31–40 of 103 posts
This is part of what turns grasshoppers into locusts. They're attempting not only to eat the insect in front of them, but escape the one behind that is attempting to eat them. I'll leave it up to the reader to complete the metaphor.
It's been downright spooky to watch people I know personally or been familiar with totally fall down the rabbit hole.
That said, like with everything, it depends on the person. Some people are taking the Jack Nicholson route, others are finally taking time off and enjoying their life (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.
This is so true with AI. You can do a lot of things with AI, but that doesn't automatically make them worth doing. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. If the benefit of something is (effectively) zero, it doesn't matter how low the cost is.
AI isn't useless and there are beautiful, enriching use cases for it. But the idea that AI must consume our lives so we don't get left behind by those who brag on LinkedIn about operating 12 concurrent agents in self-perpetuating loops seems faulty to me.
>The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine and asks how well she performed. Holy insanity
When you raise kids in a society that scruitinizes and measures every aspect of their existence against all ither kids, and then send those kids to a workforce where every aspect of their performance and personality are scruitinized and analyzed to attempt to rank them against their peers, why wouldn't said kids seek out such "objective" ranking in their personal lives? We have designed society to produce people neur…
Comparing ourselves to others is probably built into our DNA. Most primates also have a social hierarchy. A human who didn't somewhat obsessively socially compare himself to others and/or self reflect on his behavior might have been thrown out of the tribe because he would never self correct.
p.s. Very annoying when people link to paywalled articles.
Most people don’t behave this way or have these kinds of problems.
A reminder: tech jobs are their own kind of filter bubble. It’s worth taking a step out of this space every now and again to see what other people are thinking and worrying about.
It’s one of the things I love about my rec hockey games. People there have much more tangible worries: when they’re gonna fix the dock at their vacation homes, if the girl they texted will text back, when will their kid grow out of their threenager phase, etc.
Most of the world is not nearly as preoccupied with AI as this community is. It’s refreshing to see when you can access it.
This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained? Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening…
> Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less. In the last big AI productivity thread I read on Hacker News the most common anecdote was people saying they weren’t more producing more at work with AI, they were just getting the same work done faster. After that they’d relax or switch to working on side projects. I don’t think that’s going to last for everyone, but I do think it i…
There is nothing wrong with trying to build a business and taking on large projects with AI.
It seems like the smart thing to do when our employment as software engineers is foreseeably threatened in the near future.
> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line. I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something wel…
I'm not sure if there's more context to this quote, but on the surface: what a dismal take! Letting some measure of worth dictate what you do feels pretty limiting to me. I understand that he's not saying "make sure you attach worth to everything you do," but there's an implicit judgement process in what he's suggesting.
If you do something well, and you like doing that something, maybe you should enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it.
> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line. I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something wel…
> Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing. I'm not sure if there's more context to this quote, but on the surface: what a dismal take! Letting some measure of worth dictate what you do feels pretty limiting to me. I understand that he's not saying "make sure you attach worth to everything you do," but there's an implicit judgement process in what he's suggesting. If you do something well,…
I think the judgment is more that if you're doing something to produce some kind of outcome (e.g. work), don't get stuck on things that don't impact that outcome.
The point isn't that you shouldn't do things well. It's that just because AI makes it effortless to ship some random new thing nobody asked for, that doesn't mean you should ship it.
I think that calculus changes completely when you do things for fun, where the only outcome you're trying to produce is doing more of the activity.
If you're doing something for fun, the doing is itself the reward.
Luckily, never have been. From thousands of kilometers away, Silicon Valley have always been a special place of its own, sometimes in a positive way, most of the times in a pretty awful way, but only people living in the Valley think they leave in the future.