Who is benefiting from using Instagram? IMO it is just a slop generating machine with the only aim of getting you to waste your time, exhaust yourself and feel worse about yourself, all while being shown ads.
I waste a lot of time on it too and I blame myself for being pulled in to use it so much. There is a stark difference between my ability to focus on things for longer when I compare my current self with the 4 years younger self.
Matiks >>>> Instagram brainrot. Played for an hour and didn't feel exhausted but instead more energized. Just made me realise how much instagram is ruining our brains. It is seriously concerning.
AI has made it easier to write optimized code on day 0, but it is creating a new problem...
Ask an LLM to write some code, and it will often reach for the most "correct" version - caching, batching, async, configurable strategies. Code that looks staff-level from the first commit.
If you keep probing it to optimize further, it will come up with such absurd optimizations that you may not have even heard of.
Most of these optimizations solve a problem you do not have yet. A function handling 50 records a day does not need a connection pool, a retry queue, and a pluggable backend. It needs to work and be readable.
To be honest, we engineers have always over-engineered, but AI has lowered the cost of writing the complex version to nearly zero, so the lazy default (write the simple thing first) no longer feels lazy. It feels like leaving performance on the table.
The result is codebases full of abstractions nobody asked for. Interfaces with a single implementation. Generic configs for cases that will never change. Vector operations and macros no one asked for.
The skill that matters now is not writing optimized code. It is knowing when to stop optimizing. Premature optimization used to be expensive enough that most people avoided it by default. Now it is one prompt away.
Good engineering judgement is about knowing which optimizations the problem in front of you actually needs.
Hope this helps.
Enjoy not knowing.
Not everything deserves your attention. You know where you are heading. You know what you want to achieve. If something lies on that path, learn it. If it does not, let it go.
People who are "productive" are not the ones who know everything, but the ones who know exactly what they do not need to know.
There is a quiet wisdom in choosing what to ignore and maintaining a better signal-to-noise ratio.