Pretty much. I live in the Duesseldorf area which has/had it's own little NRW tech-hub mini silicon-valley thing going on. 5 years ago there were multiple really good meetups happening each quarter. An active Google Developer Group, regular well attended Web Development Meetups, a DevOps Network doing the same and even some regular exotic stuff like the pure functional algebrahic development folks meeting up and discussing Scala, Haskell, Elixir and other avant-garde topics.

Companies were eager to pitch in and offer space and catering and I was out and about regularly, enjoying the food and free drinks and getting a hefty dose of nerding off with fellow devs and IT experts.

That all has since completely dried up.

Two years ago I sent out 50+ precisely targeted resumes and had a reaction quota of less than 10%, 5 actual interviews, 3 of them meh to sh1t, two interesting, one of which turned out to be a shady shoddy joint. I joined my current gig which is OK but has me earning 20k less than such a job should reasonably score. My colleagues are leaving left and right and I'm off the team end of September. The last 6 months my coding was basically 95% AI-driven. My last girlfriend has a limited contract and will be out of a job in September too. She bought a garden two years ago and is preparing to go all in on independent homesteading and growing her own veggies out in the easter German boondocks. Demographic decline is starting to show more and more clearly too all around.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about all this.

I'm somewhat "lucky" in the sense that I live a flexible and minimalist lifestyle and that I'm technically an artist with a performing arts diploma, which is nice and fun but not really worth any significant monetary value. Inflation is palpable, even for a guy like me with some cash to spare and the excessive heatwaves and droughts aren't helping.

A friend of mine has launched multiple businesses throughout the years and is struggling once again after finally gaining some traction a few years back. His liquidity is down to zero and he's just scraping by with the German IRS breathing down his neck. We're going to scout out some derelict houses in southern Europe and see if there's anything meaningful to do and gain there. We're both quickly moving in to a semi-prepper mode. If anything meaningful shall happen on the job market for me, I likely will have to downshift my salary once again and pick some IT janitor / helpdesk type position.

Bottom line: There's a bigger shake-up moving in and I suspect there won't be any well-paying software-dev job for me on the other end of it. The bots are here and they're taking over. It's probably just that simple. That's the Age of Cyberpunk for ya, I guess.

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s.

There is and was no wider obscession with masculinity. This is what so many people - women and men - get wrong about masculinity. There is very little in masculinity - even less that with femininity - that is _objectively_ masculine. Most of what constitutes masculinity is in the eye of the beholder. There are guys who think reckless driving, drinking and soccer are "masculine". I for one don't see it.

The narrative also is that men can't express their feelings. Which is complete and utter non-sense. The vast majority of significant art and poetry is done by men. Romanticism was invented by men. We are the romantic sex trying to be rational. And a significant part of being a man is tapping into the inner flame of poetry in whatever the man does and gaining an emotional resonance and depth that is independent of the whims of hetero-dynamic relationships. Escapism is a good fallback if society around you limits everything else. Which it tends to do.

Bottom line: You did the right thing. And masculinity-wise too.

You're correctly describing a phenomenon. However, that has nothing to do with ADHD and everything to do with gyno-centric social dynamics that - by sheer evo-psych - looks for ways to exploit men. This is how cultures grow and develop. There's quite a bit of research on that (neatly sidelined by contemporary mainstream femnoise).

Bottom line: The problem you describe is a fundamental one that exists for ADHD males as it does for "regular" males. It's only that ADHD males are perhaps more sensitive to these dynamics. That's why there is a solid amount of evidence that male ADHD in particular actually is an advantage for populations, because it forces those men to leave the beaten path and explore new ground. The 'rebel' gene of ADHD is a useful vector for discovering new paths for a given population/society.

Disclaimer: ADHD candidate here.

I could write an entire set of essays on what we currently know about ADHD here but it basically boils down to this:

ADHDlers have a hightened sensitivity towards their value for people around them. So we go about our day constantly scanning for dopamine spikes or true connection. I need my medication the least when I'm in love with a cute lady (and she is with me). Given that through evolution men are more disposable than women the sense of self-worth is challenged way more often in boys and men that it is with women. Especially in a time where robots are doing more and more of the heavy lifting and masculinity is considered "toxic". Hence excessive male escapism, especially with male teens and those with perpetual creative impulses (aka ADHD types). If we didn't have this sort of escapism, fascism would've long since taken over way harder than it's doing right now.

I'm either dancing, moving around, escaping at one of my computer devices or doing some (somewhat) exotic activity thing like kitesurfing, paragliding, motorbike riding, scating, bikepacking, etc. This is SOP for an ADHD man like me.

The whole trick is not to feel guilt or toxic shame when you do escapism. You're actually doing very little damage to anybody else, it's cheap and it's a perfect fit for a society that has an abundance of stimulation just an internet connection away. Overcoming that involves actively working on your attachment style, abandonment terror and any shame-based identity that many people have. Once that happens, going out, roaming the countryside or travelling the world suddenly becomes way more interesting. Which is precisely for what the ADHD disposition brings some advantages along.

That ADHDlers are more prone to this or it's mental fallback alternative called escapism than people with a stronger frontal lobe should be obvious.

That's why my code is better that ever but I get to close up shop at 5 in the afternoon. For me 10x _is_ realized. For my company it's closer to 5x. Which is no problem for me because it's actually my private AI metasubscription taking care of all this.

This is my initial point: I get to take it easy because at least half of AIs productivity gains benefit me directly. As of know I'm basically being paid to tell robots what to do. And that's pretty much the definition of a post-scarcity utopia if you ask me.

If Google provides 100x value to users why wouldn't this translate to a measurable increase in labor productivity?

Because those productivity gains are getting absorbed by our culture. That is my entire point.

