31–40 of 56 posts
When I was in college I took a class in modern poetry. The teacher showed us a film about Bukowski. Before the film, there was a trigger warning. "I must warn you," he said, "Charles Bukowski is an asshole."
Some of it is fun and new, I'm spending a lot of time just making stuff I wanna make. But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.
And yet, when I was a developer and the only way to automate things was by hand, I found that doing so could give me lots of extra free time.
>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach. I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result. If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished. If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose…
Doing things like this for yourself is how you make automation work for you instead of against you. Then you can take some of your extra time to automate even more. Or, if you're a dev, to clean up code so it's easier to work on later, or to improve your skills.
How that applies in the vibe coding world, I'm not sure. Maybe by getting better than average at vibe coding. (I'd be interested in your further thoughts on your last paragraph.)
This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
I design games. I can't even count the number of times something someone said, or a game I've played or watched a review of, has sparked an idea for new game, especially a board game (which most of the time doesn't work out once it gets in front of players, but that's okay). It's probably been over a hundred times by now.
People love highlighting quotes from poems and stories that they find inspirational for their own lives somehow. You want to know how I know? Kindle used to tell me, with saying how many other people highlighted a specific passage (it might still do that, but I mostly listen to audiobooks right now, so of course I won't see them). Also social media is flooded with people sharing quotes from various books or poems or sayings from people.
That's all this is.
But because it's said by someone who works with A.I. and thus is thinking about the quote with that frame of reference, you had to twist it into some anti-A.I. sentiment, implying that he's doing something perverted or not normal by daring to find inspiration in a quote.
Bukowski would probably want to kick the shit out of you if he saw this.
This has been part of the critique of technology by primitivists for a while now; "labor saving" technology simply stops us from laboring on things we used to and we just move to laboring on other things on the newest level of abstraction with our freed up time / energy.
If society has uncurbed "greed", there can just be a constant "996 grind" on the cutting edge of whatever technological development currently exists.
> instead of forcing himself to write more slop (or ill words in his world) he stands up, moves away from his computer notebook and goes downstairs to his wife and 6 cats
or we could work on other projects, but yeah, take a break of some kind
This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
> “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.”
No one can say what he would have thought of AI for sure but I think he would have appreciated ability to reduce drudgery on this thoughts on factotum[1] work.
1. Why yes, that is a cheesy reference to his book of the same name. ;)
> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach. This has been part of the critique of technology by primitivists for a while now; "labor saving" technology simply stops us from laboring on things we used to and we just move to laboring on other things on the newest level of abstraction with our freed up time / energy. If society has uncurbed "greed", there can just be a constant "…
spending time with family is the only other project that's worth it, besides the one that's paying the bills