Taking a quick twenty minutes to write today. No more, no less. It was a busy day at work. The day actually started with an early morning trip to the dentist. I needed to get fitted for a night guard so I can prevent my unconscious mandible from mutilating itself. The way stress manifests is strange, isn't it? For as long as I can remember, I've always been an anxious person. Asia calls me The King of Worries - a moniker I hate not because of its cruelty, but its accuracy. My awareness of clenching my teeth wasn't ever something I was really...aware of. Now that I've been alerted, I catch myself doing it during the day while I'm awake. I've even noticed that my 'relaxed' position is still very active. Last year, when I had frozen shoulder and couldn't lift my left arm, I visited a nearby masseuse for help. I remember a moment where he'd been massaging my neck, and where it connects to the back of the head. He switched from there to massage my jaw muscles - a thing which I'd never experienced during a massage before. He made a sound when he pushed on the muscles, as if to say "holy fuck that's tight." When a masseuse is surprised by a piece of tension, you probably have a problem. Even as a kid my jaw would always loudly pop and click and crack when I would eat. It still does, but it did then, too. A sign of TMJ disorder.
The remainder of my day was spent actively working. It was unusually busy. I was building out data models and trying to map out our automated test strategy to have a better sense of what it's like for our developers to move through the test process. For most of my career I've focused exclusively on manual testing, never automated. Just before the pandemic I was placed into a coding bootcamp by my employer, presumably in the hopes that I'd take a liking to automation so that I could help out to this end. Turns out I didn't care for automation. I did enjoy coding quite a bit more than I thought I would, though. It was the problem solving nature of coding-puzzles. There's a unique sense of triumph involved with solving an abstract problem. After all coding is primarily a kind of thought work.
Last night I'd met with two coworkers of mine, engineers, for dinner. We went to a small hole-in-the-wall Italian place. During our meal I raised the topic of AI and automation and how they may in the coming years make even their jobs obsolete. They disagreed, unsurprisingly. Who wouldn't? Everybody likes to think of themselves as irreplaceable, important, useful. To imagine a program being able to take the job of a programmer is funny, but I think also inevitable. Maybe not in 5 years, maybe not in 10, but I think eventually we'll see machines are capable of this too.
I mean, who would have thought machines could draw?
No comments:
Post a Comment