I treat my coding as a craft. That has become much easier, since retiring.
I'm quite aware that doing things my way isn't commercially viable, but no one pays me to do it. I do it for myself.
That said, I find that it's important to always be challenging myself[0].
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
Depends what you mean by “commercially viable”. I’ve been making high quality products as an independent software developer in the photography space for a bit over 2 years now, and while I’m nowhere near my former big tech company salary, I still make more than needed to pay for life every month (not living an extravagant lifestyle somewhere with ridiculous cost of living does help).
And I still feel like I’m far from having reached full potential in my addressable market and the kind of products I want to build - I have indie developer friends who are pretty close to their former big tech salary, after 5+ years.
So, despair not :)
But I still use it on a weekly basis myself so I just can't stop refining it. I've been obsessed with the trichromatic process for 10+ years, ever since I discovered the work of Prokudin Gorsky (even built a website about the process and history: https://trichromy.com, due for a refresh some time). Such a clever approach to color photography that results in such a unique aesthetic.
I see you’re in Tokyo. If you ever end up in Taipei or if I’m in Tokyo I’d love to talk photography over coffee.
The only thing about my way of working that I have commercial viability issues with is when I take over someone else's work and insist on basically rewriting the entire thing before actually continuing the work. I don't always do that, some projects are just too big and some are just fine, some projects don't need me to rewrite them. But most systems I've inherited have been absolute ass and I just refuse to build on a total shit foundation. First I fix the foundation, then I build on it. You want a code monkey to duct tape things together and add workarounds on top of workarounds until the codebase looks like Escher's stairs painting you'll have to find someone else to do it. I fix problems I don't just paint over them.
That has been a problem in some situations in the past but for the most part my work has been appreciated.
Also, I insist on doing extremely high Quality work, and that seems to be very much out of favor, these days.
Just try starting a discussion on improving software Quality, hereabouts, and see how it goes.
For some reason, folks are actually actively against improving code Quality, and that is something that I can't comprehend, so I have to admit that I'm very much a "dinosaur."
We should not insist to measure new things with old rulers.
The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary.
Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.
(So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
"A typical Google engineer could describe their job as ‘taking protocol buffers and turning them into other protocol buffers’."
The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging.
WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS.
I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.
WYSIWYG never really went away even after Dreamweaver and FrontPage lost popularity. My ISP had a web-based editor in the early 2000s, lots and lots of free hosting providers also had them (HN tends to only remember only GeoCities, but there were hundreds of those providers).
Also: Weebly, Wix and Squarespace are quite old, mid-2000s.
The dream of laymen, needing nothing else but an Internet connection, pushing a button on a locally-running application and "poof" a web page appears and is accessible to the world, remains out of reach.
Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.
One of mine is to ask myself "what is my attention on?". You'd be surprised at how often the answer is, "a bunch of thoughts".
Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed.
We emit meaning the way a star emits photons.
Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around.
But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.
It is kind of funny, that we seek meaning and/or purpose in everything - our lives, our actions, our thoughts - but there is a nice change in perspective in considering it as something that we produce rather than find.
Any species that has this trait must not get stuck in local maximums, at an extreme that's why the koala is just not a resilient species, over confidence.
We are an anti-niche species, to avoid this we must have a certain percentage of our population that has doubt, existential crisis that shakes us out of a well worn path.
This always amazes me. If you deeply, emotionally _know_ that life has meaning, there will be some existential nights where you you will think "but maybe life doesn't have meaning", and if you _know_ life is meaningless you will sometime find yourself thinking "maybe there is meaning", our brains try to keep us from getting stuck.
Humility in the face of the unknown. As a species, just amazing stuff.
The cycle of confidence and doubt is absolutely amazing, it's kept us from getting stuck.
Keeps us from having "target fixation" and lawn darting into the ground.
Some individuals have these values tuned at extreme ends, the full distribution is represented by humanity.
The most overconfident and the most anxiety ridden, this is all in our spectrum, and it turns out better or worse for each individual.
The great thing is that we can share ideas and examine our priors.
I used to believe that "nothing" was a real thing, but it's only an abstraction, nothing has never been observed it's only "real" in our imaginations. There's no such thing as nothing as far as anyone has observed or proven.
Same thing with meaninglessness, nothing is meaningless, there are just bits of meaning maximally un-complex and decohered. You can use photon emissions from stars for RNG, humans have made even RNG have rich meaning and high practical utility.
This gets tricky because our perceptions can be influenced by societal expectations of which things should be meaningful - as if it's an objective property. It's easy to think of activities to which many people would respond "Oh, that must be soooo meaningful" and yet it's entirely possible you may not personally experience a sense of meaning from doing them - yet feel like you're supposed to. It's important to realize there's nothing wrong with that (or with you). You may not experience the 'expected meaning' meaning while doing some "charitably noble activity" widely thought to be meaningful, yet discover something else few would associate with "meaningful" does evoke meaning for you.
