The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#2It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play.
Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.
I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.
I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#3AI make easy work even easier, at the same time it shortens the attention span making it more difficult to do any difficult work. That's why there is so little real progress despite huge productivity gains.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#4What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#5It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play. Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barri…
In the old days, producing all those things would be tremendous learning opportunity. Today it's a pure waste, not producing income is not a problem, not producing anything is.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#6>exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking
I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#7The lucky normies have work to do, and they use their attention to meet the challenges. Us unlucky different-brained folks operate more like we have a lot of attention, and we have learned to fill it with computer stuff. AI is great for filling it but it’s often ultra processed weirdness and doesn’t seem to leave a trail of learning and productivity.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#8It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play. Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barri…
In the old days, producing all those things would be tremendous learning opportunity. Today it's a pure waste, not producing income is not a problem, not producing anything is.
If it wasn’t a learning opportunity to build those things, that was the waste. You can learn from an AI far more easily than from a book — only now it’s far more easy not to and many people unconsciously choose that route.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#9What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?
Sure, but for many folks the distraction is irresistible. It was difficult already to put care and craft into a product, having a slot machine for your attention makes it damn impossible.
Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
#10I have ADHD, and for the last 2+ years, virtually 100% of my AI-assisted coding has gone into one product, which is a SaaS that supports my family. I have no end of ideas for little side projects, things to spin off, components I can open source from what I’ve built, etc. But unlike when I was younger (I’m old now), I’ve been able to resist the siren song of the ADHD side quest, and instead channel that towards the one project I know I should be focused on.
In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.