Guilty Displeasures (opens in new tab)

Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)

Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers

Dogs - I know they are good for humanity with getting their owners for walks, loyalty, etc. But have no idea how people get hooked on them with the picking up hot feces and 25% chance of getting a barking/jumping lunatic that you have to rearrange your life every 6 hours around their bathroom habits...

I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.

It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.

It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.

So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.

Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.

I'm just so glad I'm past the phase where I'd worry about these things. It's very exhausting.

I wouldn't say I feel guilt about all of these necessarily, but I do have a list of things I don't like that I would expect "someone like me" to like:

- The Lord of the Rings (try being a geeky Catholic who finds LotR tedious)

- Fantasy stories generally (though I love sci-fi)

- Chess

- Scrabble

- Rubik's cubes

- Video games

- Listening to music (I sing in a choir, but I don't like listening to music--any of it--even the kinds of music I like to sing)

In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.

I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.

I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.

I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.

Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.

For OP's calibration since he is working on “that problem”

> A younger version of myself felt guilty at disliking reading scientific papers. Then I realized I just didn’t want to be a scientist, and stopped caring. (Also, I realized that nobody really enjoys it, so it’s kind of a moot point; when I realized this I tried to solve the problem for everybody, and now work for a startup that is making real progress against this problem.)

(my emphasis)

I did enjoy reading papers, a lot. I wish I had had more time for it. I don't think your mental model is substantiated.

I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.

On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.

I work as a librarian (and have been one for 25+ years), but I kind of hate the things that librarians should care about. I got into this business because I like helping elderly people in my community with their smartphones and tablets, and getting children to read. I don't care about cosplaying as a social worker or lawyer, fighting injustice and challenging assumptions; I just want to help Mildred w her iPad so she can zoom with her grandkids.

Jazz is my guilty displeasure. To me is the epitome of music that, to quote Peter Griffin, ‘insists upon itself.’ The more navel-gazing it is, the less I care for it.

I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.

Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.

Mine are Rust and Go.

Rust: I simply don't like the syntax

Go: It just feels "wrong". There's something off about it. I feel as if it is an evolutionary dead end.

There are two such mechanisms proposed. Ambivalence theory that says you can both like and dislike something at the same time e.g. smoking. Cognitive dissonance is that you like as you are supposed to like according to your teachings and and upbringing which might not be fully in sync your real neural response e.g. liking famous people when they might be crap.

Politics. I used to be really into them but they just make your life miserable and most discussions are pointless since the topic is always very broad, which makes it have a ton of side effects which then need to be ignored since everyone's trying to solve political issues that have existed hundreds of years in 20 minutes with extreme policy swings.

Opera is a pretty widespread guilty displeasure I actually also share. When I read "poetry" I immediately was like "yes, here, me!!!" I even remember the moment in my life when appreciating poetry was destroyed. Two instnaces. First was when I was forced to learn a poem by heart in early school. And the second one my german teacher (a few years later) gave me a poem about my disability, for interpretation. Mind you, written by a person not sharing that disability. All I could do for one hour was to stare at the lines and plain hate the author for being so pretentious, and hating my teacher for assuming that topic would be open for grabs...

No guilty pleaasures or displeasures. like what you like and accept it.

( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.

I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )

This reminds me of the anti reading list, for books that you'd like to say you've read.

The charitable perspective is that if everyone in your circle likes a thing, you might be missing an opportunity to enjoy something Objectively Great. That's why you force yourself to try stuff.

On the other hand, you have to learn to give up 100 pages into a book that everyone loves, and sometimes admit that you just don't get a movie.

I've been reflecting on my career recently, and I realized that I've built an identity around my career in software engineering. This was something younger me never wanted to do, but going with the flow brought me here and it took getting a promotion to realize and reflect this. I've been in a loop of thoughts, thinking about switching, but also thinking about the time I've already spent here and wanting to stay.

I'm supposed to like They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads, but I just can't. Even after a Terry Gross marathon of Fresh Air.

