Our efforts, in part, define us
weakty.com218 points by todsacerdoti 9 hours ago
218 points by todsacerdoti 9 hours ago
Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and that "communicating" was often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.
I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made many long gone". Which then is usually followed by "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."
Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill.
Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed.
We emit meaning the way a star emits photons.
Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around.
But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.
I love the image of humans emitting meaning like stars emit photons. It's poetic, but also kind of literal.
I really like the way you said we emit meaning.
It is kind of funny, that we seek meaning and/or purpose in everything - our lives, our actions, our thoughts - but there is a nice change in perspective in considering it as something that we produce rather than find.
Humans are evolved creatures that are very resilient across environments.
Any species that has this trait must not get stuck in local maximums, at an extreme that's why the koala is just not a resilient species, over confidence.
We are an anti-niche species, to avoid this we must have a certain percentage of our population that has doubt, existential crisis that shakes us out of a well worn path.
This always amazes me. If you deeply, emotionally _know_ that life has meaning, there will be some existential nights where you you will think "but maybe life doesn't have meaning", and if you _know_ life is meaningless you will sometime find yourself thinking "maybe there is meaning", our brains try to keep us from getting stuck.
Humility in the face of the unknown. As a species, just amazing stuff.
The cycle of confidence and doubt is absolutely amazing, it's kept us from getting stuck.
Keeps us from having "target fixation" and lawn darting into the ground.
Some individuals have these values tuned at extreme ends, the full distribution is represented by humanity.
The most overconfident and the most anxiety ridden, this is all in our spectrum, and it turns out better or worse for each individual.
The great thing is that we can share ideas and examine our priors.
I used to believe that "nothing" was a real thing, but it's only an abstraction, nothing has never been observed it's only "real" in our imaginations. There's no such thing as nothing as far as anyone has observed or proven.
Same thing with meaninglessness, nothing is meaningless, there are just bits of meaning maximally un-complex and decohered. You can use photon emissions from stars for RNG, humans have made even RNG have rich meaning and high practical utility.
This conversation is reminding me of one of the most formative books in my development: Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning". It explores this idea, that the strive to find meaning is the central defining force for humanity, set against the backdrop of brutal destruction of the holocaust.
Yeah, a typical advice trope is "Find things with meaning and do those" which isn't very useful once you understand we create meaning internally. Meaning is an individualized perception not an extrinsic property.
This gets tricky because our perceptions can be influenced by societal expectations of which things should be meaningful - as if it's an objective property. It's easy to think of activities to which many people would respond "Oh, that must be soooo meaningful" and yet it's entirely possible you may not personally experience a sense of meaning from doing them - yet feel like you're supposed to. It's important to realize there's nothing wrong with that (or with you). You may not experience the 'expected meaning' meaning while doing some "charitably noble activity" widely thought to be meaningful, yet discover something else few would associate with "meaningful" does evoke meaning for you.
This type of thinking should've died with the contemporaries of Darwin who didn't believe in evolution. We live on a planet full of complex, intelligent life, we're far from the only ones giving things meaning. Animals have social structures and emotions that are as sophisticated as our own, it's only ego to think that we're unique in giving life meaning.
The statement was qualified, if you have objective evidence for species propagating long term complex meaning that we have observed as the written word or other externalized means please demonstrate. I do not understand why a person would say that demonstratably dolphins have done more meaning generation than people?
The universe is full of possibilities, I'm trying to establish an empirical/observable floor not the ceiling.
Other species are also intelligent and create meaning, but I don't know of any proposed metric where their impact is remotely close to ours, though it's not 0 and beyond that they are part of our causal chain as well.
I personally wouldn't mind if we kept giving dogs and dolphins and other animals tools for long term complex communication but some people think we shouldn't interfere in that kind of way in the development of other species. I'd be interested in hearing if you hold an intentional development/don't interfere position.
It's ok and true to say people are empirically special and unique in actual observed reality. If there is a dolphin universe where they are the dominant species and have libraries and journals and satellites than that's fine, but we haven't observed that to be the case.
Again, there is a world of possibilities and everyone should explore that, but I am talking about the one universe we have observed and our empirical observations within it. I like to delineate between extrapolative and speculative ceilings and empirical floors.
Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process, and in the creativity needed to design an elegant solution. In fact the more boring part is often the coding itself.
This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still.
The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary.
Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.
"Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject.
(So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
If you take a software engineering textbook, you’ll see there’s nothing about code other than a chapter about methodology. It’s mostly about decomposing problems and stating criteria for a good solution. Which by itself is a lot of writing and talking.
That reminds me of a phrase that I read some years ago:
"A typical Google engineer could describe their job as ‘taking protocol buffers and turning them into other protocol buffers’."
> Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing.
The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging.
WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS.
I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.
I'd blame Social Media. It did more to kill small websites than anything else. Possibly starting with MySpace in 2004.
