100% yes. As you say, Psychosis is an exaggeration but frazzled captures it. And it's definitely a feeling that "this is such an opportunity, but the window will close - got to make the most of it somehow". Very stressful in a diffuse kind of way.
Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#22I stick to the basic subscriptions. Whenever I get into psychosis, it yanks me back. I'm forced to read a book, go to the gym, talk to people, or actually have a think about what I'm trying to do. In emergencies, I may buy add on credits or subscribe to a secondary service, but it keeps me leashed.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#23[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#24Absolutely! It feels to me almost like the toxic productivity, or longevity craze, where because you can do something or measure something, you do.. and over time your threshold and hyper focus on so many things & threads causes, anxiety, burn-out, etc.
I can't pin down exactly why, but I find myself having the same feelings about software devving my own project now that I did when I was into tracking my HSV and sleep etc, after a while those things can become a bit compulsive!
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#25Yeh the guy is going nuts. His whole job analysis thing is ridiculous. To me, it tells the guy has no critical sense, because this kind of paper would ruin the career of any economist.
To me me he's just another example of a very smart programmer being really bad at seeing big pictures, imagining from other perspectives, and generally having people/systems/economics/philosophy wisdom. Unfortunately it seems endemic in our field. So many great coders have this laughably naive belief that, because they are good at something that makes them feel like a genius when they solve problems, they are in fact…
There's a tangentially related concept to this where Nobel Prize winners have held, shall we say, rather questionable beliefs in areas outside their domain of expertise.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#26Karpathy is a theoretical guy.
I highly doubt he has ever done actual swe to build and scale actual systems from a holistic perspective.
He might be a wizard at algorithms and coming up with novel ways to do small things. I know a lot of people who can do this kind of stuff but are absolutely garbage as SWE. That’s why they’re researchers.
I don’t know why people take him seriously beyond the theoretical stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me me he's just another example of a very smart programmer being really bad at seeing big pictures, imagining from other perspectives, and generally having people/systems/economics/philosophy wisdom. Unfortunately it seems endemic in our field. So many great coders have this laughably naive belief that, because they are good at something that makes them feel like a genius when they solve problems, they are in fact…
There's a tangentially related concept to this where Nobel Prize winners have held, shall we say, rather questionable beliefs in areas outside their domain of expertise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
It's definitely a broader thing you see not unfrequently in academia too (I'm a very mature phd student right now in fact!), but man, programmers seem to have it real bad.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#28If your assistant is causing you to work more hours and only sleeping 4 hours per night, is it really a good assistant? I think I'd be firing an assistant that did that to my life. I'm a big believer is not just doing something because I can. Could AI build me a personal suite of apps to manage my life in the exact way I want... maybe? Should I spend my time doing that, even if AI is writing 100% of the code? Probabl…
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#29We all probably need to touch grass a bit. Our industry is really out of touch with reality right now, although the looming impact of AI is probably quite real.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?
#30Here's the thing. You're kind of dopamine hacking yourself. Using current LLM's is something akin to using a slot machine, and one specifically tuned to work on/predate on knowledge workers. The fact is, while it can talk a good game, and has been RLHF'd to high heaven to validate you all the bloody time to keep you engaged and burning tokens , your brain is simply tuned to reward any semblance of progress, and you g…
> Try running yourself a local model on a sufficiently beefy laptop I don't understand why you think the solution to using a well tuned and intelligent model is to use one that is a dumbass
As the parachutist says to the pilot: "I'll stop jumping out of perfectly good airplanes as soon as they start making them."
I've fiddled with enough hosted ones enough to know the hosted solution's value add is almost entirely in the hardware stack it takes to serve inference traffic at scale, and whatever that company decides "alignment" means. The major quality is found in asking the right question, and getting the right answer. Not vomiting out subtly wrong answers faster. I don't need the thing doing work for me, I just need it to occasionally give me hints on where I might want to look when I get stuck. A local model fulfills that purpose just fine. It may take a bit to get an answer back, but you can bet your sweet ass that by the time I get that answer back, I've thought things through enough where I can pretty much instantly point out bullshit vs signal. Bonus: It doesn't add my codebases to the training dataset.
But please, do go on. Continue to tell me how a tool perfectly good for my use case is a bad idea. I'm all ears. > /dev/null