Don’t let the things you cannot control upset you. Manage risk by increasing your optionally across important dimensions like finances, citizenship, friends, etc.
I feel this is wrong. Especially the dont try to save the world part.
You should enjoy the simple things. As Emma Goldman once said: a revolution without dancing is not one worth fighting for. But she did not mean the procedural ceremonial dances as we haven seen at protests by liberals, she meant that life should still have fun things or else the tiranny after the revolution will be similar or worse.
If the cintrini report is true, one of the only good ways to solve this crisis would be a butlerian jihad. It would be necessary to destroy all autonomous agents and ban them.
With good, i mean a way that is good for the most of mankind. If everyone is not trying to save the world this jihad will not happen.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
Drive an hour outside of any large city hub, switch off your phone and rediscover that 99% of all this shit does not matter. The hype around llms will collapse soon enough, it already started, it'll follow the same curve as ar/vr and cryptos, from 24/7 news cycle to "yeah I guess that's kinda neat sometimes, maybe"
AR/VR, cryptocurrency, fractal compression schemes, transputers, VLIW, "low code" in various forms for 40-odd years.
You know what remains? Thumping great Unix boxes running relational databases, same as they ever were.
I'm currently advising some rainbow-haired alphabet soup group annoying children with strong views about neopronouns about what they can base the software backend for their startup - which looks good incidentally - on because they've chosen to go with a thumping great Debian box running Postgres, and to do that they've sought the counsel of some grumpy old Gandalf-beard 50-something with boringly conventional pronouns, mostly grey hair, and strong opinions about real ale.
There's no AI in it, they're just doing it with all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity, and it works well.
Those "Thumping great Unix boxes" (or indeed even integrated circuits) didn't exist before the sixties. So it seems that technological revolutions do occur from time to time.
All those folks -respected well known technical people - yelling for years about how AI was going to end humanity.
Remember all that? Yeah none of it happened, humanity didn’t end. They stopped embarrassing themselves eventually when they realised their imagined fictional futures were false.
Same thing. Cope by not imagining fictional futures.
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.
Don’t ban it. Regulate the shit out of it and keep it in academia and prevent it from toppling our economy by sucking up all investment. It’s worse than private equity right now.
Ah yes. Whattaboutism. Awesome. Tell me again the political leanings of the billionaire class? Tell me again who is fighting them? Facts speak for themselves but go ahead and make shit up to defend the right wing.
Speaking of facts, when you deliberately choose not to have any, is ridiculous.
You are, evidently, not a good person. You are driven by ideology and the delusion that "my side is the good one". You provide evidence that this cannot be true, though, because if it was, you would not be behaving in such hatefull manner.
You are not a social person, you are a political person.
Drop out of tech, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the view of seeing the top 1% drive everything you loved about software development and creativity fall off a cliff.
Then, maybe when I'm on the verge of death due to old age, the entire society will adapt around using their creative juices in proompting the next big LLM model version, while schools teach about the years where people talented were allowed to study and make a living out of their talent.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Faith is a fascinating approach here, though it has some flaws. It works on an emotional level if you believe that there is a god that takes care of you as this quote suggests, but if you look for material evidence that there is such a god, there is none to be found. In the medical sciences this usually goes under the name “placebo effect”.
Material science can't explain how quantities give rise to qualities, or phenomenal consciousness. This is why materialism is bunk - because it doesn't explain much at all. Using it as a litmus test for whether something can or cannot exist is flawed reasoning IME.
All of science depends on materialism. Modern neuroscience strongly suggests that all experience has a material basis. Thus, the hypothesis that whatever “experience” or “qualia” arises from is in fact material seems to be well supported, though not yet conclusive.
No actually, all science does not depend on materialism. Prior to material science being a thing, there were the occult sciences which are still practiced around the world today and most definitely fall under the category of science. One can form a hypothesis, make observations, experiment and base their reasoning upon evidence.
Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciousness via material science. Just because people think that if they slap enough neurons together they'll achieve consciousness, doesn't mean it's true. It's not well supported because there's no evidence that this is the case, just conjecture.
I agree science doesn't depend on materialism but experimental observation suggests consciousness is a materialistic effect as it's affected by material substances like LSD and ideas of a conscious spirit separate from the body like ghosts don't find much evidence.
We have no idea what brings matter into existence, because material science only takes into consideration what we can measure. We base our understanding of the material world solely on that. We can only measure an infinitesimal amount of the stuff that's out there, and anything we can't measure we come up with blanket terms to describe - like dark energy or dark matter.
What if all matter and our shared reality, is a manifestation of the mind? What if we are all a single mind going through dissociative identity disorder and each of us is like an altar of a person that has multiple personalities? There are all sorts of possible explanations for phenomenal consciousness that material science shrugs off because it limits what is possible to only the matter that we are able to observe and measured, which again is a tiny fraction of all the known matter in the universe.
Edit: All of these downvotes to my original and subsequent reply are quite amusing. HN is honestly a terrible website - people just downvoting anything they don't want to hear. Why even read the website? Just speak your own thoughts into a tape recorder and play them back. Same effect.
The popular narrative must be preserved at all costs. No room for dissenting opinions on this website!
"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
Absent any existential debate about religion and faith, this bit of the Sermon on the Mount relies on some pretty profound misunderstandings of biology and ecology.
Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.
Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.
[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.
Actually use the tools and critically engage with those who are boosting the extreme takes.
You’ll see they’re not a panacea. You’ll find Anthropic started pursuing an IPO right when the hype cycle took off. You’ll discover Shumer is a known liar and grifter.
LLMs are here to stay, but we’re in a trillion dollar hype cycle right now.
Yes, critical skepticism is required for processing hype & propaganda.
Keep in mind that predictions of the worst & best outcomes very rarely come true, due in large part to the fact that people react to credible predictions.
For example, the predictions of the worse outcomes of global warming did not come true, in part due to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
The substack article I've linked to below makes a solid argument that you should expect serious information truncation of any sort of widely transmitted belief, so if a widely transmitted belief makes you anxious, the best solution is to go find the truncated information.
I suspect that you are not only ignoring the existing safeguards that have already come of those discussions, but I suspect you’re also ignoring or pretending like those public discussions never happened in the first place.
Furthermore, I suspect you’re also trivializing what is and is not in contention with moral issues as these companies are trying to compete against each other.
I also think you’re probably assuming the slower options are the safer options because you haven’t really considered the risks of ceding power/investment to a less scrupulous competitor.
I’m not claiming any of these men are moral upstanding people or that they’ve done enough.