WYSIWYG never really went away even after Dreamweaver and FrontPage lost popularity. My ISP had a web-based editor in the early 2000s, lots and lots of free hosting providers also had them (HN tends to only remember only GeoCities, but there were hundreds of those providers).
Also: Weebly, Wix and Squarespace are quite old, mid-2000s.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, standing up a public-facing web page (even a single static HTML one) is more complex than saving a word doc. Especially if it gets a lot of traffic, has any kind of user-input, or it comes under attack. So far, out of the attempts to bring web publishing to the masses, the only successful ones so far have been the "hosted" ones where you have to pay someone else to do the hard, non-creative work for you, and are for the most part dependent on them.
The dream of laymen, needing nothing else but an Internet connection, pushing a button on a locally-running application and "poof" a web page appears and is accessible to the world, remains out of reach.
It used to be no more complex than saving a Word document. You used to get a small storage space from your ISP with FTP credentials to upload files. Security was not an issue and neither was traffic. User input was a more advanced matter, but when you've reached the level to having concern for any of these, either your ISP would help you or you'd contract a professional web host. Today it's an immense task for amateurs to just get off the ground.
Framing it all as "communicating" is oddly clarifying. It explains why misalignment causes so much friction
Do you do the same with emotions? E.g., a) What is this emotion, b) no, that's the undue amount of stress from this particular encounter, c) larger, basic emotion that is the reason you're ruminating about a total stranger taking 20 seconds at the counter to decide on a coffee order after waiting 10 minutes in line... :)
> often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.
How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.
Good strategy!
One of mine is to ask myself "what is my attention on?". You'd be surprised at how often the answer is, "a bunch of thoughts".
I don't understand how does this help if, yes, communicating, is what we are doing most of the time.
It's a framing mechanism, where when one identifies with "writing code" and gains a sense of purpose doing that, and then automation starts "writing code", does that trigger a loss of a sense of purpose? By framing one's innate skill as communicating it should not matter what medium one operates, they are still using non-casual and specific communications to do their job, even when code generation, or ad copy generation, or a talking spokesperson video is the result.
Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.
Every time we invented some higher level of abstraction for software development, it became harder, not easier. The required effort, collectively, has only been increasing.
Nature language programming (aka "AI") seems to be on the same track.
I think the concern is deep, deeper than mitigations like going up the abstraction chain from coding to design, or lessons learned from failure.
It's very, very difficult to really realize that one's sacrifice was meaningless or mistaken.
Effort - sacrifice - in particular is for the sake of something else; you burn your precious life/time for the sake of X, and then X doesn't work or turns out to be an illusion. You can console yourself with lessons learned, but it's a bit hollow. And worse, if you wasted someone else's time? Almost unrecoverable.
Then you're not only less useful (stale skills), but also less susceptible to going gung-ho on the new goal X', making you a poor candidate for any employers or investors since being resilient and formidable are necessary for any uncertain endeavor.
The Confucian Ta Hsueh (Great Learning) says "Every day, make it new" was inscribed on the bathtub of the first Shang dynasty emperor: 湯之盤銘曰：「茍日新，日日新，又日新
Traditionally, the solution was a kind of selflessness, where you realize that even if (as with Ecclesiastes) empires you build will fall into dust, you can still help others. But in an age where interactions reduce to endless scrolling and online forums, it's not clear where and how to do that.
The Ta Hsueh line is such a powerful image, especially in contrast with today's digital haze. The call to "make it new" daily implies presence, intention, and responsibility
> even if ... empires you build will fall into dust, you can still help others
A beautiful sentiment reminiscent of Zen. Everything is temporary, nothing lasts, everything you build or accomplish will crumble into dust and be forgotten. On its face this appears as nihilism, but on the other side of the realization, you're still here - so what else could there be to do besides seize the moment and live it to the fullest?
The people convincing you it is a virtue to move fast always happen to be selling a car.
Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.
"Move fast" sounds noble until you realize you're just accelerating toward someone else's goalpost
Hesitation is another side of the bad decision coin. Good decisions are lost due to overanalysis. Charlie Munger: "A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency."
Had Archimedes lived to teach the Romans his calculus we might have reached Mars by 500 AD
that's not from hesitation. And one can only call the Syracuse invasion an inefficiency in hindsight.
The immediate opportunity of a ~million Roman lives compared to other hypothetical opportunities
(One might guess that opportunities of the win-win type weren't covered by Munger's model)
It's highly unlikely that the Romans could have had the industrial revolution[0], so I'm doubtful that calculus alone would have gotten them to Mars.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
A different take:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-18904-3
(Maybe the Greeks' themselves could have done it, they already had a rudimentary steam engine )
Yes, the scientific method pre-dates the industrial revolution for a reason. You simply can't get cracking on rocket science without foundational science.[-3]
[-3]: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AIDS_(Space_Program)#AIDS_Sp...
They're ten steps ahead of you. ~85% of spending is done by women.