A bushmans productivity in scavenging does not show up in the stock market because he doesn't even know (or care) what a stock market is. Likewise that you and I can read and write and do math and know enough about germ and pathogen theory to wash our hands with soap and eat with cutlery does not show up on the stock market either. It's basically a given that we know these things in our civilisation.

The exact same thing is happening with AI. AI is so universal, I'd go so far as to say that tracking it's value gain in some stock market borders on the silly. Especially if you expect it to bring the gains we all hope for. If AI puts me out of a job, that's tough luck for me but for humanity it's a huge plus.

That's why I'm going to replace my coding work with doing Yoga, exercising, doing Art, travelling and eating healthy. That's by and large the best retirement plan for a Senior Software dev being made obsolete in my position.

Clean fresh Codebase. Angular frontend, Deno backend, PostgreSQL DB, no bloat, carefully selected dependencies. Single DB record class. Clean state management (NgRX), TDD The only thing I have to look out for is when the AI loses context and forgets to use a specific state store or API. And reinvents the wheel within a new class or component. One "reminder" usually fixes that. That's why I review so code. Other than that it's basically perfect. Way better than and human team I've worked with in the past.

Another point in case: I've started making music using AI. I already have an album of 23 songs, half of which are really good. All done with AI, on the side, within less than three weeks. This would be 3 months of work of professional musicians, composers and producers and thousands of euros without AI. With it's a laptop and an 8 Euro monthly subscription.

Bottom line: Check out AI. You want to be prepared for what's coming.

As a tool for those who know how to ask questions.

My productivity has increased tenfold since January. I'm basically botsitting. I don't need a team anymore, I can do larger non-trivial software projects on my own. Well, not on my own, but definitely with my new colleague AI. Never had such a competent team in form of a chat-stream. I'm just telling him what to do and try to keep track of the code before committing. I feel like a dumb manager now, chasing some poor devs around. Only they're not human and waaaay more productive than I ever could be.

The kicker of course is right now those gains land in my lap as I'm the one using the AI. Awesome!

The downside of course is that the exact same processes I can now optimize and automate won't need optimizing and automating anymore quite soon now because those will also be done by AI. I'm a sole developer at a law firm. You should see the faces of the lawyers clueing in on what AI means for _their_ job.

Using AI is basically a new cultural technique such as reading, writing and math and it makes specialized white-collar humans (like me) less needed in the mid- to long term. Anybody who expects that to show up on some monetary balance sheet in the stock market doesn't understand the nature of the tool. Point in case: a company like Google is worth X on the stock market. The value Google provides to humanity however is 100x or something like that. We run around with SF supercomputers in our pocket that make star trek communicators look like some plastic toy you get as a token prize at a fair-raffle.

Thus are the effects of an ever expanding post-scarcity economy. Expecting something meaningful to show up on the stock market because of that is like expecting a decomissioned steam engine to fix itself when I get a new Tesla car.

I'm getting into music production using an all-digital FOSS toolchain with only a Suno subscription and some second-hand Midi Controller hardware as the proprietary stuff. I use Suno as a source of inspiration and foundations for own tracks. What newest 5.5 model of Suno puts out, even in written and sung lyrics, is absolutely impressive. Media production is a field that's being turned on its head by generative AI and the most impressive case for that is about 80% of stuff Suno has put out for me in the last 10 weeks. If there is anything sustainable about how Suno is doing its thing, entire production pipelines in the music industry can basically get ready to shut down. I've seen sound engineers turn speechless listening to what Suno does with their raw material in less than 5 minutes for a process that would take some pro an entire week and even then not quite reach the level of quality.

Given that every cord and cadence has been played and (re)discovered probably hundreds or even thousands of times I wonder if anyone has a case against their AI or could argue that Suno is not original in the same way humans are. But other than that, as of today modern digital music production has basically ceased to be a job IMHO.

Is that a problem? It feels uncomfortable, sure. But what's the legal take here?

... to begin with. Why I don't quite get is that many people seem to be unaware of how quickly LLMs will be optimized to run on quasi-regular hardware, not needing the insane datacenters primarly used for training. AI _is_ a revolutionary tech, no doubt, but there also is a bubble that likely is about to pop.

... is what I suspect. If AI has the impact many predict, people will have to rely on their social security network for a while, but given the AI productivity boost things will get way cheaper too. There will be chaos and more pain than necessary for country with a sub-par wealth distribution, but by and large I am somewhat optimistic about the AI shakeup.

If all goes as it should we'll all simply be working less in 10 years time. To be honest, I already am. AI has cut my workload and increased my productivity even further to more than compensate for me calling it a day an hour earlier than just a year ago.

Bulldozer flatten the physical world. AI generates content and code in the virtual world. Huge difference.

So being smart isn't a rarity anymore? Boo hoo.

When a smartphone can do a diagnosis just as good as a doctor (or better), when it can cough up a legal document that is 80% finished after 30 seconds, that's overall a good thing. Some desk jockeys like us will lose their prestigious jobs. Really no big loss for society as a hole.

The problem is, of course, that running a fascist surveillance state has just gotten 5 orders of magnitude cheaper. That sure is a problem we need to be aware of.

The TOS of these commercial services say they basically own your content, unless it's illegal, then all the burden is on you. This has been the case ever since those services became a thing, more than 25 years ago.

That's why any computer and internet expert worth their reputation does not use these services without a throw-away alias account or for anything mission-critical.

... Xbox One X. Awesome machine. Console affordable, games dirt cheap, all the bugs ironed out. I'll be getting the Xbox Series X when that drops in price ... which is likely not going to happen for a while but is totally fine by me. I still have plenty games to play on my current main console.

I always wait until the end of a generation before I buy. I've still got 80+ games, most of them unplayed. Even my Xbox 360 library is half unused. Someday I want to finish the Orange Box on that one.