Why does intrinsic meaning make this advice not useful? I have always understood this sort of advice to mean “do things that are meaningful to you”.
Inevitably you have to compromise on what is the most meaningful thing to achieve some reasonably happy balance. How much compromise, how you internalize it to yourself, etc. you have to figure out.
The universe is full of possibilities, I'm trying to establish an empirical/observable floor not the ceiling.
Other species are also intelligent and create meaning, but I don't know of any proposed metric where their impact is remotely close to ours, though it's not 0 and beyond that they are part of our causal chain as well.
I personally wouldn't mind if we kept giving dogs and dolphins and other animals tools for long term complex communication but some people think we shouldn't interfere in that kind of way in the development of other species. I'd be interested in hearing if you hold an intentional development/don't interfere position.
It's ok and true to say people are empirically special and unique in actual observed reality. If there is a dolphin universe where they are the dominant species and have libraries and journals and satellites than that's fine, but we haven't observed that to be the case.
Again, there is a world of possibilities and everyone should explore that, but I am talking about the one universe we have observed and our empirical observations within it. I like to delineate between extrapolative and speculative ceilings and empirical floors.
How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.
"Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.
I only ask because I find myself on the tools most of the time still. The difference in how different people experience this tech is astounding sometimes.
Obviously there are very many Amish people who leave their communities to join the modern world - according to various sources this attrition seems to be between 15-25%. And even amongst those who stay, it's likely that a central reason is the fear of excommunication/shunning, rather than an inherent desire to reject modern technology.
I’m not a programmer because I wanted to program.
Thus AI is incredibly exciting to me because it makes it easier to make computers do things.
I guess ideally I'd get a job that is perfectly aligned with this profile (a work in progress!), but AI allows me to deal with the reality I have now in a much more pleasant and productive way.
I saw 1 study which suggested this.[1] Were there more?
I became a programmer because I want to explore the edge of what's possible. I'm finding it still satisfying when I'm doing it via LLM. They're only good at spitting out entire projects when those projects resemble many that already exist.
Unless you are into it, you’ll realize that it’s quite a grind and your time is much better spent getting somebody who is into it (and thanks to that became an expert to it) get computer to do what you want faster and better.
There’s nothing wrong with trying it, if anything to find out whether you are into it or not in the first place. If you stick to it, chances are you are into it—just like you don’t become a carpetner simply because you want to have furniture: perhaps that’s one of your initial impulses, but you are also mentally compatible with the process and tick some other boxes.
On that note, what does it mean to be “into it” when it comes to programming? What is a “good” reason to become a software engineer? To me, it’s about the inclination to tinker, the eventual payoff of the dopamine rush from seeing puzzle pieces fall together, and the desire to own the process, do things by yourself even as you stand on the shoulders of giants.
Between these things, LLM-driven development strikes me as somewhat weak on tinkering (there may be some, but less, and much less precise and deterministic), and very weak on the desire to do things by yourself. Of course, that shouldn’t invalidate anyone’s personal experience.
But I, on the other hand, do not find LLMs “incredibly exciting”. Maybe I’m the odd one here, but one of my requisites for getting the computer to do things is for it to do them correctly and efficiently. It needs to do the thing I want, and do it right. But it should also not waste my time and other worldly finite resources doing it. LLMs fail at both, and as such (for me) they don’t make it easier to make the computer do things, they make it more frustrating.
Worse is that now I have to deal with the increasing torrent of shit code that’s being put out by people with zero care or understanding for what they do. Meaning that now I’m being bitten even more frequently, and it’s just a matter of time before I’m affected by an unnecessary, incompetent, and wholly avoidable error. Not to mention the increased spread of misinformation, lies, surveillance, spam, and phishing, all while wasting earthly resources we do not have the luxury of spending right now.
Coding for me is more reading than typing, because any time I'm not exactly clear on the code I want to write, it's because there's some aspects of the problem or the tools to solve it that I do not grasp well. So, I usually have a lot of documentations around me for the stuff I'm working on. And that means I don't like LLM for that, because there's no clear signal for wrongness.
And when I'm clear on the code to write and I find it tedious, that usually means that it's time to abstract away the tediousness. LLMs won't help with that, because it's more of a perspective shift than a clear methodology.
LLMs, in its current forms of offering, is like asking a random stranger in a bar. They may know the answer or not. They may give you an incoherent answer even if they know or fabricate stuff when they don't know. But there's still a plus, is that you may still get "I don't know" or silence instead of a wrong answer. Like getting an empty list when making a web search. Which is a good signal by itself.
Some will go into computer science to push the limits of what is possible. That takes a rigorous understanding of the science, not just throwing stuff into an AI.
