> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.

This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".

Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!

> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo. I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering

Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?

Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.

I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?

> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.

It depends what you're building, and why you're doing it.

For example I've always been interested in compilers and interpreters, and I've spent the past few months writing (by hand) a lisp compiler.

It's nothing special, nobody will use it, and existing solutions already exist. But I've had a lot of fun getting things working.

To highlight two examples, and bearing in mind my output binaries are statically linked with no libc, I wrote a garbage collector in amd64 assembly. Getting that working took a couple of weeks, as I kept finding random segfaults and issues. But now? Now I could write something similar in an afternoon. (And because it was for learning I chose stop&copy instead of mark&sweep. It seemed simpler and easier.)

Secondly I realized, belatedly, that I could implement the "(syscall N arg1 arg2 ..)" primitive in my lisp. Which meant that I could write wrappers like this:

     (defconst SYS_mkdir 83)

     (defun mkdir (path)
       "Create the given directory."
        (if (< (syscall SYS_mkdir path (octal "0o755")) 0)
           nil
        1))

Nobody will find it too interesting, I'll say again, but writing a compiler (in golang) that has it's own static runtime written in pure assembly? I'm sure some models will eventually one-shot that, but it won't teach anybody anything.

For me hobby projects are either a) to solve a need (which is what led to me writing a toy CP/M emulator), or they're for learning. And for learning the whole point is to type the code yourself, identify the inevitable bugs, and make iterative improvements.

Looking at what I have now? It feels good. Despite the existance of other lisp interpreters, compilers, or the random LLM stuff people do.

It's not a competition, I've not lost anything, and now I think I've internalized the SysV ABI convention, learned about the limits, and implemented trivial things like "print a floating point number in assembly". As well as learning about how to invoke linux syscalls to read the entries in a directory, & etc.

I’ve left everything (Facebook, Instagram, I’ve even deleted the YouTube app from my phone, etc.) apart from HN. I occasionally look at Twitter, but only when someone sends me a link.

So there are some counterexamples.

I haven't been on twitter for about 5 years, facebook for about 10, my instagram account lasted 2 weeks before I got tired of it. These sites are pretty easy to leave.

Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.

I've left a few sites.

I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.

I don't have a citation, but as hyperbole goes, it's a growing trend no matter how slow or small.

sdf.org is still running.

You say that, but the platforms have pretty much reached market saturation. The only way to get more users is for more users to be born, or perhaps some will be forced offline and then eventually come back online because of age gating.

The only growth is in fake bot accounts.

> The only way to get more users is for more users to be born

As I said, people are constantly arriving.

Reddit went to absolute shit

Enshittification takes so much from us

Mastodon is absolutely thriving. I get you want to be a contrarian but the fediverse is loaded with people who left X and never went back.

I know a considerable number of people who abandoned Twitter for either Mastodon or Bluesky and haven't gone back. It probably depends on what circles you run in. There are some people I know who keep Twitter accounts because it's used for professional networking, for example, but they're in specific fields.

https://ooh.directory/

Pangram is utterly useless.

P.S. The response is non sequitur. I already noted that TFA is ridiculous, but that has nothing to do with the fact that Pangram produces a very high number of false positives.

I will celebrate shutting down the last Wordpress site I have to deal with like the last day of supporting Front Page Server Extensions for UNIX.

IP/subnet reputation. Either someone in your house has a hacked device, or someone in your neighborhood or IP subnet does, or maybe they were used as a residential proxy due to a router with a hardcoded password or something.

Soon you'll have to prove you're an adult the same way to click through for cookies. Can't wait.

The problem for many sites and apps is that it's basically impossible to tell one from another now.

How dare you use Firefox.

No, I don't think captchas are a reason people are leaving platforms, at least not in any large number. If the content of a platform is good, the (extremely slight) roadbump for people is not going to deter them.

Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.

Yes, I think captchas are the wrong solution. They annoy all clients, humans included.

IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?

Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.

Personal sites were always an option and yet they chose the big platform. I interpret "giving up" in that sense, giving up your preference.

Leaving a large audience platform was/is like giving up on having a large audience for your stuff.

This reads as slop to me. Added contrast containing no semantic content.

Same with:

> it changed under them

I use xitter and as long as you nudge the For You tab by clicking show less of this a bit and following the odd thing you like it becomes quite useable.