Here's my take: https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/manifesto-for-survival.htm...
In other words, live below your means and decouple your happiness from your income.
What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
131–140 of 157 posts
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#132To quote Python """ Always look on the bright side of life... Life's a piece of shit When you look at it Life's a laugh and death's the joke, it's true You'll see it's all a show Keep 'em laughin' as you go Just remember that the last laugh is on you """ I'm optimistic that AI will fix some of the shittiness, and something like uploading may fix the last laugh on you bit. Anyway no harm looking on the bright side...
"Python" or Pynchon?
I was thinking this https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been using the tools for the last 3 years and I don’t find them joyful. I’m a craftsman at heart and managing agents sounds like an even worse proposal than managing people
The people I know who are having the most fun with this stuff do tend to have had engineering management or other people managing experience in the past. It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.
Doesn't this imply a quite insular, and somewhat anti human (if you allow me to be a bit flowery) future? I get other people can be annoying but that's part of us as a species. All of us now just working in our little silo with all our llm tools doesn't seem like a lot of fun long term
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, but I'm too busy creatively exploring creative writing, engineering, medicine, therapy, fitness, bio-hacking, accounting, marketing, sales, ad copy, web site design, business strategy, and so much more with just Claude code. > It is better than me and every professional I've met in my entire life. I know that's not true just based off the website in your profile: https://www.adama-platform.com/
Yeah, but I failed as I swung way too hard in many pathological ways. I'm in conversations with other IC8s, and things are... very different. I can't talk about the conversations, but this thing is good. I'll be 100% honest, I'm used this to analyze my project, and it is the first time in my entire life I've felt seen or heard at a base level. Look at my post history, it is sad tale of a man posting his life's work t…
Wish you all the best mate but please try to remember that LLMs don't actually see or hear you any real human fashion. It can be a slippery slope when you forget that
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#135> The key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building
Can you provide examples of this? As far as I can tell, they have long pushed past any moral quandaries and are speeding towards implementing their visions while pushing off any problems of societal upheaval onto our politicians.
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people I know who are having the most fun with this stuff do tend to have had engineering management or other people managing experience in the past. It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.
Doesn't this imply a quite insular, and somewhat anti human (if you allow me to be a bit flowery) future? I get other people can be annoying but that's part of us as a species. All of us now just working in our little silo with all our llm tools doesn't seem like a lot of fun long term
Just because you are working with a team of coding agents doesn't mean you don't also get to work with other humans as well.
What's changed is the scope of ambition of the projects you can take on with that team.
Think about a project that a team of 3 could have taken on together in 2022. I expect that many projects of that scale could be handled in 2025 by a single expert coding agent enhanced engineer.
So now we get to ask ourselves what a team of 3 coding agent enhanced engineers working together can take on instead!
I've always been frustrated at how long it takes to build interesting software. Part of the joy for me right now is rediscovering how large a project an individual or a small team can take on.
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#137Here's my take: https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/manifesto-for-survival.htm...
In other words, live below your means and decouple your happiness from your income.
Practically speaking yeah! There's psychological / libidinal aspects to it that I think are also almost just as important, but yes.
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is forcing AI on us? How can you be on HN and even make that claim? It’s literally everywhere.
In the last week or so my company has enabled some kind of Microsoft spam bot in Teams that posts several useless messages nobody wants in meeting chat-channels, burying messages from humans and generally making everything worse. It's astonishingly useless.
That's at work, though. Presumably most people aren't willingly using teams—you might as well say "teams" is being forced on you as "ai" is.
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else. You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing? I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an…
I emphasized the career status of the people I'm describing here precisely because it's important to acknowledge how different perspectives are affected by privilege in this kind of conversation.
So what's the aggregate perspective of the 99%? You've described the 1% well, but that's only... well to be honest it is probably quite a bit less than 1% of all humans.
Any thoughts? What do you think the average work-a-day Joe thinks about all this?
Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else. You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing? I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an…
I emphasized the career status of the people I'm describing here precisely because it's important to acknowledge how different perspectives are affected by privilege in this kind of conversation.
In practice this sounds exactly like when organizations go "we are located on the traditional land of X people" and then do absolutely nothing about, say, the X people who are still around and living in poverty.
It feels like something you acknowledge to alleviate your own sense of guilt. Not something others would find useful.