The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.

I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.

I have gotten into watching Street Fighter tournaments online and recently found out about Tool Assisted gameplay for emulators. Not sure I have time for hacking ROMs but do enjoy those tournaments

Oh. That's definitely my ~6 years old kid. I should spend >= 90 minutes of high quality time with him every weekday after he comes back from school, but nowadays I'm only spending 45-60 minutes. And I'm not reading much to him these months. The "good" news is that grandparents will go back next month, so I gotta pick up more time with my kid. Not sure about the quality, though. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing things he enjoys to do, so I fake for about 15 minutes and call a break. I can't wait for the him he reaches 6 -- I'll gift him a RPi loaded with DOSBian, sit with him every Wed evening to code QBASIC games. I'll ask him to do the design and I'll code it before him. He doesn't read yet, but maybe by then he can read some simple words.

The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.

So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.

[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.

"Guilty" seems like the wrong word. Calling something like exercise a "guilty displeasure" just doesn't seem right

Read. Found it interesting. "My kind of social class...". Immediate close.

My life got a lot better years ago when I became honest with myself about the things I like and dislike, regardless of whether or not they are "in character" or even "normal".

I really, really hate being outdoors. I don't like jazz. I really enjoy Lady Gaga. Oasis is a great band, despite their fanbase being mostly wankers. MCU movies are for the simpleminded. ebooks on an e-ink device offer a much better reading experience than paper books. Dogs and young children are terrible to be around.

Live your life. You don't have to go around advertising how weird you are, but don't be afraid to live authentically.

No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?

But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.

Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.

people

It’s the IT career requirement to keep abreast of everything in tech while being cursed to know most of it is various forms of unnecessary for the supermajority of IT/Enterprise use cases. A few highlights:

* Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doesn’t support it. Kubernetes is amazingly awesome but the equivalent of using nuclear weapons to go duck hunting for most folks.

* AI, for all its power and capability, is too unreliable for wholesale automation - especially when you can just use it to generate the code or software to run the same automations infinitely with deterministic outputs. Your entire org doesn’t need Claude Code Pro Max 20x subs, you just need to get better at getting the code needed for infinite repetition without the AI sub

* Your fridge, oven, microwave, coffee maker, toaster oven, furnace filter, and dishwasher don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or Cloud Connectivity. They just don’t.

* Public Cloud didn’t let you reduce your infrastructure headcount, but it did make it easier for shadow IT to consume more spend, make your headcount more expensive and specialized, and put your infrastructure eggs in the same basket as millions of others, which surely will never become a problem. (/s)

* If you can run basic infra (compute, VPCs, storage, networking) for one public cloud provider, you can run them all. If you’re requiring Architect certs just to run VMs in a landing zone, you’re spending way too much for way too little.

* VLANs and a firewall are enough for 90% of use cases. The only reason you need a NGFW for layer 7 filtering is because vendors stopped publishing what IP ranges, FQDNs, and ports their stuff uses, and that’s less a justification for NGFW’s and more a damning indictment of shitty security practices industry-wide.

* VMs are fine. Containers are nice and efficient, but VMs are still perfectly fine. I am tired of having this conversation with folks who don’t know what containers do but think they’re God’s answer to the myriad of faults of VMs (that they also can’t identify)

* You don’t need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to “automate” workflows. Oftentimes all you need are cronjobs and webhooks, rather than another whole-ass set of sludgepipes.

* You don’t need a data lake, you need to do a better job identifying which data points are meaningful in a context and capturing them efficiently.

I love technology. I love learning about technology. I love solving problems with technology.

I hate the insistence that everything be maximally technological in nature and that every product must be adopted in order to not be left behind.

I hate the lack of discipline, is what I’m saying.

what is "mainstream global anglo pop music"? Anglo apparently means "white"? Is there such a thing as "mainstream global anglo pop music"? I certainly can't separate many mainstream global pop music by the race of the person singing.