The takeaway message is you can be more on the beach and don’t have to ship 40k LoC everyday with your GStack. I like that.
What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
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Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#42I think it boils down to most of these folks don't have anything better to do. Or worse (the bucket I find myself in) this type of work is the most mentally stimulating thing I have, so I do it willfully at the expense of my wife and cats. I'm still building the discipline to put the important stuff first!
By your own admission you are giving your work more import than your wife and cats. You are putting the important stuff (to you) first.
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#43The takeaway message is you can be more on the beach and don’t have to ship 40k LoC everyday with your GStack. I like that.
I could use a Tan...
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#44This 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.
Bukowski was a fan on new technology even towards the end of his 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 ye…
> On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski. His output of poems doubled in 1991.
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer - https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-bukow...
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#45>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…
Your friend could have still done the woman a favor, if he shared the automation with her privately, instead of with their employer. 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…
You mean by automating it but pretending you're still doing it manually?
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#46All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. plumbers don't get plumbers block, and doctors don't get doctors block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expects sympathy for it? —Philip Pullman
> "Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. > This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: Must I write? Dig into 1 yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question…
A while back I started a substack and diligently posted every day, for about a month.
The first few posts had some actual substance (a kind of backlog I suppose), but eventually I realized that I was just posting because I had decided to post and I didn't actually have anything left to say.
So I just stopped posting. I guess it'll probably be a few more years until the next one :)
(Gosh, just imagine if YouTube operated on this principle...)
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. > This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: Must I write? Dig into 1 yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question…
Beautiful. Charles Bukowski said something similar… > /…/ no baby, if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare, you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you’re going to create blind crippled demented, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your bac…
I said last year, "if I'd known I was going to be homeless for this long, I would have just kept working on my game the whole time."
It seemed logical, at the time, to postpone such frivolous affairs until life was more orderly. But it sure didn't help speed things along.
On another note, I have also heard it said that one must suffer for one's art, but I haven't found much correlation personally between suffering and art... except perhaps to the degree that JavaScript is involved!
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#48I enjoy the fact that you were able to wedge Bukowski into this clusterfuck of technobabble , but the parallel being drawn between quality-writing and hitting buttons on the magic-elaboration-device ["ai"] is just... not there. Quality writing requires actual lived-experience, emotions, adventures, and a keen ability to grasp and clasp ends of an event-sequence like a beaded necklace or rosary; to present something c…
Summarybot (I feel silly for replying to a *bot*), that's a really good point, and I'd argue that creative writing and software development have a lot in common, especially now that English is the #1 programming language. Nowadays when we can build software 50x faster, there are even greater benefits from spending time to speak with our prospects/customers. This is the "working subconsciousness" take-away from Earnes…
Definitely put that "post" in the trash bin Bukowski was talking about. Took a perfectly fine idea from Hemingway and segued to a discussion about your bladder. Not a fan. But yes, Hemingway did say to always leave some ink in the quill. That is, to not deplete your wellspring of creativity to its last droplet, but to leave some in there and let it replenish itself naturally [overnight]. Yeah stepping away from the computer is a good idea, and also has nothing to do with being a good or effective writer. Your point about talking to customers as some sort of analogous moment to living life and being in the felt-sense , in contrast to writing , is really trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It's okay for things to not be the same, to not be analogous, to evade parallellism. Managing the code-output of an LLM that is , by design , an endless elaboration device, is not the same as summoning from one's depths the diction that immortalizes otherwise fleeting scenes and images. Code is an instrument for modulating pixels, and while this can lead to new experiences, it is not the re-projection into the inner sensorium that good literature provides. You can sit in the passenger seat as a professional F1 racer takes you around the track, or you can change the oil on a car. That's the difference between great literature and great code.
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#49> If I had access [to AI] back then, I'd probably just spend more time on the beach.
If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.
Re: What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
#50I think it boils down to most of these folks don't have anything better to do. Or worse (the bucket I find myself in) this type of work is the most mentally stimulating thing I have, so I do it willfully at the expense of my wife and cats. I'm still building the discipline to put the important stuff first!
By your own admission you are giving your work more import than your wife and cats. You are putting the important stuff (to you) first.
"There is way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death." Proverbs 14:12
By my own admission, I often place importance on the wrong things. I am building the discipline of putting the truly important things first.