uludag

I've been having this same gnawing feeling. I just started reading the book "The Collision" by Eric C So which promises to cover this subject. I haven't finished it but seems decent so far.

It's so depressing a thought that if I continue on this path, in a few years, let alone a decade, I'll be utterly unable to produce or even understand code. I realize the skill may not be very economically useful, but losing it is still a depressing outcome that's preventable in theory. At the same time I'm feeling a deep apathy towards building anything. Playing a Zachtronics game is the farthest my internal motivation can push me towards...

I'd love to hear what others are thinking/doing.

One of my favorite life hacks (which really isn't a hack) is to not change my clock, go to sleep and wake up at the exact same time (solar wise, not wall clock), and just view the shift as a shift in schedules as opposed to time.

nope, you'd be bypassing an encrypted system and would be imprisoned thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I think even apart from unionizing, if all/ the employees at company aren't AI jockeying, more work isn't necessarily demanded. I realize you have to have relatively decent management too. I consider myself extremely lucky to work for a company that hasn't been beating the drum of AI maximalism and our work load in general has stabalized.

Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.

Obviously "a blank sheet of paper" here is meaning thinking about the problem deeply. I'm surprised how dismissive people are to using brainpower whatsoever. I get that juxtaposing paper to LLMs might have triggered some people though.

As a counterpoint, bringing a one-shotted POC without thought may actually do have a shock and awe sort of effect, dazzling the stakeholders to go down the wrong path since the AI prototype was so easy.

I'm reading the book "The Nerd Reich" and the book dives deep into the various ideas circling Thiel. I highly recommend this book.

People should realize that this isn't isolated to Thiel and his idiosyncratic views on the antichrist: he's actively trying to evangelize his social and intellectual circles. For example, one of his Antichrist lectures was hosted by The Acts 17 Collective and is in cohoots with them.

This shouldn't be seen as "eccentric tech CEO's strange view on the Antichrist" but rather, "tech elites turning to Christianity as a blueprint for civilizational hierarchy". I don't have a good feeling about this at all.

That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.

Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.

It's such a shame that sleek looking sites and project depth aren't a sign of human effort and by extension longevity.

For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!"

Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.

I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.

Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.

There may be different thesis out there, but the fact of prices going down definitely doesn't help the case that the major AI labs are are overvalued and need to vastly increase their revenue to stay afloat amidst their contractual obligations.

I honestly don't think there are too many people arguing "AI is actually too expensive to take my job". "AI being too much of a commodity to make meaningful profits" could very well be the case though.

I think this analogy breaks down in key areas. Software can be distributed limitlessly unlike a croissant, which can only be enjoyed by one peraon and only within a time period before it goea stale. Like immagine of you spent 100s of hours perfecting your croissant making skills only for others to have a machine look at ypurs and just instant copy it effortlessly.

Because cooking has such intimate benefits not easily replicable I've actually found it a good sink for some of my hobby coding time that I too lost interest in.

So people's salaries may vary, but voluntarily paying 1k usd out of one's pocket a month seems like quite a high cost I'm sure many wouldn't/couldn't pay.

Like if I had to choose between Claude Code and income -12k USD, I would most certainly work the extra hours without it.

I think 2x or 3x is maybe too generous. Obviously pure code output is extremely high but I would think for something to truly be a 2x a company would either have to be able to effectively get rid of half its SWE workforce or produce enough to make some notable increase in revenue.

It doesn't seem like the SWE labor market has been shedding anywhere near that order of magnitude of jobs (there are about 1.7 million SWEs in the USA alone) or that companies going heavy into AI are boosting revenue significantly.

I think all things considered we're only getting a single digit percentage total productivity increase.

I completely agree. While the best outcome may obviously involve lots of thinking, from what I've seen an experienced, the AI tools we have today put people on a slope to becoming "meat proxies". Some of the brighter, stronger engineers may have a less steep slope, but I'm convinced that with time they too will be meat proxies. AI is attacking on too many fronts for it to be otherwise:

  - AI generates too much code that overwhelms humans
  - AI deskills users concerning the gritty details of coding by having them not do it themselves
  - Having most of one's co-workers become meat proxy will put pressure for others to convert
  - Lack of effort or expertise invested into codebase leads people to care less; caring less -> not caring about optimal outcome -> not expending brain power on problems we don't care about.

I think since we as an industry are still on this slope, we're still having systems propped up by people actually using their brains. I personally think this situation is regrettable. We should as an industry consider if the direction we're going truly is something we want.

My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.

Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.

If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.