaining either. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that people I know that are complainers are rarely the source of improvements. They're usually too busy complaining about the situation and the proposed solutions to pick one.

Improvements most often come from a mindset of "this thing is not the way I want it to be, so what am I going to do to change that?" Sometimes "complain to someone with the ability to change it" is the right answer, but usually you have some degree of agency yourself and it's a lot more effective to exercise that agency than to get someone else to act on your behalf in response to your complaints.

I see it like a scale of how easy it is to deal with a problem.

The easiest thing is to stew and do nothing. Next easiest thing is to is to sit around and complain. After that comes actually doing something about the problem.

I think efficient, productive, optimistic people are people who don't have the ramp up time of stewing and complaining, and it becomes self perpetuating: they have a better life that's easy to be optimistic about because problems get solved by themselves without issues ("complaints").

Suppose Bezos burns 80% of his net worth playing with his willy in his garage and decides to wrap it up. He goes straight back to his cushy HF job, 3 years behind in his career if he can't manage to market his experience as some kind of lofty journey landing him a better role than when he left. Let's not pretend it was brave - he had the foundations to take the risks and still come out just fine.

>If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture.

This person has seemingly never worked with the kinds of tech people who are happy to point and click their way through their career, rarely taking an interest in automation or a deeper understanding of the tools they use every day. I won't say all of them are stupid, but certainly some of them are.

>What's to stop any malicious actor from posting these same comments?

Nothing, but that is missing the broader point. AI allows a malicious actor to do this at a scale and quality that multiplies the impact and damage. Your question is akin to "nukes? Who cares, guns can kill people too"

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

Technical moncultures are bad. The VSCode people ought to at least tolerate VSCode refuseniks as a kind of endangered species, worth keeping around out of a mixture of sentiment and insurance against memetic stagnation

I've grown up on vi and later emacs, but VSCode is no joke. It does almost everything, and most of it better, and more intuitively. There's no reason to torture yourself with counting characters, words or lines in order to get the delete command correct in one go.

> There's no reason to torture yourself with counting characters, words or lines in order to get the delete command correct in one go

No one proficient in vim does this. Just use relative line line numbers or delete words in full with ciw.

The single most intuitive ah-ha moment I’ve had in Vi was the change verb. Change In <object>: ci( means “change the text within parentheses.” Change unTil <object>: ct& means “change the text until an ampersand.” And so on. It just makes sense.

VSCode never had moments like that for me. It’s fine, sure, but it wasn’t anything special.

You may love to learn then: Those aren't part of change.

"i(" is a selector (see ":help object-select"), and it also works with "y" or "d" or even in visual mode. Likewise "t" is a movement that can even be used on its own.

There's also a sibling to "i", "a", that includes the delimiter used, and "t" is a valid delimiter for HTML or XML tags.

No, it isn't, but that's perhaps the point: it's so direct. It rarely gets in the way. Sure, some things are easier done in emacs, but that's when you just copy the text to emacs, do your thing, and copy it back.

What VSCode isn't, is elegant. I think the OP likes that very much, and VSCode has forsaken that in favor of simplicity and a kind of free-for-all extension mechanism.

That's such an overtly bad characterisation of Vim editing that I can't take your reply seriously.

It's --however-- the take of the article.

Vim feels equivalent to a horse carrier in comparison to vscode to a modern car.

To me, vscode feels like a huge truck with too small an engine, and vim feels like a sports car.

Also comes with all the downsides of a modern car (ads, random BS, blackboxes, etc...)

I feel like those trying to teach me Vim are the same who refused to learn to use VsCode.

Once configured, I can do the same than Vim. With more features.

I find VSCode to be sluggish and buggy, especially plugins, and also gave up on figuring out how to rebind jk to Esc. I also don't trust the telemetry flag, so I'd rather not open any proprietary projects in it.

It also can't run in a terminal, as far as I know.

> Once configured

is doing some heavy lifting here. "Once configured" vim can do the same you can do in VsCode. Editor wars are really the dumbest nerd fight.

Such a bad take as once configured Vim can do everything VSCode can and more.

You do you, but I'd be curious to hear what you think you can do in VS Code that you can't do in vim - what these "more features" are. Vim, and Neovim, have an expansive plugin culture. They are designed to be very configurable and customisable, so that the software fits around you and what you need to do. What features do you find missing?

Also, I get that you feel vim users are being a bit evangelical - "trying to teach", as you put it - but I can assure you that I, for one, have used VS Code plenty (including using vim keybindings), and it's just not very good for me. It doesn't fit me.

It's slow, it's not as configurable to my needs. I sometimes have nothing more than my iPad Pro (and magic keyboard), with me - I can mosh/ssh into a dev box, tmux up a session get to work easily, I never found a nice way to make VS Code work in this pattern.

What's the point in being a software engineer if you can't have software that fits you? Yes, vim has a learning curve, but then I get to make it my own and make it fit what I need. Same with tmux, my shell, and so on. In my experience, VS Code forced me a little more to fit to it rather than the other way around.

Like I say, you do you, but don't think all vim fans are talking from a place of ignorance.

Appreciate your perspective, and it makes me wish there was some kind of online 'engineers learning from their mistakes' forum (rare to see "I burned myself"). To hear hard won knowledge distilled like this is a nice reminder to spend ones complexity budget wisely.

How about: IIPTWNIRTIoSoDIQMBSNRTL

(It Is Probable That While Not Immediately Required The Implementation of Storage of Data In Question May Be Simpler Now Rather Than Later)

I've gone ahead and included additional detail in the acronym in the event that the clarity is required later, as this would be difficult to retrofit into a shorter, more-established acronym.

Why do I feel like that should be a cheat code in a FPS game?

I'm worried about AI changing the shape of my job to the point of it being unstimulating and soul sucking. I enjoy the challenges, solving problems, achieving what others (peers) tried and failed to. Knowing that continuing to develop these skills also keeps my mind sharp is motivating, too. If I lose that, this is just a boring corporate role among dullards.

If one of the idiots in my reporting line decides AI should be mandated (e.g. Shopify dunce), that's the end for me. I have no interest in being spoonfed by a chatbot and being accountable for it.

Don't be so shallow! These robots allow them to focus more on animal care! They said so, so it's true.