frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

What Happens When There's No Job to Learn On?

https://gideons.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-theres-no-job-to
12•paulpauper•9mo ago

Comments

sherdil2022•9mo ago
This is indeed my worry and I am sure others have similar experiences. I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem, designing solutions at different times and moods - and use the best of those. All that can be considered 'art' - for lack of a better term.

There is a project that I have spent years on, honing, refining, building, rebuilding etc. All of that I have seen reduced to a handful of prompts!

It was a bit disheartening - but I made peace with it because one is 'art' and another is 'science' (again for lack of a better term) - and both art and science have - and should have - a place where they co-exist and co-mingle.

It's literally the dawn of a new age - new age of thinking, new age of implementing, new age of building and so on.

Resistance is indeed futile / the genie is out of the bottle - but we should definitely have guardrails. And just like we have web and dark web, we will have Responsible / Ethical AI and Irresponsible / Ethical AI.

orionblastar•9mo ago
This is like asking where the next Mainframe COBOL programmers will come from, and the colleges don't teach it anymore. Only people my age, age 56, are left knowing DOS/VSE and COBOL from an IBM Mainframe. We aren't getting hired because we are too old or suffer from too many illnesses. No one wants to learn COBOL because it is outdated, but the Social Security check writing software is still in COBOL, and porting it to a modern language would be too hard and too expensive.

I know about 37 different programming languages, most of which are obsolete. So how can I learn if nobody wants to hire me?

GianFabien•9mo ago
You could checkout: https://cobolcowboys.com/ they might have some opportunities you might be interested in.

As for learning, I have always learnt new languages, environments in my own time and then having got some knowledge then together with domain knowledge found suitable contracts. When contracting your portfolio and network are critical resources.

orionblastar•9mo ago
The thing is, I'm so old that my former managers have died or retired. I don't have much of a network left. I'll check out COBOL Cowboys, thank you.
sandspar•9mo ago
I find that I'm learning much more and much faster with AI. I have a tutor in my pocket 24/7. With AI, I can now learn in a day what would have taken me a week before. And the tutor will only get smarter, and better at teaching, and more knowledgable about a wider and wider range of subjects. If you're not learning now, then it's your fault - not AI's.
k310•9mo ago
Outlier here. I'm retired and I have zero need for AI or even Siri in my more than full life full of the usual chores (way more in fhe foothills than in the suburbs I inhabited "forever") and hobbies, chief of which are piano and photography. I could let AI play music all day, but I wouldn't be engaging with the music. I could let AI create an infinite gallery of pictures, but I wouldn't be running outside in a sun shower to catch a fabulous double rainbow, fully engaged with nature (and needing only minor touch up to make the image match my feelings.)

I experience. I have agency. I co-create. I feel what a composer felt through my hands and ears. Absolutely nobody knew about the sun shower, but I felt it.

The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

To destroy meaning is to destroy life. Might as well be "living" in The Matrix. Someone else's idea of life.

Virtual steak.

potholereseller•9mo ago
> The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

AI may have ruined his life, but it seems to have not ruined your's; it certainly hasn't ruined mine. This phenomena might be more unevenly distributed than we know.

> My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

If something can destroy that meaning-creating in a person without altering their way of life (as war alters lives), then it might be the case that the person's ability to create meaning was under-developed the whole time. It's somewhat related to consumerism and trend following; one makes so little meaning in one's life that an external, endless stream of vapid things feels meaningful. The current generation of AIs (and social media) seem to target that exact sort of person.

It will be worth paying attention when the AI companies crash and burn during the next recession. Our friends/families/co-workers who currently rely on those vapid streams might not take it well, and may need someone who can show them that it's not difficult to create meaning.

AI is making me anxious and stupid

https://tom.so/posts/ai-is-making-me-anxious-and-stupid
1•tomupom•49s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Real-time path tracing of medical CT volumes in the browser via WebGPU

https://grenzwert.net/
1•MickGorobets•4m ago•1 comments

United States – Crypto Scam Help – Intelligence Cyber Wizard Safe Guide

1•Forensics•7m ago•0 comments

What to Do After a Crypto Scam (USA) Intelligence Cyber Wizard Explained

1•Forensics•8m ago•0 comments

The Physics of 588: A 17.64μm Isolation Barrier Strategy for 5nm Process

https://github.com/eggpine84-del/NHE-CODING
1•eggpine84•8m ago•0 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•9m ago•0 comments

Data Modelling Open Source

https://github.com/sqlmodel/sqlmodel
1•Sean766•12m ago•0 comments

Mid-life transitions

https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2026/02/06/mid-life-transitions/
2•pabs3•12m ago•0 comments

My Airships – My "No. 9," the Little Runabout

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Airships/Chapter_22
1•interstice•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Portview, A diagnostic-first port viewer for Linux (~930 KB, zero deps)

https://github.com/Mapika/portview
3•Mapika•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Claude has a compiler, I have SlopScript

https://slopscript.netlify.app/
1•hiten_sharma•16m ago•0 comments

Context Is Part of the Game

https://joy.pm/context-is-part-of-the-code/
1•rafadc•17m ago•0 comments

Dave Farber has passed away

https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/thread/TSNPJVFH4DKLINIKSMRIIVNHDG5XKJCM/
2•vitplister•17m ago•0 comments

Researchers find brain mechanism behind 'flashes of intuition'

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-brain-mechanism-intuition.html
1•pseudolus•20m ago•0 comments

Extracting Xcode's Claude Code Prompt

https://www.jackpearce.co.uk/posts/extracting-xcodes-claude-code-prompt
1•jkpe•20m ago•0 comments

AI is not another abstraction because god plays dice

https://rakhim.exotext.com/ai_is_not_another_abstraction_because_god_plays_dice
2•freetonik•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tandem – An open-source, local-first AI workspace (Rust and React)

1•frumu•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Perks – A curated list of free AI credits and deals for developers

https://www.getaiperks.com/en
1•artluko•24m ago•0 comments

Why E cores make Apple Silicon fast

https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/08/last-week-on-my-mac-why-e-cores-make-apple-silicon-fast/
2•ingve•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Google Maps but for your repo (Open Source)

https://github.com/zacharykapank/repomap
1•zacharykapank•26m ago•0 comments

Djevops: Host Django on Bare Metal

https://github.com/mherrmann/djevops
1•mherrmann•27m ago•0 comments

How to Destroy a Space Station

https://www.thequantumcat.space/p/how-to-destroy-a-space-station
1•verzali•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a framework to benchmark LLMs on System Design and Architecture

https://github.com/Ruhal-Doshi/hld-bench
1•ruhal•28m ago•0 comments

What do you expect from a Turkey-based hosting provider?

1•dpnet•29m ago•0 comments

Why Files Are Not Enough as Memory for AI Agents

https://medium.com/versanova/why-files-are-not-enough-as-memory-for-ai-agents-5a4aeca81154
2•gauravsc•29m ago•0 comments

Nabaztag: Embodiment of "IoT" that was before its time

https://nabaztag.com/archive/violet
1•simonjgreen•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Friends don't let friends do math after a few drinks

https://divvyai.app/
1•pieterdy•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A free, minimal CV builder I made as a side project

https://cv-today.com
1•PokeWorldJG•37m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Competitor Finder API – find real competitors from one hostname

https://champsignal.com/competitor-finder-api
1•maximedupre•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Textream: Dynamic Island-style teleprompter for macOS with voice track

https://blog.fka.dev/textream/
1•fka•44m ago•0 comments