What are the best psychological coping mechanism for this stage of the S-curve?
Asking for a generation...
What are the best psychological coping mechanism for this stage of the S-curve?
Asking for a generation...
That something is not immediately visible doesn't mean that it does not matter.
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.
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.
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.
But it will, really! Just keep waiting..
Progressive democrats shouldn't waste their time talking about software.
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
Nightmare
Implying that democrats are not fed money by exactly the same cheese pizza eating billionaires.
Surely you're joking?
We know the Democrats work for the same billionaires and industry leaders as the Republicans. We know they vote to fund the same concentration camps and secret police as the Republicans.
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.
Yeah, right.
I really do have a panacea though.
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.
Schools won't teach about something they don't want you to do. They'd just invent an alternate history.
The Wright brothers constructed an elaborate prompt in order to get BC-GPT-3.5 to generate the plans for the first working airplane.
I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.
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
- O Brother, Where Art Thou?
"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."
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
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.
they definitely are not.
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.
> 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.
(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)
im hoping to see over the top of the haze / level the curves by building a platform for everyone to climb
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.
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 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.
Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.
if it's not over in a year or so I'm finding an alternative career, or retiring early
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...
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.
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."
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.
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
andsoitis•2h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago
NikolaNovak•1h ago
Suggestions 1 and 3 are hard though!