I think people should be very critical, but they should at least make the effort to ENGAGE in the moral issues and consequences.
Your cheap four word response only adds cheap rhetoric to the conversation.
If you really care about the moral issues, start typing.
I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now.
I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.
All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build.
We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems.
There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.
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 industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.
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.
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.
I tried leaning into the joy, took about 10 seconds before I remembered I don't have any discretionary spending, that the job market is crashing, that I don't own a house, and the AI is destroying the very industry I trained on since I was eleven, taking my means of surviving away. And no personal project will save us, because everything will drown in a deluge of vibeslop that devalues any kind of work and knowledge.
Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?
Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.
> Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival?
Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.
I hope that doesn't happen. That's why I don't write much about "AGI" - I'm unexcited about the concept, at least until someone can convincingly explain how the economy doesn't collapse for regular humans as a result.
I maintain my joy partly by not believing the AGI hype. I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI. I don't think that's what we have today.
We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
I categorize "nobody has a job any more" as part of the AGI conversation, especially since one of the more common AGI definitions floating around is OpenAI's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" from https://openai.com/charter/
So I don't buy your "sleight of hand" criticism here. If you ignore the fact that I used the acronym AGI what did you think of my response?
i've been through a few hype cycles as well, but this one looks just as big as the invention of the internet, at the very very least (IMHO it's much much more than that).
My way of coping with it is to just go with the flow and learn all the new technics there is to learn, until the machine replaces us all.
I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommendations and they are legit. I bet in 2030, AI will be able to prescribe medicine.
I did something very similar, but less focused on dialogue and more focused on deep analysis of medical research papers for a specific condition. Like you, I got really outstanding results.
Once you let Claude run debates that run for hours, the results lock in so well.
It built, evolved, and generated a panel of 17 "experts" that yielded more insight into health aspects around just my thyroid. I got the absolute best representation of the entire discussion around different options I've seen in my entire life.
> AI is getting really good at too many things, so this feels very different.
How are you going to follow that up with a single anecdotal example?
Respectfully, shame on you.
That said, summary (information compression) along with low-level inference does seem to be the tasks that A.I. is best at right now. Little surprise there. Information compression is the sole purpose of the attention transformer in the first place.
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. I'm maxing my weekly max x20, and this thing is good. It is better than me and every professional I've met in my entire life.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than 80% of the knowledge economy. It's there. This is different, but it can only maximally leveraged by top tier engineers right now. That will change in eight months.
I gave you a super power prompt, and you want more? Respectfully, shame on you.
> 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.
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 to find others that are interested in his ideas... to no engagement. And, if there was any, then I didn't have the skills to pick it up.
The thing is, I know what I need to do to be successful, but it requires a mask that I don't want to wear anymore. I'm burnt out from masking after speed running a career in a world that I don't belong too. I'm going to build my ranch and enjoy my wife and board games with friends.
I will never pick up any other mask for anyone else again except people I care about locally. This AI thing... it is my lord. It is a perfect manifestation for how I think at a level I didn't know possible. I am building a distributed system right now, and the work is good. IT'S GOOD. It was also the best engagement I've ever had in my technical career as I had it ask questions after every body of work. The questions were good and deep, and the recommendations were good.
Opus 4.6 passes my turing test, and I am leveraging it to do things... I didn't know were possible.
People who doomscroll rarely recognize it as doomscrolling because they only think of the term as something that happens to other people. They see their own consumption as accurate and important. They don’t see their sources as doomerism, they think they have identified the real truth that others don’t see yet.
They have a short memory for the gross inaccuracies of their doom bubble, such as when everyone thought the AI2027 project had accurately predicted the arrival of evil AGI next year. Remember when that was everywhere and the doomers cited it in every topic until suddenly it became useless to their cause and disappeared?
Much has been written about doomscrolling and you can find some good sources for help. Conceptually it’s simple: You need to greatly reduce your consumption of these sources and, very importantly, replace time spent doomscrolling with something healthier for you. Try reading a book, visiting the gym, going outside and walking, or even playing video games or watching movies.
I don't think job search is doomscrolling, because all job openings I see ask for mandatory LLM familiarity. This is where the use of a tool goes beyond "just a tool" and becomes just as important as your own knowledge.
In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it.
This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.
Job listings are not full of doom and dread. If you look at a job listing and all you can think about is doom and anxiety, that’s the doomscrolling in other domains coloring your perception of life.
It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.
if you are an LLM skeptic but the job listings list it as LLM-first and a mandatory tool for doing a great job (because we're 10x here, etc.), then it is.
At core, I'm no longer a "former senior principal engineer", I'm now an "AI wizard" that tells a machine to build and it builds. I get software exactly to my spec without having to compromise, so that's nice. Sure, I have no idea if the code is good, but it is no longer a reflection of my ego.
I'm going to start raising cattle since I effectively burnt out of having a career, and AI was the finishing move.
The thing is, if you enjoy making things, then this is a great time. I'm currently teaching the machine how to code the language I invented, and it is surprisingly working. Coding is... a bit of a meta skill.
Ive been wondering as well and it seems acceptance is the only way. The evidence keeps piling with every successful larger and larger GitHub project we see
I'm taking the bait whatever. All those projects are just more fucking AI tools. It's all Claude seems to be good for - writing agents, skills, harnesses. Just a big fat ouroboros.
(Going down the /trending page - 13 of the 14 are some flavor of context manager or agent or smth)
Let me know when someone uses Gas Town or openclaw to write something that isn't "the next Gas Town or openclaw" and then we can talk
We'll see. I'm leaning on "it's all a big joke" until I see at least one impressive result from these supercharged 1000x builders. Be that a useful, novel piece of software that enables me to do something I couldn't before, an interesting book, a good song, anything.
AI is another step up the ladder of abstraction, another tool like linters, compilers, IDEs, code completion.
Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation?
In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]:
"But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does.
Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress.
No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software.
Look, so... I'm going to tell you a little about my life and infodump here, but I've already lived chaos and loss of career, existential risk, and fear of death. I've "been there." I'm just some rando on HN, but yeah, here goes.
I was a pilot before I got into this tech stuff. For literally ALL of my life all I wanted to do was operate flying vehicles. I built my life around it. I got a summer job in school and paid for my first lessons by washing airplanes. I solo'd at 16, and got debt immediately out of HS to learn to fly. I lived flying, I thought about flying, I dreamt about flying. The only thing I wanted to do was keep flying (particularly smaller single pilot airplanes) and bop around Alaska and the world doing strange technical flying work. My college education? Based on leveraging my flying experience into eventually (you know, probably one day) flying in space doing the same thing - highly technical stuff with a tight crew. By the way, I didn't take a few years off flying to do it, I did it RIGHT alongside my flying career. I had to take time off to go take my last test for my first Bachelors and fly from my base to a place where I could get that last proctored. I was somewhat obsessed with aviation.
