11–20 of 157 posts
The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function. Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better. What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead r…
But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone living a life even tangentially touched by tech.
(I think the author is ahead of the curve too).
But I feel this post identifies the problem and then compounds it with this line:
> This messaging works. Look at me. I feel the need to write a post about it. But it is completely wrong.
I would counter that (intentional) "ignorance is bliss". If you want to play the VC grind hustle game, do it, but be intentional about checking in and checking out, and don't let it into your identity. And don't write posts like this.
It might "feel" dishonest to operate like this, but the alternative is doom, because you are fighting against demons that don't actually exist. I think more and more people will realize this over the coming years -- we are only now starting to react to the personal problems caused by immersion in social media.
This also reminds me of a good piece by PG: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
Around 2019 it became clear to me how much I was underestimating how quickly AI would "take over" and "take credit" for the parts of my identity I wanted to keep (engineering, design taste, invention for example). But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone…
There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely.
This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical spreadsheet vs Microsoft Excel. It's more like using a text editor versus an IDE. If you're happy producing software the way that you always were sans AI, you should just keep doing it that way and don't even pay mind to AI tooling.
Those guys who have super sophisticated MCP/tool use setups, and a roster of agents, and testdrive all the latest tools and plugins, and curate a personal library of carefully tuned prompts that make them the "LLM Whisperer" — they're not actually doing that much better than you at producing software. Or at least not to the extent that you are totally obsolete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better. What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven. A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all. So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to cont…
Around 2019 it became clear to me how much I was underestimating how quickly AI would "take over" and "take credit" for the parts of my identity I wanted to keep (engineering, design taste, invention for example). But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone…
I think AI is completely optional for software development. There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely. This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical…
I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think AI is completely optional for software development. There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely. This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical…
I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all). I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.
The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function. Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better. What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead r…
A way to offload the challenging search for purpose, to a shallow controllable process, consistent with the described disillusionment.
But people are idiosyncratic. Maybe for someone, a life of inscrutable eccentric rebellion against the Gods of practical reality, might actually be deeply meaningful to them - even if they don't admit it.
There are people who are genuinely happy doing the same thing every day. Every day. That is just as strange to me!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better. What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven. A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all. So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to cont…
To live well and accomplish OP's goal in the modern era you have to understand that the attention economy has won, completely and totally. You can choose to live your life in a proactive manner: motivating force arises internally, through contemplation, meditation, deliberate study, and intention.
Or you can choose to live it reactively: you look at what just popped up in your feed and you write a blog post about it.
We're living more reactively than ever now. It's stifling creativity and individuality, it's creating depression and anxiety. The answer is to unplug and let the motive force for your actions start coming from your internal world again. It's okay to be influenced by the outside but we're more possessed now by derivative slop (see how all brand logos have essentially become the same) than we probably ever have been. It's time to unplug from the hive mind and wait in the resulting stillness for the next step.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven. A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all. So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to cont…
You should understand what this is in response to, though. The commenter advocates opacity for the sake of not being treated like a machine. The ideal solution is for people to not treat you like a machine, but things aren’t always ideal.
But I feel it though, the urge to grind. When I have free time I think, shouldn't I be doing/achieving something. If you quantify value by money then yeah there are dumb ways to make money like me driving Uber Eats and donating plasma (an extra 17 hrs of my life per week). I can instead spend less money and enjoy life more.
I almost think social media is the worst thing that I ran into, the points/likes aspect. Going back to sharing things that aren't real yet for the kudos. Anyway ranting. I'm thankful I became self-aware as when Facebook was new I was posting like everything about my life like "omg look at me...". Which is a double-edged sword you know, something like Instagram is how women scope you out and if you don't have a good one...
Tangent, there is also this fetishizing of productivity where you see this clean desk and a little notepad. Or some kind of setup like a minimalist laptop. The whole video is about that but not actually working ha.