The other part of the job/hobby that I've always found enjoyable is in striving for "perfectly" minimal/clean designs where the code reads more like functional requirements than messy implementation detail. You look at the code and it is obvious that nothing can be taken out, and no more minimal implementation is conceivable. A bit like an impressionist painting perhaps, where every brush stroke counts, and all you are left with is the essence of the thing being captured. I would proudly consider myself to be a hardcore geek, but there is no doubt an aesthetic/artistic component to software done right, a goal you know has been achieved when at the end of a project you re-read the code and gloat over how beautiful and minimal it is!
This part of the satisfaction of software development will sadly be disappearing as the role of coding is taken over by AI, but perhaps there will still be some satisfaction in minimal design, if not in minimal implementation.
Try “Digital Prophet”. It worked for David Shing.
Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.
LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.
There is no LLM which could ever be faster than a well-configured snippet manager for stuff you’ve done before. Not to mention you won‘t get random bad text thrown at you.
I see this one is popular and high on DDG: https://github.com/massCodeIO/massCode
But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.
Is it like a local search engine you install? Is it an LSP? An LSP that's lighter than rust-analyzer could be useful for this kind of thing.
Edit: I searched for "What is a snippet manager" and DDG search returned a bunch of useless-looking listicles, but their AI actually told me and linked to an article explaining it: https://www.codiga.io/blog/code-snippet-definition/
Edit 2: I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy. I don't think my favorite text editor has a web view built in, so I couldn't install massCode in there
I no longer recall, I’ve been using them for something like two decades.
> But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.
See SnippetsLab for a good example of a snippets manager.
https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/
> I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy.
I prefer it as a standalone app. I don’t use VSCode nor would I want integration with my text editor. Snippet managers generally have ways of being invoked from anywhere, or you can type a few characters and have them replace the text, or you can search them from launchers like Alfred.
Which is ironic, because smartphone photography is astonishingly average to someone who actually understands photography. Phones try to handle every scenario for the user. It has been optimized for bright outdoors, low light conditions, even specific stuff like sunsets. So most people never realize how difficult it really is to shoot in bright daylight with the light source behind the subject. Only when you pick up a traditional camera do you realize that’s one of the worst conditions to take a photo in.
Maybe coding is headed toward the same place. AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
Having done photography with Sony-a6000, I’ve found that it made me more skilled with a smartphone camera. So, I am still optimistic that knowledge gained through deliberate effort has value, even in a world that increasingly prizes “effortlessness” in everything. But only time will tell how much that belief really holds up.
The computers is a very dumb machine. It does exactly what you tell it to do and nothing else. Complexity in programming stems from the need to formalize things and specifying every single detail of the algorithms.
Using AI can give you patterns for the most common things, but everything common is likely to be soon a library or a framework. So what you're instead doing is reinvent the wheel, but differently and the result is likely broken. Good enough for short runs (scripts), but anywhere you want something to last, then the cracks will start to appear.
The things with photography is that it's a spectrum. But software is discrete. It either works or it doesn't.
I even feel this about the wargame "Warmachine", where in the past you could not measure distance before committing to actions. Deciding if model A and B were 10" or 14" apart was a critical skill, and called "weaponized geometry". I was good at it. The game has changed, and you can now measure to your hearts content, making this skill basically pointless. I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about it.
Dublin in the Rare Old Times - The Dubliners
Like my house that fell to progress//My trade's a memory
Antoine de Saint Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), in Citadelle
By definition this is instrumental value rather than intrinsic value.
If they fail at this, they will be ejected from the middle class, and their children will not be properly educated, therefore never beginning the middle class journey. If you're born poor, it's easy to stay poor all your life; if you're born rich, it's easy to stay rich all your life; the middle class is the class that has to reproduce itself every generation and sustain itself by constant service and sublimation of their desires and dreams. That's why they're simultaneously overpaid and overtaxed - just to keep them caged and desperate, a layoff away from a family annihilation. Loyal to death.
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich is a good book about this.
This essay is pompous. Just say: I'm afraid my job is going to leave me, and it makes me feel insecure. Maybe sympathize a little when all of the storefronts on Main Street in some small town are empty after the dog food plant got obsoleted by Chinese imports, instead of telling them they should learn to code like you and to move to where the jobs are.
Middle class is squeezed everywhere, that's true. But I sincerely doubt young generations 'can't distinguish their work from their identity' en masse. Thats a recipe for disaster, at latest during retirement, probably with first firing from the job and generally a big stupid no-no. But don't expect state will drill this into you in the schools, its up to everybody to look around and figure these things out for themselves, just like rest if life (TM).
> This essay is pompous
Pompous he said.
Also, speaking as someone that uses LLMs every day, they take effort! They cannot spin straw into gold. The terrible work I see coming from AI is usually from someone who doesn’t realize that.
> To conclude, I think that there is only one way to science—or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part—unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
https://archive.org/details/realismaimofscie0000popp/page/8/...
Edit: if I heed the content of the paragraphs just before this quote, maybe I should prefer the rewritten version.