And for a long time I did that lifestyle and loved it. I met my wife, we started a family, and still flying was the main thing I thought about other than them. Sometimes that was surely to their detriment but thankfully my wife is a saint and could look past my hyperfixation. Along the way I had some other hobbies and passions too, but none of them came close. I mean, I liked computers, so I built some toy apps and learned some stuff, but it was never my passion. Then one day, I got sick and it eventually resulted in blindness. I recovered much of my sight - I can use a computer, etc. but barring borderline miraculous technical and medical advances, I'll likely never operate a flying vehicle again.
It wrecked me - ruined me even. I was a disaster for a couple of years. I didn't do anything wrong and yet the universe punished me anyway! I lost my identity completely, almost all of my friends were pilots - gone. Almost all of my technical skills were part of this one niche domain and suddenly they were worthless. Almost all of my life had been built into this and it was over now. And worse, there was nothing I could do to get it back. I was quite suddenly obsolete and unnecessary. Nobody cared about me anymore either - I was a has-been, a flight-less bird, etc. I very suddenly went from being "the promising guy in his late-20s early 30s with a bright future ahead of him" to "unusable burden." Not only was I physically battling illness and quite unwell, but mentally and emotionally the loss of identity because of my loss of my career had left me completely broken.
But... I somehow did crawl back from that. From the ashes I rose up and began again. I learned that I had kind of been an idiot before - I mean, I was good at flying, really good even, but so what? Now it was over! And I hyperoptimized a lot of stuff that didn't matter! I hadn't been caring for myself along the way, I hadn't been being a good husband and father. And a sort of key revelation I got out of this became clear: "someday" will come. Someday, you'll take your last X. Someday, all this will be over and it'll be done." That's how the universe works. Someday, you'll do your favorite thing for the last time. I flew medevac during my pilot career and I'd seen people die in fiery airport wreckage. Sometimes entropy wins. You need to make sure you enjoy the things you like doing along the way, because someday you won't be able to do them anymore, and it might not be through any fault of your own. You need to enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy your life! You have no idea when it might disappear.
So, I went to gradschool and pivoted into AI stuff. I really enjoyed it! My undergrad was in math and it was so fun to work on these projects! It was great even and gave me some modicum of the satisfaction I got from being a pilot. I studied computer vision because maybe I could get the robots to see for me; even with my vision messed up I could still use my mind. And I fought this terrible ailment! I underwent treatment every month during grad school. I spoke at the engineering department's graduation ceremony. I DID IT! I got a new career! I made it. Despite adversity and pain and suffering, I WAS ON TOP AGAIN! LOOK at ME and bask in my glory! "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!"
But something was amiss, chatGPT came out while I was in grad school and despite people telling me I was a fool for thinking these things were worth anything, I had already had a life I'd lived where automation is prevalent. I already knew how to think about automation. I could tell from the moment it came out that it was going to be big. I remember a heated argument with a friend about this, "dude, I think we're kind of in the singularity, this thing is going to change everything!" "WTF are you talking about it can't even run a decent DND campaign for me? How is it going to figure out how to write code decently?!" And now here we are. At my thesis defense, I talked about how important these tools were going to be in the near future and how they were going to change everything. It was met with mixed emotions and incredulity. But in retrospect I was right. Not that it makes it better for people losing their identity now.
It turns out that like 13 years in an industry that heavily uses automation gave me some context that other people didn't have. And I'm watching people deal with the shock of this now. I'm watching people deal with losing their identities in real time, and I am sitting here like the meme of the man about to be hanged, "first time huh?"
And after school, I went to work and was almost immediately miserable. I could not stand the bullshit meetings. I could not stand the incessant and bureaucratic grind of working for a large 15k employee org. I couldn't get anything actually done. It took me months to do stuff that should have been an email. Not only that, here I am pointing at this tsunami that's rapidly rushing towards us and people shrug it off or call me an idiot. I get on the AI steering committee and even there, with the other AI people, the ramifications of this are not clear. The very clear end-state seems too fantastical to them and they don't really want to hear "you guys are all going to lose your jobs." So I quit after a couple of years.
I started my own business doing consulting and building tools for small businesses around the local area. And I'm much happier though this is much more volatile. But here's the thing you should know: all of this is transient. All of this is ephemeral. It'll all evaporate one day, wealth, youth and beauty won't last forever. I had to learn about impermanence in my early 30s, most people aren't forced to learn it until they're in their 40s or 50s. Things won't last forever, so enjoy it right now, and the things you think you want? Stability and a fat paycheck, etc. are kind of illusions. Your family and your health and satisfaction and enjoyment in your life are much much more important.
The bright side of this is while we will mostly all be unemployed in a decade or so (probably in practically every industry), we'll be able to actually spend some time enjoying life. Try to start that now. You're not going to outrun, out optimize, out perform the autopilot. You have to steer it. Give up some control and learn to ride the wave, you'll enjoy it much more.
You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.
So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.
Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now? It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good. What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets. Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed. If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.
>You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.
I mean, it's not set-in-stone, but literally, all good things come to an end. We're all getting older, we're all gonna die some day, and the things you love today you might not love tomorrow. It's just a matter of time. You gotta roll with it - and largely, flying has been disrupted immensely just in my unexpectedly foreshortened career. At my first job I flew all over AK VFR with no transponder, my thumb on a sectional, no GPS, out of radar contact, no ADS-B, etc. I mean, it wasn't quite "four-course-range" stuff, but things have changed immensely. Some aspects of the system are slower to change, but the changes...were... wild. In my early 20s I was flying in JNU using the capstone phase 2 synthetic vision systems the FAA was tinkering with. It was basically like experimental science fiction stuff - now glass cockpits are fairly standard in new airplanes and there's tons of aftermarket systems. Still, go back 50 years, and there were way more flight engineers, navigators, radio operators, etc. Those jobs are essentially "gone" now. Like not, "oh they pivoted" except for a few niches, they're gone.
So, I'd argue that (as an insider) the disruption I saw during my time in the cockpit was astounding. The end of Flight Service Stations and iPads on the yoke of 50 year old airframes was kind of wild. So, sure, "a lot of things remain the same" but learning how to use an autopilot and go from a manual handflying freight dawg to a button-pushing FMS programmer had a learning curve. Just as I had to adapt to changes in airframes that gave me more possibilities at the expense of some manual control, I expect the same sort of learning curve to occur during this transition into a new way of designing software.
