dontparticipate

I completely agree. My first intervention with this person was to try to get them to set up a test driven development framework. Unfortunately, that's also when I learned he didn't know what that was. He also just copied "do TTD" into Claude. It was definitely my mistake, and probably over optimism about what AI might be able to do, that we didn't enforce that a lot earlier, and have been working on making sure to enforce a lot more gates going forward.

We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it.

Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.

Today's bombing of Yemen is tomorrow's landing of Marines on Taiwan, or I guess these days marching into Montreal and landing in Greenland. All of these require complete OPSEC from the entire chain of command.

There's a body of government explicitly built to do exactly that and given exactly that power in the constitution. It's called Congress.

We need to use our skills to build platforms that have both high retention and diffuse ownership that uplifts its users. We need to build a media ecosystem that isn't just a toy. My generation treated social media like it was just an amusement, and didn't notice it slowly turn the flow of information back into AM talk radio until it was too late. There have to be genuine alternatives to Tiktok and X and Instagram that are just as obsessive about UX as the proprietary apps are, but can't be owned.

If only there was a group of people that were given the legal rights to make that decision... We could call them like... A Congress and we could like write those processes down. Maybe call that document a Constitution.

Being under 30 and already having this mindset is going to take you far. I would argue it makes you even better at work because you'll over time iterate towards things that you value weighed against all the other good things in life rather than just try to find the biggest paycheck making a Belching as a Service app that some VC thought up on ayahuasca.

So you're spending time with your families and communities instead of working during the day then. That thing you're calling "forced socialization" has another name. It's called work. Your ability to have conversations with your coworkers and customers about your work is in fact part of most jobs that involve developing products. Most of us making over $200k don't just pull the code lever at the code factory all day and if your idea of what work in software is doesn't involve people, you've put a permanent ceiling on your career.

Psychedelic assisted therapy is so good an powerful precisely because it exploits the best case scenario of set and setting with the way the drug has an impact on your mind. I'm far from against psychedelic and have done the therapy myself.

However, if you're in a positivity cult, and don't realize you're in a cult, and don't have someone guiding you to consider you might be in a cult, the shrooms are just as likely to make the cult seem like the most profound and important experience in your entire life.

If you are a lead in a company, you suddenly have a profound spiritual experience based around your ability to hire and fire people and tell them what to do and can use the drug to convince yourself that the ideas you are coming up with are the most profound thoughts a person has ever had. You won't even realize you're shutting out good ideas, because you have a messianic belief in AI or crypto or whatever the thing is, and you take the shrooms to reinforce that belief and you create an environment around yourself and put people around you that reinforce that belief.

It's a very different experience than going to therapy to work through your fear or depression.

> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". > it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore

It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored.

Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.

So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?

You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.

But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.

Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.

Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.

When it happens, I'll have a hyperloop tunnel to sell you under Los Angeles.

It absolutely has become a new faith. A lot of the cryptocurrency faith healers moved into the space as that grift began to collapse and moved from copying the prosperity gospel to apocalyptic "the end is nigh, repent for the second coming of Christ is at hand" type preachers. LLMs that these people envision are not about intelligence. They're about creating a God you can pray to and it answers back, wrapped in a veil of scientism. It's a slightly more advanced version of 4chan users worshiping Inglip.