So far as moral duty goes, play to your strengths, you're at your best when having fun. This conveniently evaluates to "do what you like". It's not perfectly true, but you can get away with it, blamelessly. Nobody needs you miserable, usually. Then there's the wrinkle where the importance of something to humanity (or even the promise of a large cash reward) may make it fun ... if you happen to feel that way.
Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.
that's not from hesitation. And one can only call the Syracuse invasion an inefficiency in hindsight.
The immediate opportunity of a ~million Roman lives compared to other hypothetical opportunities
(One might guess that opportunities of the win-win type weren't covered by Munger's model)
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-18904-3
(Maybe the Greeks' themselves could have done it, they already had a rudimentary steam engine )
[-3]: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AIDS_(Space_Program)#AIDS_Sp...
If you don't want to live alone - you will be living a marketing campaign.
I think of it from another angle. AI is reaching an energy limit. Companies are way overvalued and in a race to spend most of their gains on AI and that may end badly. Governments are on edge and conflict is brewing. All of that and unknown unknowns can put a stop on the amazing stream of affordable AI we have now. I am using the models as fast as possible to build things I find meaningful and to learn as much as possible. Having unlimited help with any idea that I come up with is incredible. It’s akin to infinite VC funding, but you don’t owe equity or a cent back. The world is now what your cerebellum can come up with. And what you know about the needs of people.
I found the flaw.
Effort is the process of converting energy into value (the state of something being effortless in the future). It's not the efforts themselves that have intrinsic value, but the work ethic that drove the effort in the first place.
Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time.
When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value, and then optimize our entire lives according to that myth.
The idea that AI destroys meaning is a false framing. Many people are already experiencing a meaning crisis, and AI is simply an easy scapegoat.
Purpose comes from discovering our own values through living, not from accepting meanings imposed by others.
If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation.
And that’s a bit of a problem with this article. The photographer that wants to quit because of digital photography? I find that odd, it seems to me like the film community has a really great time with the craft of film photography in the digital age. If anything, the massive shrinkage in available professional labs should make the art of developing your own photos even more validating.
Why didn’t this photographer want to quit when Kodak made disposable cameras and CVS would develop your photos in an hour? I submit that it isn’t digital photography that killed their hobby/passion.
It’s okay to not love doing something anymore and take a break or move on to something else. I think this idea that it defines you is a bit of a toxic validation mechanism.
This is written from a different values perspective than mine, but I can understand it. I think you’d have made a stronger point if you’d focused on internal validation, though.
For many, the ideal is internal integrity driving oneself forward. I say ideal, because we’re imperfect creatures - external validation, greed, etc. slip in.
Overall though, a life on the beach sipping coconuts sounds immediately appealing, but long term empty. I’m not going to tell you it’s working 996, either. For me, the journey is finding what makes me whole - through many failed starts.
This seems like a dire situation for most humans and probably isn't the status quo for human operation. Its perfectly fine to sit on the beach, but eventually a light should go on that would say "lets go build some tools", "lets go see if I can catch a fish", "lets build a hut". Which would all be fine and admirable things to spend your time doing.
Things that are built with money (& not by say, intrinsic motivation alone) seem to have a high ratio of (traction) to (resources invested). Not sure if marketing alone can explain that?
Obvious exceptions come to mind , eg the Linux kernel, but even that was massively boosted by commercial interests.
(One other class of exceptions could be tentatively named "winning the zeitgeist lottery")
If you would agree that this phenom exists in the short to mid time frame: without the likelihood of traction, how can intrinsic meaning alone provide motivation?
Things that are built with money are often done so for scale. Successful things that are built with money often also have people who have some interest in the thing they are building.
More like survival. I think of Archimedes' letters to the librarian of Alexandria, describing his secret technique of infinitessimals. It seems clear that he knew his work was meaningful but he wasnt going to die without telling anybody about it. He wasn't looking for validation, he didn't need it
Wealth, in the modern era, has been a vehicle to achieve power. It is certainly not the only path, but it is the most culturally universal path to influence the effort of others available today. When we set our ambitions towards lofty outcomes that require power to accomplish, we inevitably run into the capacity constraints involved with being a single person.
Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power to realize goals. Power itself is amoral, and the idealist with good intentions must inevitably conclude that power is a requirement to realize big dreams.
But, effort is also power. For our sanity, wisdom would have us focus on our efforts, with every moment we have, rather than whether or not we achieve the goal. I'll also add that AI is increasing the scope of what our efforts alone can accomplish, for good and bad.
To achieve large goals, pragmatism would require us to derive meaning and purpose from the effort put towards those ends, rather than the attainment of the goal. Think this is best described as an 'open purpose'.
>Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power
Power and money are almost interchangeable, and I'm taking a wild guess that better questions are hidden in that "almost" (as you say, "wisdom+effort", but I'd have to sleep on that for a few nights in order not to casually one-up that with "precience")
However, I'd encourage you to contemplate all the things that money can't "buy."