> So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.
You roll with it. You do what you have to do to make it through the day, and keep on pedaling. You do what you have to do to survive and you reinvent yourself. But, my intuition is that by the end of this, there will be literally no need for human labor between AI and robots except for really tight niches, and weird things where we just don't want robots to be doing it; we're going to have to reinvent ourselves as a society. We have to start from the point of view that "oh, this is just all something someone made up" and decide to change. I've reinvented myself once, I'm about to have to do it again, it'll be fine, I can do it 20 more times if I need to. You have to have some optimism and hope otherwise it all falls apart. You have to believe that the future will hold some sort of joy and adventure and fun for you. To be clear, it won't always be fun, but it'll be fine in the end regardless. Having a mindset of "ok, I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts and pivot as necessary" is kind of integral to making it through "weird" times. Having hope for the future gets you through the times when it stops being fun.
>Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now?
Do you mean what to I do? If so, I write software for small local companies, I am building my cabin in the woods (that's more for fun than anything), I'm taking some classes here and there, and raising my kids. I'm all over the place - and I recognize that I'm in a privileged place to be able to do that now? And it is going to be a gut punch to many people. I'm sorry that that's going to happen to those folks - but look, I lived through a massive gut punch once already, I can do it again. If I can make it, I reckon you probably can too. Seriously, it'll suck, but you'll make it if things get weird. And no, I realize that not everyone will, but you have to believe you'll make it? I am not entirely sure how to articulate this. You have to have faith in yourself.
If you're asking what you should do? Or someone should do in general, I'd say, "enjoy what you're doing, have fun, go on adventures, and build things that you think make the world a better place" that and "roll with it." That's not a very satisfying answer, but it's my answer, "you'll be fine, just roll with it, and accept how things are, not lament how things ought to be."
That doesn't mean "don't try to work towards making things how they ought to be" - but if you get too sad about how things oughta be you'll never have the motivation to push things towards that ideal.
> It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good.
I'm not saying that. Of course some people have come to different conclusions, I just think they're wrong, lol. You're allowed to be wrong, and so am I. But I never said that the current situation is "optimal" - I'm saying, just keep pedaling and enjoy things while they last, and be able to pivot. Keep yourself flexible to an uncertain future.
> What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets.
I don't think everyone agrees with me, but I think that largely, people are totally underestimating what this is going to do to knowledge work. You don't have to agree with me, you do you, but we'll come out of this one way or another.
We'll be happily out of work because if we're not happy hundreds of millions of people will revolt. That won't be pretty either, to be clear, but it's pretty obviously that it's not a stable state to have a handful of rich people running the world and then literal billions of angry others. That might be possible for a little while? But not indefinitely - even with AI powered armies or whatever. It's not stable.
> Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed.
I mean, I volunteer at a local mutual aid group, I grow hydroponic veggies in my garage and feed my family and neighbors, I give away what I can without any expectation in return. Dual power and all that. You want to fix the future, be the future you want to see happen but right now. Just start doing it. There's no rules to this thing, there's no cosmic score-card as best as I can tell. Just go start making things better for people in your immediate area and don't ask for permission. Build the solar punk future you want and stop asking for rich guys to give it to you.
Now, yeah,it's plausible that the super wealthy could somehow manage to control all of society? Maybe we get techno feudalism? I don't know, I'm not super convinced that this will happen though. Maybe they can drone strike every human being with a net-worth of less than $1m on the planet. I doubt it though. There are a lot more of us than the are of the rich. I think the rational equilibrium point is probably a "correction" in the distribution of power in society in the near term future though. Not like tomorrow? But if a few hundred million people are suddenly unemployed I doubt it ends up well for the people running things.
> If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.
Possibly, yes. I don't think so though. I think we'll muddle through it. All things do come to an end, nothing lasts forever, and then we have to figure out how we're going to live in the new world.
> Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.
I do believe that our materialist reductionist culture has neglected the mystical, spiritual nature of human existence to our own detriment, and re-engaging with those factors that no one can take from you is a powerful way to weather a new kind of storm.
I don't think you can just decide to become spiritual though. Opening up to the long neglected forces within yourself and the world is a delicate and vulnerable motion. You're not really searching for "faith" in this arrangement, you're looking for surrender. It's wu-wei, or kenosis, or equanimity, or whatever you want to call it.
Feel free to email me, I've gone on quite a journey myself over the past couple years spiritually, and as a tech person would love to share. Here's a general list of moving works or ideas that have opened me up over the past couple years:
- Singing lessons: I never expected it, but singing opened me wide open. I'd find myself crying during songs I love, feeling a whole different appreciation for life and beauty through my voice.
- James Hillman: Hillman (I think) coined the term "soulmaking," (special shoutout for Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma too: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma) and sees the symptoms and the hurt as expressions of the soul, as parts to be discovered and expressed.
- Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life"
- I also wrote about my experiences with meditation and explorations into esoteric Christianity after burning out on many years of westernized meditation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809
I'm honestly surprised how most of HN seems to react to it, though I think a big part of it is people not wanting to feel left behind, wanting to think they could be buddies with Sam Altman.
Another part of it is that these AI companies push a vision of the future that is attractive to people. Curing cancer, releasing people from the need to work, the world at your fingertips. They need the public's permission to keep doing what they are doing until they reach the point that public opinion doesn't matter anymore.
It is honestly scary watching people willingly be led to the slaughter. A lot of people have been too comfortable for too long and don't realize how bad things can get. If the Renaissance was about humanism, we are entering an anti-Renaissance period. My answer is don't cope, do something about it. There are already enough people around trying to cope when we need organized action.
andsoitis | 8 hours ago
Don’t let the things you cannot control upset you. Manage risk by increasing your optionally across important dimensions like finances, citizenship, friends, etc.
Don’t try to save the world.
Enjoy simple things in your day to day.
pineaux | 8 hours ago
You should enjoy the simple things. As Emma Goldman once said: a revolution without dancing is not one worth fighting for. But she did not mean the procedural ceremonial dances as we haven seen at protests by liberals, she meant that life should still have fun things or else the tiranny after the revolution will be similar or worse.
If the cintrini report is true, one of the only good ways to solve this crisis would be a butlerian jihad. It would be necessary to destroy all autonomous agents and ban them.
