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Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

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Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#61
post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

yeah, I would like some examples that sent just trivial. I have failed to use it successfully for anything I cannot simply state in a condensed singular statement or paragraph. And almost none of my work is easily condensed into a single paragraph. Coupled with the complete misunderstanding it constantly seems to have and it's inability to understand nuance...I am struggling to make use of it and actually feel productive. Everything I use with it fails when I attempt to test it and it won't do anything complex because the tokens needed to explain the idea alone are quite numerous. I guess you could have it refactor code...?

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#62
> At times it feels like we are working for ChatGPT and not the other way around.

Welcome to the future, where AI subscriptions (self or employee provided) are required for employment, with the majority of your work being management and high level input, where you guide and answering questions for the* AI.

*Probably "The" AI, since there will be one obvious choice for your problem space, which not using would put you at a severe disadvantage.

Seriously though, I've been feeling this somewhat too, lately. The "investment" part of ROI has been shifted significantly, for the "junior" side of things, where I can do "boring" things I wouldn't normally. So, I find myself doing more boring tasks, with a definite net positive outcome, but also everything negative that you described.

The problem with this is that this ROI only the "junior" end of problem space, so, I'm working on more junior problems than I was before.

I think we're somewhat proving that juniors are still needed, to take these tasks. They have been empowered the most, and will still learn and feel creative, working on these problems. More senior people won't. I understand I'm saying this from a point of extreme privilege, but I think most of us need to feel creative, and "enjoy" what we're doing. That means harder problems.

Maybe it's best to still let the juniors continue to do the junior things. There's someone out there that would love to spend all day doing what's burning you out.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can witness this happening in the trades right now. A whole generation of people were told to goto college and to avoid the trades, and now here we are in possibly the most significant manpower drought the trades have ever experienced. And this has a ripple effect as the older generations retire out, and take their hard won experiences with them with nobody to pass their knowledge onto. Can't tell a carpenter to…

And yet the trades still have uneven access (or none at all) to health coverage, retirement planning options, etc. As an American parent of young children, I keep being told that college is a scam and I should steer my kids toward the trades. 90+% of the time, I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating. When we reach a real crisis point, severe enough to actua…

It is an interesting game we are playing as a civilisation since without people skilled at making our material environment the quality of life we enjoy will most likely drop.

We seem to have structured things in a way where what is individually optimal and desired is very opposed to what we need at larger scales. It does seem like the system is maintained only by inertia at this stage.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#64
post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

After putting some thought into this I think it has to do with the kind of developer you are. In my case I'm usually across 10-20 ecommerce websites doing various semi-unique jobs with relatively simple code. Largely I use CGPT for work that's boilerplate/LOC heavy but architecture light, things like writing first drafts of React hooks and the like. It's quite good with constraints like use typescript or use X functi…

> but architecture light

It does fairly well for architecture, if you don't expect too many specifics. It, at least, works as a reasonable sanity check/brainstorm.

All of these LLM becomes less expert the finer resolution you take the context. Keep it high level, and you still have a relatively expert assistant.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#65
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then there will be a decision point: either the senior-level people who thought they were safe get replaced by a more-advanced model, or they don't and there's a future society-level shortage because the pipeline to produce more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t f…

> Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things And everybody also gets a pony! Win-win-win situation! Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a hanful of m…

> Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a handful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close.

previous 'computing saturation is at 100% or close' pronouncements go back to 01953 https://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-w...

this human body weighs about 100 kg and occupies about 100 liters. it contains about 30 trillion cells, each of which contains something like 10 million ribosomes, 300 quintillion in all, which are programmable machines that construct proteins by executing a digital program on a dna tape, although the program is quite limited, more like a player piano roll than a computer program

current sram bits are on the order of 20 nanometers in diameter, about the same size as a ribosome. this is clearly feasible because these devices are already in mass production. you need on the order of 4096 of these, plus a roughly equivalent number of transistor-like switching elements (which are smaller), to get something we would recognize as a computer (i.e., you can program it in c or basic or assembly rather than verilog or abel or something). multiplying by a safety factor of two, we're talking about 32768 20-nanometer-sized elements, which is a cube 640 nanometers on a side