I categorize power not as the sum total of capability to dominate, or purchase, but influence belief, shape motivation, and inspire action.
Our body can develop power over the physical world. Our mind can develop power over the world of myths and information. Our ability to communicate can develop motivation in others through belief, inspiration, and hope.
Money can out-source, to acquire the power and resources of others.
There are many ways to power - Money is a centrally dominant one, today, but is predicated on a certain order to the world and is not universal.
Money gives you food, shelter, healthcare and relationships; all of which are required for happiness.
I think we need make the distinction between a startup founder missing his daughter's birthday because he is at the office chasing money and the average Joe working double shifts at Walmart.
Most people don't even have the luxury of optimizing their life for money.
Go back far enough in history and money disappears. We had barter and trade and happiness still existed without money.
Go back further and trade becomes les important and violence/cooperation to achieve what one wants becomes greater.
Trying to shove money in a post labor world won't make sense and will just lead to war/genocide if we don't find a way to transition.
How do you efficiently allocate resources? Especially when you have a wide spectrum of preferences.
I think if you spent long enough thinking about that problem you'd just end up inventing money. You'd have to call it something else so it sounded rebelliously anti-capitalist though
Violence is problematic for self evident reasons. Cooperation I already touched on about the community involvement, with all the same problems.
It isn't that we can't imagine a world without money, but that we quickly see the problems with it given the scale of modern day life.
As for post scarcity, it really depends upon what is post scarcity. Money becomes meaningless for things that are not scarce, but some things remain scarce.
By the power of sheer discipline I keep moving on. I have my daily routine which encompasses a variety of activities that theoretically should push me forward as a person. But I can't escape the profound sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. It's terrifying for me to think that this is how I'll spend the rest of my life and then I'll die, but at the same time I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged.
Some time ago I was helping my parents with renovation, and I found school documents from my childhood. It said that I had issues getting along with other kids. As an adult I learned what to tell people to get them to like me, but this strategy only gets me to survive in the society, not thrive in it.
It’s really interesting that lack of connection is what you jump to immediately as the cause of your sense of meaninglessness. I wonder what “thriving in society” looks like to you?
And you may have tried this already, but personally I’ve found group hobbies to improve my sense of connectedness. I’m part of a group that meets regularly to sketch on street corners and in coffee shops. I’m not best friends with anyone there, but it’s very fulfilling just to sit with people in the same space for a couple hours, listen to them talk, and share our sketches. There might be drawing, hiking, photography, dance, etc. groups near you…?
You’re certainly not alone in feeling lonely these days though. Modern society is so isolating, connecting feels like such a challenge.
"I know that one day I'm going to die". Yes, and most people ignore it and push this insight away. You know who deals with this topic over and over, that is Buddhism. You might be open to investigate what they have to say. The rest of what you wrote also reminds me of what Buddhism has to say.
"I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged."
Again, as I understand it, the buddhists think our live as a human is like a very fine boat, very precious. The Buddhists think we needed many lives to get to this point in the Karma circle. Sounds stupid, but just think how long evolution took to create you, how many of your parents and anchestors had to have how much luck, and voila, here you are! Bummer, not? And you know, just for a short time, and then what for. So the Buddhists think, you have kind of an obligation and responsibility, to make good use of this precious boat. They say, yes, it is urgent, not much time left.
For you it is meaning (maybe). For other it is happiness. For others yet something else. What is wrong to spend a whole life about what would or could be meaningful, or maybe there is nothing, or maybe there does not need to be something, or maybe there is something. Nothing to loose, not. Btw, here is a story I heard from Ken McLeod online in a talk:
It goes like this, a sage is sitting on the side of the street, and Alexander the Great comes along with his army. He sees the sage, and asks him, what do you do the whole day? And the Sage says I am contemplating/meditating/do nothing (I forgot the detail), and Alexander shakes his head and says, what's the point of that. And then the sage asks Alexander, and what do you do the whole day? And Alexander says, I am building an empire! And the sage says, but what for?
So if you haven't found meaning for yourself, at least you are honest about it, and maybe you know already what you are looking for.
The above mentioned Ken McLeod has written a book about Buddhism, that puts it into the context of our Western culture. I once gave a copy to a Chinese, and she said after reading it, the concepts are easy to understand, but hard to remember. For me it is the other way around, very counter intuitive to understand. I gave the book someone else too, and when she saw the book she said, "ah, you are a searcher". Maybe I am, and so far I haven't found anything better or a contradiction in it. So that is my best lead so far, maybe you would find it worthwhile to look into this area too (the book is BTW "Wake Up To Your Life", there is also a web site with lot's of transcribed talks: https://unfetteredmind.org/).
(disclaimer: meditation can be also potentially harmfull, as e.g. "terrifying" thoughts could be even more amplified and leading to a real or deeper crisis.)
