I was in a similar place ~6 years ago, so not AI-based but still depressed. I tried therapy for 2-3 years and personally didn’t find it helpful. My problem is overthinking and dwelling on things, so I think it was counterproductive to spend dedicated time every week talking about why I was depressed. However, I’d still recommend trying it since it’s obviously helpful for a lot of people. Just don’t get too discouraged if it doesn’t work for you.

I tried improving diet/exercise/sleep like the other commenters suggest, but of course the depression makes that nearly impossible. The only thing that actually helped me was burning all the way out, quitting my job, and going back to blue collar work. I don’t work from home anymore and I make less than half of what I made as a dev, so it was a big lifestyle change, but I wish I had done it years earlier.

Anyway, I hope you figure out what works for you. I wasted a lot of my life being depressed and I hate to see others going through it.

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.

`let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

    let fac =
      let rec fac' acc = function
        | 0 -> acc
        | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1)
      in
      fac' 1

    let seven =
      let four = 4 and three = 3 in
      four + three

https://ideone.com/HpTrI4

Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it

Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.

The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.

Yeah and it's fucking ugly and unreadable, it shouldn't be allowed.

That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3].

I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly.

I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.

> I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

IMO with multiple devs the focus on integration (module-level) instead of unit (lower-level/helper-function-level) is even more important than on single-dev projects.

I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.

Reminds me of this page with an example for understanding how many permutations there are for a shuffled deck of cards: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

> So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way. Shall we play a game?

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

Damn, I got the paper stack wet with all that ocean water. Guess I'm starting again from scratch...

I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).

Care to share the link? I'd like to take a look.

> Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv

But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.

The youtube channel Summoning Salt made a great video that covers the history of Tetris world records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOJlg8g8_yw

Highly recommend Summoning Salt in general. I never thought I'd find video game speed runs, records, etc, interesting, but his videos end up being very entertaining. His pacing, tone, and the way he works in music are very effective.

> I'm curious how this can be applied with the inevitable combinatorial exhaustion that will happen with musical aspects such as melody, chord progression, and rhythm.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

They did this in 2020. The article points out that "Whether this tactic actually works in court remains to be seen" and I haven't been following along with the story, so I don't know the current status.

> still being as faithful to the original as it could be

Wow, you weren't kidding - it's basically a note-for-note cover of the whole album. Thanks for sharing the link!