> People find me funny and when I do talk to people we have decent conversations (though small talk tends to bore me).
> However that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t bring me any kind of comfort or fulfillment
You have two good things going for you here:
- you're able to hold a conversation with people, even if it might not be as deep a conversation as you'd like it to be.
- you're funny and can joke around with people.
It sounds like you might have some surface level relationships and want deeper connections with people, which is totally understandable. Small talk can be boring at first, but it often opens the possibility of deeper relationships. I'd recommend low-stakes/activity based social interactions and seeing where they take you.
Some ideas:
- If you're on your way to the dining hall to get a meal, ask your dorm mates if they wanna join
- Colleges have a movie night on weekends to see a movie for free, ask class mates, dorm mates to go.
- Does your campus have like a rec/game center (think pool, air hockey, games etc). Another thing to ask people to.
You might have to suffer through a lot of rejection before you get takers. After that you might have to suffer through small talk about the weather, where someone is from, what their major is, etc before you get to the deeper connections.
> But there seems to be a recent trend of some who cry discrimination when their sub-par work is called out.
This sounds like you worked with or heard about 1 trans person who did shoddy work and now it's a "recent trend" that all trans software devs are saying it's discrimination.
I started a new job last year (on a greenfield project) and our director of product told us we had to use React because "we won't be able to find developers if we don't use react". I love constantly shooting myself in the foot with react because vercel has good marketing.
It rocks how Vercel has spent so much time and money on marketing Next.js that my product manager tried to tell me last year that I had to use it. In his mind we wouldn't be able to build our app correctly (an SPA that barely a couple hundred people use) or find developers since everyone uses and knows Next.js.
truly hate how hard these guys have made my job by making react popular.
> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
Maybe you just think you're being more productive ;)