Anyway, good luck (to everybody).
But just remember, we are the only observed entities that _create_ meaning, complex, rich, nuanced meaning. We are the meaning generators of the universe.
If the universe has a random forest walk to create meaning, to try new cool stuff, to hold a mirror to and understand itself.
We are it.
We don't know and ex ante can't predict which human(s) might reverse entropy, alter the topology of the universe, prevent an asteroid from wiping us out, escape the bounds of this reality.
None of those things may ever happen, but as far as I know they haven't been strictly ruled out yet.
It's early days yet.
If I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes (when he basically discovered calculus) motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "yep that works!"
(That was long ago, but I'm sure it also happens today)
When we imagine something in our brain we are physically testing or creating something even if ephemeral, these thoughts you make have meaning and are real just with low distribution.
They can be very complex thoughts, you can invent worlds and objects and play around with them in your mind for relatively low cost, this is the root of humanities power, the ability to create meaning, to create arbitrary coherence (even if it's just internal coherence)
You can distribute this meaning to others, as a written or spoken word.
You can investigate if your thought has correspondence to something that exists in the exterior world. This can be science and discovery.
But you can also create something that you know doesn't exist and then work to have it realized in the external world.
What's the casual path from Gene Rondenberry to the iPod? Hard to compute.
We create meaning. It's what we do.
The funny thing is this, we keep talking about people's search for meaning, but if we look at the observable facts, to speak poetically, if the universe was sentient (and I don't personally believe it is) it would be looking to us to see what meaning we create and new shit we discover and why it works the way it does.
The causal path from Rodenderry to the ipod .. is.. easy to approximate compared to the causal path from Zen Monks to Darth Vader.. (though they are in roughly opposite directions)
Financially, I'm completely free, very comfortable, want for nothing, but still don't feel any sense of achievement.
I need help
Protestantism or Japanese cultures really value effort in a way mediterannean culture (for instance) does not.
Think about Flemish paintings that have all these very intricate details, while Italian painters invented the messy sfumato.
I don't like that digital cameras took over, because I don't like the quality of digital pictures, but I love that LLMs are taking stuff off my plate / brain. I have absolutely zero romanticism associated with effort. I do romanticize smartness.
Gauss finding n*(n+1) / 2 because he didn't want to sum numbers by hand is my absolute hero. Of course he was protestant so what I just said really doesn't make much sense.
However, I'm pretty sure that the job of SWE isn't about to disappear, since even when human-level AGI appears, the process of software development isn't about to get any easier than when it was done by actual humans. I don't see non-technical middle managers able to take over as systems architects and lead developers. It'll just mean that the day-to-day of those charged with developing software per PHB's requirements changes.
That said, I do feel fortunate to have been from the generation where software was developed entirely by hand, having started in the era of 8-bitters (NASCOM-1 in 1978) and only just in the last year transitioning (against my preference) to a role of overseeing offshore developers rather than being hands-on. Still, I think that those who enjoy the challenge and fun of conjuring up dreams out of software will still find plenty to enjoy in the future, although it will be different, just as it has already changed a lot from the time when we were writing everything in assembler to today arguing about whether Rust is better than C++.
Hassabis has the Google DeepMind team of 5000+, very many of who are PhD's, working for him, so a lot can be done in 5-10 years.
When Hassabis says it'll take 5000+ people 5-10 years and maybe a couple of Transformer-level breakthroughs, then he's clearly not talking about just adding search, and everyone realizes that things like continual/incremental learning are also required. I'd guess that Hassabis has a pretty good idea of what's missing from LLMs and needs to be added to get to AGI.
I really would not dismiss Hassabis. He is a lot smarter than you or I, and has won a Nobel Prize for his application of AI to science, as well as stunning the machine learning community with AlphaGo (most had thought beating Go would take another 10 years).
I think there are better long term approaches to super-human AI than building upon LLMs, but just as a cog is not a car, there is no reason it can't be a part of a car.
It was.
“All that was will always have been somehow never again”
Probably also tied to changes in neuroplasticity, I guess. Humans are generally good at adopting new behaviors.
I took a lot of 'pride in the craft', and I used to really enjoy hacking away on new projects with languages that I normally wouldn't use in my day-to-day. But now whenever I start something I think of how much faster I could be if I just used an LLM. Which takes away some of the joy.
I'll be honest, I struggled with this for many months.. actually years at this point (since ~GPT3.5). I hardly code in my spare time now, and am spending more time on other hobbies. I think I've kinda come to terms with the fact that I won't really enjoy coding anymore.
LLMs have completely changed that for me. I can actually start and do those side projects that have been kicking around in my head for years. I don't need 8 hours just to get to a starting point on a project; I can type up a spec off and on during my spare time, then sit down with an LLM and generate the framework of my project in minutes. I am no longer stymied by my short chunks of free time.
I feel like a whole world of creativity has opened up for me again.
