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

You need to have one to understand the unconditional loyalty, love, and the bond. You come to appreciate it even more once you lose them. Having a dog is the best and worst thing in the world. Just lost our fur baby a week ago...

The same reason people generally don't regret having kids even though the commitment and overall change of your life are much greater than what you described for dogs.

Yeah, a few friends of mine have dogs, and they fall very much into the "nice to visit, wouldn't want to live there" category for me.

Other people's dogs are my favorite dogs.

From your description, I will assume you never had a dog as none of what you said happens like that

Remember that feeling when you successfully wrote, debugged and ran your first useful program ? I think we are always chasing after that feeling in our own way with our little side projects.

Using AI is probably the fastest and shortest way to get that feeling(or dopamine hit) repeatedly if you let go of a little control on code.

I just hope in the long run AI doesn't take away that thrill and joy when it stops being a novelty and challenge.

You're not alone! I love hand-writing code, I love solving the puzzles that come along with it, but I'm having a blast learning how to apply all these new tools.

I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.

Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.

Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.

I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.

The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.

This is entirely normal. I think jet skis and French arthouse cinema should be legal, I just don't want either of them anywhere near me.

> 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.

Oh god. You just reminded me of my last "smoke buddy". Someone I tolerated because we got high together. He was definitely the type to watch some shit he didn't understand and have some sort of revelation. One of the last before I cut ties with him was about how he believed the earth would one day "become another sun". The earth is getting all of this energy over time from the sun, so it will eventually have enough energy to become a sun itself! He was really proud of that one.

That's not NIMBYism or hypocrisy. It's just liberalism. You don't like something, but you think it should be legal. That is exactly what liberalism is about. You do not have to like everything and in fact, if you only want to allow things that you like, you're not liberal. It's precisely the acknowledgement of other people's right to do things that you do not like that defines liberalism. But at the same time you have the right to not associate with people who do these things. You give them their freedom and they give you yours. There is nothing hypocritical about that.

Also some of the things you describe are just addiction and coping, euphemizing it.

That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.

I love hiking, but I always encourage people to start with short walks in nice places. You need a solid foundation of nice, normal, fun times before you start thinking about walking 17km a day through a freezing leech-infested mud pit, and more importantly you need time to work out what you actually enjoy.

I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.

Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.

What about like easy day hikes on 70 degree days?

dust, hay fever, pollen, gnats, ugh!