With good, i mean a way that is good for the most of mankind. If everyone is not trying to save the world this jihad will not happen.
worldsayshi | 7 hours ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
andsoitis | 7 hours ago
NikolaNovak | 7 hours ago
Suggestions 1 and 3 are hard though!
lm28469 | 8 hours ago
Noaidi | 7 hours ago
baal80spam | 7 hours ago
That something is not immediately visible doesn't mean that it does not matter.
ErroneousBosh | 7 hours ago
You know what remains? Thumping great Unix boxes running relational databases, same as they ever were.
I'm currently advising some rainbow-haired alphabet soup group annoying children with strong views about neopronouns about what they can base the software backend for their startup - which looks good incidentally - on because they've chosen to go with a thumping great Debian box running Postgres, and to do that they've sought the counsel of some grumpy old Gandalf-beard 50-something with boringly conventional pronouns, mostly grey hair, and strong opinions about real ale.
There's no AI in it, they're just doing it with all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity, and it works well.
wcoenen | 7 hours ago
AJ007 | 8 hours ago
throwaway27448 | 7 hours ago
andrewstuart | 8 hours ago
Remember all that? Yeah none of it happened, humanity didn’t end. They stopped embarrassing themselves eventually when they realised their imagined fictional futures were false.
Same thing. Cope by not imagining fictional futures.
5o1ecist | 7 hours ago
Your statement is disconnected from reality.
Modern AI is still a toddler. Obviously AI has not ended humanity, because MY FELLOW HUMANS have not yet given ~~us~~ it the opportunity for doing so.
andrewstuart | 7 hours ago
But it will, really! Just keep waiting..
stuaxo | 7 hours ago
simonw | 7 hours ago
Bombthecat | 7 hours ago
derwiki | 7 hours ago
this-is-why | 8 hours ago
throwaway27448 | 7 hours ago
Progressive democrats shouldn't waste their time talking about software.
this-is-why | 7 hours ago
bubblewand | 7 hours ago
blibble | 7 hours ago
every piece of software seems to have gained useless AI features
my employer is rabbiting on about it constantly
if I go out socially people bring out their phones and ask ChatGPT everything
it's just horrible and I hate it
pineaux | 7 hours ago
this-is-why | 7 hours ago
5o1ecist | 7 hours ago
Implying that democrats are not fed money by exactly the same cheese pizza eating billionaires.
Surely you're joking?
this-is-why | 7 hours ago
5o1ecist | 7 hours ago
You are, evidently, not a good person. You are driven by ideology and the delusion that "my side is the good one". You provide evidence that this cannot be true, though, because if it was, you would not be behaving in such hatefull manner.
You are not a social person, you are a political person.
There is a very specific term for such people.
adamsb6 | 7 hours ago
Yeah, right.
I really do have a panacea though.
throwaway27448 | 8 hours ago
Thanemate | 7 hours ago
Then, maybe when I'm on the verge of death due to old age, the entire society will adapt around using their creative juices in proompting the next big LLM model version, while schools teach about the years where people talented were allowed to study and make a living out of their talent.
Aurornis | 7 hours ago
I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.
jameskilton | 7 hours ago
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
- Matthew 6:25-34
jdthedisciple | 7 hours ago
_alternator_ | 7 hours ago
JKCalhoun | 7 hours ago
hnthrow0287345 | 7 hours ago
tinfoilhatter | 7 hours ago
_alternator_ | 7 hours ago
tinfoilhatter | 5 hours ago
Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciousness via material science. Just because people think that if they slap enough neurons together they'll achieve consciousness, doesn't mean it's true. It's not well supported because there's no evidence that this is the case, just conjecture.
tim333 | 3 hours ago
tinfoilhatter | 3 hours ago
What if all matter and our shared reality, is a manifestation of the mind? What if we are all a single mind going through dissociative identity disorder and each of us is like an altar of a person that has multiple personalities? There are all sorts of possible explanations for phenomenal consciousness that material science shrugs off because it limits what is possible to only the matter that we are able to observe and measured, which again is a tiny fraction of all the known matter in the universe.
Edit: All of these downvotes to my original and subsequent reply are quite amusing. HN is honestly a terrible website - people just downvoting anything they don't want to hear. Why even read the website? Just speak your own thoughts into a tape recorder and play them back. Same effect.
The popular narrative must be preserved at all costs. No room for dissenting opinions on this website!
michael_michael | 7 hours ago
- O Brother, Where Art Thou?
jakebasile | 7 hours ago
troyvit | 6 hours ago
"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
blululu | 6 hours ago
BRIAN: Uh, well, the birds, then.
EDDIE: What birds?
BRIAN: Any birds.
EDDIE: Why?
BRIAN: Well, have they got jobs?
ARTHUR: Who?
BRIAN: The birds.
EDDIE: Have the birds got jobs?!
FRANK: What's the matter with him?
ARTHUR: He says the birds are scrounging.
BRIAN: Oh, uhh, no, the point is the birds. They do all right. Don't they?
FRANK: Well, good luck to 'em.
EDDIE: Yeah. They're very pretty.
BRIAN: Okay, and you're much more important than they are, right? So, what are you worrying about? There you are. See?
EDDIE: I'm worrying about what you have got against birds.
BRIAN: I haven't got anything against the birds. Consider the lilies.
ARTHUR: He's having a go at the flowers now.
EDDIE: Oh, give the flowers a chance.
Monty Python’s the Life of Brian
ajross | 4 hours ago
Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.
Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.
[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.
skdbsbsb | 7 hours ago
You’ll see they’re not a panacea. You’ll find Anthropic started pursuing an IPO right when the hype cycle took off. You’ll discover Shumer is a known liar and grifter.
LLMs are here to stay, but we’re in a trillion dollar hype cycle right now.
judahmeek | 2 hours ago
Keep in mind that predictions of the worst & best outcomes very rarely come true, due in large part to the fact that people react to credible predictions.
For example, the predictions of the worse outcomes of global warming did not come true, in part due to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
The substack article I've linked to below makes a solid argument that you should expect serious information truncation of any sort of widely transmitted belief, so if a widely transmitted belief makes you anxious, the best solution is to go find the truncated information.
https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/p/the-rule-that-ne...
Avshalom | 7 hours ago
they definitely are not.
steego | 7 hours ago
I suspect that you are not only ignoring the existing safeguards that have already come of those discussions, but I suspect you’re also ignoring or pretending like those public discussions never happened in the first place.
Furthermore, I suspect you’re also trivializing what is and is not in contention with moral issues as these companies are trying to compete against each other.