obviously (?) such a computer can't be manufactured by current manufacturing techniques, but also obviously it will work once you figure out how to make it. quite likely you can improve on that by orders of magnitude; ribosomes, after all, are considerably more capable than a 1-bit memory cell

you can fit 400 quadrillion such computers into the space of the human body, a bit over ten thousand per cell

so quite plausibly we are still 20 orders of magnitude away from personal computing saturation, and after another 12 orders of magnitude people will be saying things like 'then a few in every home, later one in every hand, and finally one in every cell. now it's at 100% or close'

even this is overly pessimistic, though. the obviously-workable computer outlined above weighs about 2e-16 kg, and jupiter weighs about 2e27 kg, so if you convert jupiter into computronium, you can get about 1e43 computers, roughly 1e33 computers per currently living person. and the milky way is about 1e12 solar masses, which works out to 2e42 kg, so a milky way of computronium would be roughly 1e58 computers

converting most of the milky way to computronium is less obviously feasible or desirable than putting anticancer robots in every cell but it suggests that we're closer to 48 orders of magnitude from computing saturation

as for corporatism, corporatism seems very unlikely to become established in the current political environment outside of backwaters like argentina. of course, the future is enormously unpredictable, but to me corporatism seems like an idiosyncratic response to the political conditions of the 01920s

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#66
post #50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The threat of these models isn't that they'll go all Skynet and kill everyone, it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living Yes. This is pretty much my only concern about these models, and I'm powerfully concerned about this. It's hard to see how this will lead to a good place. It seems more likely that this will lead to increased poverty and multiple socioeconomic crises. I am…

> I am even more concerned that very few people are talking about this. People have been talking about the threat of automation since the very beginning of the industrial revolution. It just never plays out nearly that badly, and short-term disruptions are always outweighed by long-term efficiency gains within ~5 years or so; even those who experience the worst career disruption tend to end up better off within that…

> People have been talking about the threat of automation since the very beginning of the industrial revolution.

And the prediction that only the ownership class would benefit from technological improvements is at least as old as Marx.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#67
post #11

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. > A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference i…

The only solution is to rapidly scale these up so that they can disrupt every aspect of everyone's life until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct.

I'm surprised someone hasn't replace politicians with an LLM. Imagine not having to pay their salaries when ChatGPT can send "thoughts and prayers" to Maui over Twitter 24/7.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#69
post #67
post #11

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. > A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference i…

The only solution is to rapidly scale these up so that they can disrupt every aspect of everyone's life until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. I'm surprised someone hasn't replace politicians with an LLM. Imagine not having to pay their salaries when ChatGPT can send "thoughts and prayers" to Maui over Twitter 24/7.

This was a plot point in Avenue 5. The office of the other president.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#70
I am in a similar position as you. And I feel like I am avoiding burnout by shifting the productivity ChatGPT provides me with to my own projects. I mainly work for clients as a independent contractor (web dev), initially they got A LOT more output from me, in the hours which I worked in. I stopped doing that, I actually started to reduce my hours, and gave them the same expected output. 8 hours billed usually where 4-6 hours of sitting behind my desk, now 8 hours billed are 2-4 hours. I would have expected to burn out by now, if all I did was client work; even if they paid me by my output.

Now, I have a mountain of free time, and all this free time goes into working alongside ChatGPT on my own startup. It's a non-AI B2B app, where before ChatGPT I would have needed at least 2 other people working with me. Instead its just me, 8-12 hours per day, next to my work. Its absolutely NOT a work-life balance, but the potential in pay-off which is slowly starting to become realized (2nd B2B user signed on just yesterday), off-sets any fear of a burn out at the moment.

I often feel, that people who say, that ChatGPT can't help them be productive, or makes them "10%-20% more productive", are too far ahead of their own progression curve, or just don't know how to prompt well. For me its easily a 2-5x productivity boost. I stopped talking with some friends who were constantly sending me ChatGPT memes or tricks to get AI to see weird things; its been ridiculous.

> Personally, in my early 40s, I feel my brain is back in 20s.

I am nearing my 40's now, and it feels the same.

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