It's very, very difficult to really realize that one's sacrifice was meaningless or mistaken.
Effort - sacrifice - in particular is for the sake of something else; you burn your precious life/time for the sake of X, and then X doesn't work or turns out to be an illusion. You can console yourself with lessons learned, but it's a bit hollow. And worse, if you wasted someone else's time? Almost unrecoverable.
Then you're not only less useful (stale skills), but also less susceptible to going gung-ho on the new goal X', making you a poor candidate for any employers or investors since being resilient and formidable are necessary for any uncertain endeavor.
The Confucian Ta Hsueh (Great Learning) says "Every day, make it new" was inscribed on the bathtub of the first Shang dynasty emperor: 湯之盤銘曰：「茍日新，日日新，又日新
Traditionally, the solution was a kind of selflessness, where you realize that even if (as with Ecclesiastes) empires you build will fall into dust, you can still help others. But in an age where interactions reduce to endless scrolling and online forums, it's not clear where and how to do that.
A beautiful sentiment reminiscent of Zen. Everything is temporary, nothing lasts, everything you build or accomplish will crumble into dust and be forgotten. On its face this appears as nihilism, but on the other side of the realization, you're still here - so what else could there be to do besides seize the moment and live it to the fullest?
Nature language programming (aka "AI") seems to be on the same track.
"There's no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is purpose that defines, purpose that binds us."
Healthy love is effort in the right direction.
I was into DJing when that meant buying vinyl and mastering the difficult art of beatmatching by ear before CDJs made acquiring music trivial and automated beatmatching made mixing easy.
I was a game developer during the time when casual smartphone games came and ate so much time and attention that players had less time available for other games.
I got into making music when that meant fighting with big, slow, complex hardware synthesizers, then watched anyone with a laptop (including me) be able to do all of that a hundred times more easily, and now I watch AI auto-generate passable background music.
Time and time again, I've seen this same process play out.
Many of the deepest joys in my life involved putting deep time and care into making something to share with others. That feels increasingly out of step with the culture at large.
I used to enjoy writing but now it's so easy for anyone to self-publish a book on Amazon that I don't see the point.
I used to enjoy running but all the fun has gone out of it now that motor vehicles exist that can move faster than I can run.
I used to like sky-diving, but then hail stones ...
tolerance•4mo ago
My impression is that many white collar workers felt that their jobs and accompanying status were immutable. They’re not. Couldn’t they have seen this coming?
Nothing prevents people from continuing on with their trades or interests how they did before the AI bubble bloomed. But if they want to earn a living doing it, I guess they need to start thinking outside of the box. I believe prolonged contact with insulation induces hive breakout.
zwnow•4mo ago
Personally I am pretty conflicted about using it considering its built upon theft and cheap labor. Making money isn't that nice if its unethical, and id keep that out of my company for as long as possible.
bartread•4mo ago
It took me by surprise how much I tied what I did to who I was, and how much it bothered me that I could no longer so easily articulate what I'd done during a day at work. It was no longer I made this, I made that, I added these features, I fixed those bugs. It was all relational. It was all meetings and conversations. It felt like anyone could be doing it. So I felt like I had no value. Like I was a spare wheel. Three or four years and in all that time I never made my peace with it.
So burned out and dejected[0] I went back to software development and performance consulting. I did that for about 3 years.
The second time I went into management was different. Maybe I was just older. Maybe I'd done a bit more reading and thinking about management and leadership. I certainly knew what I liked and disliked, and what I admired in other leaders. Because of the consulting I'd seen a variety of leaders at work in lots of different contexts, with different challenges, different styles, and different personalities. At any rate, I had a different and broader view of what good looked like.
I also had a clear and strong remit and room to operate: build a new product, build and lead a new team, open an office, rearchitect and rebuild our platform, become CTO.
But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).
This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.
In my case that took for-fucking-ever - I've always been something of a late developer[1] - and many people reading this have and will adapt much more quickly. I'll say this: it's much easier to let go when you have a stronger idea of what "next" looks like[2], so figure out what that is. Software development is changing, for all of us, and even now nobody really knows what that means, but it doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities.
It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the more extreme viewpoints published online regarding AI and software development are no better than noise: they're just clickbait designed to generate reaction and engagement. Their real informational value is close to zero.
That is obviously not the case with this piece, which describes the author's personal experience in our new AI enabled world.
And I get their point about the craft. You really do feel that. But what you have to realise is the craft doesn't go away: it moves to a different level of abstraction. What can you (what can we) do now that you couldn't do before? What do the wrinkles and contours of that, where your (our) finesse will be needed, actually look like?
This all reads more like a pile of scattered thoughts than I'd intended, but hopefully there's some value in there for some of you.
[0] Not just for these reasons: there were other things - including one or two other major contributors - going on that I don't want to talk about here, but my lack of comfort with the nature of my role was certainly a somewhat chunky factor. Just don't overread or assume too much from what I'm saying.