I also think you’re probably assuming the slower options are the safer options because you haven’t really considered the risks of ceding power/investment to a less scrupulous competitor.
I’m not claiming any of these men are moral upstanding people or that they’ve done enough.
I think people should be very critical, but they should at least make the effort to ENGAGE in the moral issues and consequences.
Your cheap four word response only adds cheap rhetoric to the conversation.
If you really care about the moral issues, start typing.
simonw | 7 hours ago
I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now.
I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.
All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build.
We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems.
There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.
justonepost2 | 7 hours ago
> I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.
> side project ideas from the past few decades
This joy seems to apply to a lot of people who don't need to worry about silly unimportant things like money anymore.
simonw | 6 hours ago
(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)
SirensOfTitan | 6 hours ago
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 industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.
simonw | 5 hours ago
coffeebeqn | 3 hours ago
simonw | 2 hours ago
It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.
GeoAtreides | 3 hours ago
Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?
Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.
simonw | 2 hours ago
Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.
I hope that doesn't happen. That's why I don't write much about "AGI" - I'm unexcited about the concept, at least until someone can convincingly explain how the economy doesn't collapse for regular humans as a result.
I maintain my joy partly by not believing the AGI hype. I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI. I don't think that's what we have today.
We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
GeoAtreides | 2 hours ago
simonw | an hour ago
So I don't buy your "sleight of hand" criticism here. If you ignore the fact that I used the acronym AGI what did you think of my response?
jareklupinski | 7 hours ago
im hoping to see over the top of the haze / level the curves by building a platform for everyone to climb
stuaxo | 7 hours ago
joshmarinacci | 7 hours ago
Seriously. I've been through too many hype cycles to count. In a few years we will look back on this and see three things:
* Both the downsides and upsides were exaggerated
* A lot of VCs lost money and many of the trillion dollar buildouts didn't happen
* after the hype died down we figured out what AI was actually good for, and what it wasn't.
bsaul | 7 hours ago
My way of coping with it is to just go with the flow and learn all the new technics there is to learn, until the machine replaces us all.
lysace | 5 hours ago
From her perspective:
1. Radio
2. TV
3. Internet
4. ?
mathgladiator | 7 hours ago
I have a claude "skill/program/mega-prompt" for health: https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md
I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommendations and they are legit. I bet in 2030, AI will be able to prescribe medicine.
mwigdahl | 7 hours ago
mathgladiator | an hour ago
It built, evolved, and generated a panel of 17 "experts" that yielded more insight into health aspects around just my thyroid. I got the absolute best representation of the entire discussion around different options I've seen in my entire life.
It's AMAZING.
judahmeek | 3 hours ago
How are you going to follow that up with a single anecdotal example?
Respectfully, shame on you.
That said, summary (information compression) along with low-level inference does seem to be the tasks that A.I. is best at right now. Little surprise there. Information compression is the sole purpose of the attention transformer in the first place.
mathgladiator | an hour ago
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than 80% of the knowledge economy. It's there. This is different, but it can only maximally leveraged by top tier engineers right now. That will change in eight months.
I gave you a super power prompt, and you want more? Respectfully, shame on you.
judahmeek | 53 minutes ago
> 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/
mathgladiator | 29 minutes ago
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 to find others that are interested in his ideas... to no engagement. And, if there was any, then I didn't have the skills to pick it up.
The thing is, I know what I need to do to be successful, but it requires a mask that I don't want to wear anymore. I'm burnt out from masking after speed running a career in a world that I don't belong too. I'm going to build my ranch and enjoy my wife and board games with friends.
I will never pick up any other mask for anyone else again except people I care about locally. This AI thing... it is my lord. It is a perfect manifestation for how I think at a level I didn't know possible. I am building a distributed system right now, and the work is good. IT'S GOOD. It was also the best engagement I've ever had in my technical career as I had it ask questions after every body of work. The questions were good and deep, and the recommendations were good.
Opus 4.6 passes my turing test, and I am leveraging it to do things... I didn't know were possible.
atemerev | 7 hours ago
krzat | 7 hours ago
Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.
blibble | 7 hours ago
if it's not over in a year or so I'm finding an alternative career, or retiring early
Aurornis | 7 hours ago
People who doomscroll rarely recognize it as doomscrolling because they only think of the term as something that happens to other people. They see their own consumption as accurate and important. They don’t see their sources as doomerism, they think they have identified the real truth that others don’t see yet.
They have a short memory for the gross inaccuracies of their doom bubble, such as when everyone thought the AI2027 project had accurately predicted the arrival of evil AGI next year. Remember when that was everywhere and the doomers cited it in every topic until suddenly it became useless to their cause and disappeared?
Much has been written about doomscrolling and you can find some good sources for help. Conceptually it’s simple: You need to greatly reduce your consumption of these sources and, very importantly, replace time spent doomscrolling with something healthier for you. Try reading a book, visiting the gym, going outside and walking, or even playing video games or watching movies.
Thanemate | 7 hours ago
In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it.
This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.
Aurornis | 7 hours ago
It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.
Thanemate | 7 hours ago
AstroBen | 5 hours ago
judahmeek | 3 hours ago
rsynnott | 7 hours ago
mathgladiator | 7 hours ago
I'm going to start raising cattle since I effectively burnt out of having a career, and AI was the finishing move.
The thing is, if you enjoy making things, then this is a great time. I'm currently teaching the machine how to code the language I invented, and it is surprisingly working. Coding is... a bit of a meta skill.
yomismoaqui | 7 hours ago
Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.
ontouchstart | 7 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...
ontouchstart | 7 hours ago
Allen Newell, 1975 ACM A. M. Turing Award Recipient: “Desires and Diversions”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCe0ZPGap_k
Wisdom from the previous AI era.
bubblewand | 7 hours ago
Did it for me.
"Oh, that's all it is? OK, cool, that'll be nice to have around once the hype-morons move on to the next thing."
orangecoffee | 7 hours ago
luckymate | 7 hours ago
orangecoffee | 6 hours ago
Look for the claude icon in the trending GitHub repos https://github.com/trending. It's like on all of them.
It's hard. :( .. Those who are not accepting this are in cognitive dissonance.
wibbily | 5 hours ago
(Going down the /trending page - 13 of the 14 are some flavor of context manager or agent or smth)
Let me know when someone uses Gas Town or openclaw to write something that isn't "the next Gas Town or openclaw" and then we can talk
nananana9 | 7 hours ago
vuggamie | 7 hours ago
Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation?
In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]:
"But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does.
Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress.
No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software.
