Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#31

Post by NoPicklez »

Sean-Der wrote: post #3

I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents. I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

Carpenters and powertools sounds more like handwriting or typewriting vs using a computer to write.

AI feels like something else entirely. You're not even doing the writing or the thinking, you're telling someone else to do it and they "do" it.

It's more like a carpenter walking into a factory and saying to someone I want to build xyz and it builds it immediately.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#32

Post by flyingshelf »

rvz wrote: post #8

Almost everyone is now about to feel what Lee Sedol felt a decade ago. We are all Lee Sedol.

I don’t think it's the same at all. Nobody is interested in watching computers play against each other, so he still can do what he loves. He didn't suddenly have to work with/through machines now.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#33

Post by etrautmann »

grebc wrote: post #10
Sean-Der wrote: post #3

I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents. I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools. I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused pe…

A better analogy for an individual might be a cnc lathe. You can make anything you want perfectly but if you enjoyed wood turning then you may not get the same satisfaction from the process of running a cnc.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#34

Post by rakejake »

Try to increase the complexity of the work you're doing. It's not that AIs don't makes mistakes but they are able to pattern match to larger and larger pieces of the problem as more people use it and more iterations of the model are released. So your challenge is now in steering it in a way that these errors are minimised while reducing bloat.

Try to think of yourself as a professor who's trying to come up with a problem statement worth solving. The AI is your "lab" that will help you run experiments.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#36

Post by gagabity »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #16

First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional. Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to…

A big part of the journey is the exact thing AI took away though! The destination mostly has remained.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#37

Post by OccamsMirror »

markmiro wrote: post #5

It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement. User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly har…

I don't think anyone is worried about user expectations. It's management expectations. The output expectation goes up, while the quality of that output goes down, but is still your responsibility.

I'm not surprised professional software developers are not enjoying AI development.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#38

Post by recursive »

spaqin wrote: post #17

Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever? So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.

Housing and food for everyone. I guess I missed the step where that part happens.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#39

Post by PaulStatezny »

nimski wrote: post #30

Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result. Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became re…

> there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself.

It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.

E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.

It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#40

Post by steinbeck »

I don’t get it. The premise is flawed.

AI does not create world shattering products.

You haven’t made any big hits either (with or without AI).

What’s changed?

Use AI all you want, that isn’t going to bring your passion to life. It’s no different than using an IDE or React or GitHub.

The world is still starving for novel experiences and solutions to annoying problems and clunky workflows.

AI hasn’t changed that. It hasn’t delivered anything either. For that you need the lonely mind of a man

Post reply on HN