[1] No pun intended - nobody should read anything delivery related into this comment.
[2] This touches on some of those issues I didn't want to talk about. Within that organisational context I'd reached a ceiling and no-one, including me, was grown up enough to be real about that. So I kept trying to push on and break through and, well, I guess we all wasted a lot of eachother's time although, from my side, I don't feel too bad about it.
tolerance•4mo ago
> But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).
> This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.
> Represent the perspectives I was hoping to invite with my comment. The paragraph immediately following these was equally great.
I’ve read a lot of interesting remarks about people who’ve gone back and forth between programming and management positions in tech and I can relate to the experience in some ways.
What you and the author are describing is legitimate. And I think that your experience occurring while making an apparent step forward in your profession (as opposed to the step backwards that AI imposes) indicates something…special about man, his craft and its relation to himself and his perceived value to others (or lack thereof) while practicing his craft.
I think this is a common thing, generally speaking. On one end, there are plenty of people in other (less-paying, less-appealing) industries who have gone through these kind of experiences—past and present—so it’s easy for someone like me to feel apathetic in this case.
For better or worse it’s a privilege that there are some people who are able to articulate their particular circumstances, under a shared shade.
I guess this is the point where the Marxists begin to revel in the bourgeois gaining “class consciousness”. I haven’t checked on all the literature to be sure how that often turns out in history.
bartread•4mo ago
I guess this is my only quibble: is it really a step backwards? I can get on board with the idea that maybe the jury is out, but the evidence I've seen and experienced is more that it's a force multiplier than anything else.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're all fucked.
But for now at least I think reports of the death of software development as a profession are greatly exaggerated.
tolerance•4mo ago
I think that AI is going to be a boon for certain types of people, an impediment for some others and a source of indifference for some too. But I don’t necessarily expect the median to go quietly out the door. Unless they receive a universal, perpetual sort of “severance” with a progressive-sounding tint.
bonoboTP•4mo ago
Having to reinvent your career when you are 30+/40+/50+ is not so simple. You studied something, amassed experience and tacit knowledge, taste and work habits.
It used to be the case that you learned as an apprentice (or simply grew up on a farm and saw the work) and then continued it the rest of your life.
We will be more and more efficient at pumping more wealth to the owner classes, but people will be spiritually ground down.
tolerance•4mo ago
I read in a book titled The Technology Trap about how in the past, rulers withheld technological advancements and gave strategic deference to the people whose labor would be most affected by them, so as it not put their own necks at risk.
That doesn’t seem to be a concern today.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Of course AI is a failure of imagination. But so were symbols, which cannot reference, they can only represent, if at all.
The real function of AI appears to be the transition away from symbols, metaphors, folk science cause and effect ideation.
We're only barely sensing this, but if you listen to Gary Marcus, Rich Sutton and those willing to see the larger scales, they are bellwethers that are actually sinking their own approaches as well as LLMs.
In effect, labor is about to reap the benefits of the AI debacle. I see this in the AI at the major teaching hospital my sister is a department head of. In lead developers in gaming, in media. AI does not function well, it's essentially wax fruit, it's not even mimicry. That's going to lead to an analog rebirth.
tolerance•4mo ago
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/lessons-of-babel/articles/...
mallowdram•4mo ago
The word is an arbitrary form, as myth is, (as symbols, money, news, states/politics) both are ultimately evolutionarily suspect in terms of animal signals, and we haven't found a specific workaround to that arbitrariness. That's extinction. The world is only specific, as is survival.
I suggest the only function of arbitrary signals is to refute themselves into replacement. The good thing about the AI debacle is that it's about speeding that up.
bonoboTP•4mo ago
mallowdram•4mo ago
pettertb•4mo ago
You do well to limit this somewhat. But it is inevitable, if you want to achieve anything. You are going to end up smelling somewhat like your work clothes, no matter your industry, no matter the year.
We can't all have the mission statement "to make money", if the machines of money-making are to function. You would never have the nevessary skills that way.
Not saying that we do well to spend the next 30 years griping, we don't. But don't shame people from being hurt by the whims of business. People need to grieve lost stuff, goes for AI, goes for "auto plant went out of business", goes for anything.
tolerance•4mo ago
So no, I agree, don’t shame people for being hurt by the whims of business. But I would say, encourage the newcomers to this experience (who I suspect are exceptional in their sociopolitical status compared to their predecessors) to re-envision themselves and the ways that they render their service beyond prior cushiony contexts.
Businesses may not need you, you may make much less than before. But society sorely does need you in some capacity and the unfortunate case is that, to be frank, not too many people are going to be quick to boo-hoo with you over your loss because they’ve gone through something like it before already. Them or a loved one.
This is an American phenomenon. Join and be of aid to your countrymen. But don’t get SaaSy.
bonoboTP•4mo ago