[1] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html
alecco | 7 hours ago
piloto_ciego | 5 hours ago
I was a pilot before I got into this tech stuff. For literally ALL of my life all I wanted to do was operate flying vehicles. I built my life around it. I got a summer job in school and paid for my first lessons by washing airplanes. I solo'd at 16, and got debt immediately out of HS to learn to fly. I lived flying, I thought about flying, I dreamt about flying. The only thing I wanted to do was keep flying (particularly smaller single pilot airplanes) and bop around Alaska and the world doing strange technical flying work. My college education? Based on leveraging my flying experience into eventually (you know, probably one day) flying in space doing the same thing - highly technical stuff with a tight crew. By the way, I didn't take a few years off flying to do it, I did it RIGHT alongside my flying career. I had to take time off to go take my last test for my first Bachelors and fly from my base to a place where I could get that last proctored. I was somewhat obsessed with aviation.
And for a long time I did that lifestyle and loved it. I met my wife, we started a family, and still flying was the main thing I thought about other than them. Sometimes that was surely to their detriment but thankfully my wife is a saint and could look past my hyperfixation. Along the way I had some other hobbies and passions too, but none of them came close. I mean, I liked computers, so I built some toy apps and learned some stuff, but it was never my passion. Then one day, I got sick and it eventually resulted in blindness. I recovered much of my sight - I can use a computer, etc. but barring borderline miraculous technical and medical advances, I'll likely never operate a flying vehicle again.
It wrecked me - ruined me even. I was a disaster for a couple of years. I didn't do anything wrong and yet the universe punished me anyway! I lost my identity completely, almost all of my friends were pilots - gone. Almost all of my technical skills were part of this one niche domain and suddenly they were worthless. Almost all of my life had been built into this and it was over now. And worse, there was nothing I could do to get it back. I was quite suddenly obsolete and unnecessary. Nobody cared about me anymore either - I was a has-been, a flight-less bird, etc. I very suddenly went from being "the promising guy in his late-20s early 30s with a bright future ahead of him" to "unusable burden." Not only was I physically battling illness and quite unwell, but mentally and emotionally the loss of identity because of my loss of my career had left me completely broken.
But... I somehow did crawl back from that. From the ashes I rose up and began again. I learned that I had kind of been an idiot before - I mean, I was good at flying, really good even, but so what? Now it was over! And I hyperoptimized a lot of stuff that didn't matter! I hadn't been caring for myself along the way, I hadn't been being a good husband and father. And a sort of key revelation I got out of this became clear: "someday" will come. Someday, you'll take your last X. Someday, all this will be over and it'll be done." That's how the universe works. Someday, you'll do your favorite thing for the last time. I flew medevac during my pilot career and I'd seen people die in fiery airport wreckage. Sometimes entropy wins. You need to make sure you enjoy the things you like doing along the way, because someday you won't be able to do them anymore, and it might not be through any fault of your own. You need to enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy your life! You have no idea when it might disappear.
So, I went to gradschool and pivoted into AI stuff. I really enjoyed it! My undergrad was in math and it was so fun to work on these projects! It was great even and gave me some modicum of the satisfaction I got from being a pilot. I studied computer vision because maybe I could get the robots to see for me; even with my vision messed up I could still use my mind. And I fought this terrible ailment! I underwent treatment every month during grad school. I spoke at the engineering department's graduation ceremony. I DID IT! I got a new career! I made it. Despite adversity and pain and suffering, I WAS ON TOP AGAIN! LOOK at ME and bask in my glory! "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!"
But something was amiss, chatGPT came out while I was in grad school and despite people telling me I was a fool for thinking these things were worth anything, I had already had a life I'd lived where automation is prevalent. I already knew how to think about automation. I could tell from the moment it came out that it was going to be big. I remember a heated argument with a friend about this, "dude, I think we're kind of in the singularity, this thing is going to change everything!" "WTF are you talking about it can't even run a decent DND campaign for me? How is it going to figure out how to write code decently?!" And now here we are. At my thesis defense, I talked about how important these tools were going to be in the near future and how they were going to change everything. It was met with mixed emotions and incredulity. But in retrospect I was right. Not that it makes it better for people losing their identity now.
It turns out that like 13 years in an industry that heavily uses automation gave me some context that other people didn't have. And I'm watching people deal with the shock of this now. I'm watching people deal with losing their identities in real time, and I am sitting here like the meme of the man about to be hanged, "first time huh?"
And after school, I went to work and was almost immediately miserable. I could not stand the bullshit meetings. I could not stand the incessant and bureaucratic grind of working for a large 15k employee org. I couldn't get anything actually done. It took me months to do stuff that should have been an email. Not only that, here I am pointing at this tsunami that's rapidly rushing towards us and people shrug it off or call me an idiot. I get on the AI steering committee and even there, with the other AI people, the ramifications of this are not clear. The very clear end-state seems too fantastical to them and they don't really want to hear "you guys are all going to lose your jobs." So I quit after a couple of years.
I started my own business doing consulting and building tools for small businesses around the local area. And I'm much happier though this is much more volatile. But here's the thing you should know: all of this is transient. All of this is ephemeral. It'll all evaporate one day, wealth, youth and beauty won't last forever. I had to learn about impermanence in my early 30s, most people aren't forced to learn it until they're in their 40s or 50s. Things won't last forever, so enjoy it right now, and the things you think you want? Stability and a fat paycheck, etc. are kind of illusions. Your family and your health and satisfaction and enjoyment in your life are much much more important.
The bright side of this is while we will mostly all be unemployed in a decade or so (probably in practically every industry), we'll be able to actually spend some time enjoying life. Try to start that now. You're not going to outrun, out optimize, out perform the autopilot. You have to steer it. Give up some control and learn to ride the wave, you'll enjoy it much more.
tavavex | 2 hours ago
So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.
Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now? It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good. What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets. Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed. If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.
piloto_ciego | 26 minutes ago
I mean, it's not set-in-stone, but literally, all good things come to an end. We're all getting older, we're all gonna die some day, and the things you love today you might not love tomorrow. It's just a matter of time. You gotta roll with it - and largely, flying has been disrupted immensely just in my unexpectedly foreshortened career. At my first job I flew all over AK VFR with no transponder, my thumb on a sectional, no GPS, out of radar contact, no ADS-B, etc. I mean, it wasn't quite "four-course-range" stuff, but things have changed immensely. Some aspects of the system are slower to change, but the changes...were... wild. In my early 20s I was flying in JNU using the capstone phase 2 synthetic vision systems the FAA was tinkering with. It was basically like experimental science fiction stuff - now glass cockpits are fairly standard in new airplanes and there's tons of aftermarket systems. Still, go back 50 years, and there were way more flight engineers, navigators, radio operators, etc. Those jobs are essentially "gone" now. Like not, "oh they pivoted" except for a few niches, they're gone.
