Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

On the contrary, only when we're an immortal, intergalactic species that has mastered the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe, there might be nothing left for us to do and you could make this complaint. Until then the number of challenges we have to overcome is basically infinite, and we finally have the powers needed to make any kind of meaningful progress on it.

There is the pesky little matter of jobs and paying rent and capitalism which will cause a lot of turmoil for a very long time, but once we get past that we have our work cut out for us.

"You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

Sometimes. Have you ever played a single player game where there are achievements, goals, strategies to be had (...). You can often get addicted (eg Factorio) trying to optimize, make the best of your limited resources.

But then you realise you're spending too much time on it. And you just want to see the ending. So you enter the cheat codes to make it easy. You blast through everything, you get to the last levels and still easy. And things start feeling meaningless and pointless, and in fact, probably because of that, you quickly lose interest in the game completely.

It now feels like we're in the end game.

For hundreds of thousands of years we struggled with finding food, be it foraging or hunting, both of which requiring a lot of skill, dealing with several difficult diseases throughout adulthood, droughts, finding new places to stay for the night, for food.

And now... all we do is sit 8h per day in front of a screen, and everything else is taken care of. We can even have sex without having babies and a huge lifelong commitement. A first! The pleasures that it unlocks. We have food from all over the world at our fingertips. A feast no hunter-gatherer tribe would ever in their wildest dreams could even conceive of. We have cameras streaming animals from all over the world, lions killing impalas recorded being uploaded for the pleasure of people who watch it on youtube, or simply fledgling birds and their progress, we monitor the weather on all of Earth. We convert sunlight into thunder energy, and make thinking machines from rock. Truly, feels like the last levels of a game where we have the cheat codes.

A fish will rarely ask himself "what is water?". It just is. That's just how it is. So we also tend not to realise the ridiculousness of the world we live in because we have been born in it. Even more so younger generations. Some of us have seen the world rapidly changing at an increasingly faster pace. This all we have today is NOT normal. We live in the equivalent of a fraction of the blink of an eye to human existence.

Of course, we stress. A lot. Our mental health has never been worse. But this is feels like the end game. Our 'progressivism' and 'Libertarianism' led us to change a lot without thinking of the consequences. And here we are, reaching the finish line, unprepared. Our systems, laws, mental stability have no have time to adapt.

And it's scary. I hope we can pull it through.

I have spoken to many professionals and looked at some companies usage. I can definitely tell we are in a bubble.

I noticed when a non-tech person tries to solve a problem with AI, they only tend to think in-terms on LLM. For e.g. even for a calculator app they use LLM for compute instead of direct calculation.

Sure they have managed to solve it. But they are remotely usable.

I have seen multiple failed projects taking these vibe coded ideas to production.

I wouldn't be disheartened and give up.

> Democracy is "everyone gets a vote"

It is that we are governed by those chosen by us to represent us. In a perfect democracy the government is (the majority of) us. Hence the saying … “in a democracy the people get the government they deserve”.

I'm basically unable to work on boring things without LLMs now because it just doesn't feel like a good use of my time. I am also unable to work on thinks that are mostly vibecoded, by hand, because I know the code is bad, and I know the work will often be surpassed by a model in 1/5 the time once I get tokens again. This is not a "AI is replacing me" comment, but more a "The 90% of my job that takes time and that nobody wants to do is now automated, and not using LLMs is no longer motivationally an option". Vibecoded projects have short term rewards but long term I just find I don't really care, its not "my project" and I'm not proud of it.

I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.