pmg101

Appears to be a log of Peter's sneezes. Location, intensity, and a few words about that day.

Absolutely! This whole blog post is horrible.

The guy needs to get outside, touch grass, and go talk to some kids studying the classics.

I mean the answer is clearly yes! People in my family have for sure shared round logins to various things, I guess they think that's ok too

In general I take your point, but in an attempt to steelman OP:

Perhaps they're using "surrender" in its meaning of "hand over something you didn't want to hand over", "give up under duress"?

If you've ever worked with talented, but younger, colleagues, you'll see this. Something about our industry, or maybe the kind of person in it, where individual brilliance seems always to be more prioritised than collective endeavour and progress.

For software or IT folk to be doing this would be indeed worrying (and I bet some are, and I'm worried about them!)

For civilians though... They've been told it's AI, it can do stuff for them. And one thing they do is log in to stuff. I don't think they're stupid. Just that what's obvious to IT folk is simply not at all obvious to the average person. Maybe that's on us not on them?

Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.

I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.

So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".

This is the old comfort/friction/happiness dichotomy isn't it.

Each incremental reduction in friction and improvement in comfort feels good. But is the net effect happiness? I think it's anomie, in the limit.

Ok but... You aren't planning to get paid to be a software engineer? Or you are? Surely this is the way in which the futures are entwined, for most of us?

What if what we call "white collar work", for the most part sitting at a desk, interacting with a computer, isn't really the sort of work suitable for human flourishing at all?

When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.

What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.

Now you do it in your time off instead.

I'm an absolute doofus in the physical realm. No hand eye coordination of any kind. No common sense. No social skills or ability to read and understand humans.

In any other era I would have been a useless drain on society and yet I happened by an incredible stroke of luck to be born at a time when the few skills I do have perfectly aligned with a career niche. It's been a good few decades. Now I just go back to being a useless nobody but at least I have my memories and my investments.

Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds?

Maybe that's a reasonable definition of white vs blue collar worker?

If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.

If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.