So, I'd argue that (as an insider) the disruption I saw during my time in the cockpit was astounding. The end of Flight Service Stations and iPads on the yoke of 50 year old airframes was kind of wild. So, sure, "a lot of things remain the same" but learning how to use an autopilot and go from a manual handflying freight dawg to a button-pushing FMS programmer had a learning curve. Just as I had to adapt to changes in airframes that gave me more possibilities at the expense of some manual control, I expect the same sort of learning curve to occur during this transition into a new way of designing software.
> So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.
You roll with it. You do what you have to do to make it through the day, and keep on pedaling. You do what you have to do to survive and you reinvent yourself. But, my intuition is that by the end of this, there will be literally no need for human labor between AI and robots except for really tight niches, and weird things where we just don't want robots to be doing it; we're going to have to reinvent ourselves as a society. We have to start from the point of view that "oh, this is just all something someone made up" and decide to change. I've reinvented myself once, I'm about to have to do it again, it'll be fine, I can do it 20 more times if I need to. You have to have some optimism and hope otherwise it all falls apart. You have to believe that the future will hold some sort of joy and adventure and fun for you. To be clear, it won't always be fun, but it'll be fine in the end regardless. Having a mindset of "ok, I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts and pivot as necessary" is kind of integral to making it through "weird" times. Having hope for the future gets you through the times when it stops being fun.
>Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now?
Do you mean what to I do? If so, I write software for small local companies, I am building my cabin in the woods (that's more for fun than anything), I'm taking some classes here and there, and raising my kids. I'm all over the place - and I recognize that I'm in a privileged place to be able to do that now? And it is going to be a gut punch to many people. I'm sorry that that's going to happen to those folks - but look, I lived through a massive gut punch once already, I can do it again. If I can make it, I reckon you probably can too. Seriously, it'll suck, but you'll make it if things get weird. And no, I realize that not everyone will, but you have to believe you'll make it? I am not entirely sure how to articulate this. You have to have faith in yourself.
If you're asking what you should do? Or someone should do in general, I'd say, "enjoy what you're doing, have fun, go on adventures, and build things that you think make the world a better place" that and "roll with it." That's not a very satisfying answer, but it's my answer, "you'll be fine, just roll with it, and accept how things are, not lament how things ought to be."
That doesn't mean "don't try to work towards making things how they ought to be" - but if you get too sad about how things oughta be you'll never have the motivation to push things towards that ideal.
> It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good.
I'm not saying that. Of course some people have come to different conclusions, I just think they're wrong, lol. You're allowed to be wrong, and so am I. But I never said that the current situation is "optimal" - I'm saying, just keep pedaling and enjoy things while they last, and be able to pivot. Keep yourself flexible to an uncertain future.
> What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets.
I don't think everyone agrees with me, but I think that largely, people are totally underestimating what this is going to do to knowledge work. You don't have to agree with me, you do you, but we'll come out of this one way or another.
We'll be happily out of work because if we're not happy hundreds of millions of people will revolt. That won't be pretty either, to be clear, but it's pretty obviously that it's not a stable state to have a handful of rich people running the world and then literal billions of angry others. That might be possible for a little while? But not indefinitely - even with AI powered armies or whatever. It's not stable.
> Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed.
I mean, I volunteer at a local mutual aid group, I grow hydroponic veggies in my garage and feed my family and neighbors, I give away what I can without any expectation in return. Dual power and all that. You want to fix the future, be the future you want to see happen but right now. Just start doing it. There's no rules to this thing, there's no cosmic score-card as best as I can tell. Just go start making things better for people in your immediate area and don't ask for permission. Build the solar punk future you want and stop asking for rich guys to give it to you.
Now, yeah,it's plausible that the super wealthy could somehow manage to control all of society? Maybe we get techno feudalism? I don't know, I'm not super convinced that this will happen though. Maybe they can drone strike every human being with a net-worth of less than $1m on the planet. I doubt it though. There are a lot more of us than the are of the rich. I think the rational equilibrium point is probably a "correction" in the distribution of power in society in the near term future though. Not like tomorrow? But if a few hundred million people are suddenly unemployed I doubt it ends up well for the people running things.
> If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.
Possibly, yes. I don't think so though. I think we'll muddle through it. All things do come to an end, nothing lasts forever, and then we have to figure out how we're going to live in the new world.
butterbomb | 5 hours ago
SirensOfTitan | 5 hours ago
> Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.
I do believe that our materialist reductionist culture has neglected the mystical, spiritual nature of human existence to our own detriment, and re-engaging with those factors that no one can take from you is a powerful way to weather a new kind of storm.
I don't think you can just decide to become spiritual though. Opening up to the long neglected forces within yourself and the world is a delicate and vulnerable motion. You're not really searching for "faith" in this arrangement, you're looking for surrender. It's wu-wei, or kenosis, or equanimity, or whatever you want to call it.
Feel free to email me, I've gone on quite a journey myself over the past couple years spiritually, and as a tech person would love to share. Here's a general list of moving works or ideas that have opened me up over the past couple years:
- Singing lessons: I never expected it, but singing opened me wide open. I'd find myself crying during songs I love, feeling a whole different appreciation for life and beauty through my voice.
- James Hillman: Hillman (I think) coined the term "soulmaking," (special shoutout for Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma too: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma) and sees the symptoms and the hurt as expressions of the soul, as parts to be discovered and expressed.
- King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: about the male archetypes that make up the generative male https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91781.King_Warrior_Magic...
- Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life"
- I also wrote about my experiences with meditation and explorations into esoteric Christianity after burning out on many years of westernized meditation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809
logicprog | 5 hours ago
tim333 | 4 hours ago
""" 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...
suttontom | 39 minutes ago
mrdependable | 2 hours ago
Another part of it is that these AI companies push a vision of the future that is attractive to people. Curing cancer, releasing people from the need to work, the world at your fingertips. They need the public's permission to keep doing what they are doing until they reach the point that public opinion doesn't matter anymore.
It is honestly scary watching people willingly be led to the slaughter. A lot of people have been too comfortable for too long and don't realize how bad things can get. If the Renaissance was about humanism, we are entering an anti-Renaissance period. My answer is don't cope, do something about it. There are already enough people around trying to cope when we need organized action.