I miss thinking hard

90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. The rest is boilerplate. Conjuring up whatever arcane runes are needed to wake a slumbering beast made of anti-patterns and groupthink.

For me, AI offers the first real computer that I've had access to in over 25 years. Because desktop computing stagnated after the 2000 Dot Bomb, and died on the table after the iPhone arrived in 2007. Where we should have symmetric multiprocessing with 1000+ cores running 100,000 times faster for the same price, we have the same mediocre quad core computer running about the same speed as its 3 GHz grandfather from the early 2000s. But AI bridges that divide by recruiting video cards that actually did increase in speed, albeit for SIMD which is generally useless for desktop computing. AI liberates me from having to mourn that travesty any longer.

I think that people have tied their identity to programming without realizing that it's mostly transcribing.

But I will never go back to manual entry (the modern equivalent of punch cards).

If anything, I can finally think deeply without it costing me everything. No longer having to give my all just to tread water as I slowly drown in technical debt and deadlines which could never be met before without sacrificing a part of my psyche in the process.

What I find fascinating is that it's truly over. I see so clearly how networks of agents are evolving now, faster than we can study, and have already passed us on nearly every metric. We only have 5-10 years now until the epiphany, the Singularity, AGI.

It's so strange to have worked so hard to win the internet lottery when that no longer matters. People will stop buying software. Their AI will deliver their deepest wish, even if that's merely basic resources to survive, that the powers that be deny us to prop up their fever dream of late-stage crony capitalism under artificial scarcity.

Everything is about to hit the fan so hard, and I am so here for it.

There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.

A silly example to illustrate the kind of guy I am: when I'm watching a show or movie, I'll often wonder where I've seen an actor before. A "normal" person, like my wife, would just look it up on IMDB and be done with it. But I almost always insist on rifling through all the dustiest corners of my brain to figure it out. Even if it takes me a day or two of thinking about it off and on. Because to me, the satisfaction of doing it myself is worth it.

You are advocating for a particular (more inclusive) definition for 'thinker' which clashes with the author's, but his is equally valid. You're both just gesturing at different concepts and suggesting they should be tagged to that word.

OP raises a particular way to classify something about personalities, says he finds it quite interesting/discriminative, and calls that kind of personality a "thinker". You instead consider a "thinker" a broader category.

That feels like an empty disagreement (nobody is right on such matters) - the real debatable question of substance is whether the _concept_ OP is gesturing at has interesting discriminative power. That concept is something like "personalities which seem to value the act of thinking through a problem/problem solving itself rather than downstream result".

I would very much like to know the kind of app you’ve seen. It’s very hard to see something like mpv, calibre, abiword, cmus,… through that lens. Even web apps like forgejo, gonic, sr.ht, don’t fit into that view.