reidalert

The description of the risk factors very much jibes with what I have seen in a friend recently. He is quite isolated, and spends most of his evenings writing using AI (he works in a blue-collar trade and wouldn't be typing stuff out by hand usually).

He's convinced that he has discovered a grand theory of human connection / relationships / energy / physics, and keeps interrupting in conversation to explain how something I've said is just an example of a deeper pattern.

Sadly, this theory of connection is cutting him off from actual connection - he gets so much validation from AI that he believes he has discovered a new world model. But the people around him aren't bought into the vision (mostly because it is bullshit), and so he ends up even more isolated.

Well said - I'd say the hardest part of the job is balancing listening/gathering feedback, and maintaining a core vision for the product that's not just a wish-list of feature requests. There's a dark art of making someone feel listened to, without necessarily doing anything about it.

Yep, guilty as charged and I look back on this experience and see a lot of things that could have been done differently. To clarify, the video idea was about new users of the product not internal hires, so the production quality would need to be higher. These days I'd probably whip up a Retool-style intro video using Loom + Wistia in a day or so.

This thread resonated with me a lot - instead of dividing time into 'good/productive' and 'bad/unproductive', it's worth acknowledging the signal my brain is sending when it wants to scroll HN/Reddit and responding to it directly, instead of scrolling on autopilot and then feeling vaguely guilty/dissatisfied.

The times when I'm able to intentionally take a break feel much more restorative than the times when I'm acting out of avoidance.