If you don't want to live alone - you will be living a marketing campaign.
She needed the SUV because it is safer for the kids, the more expensive cleaning supplies to save the environment, and the new furniture because the previous color scheme was last decade.
I think the hardest part is that effort wasn't just a means to an end; it was the thing. Not always pleasant, not always noble, but it gave shape to our days, our roles, even our self-worth. It reminds me how fragile that sense of value is when it's tied to output
It's still largely unclear how AI is going to affect the job of software engineers both in the shorter term, pre-AGI, and after that.
However, I'm pretty sure that the job of SWE isn't about to disappear, since even when human-level AGI appears, the process of software development isn't about to get any easier than when it was done by actual humans. I don't see non-technical middle managers able to take over as systems architects and lead developers. It'll just mean that the day-to-day of those charged with developing software per PHB's requirements changes.
That said, I do feel fortunate to have been from the generation where software was developed entirely by hand, having started in the era of 8-bitters (NASCOM-1 in 1978) and only just in the last year transitioning (against my preference) to a role of overseeing offshore developers rather than being hands-on. Still, I think that those who enjoy the challenge and fun of conjuring up dreams out of software will still find plenty to enjoy in the future, although it will be different, just as it has already changed a lot from the time when we were writing everything in assembler to today arguing about whether Rust is better than C++.
I became a computer programmer because I want the computer to do things.
I’m not a programmer because I wanted to program.
Thus AI is incredibly exciting to me because it makes it easier to make computers do things.
I became a programmer because I like to write code. Having an llm write code for me is like building a robot that eats cake.
The kind of things that LLMs can make without tremendous amounts of hand holding... Are they the kind of projects that you like to write code for?
I became a programmer because I want to explore the edge of what's possible. I'm finding it still satisfying when I'm doing it via LLM. They're only good at spitting out entire projects when those projects resemble many that already exist.
For me it is both. I love certain kinds of programming, and don't enjoy other kinds. I'm naturally very good at some kinds, and not good at other kinds, despite putting in enormous effort.
I guess ideally I'd get a job that is perfectly aligned with this profile (a work in progress!), but AI allows me to deal with the reality I have now in a much more pleasant and productive way.
Careful with the productivity claims, there's plenty of research showing that perspective is usually a distortion of some kind. Which makes sense, you have someone at your shoulder constantly reassuring you and bubbling ideas; I can see how it feels productive. Many report feeling more stressed, because the spaces where they used to think are no longer there.
> Careful with the productivity claims, there's plenty of research showing that perspective is usually a distortion of some kind.
I saw 1 study which suggested this.[1] Were there more?
You can still write code without AI. But for people who actually have the goal of solving problems they can now solve much more problems!
For what it's worth, collecting new problems to solve is actually the main fuel for improving the AIs, so if GenAI becomes good at creating problems, which it can iterate on tackling, then there's a flywheel going.
That’s a nice prospect. What worries me is the point at which I’m no longer a required part of the problem solving process.
Beautifully put. I'm about as excited for LLMs as an artist would be for a robot that can paint. I know a lot of people out there can't imagine actually enjoying programming though.
I can understand then why you might not enjoy using AI to make a computer do your bidding.
I'm sure you can and will still be able write code. It's just you'll be getting paid less and less if you do it for a living.
Do you think a senior programmer will earn less money because the company now can have a junniors for 250$ a month?
I'm at the tail end of a lifetime career of software development, and the way I've come to understand it is that I largely enjoy it because it lets you conjure dreams into reality - really a kind of superpower given how abstract and arbitrary those dreams can be. I used to think that "We are the gods of the digital age" would be a cool business card logo, although I doubt it would go down too well!
The other part of the job/hobby that I've always found enjoyable is in striving for "perfectly" minimal/clean designs where the code reads more like functional requirements than messy implementation detail. You look at the code and it is obvious that nothing can be taken out, and no more minimal implementation is conceivable. A bit like an impressionist painting perhaps, where every brush stroke counts, and all you are left with is the essence of the thing being captured. I would proudly consider myself to be a hardcore geek, but there is no doubt an aesthetic/artistic component to software done right, a goal you know has been achieved when at the end of a project you re-read the code and gloat over how beautiful and minimal it is!
This part of the satisfaction of software development will sadly be disappearing as the role of coding is taken over by AI, but perhaps there will still be some satisfaction in minimal design, if not in minimal implementation.
> I used to think that "We are the gods of the digital age" would be a cool business card logo, although I doubt it would go down too well!
Try “Digital Prophet”. It worked for David Shing.
I became a computer programmer because I was frustrated “the computer” (i.e. other people’s programs) didn’t do things exactly as I wanted them. That could mean current solutions didn’t do it efficiently, or correctly, or maybe it was just different from what I wanted. In other words, I did it for the same reason as you: to get the computer to do things.
But I, on the other hand, do not find LLMs “incredibly exciting”. Maybe I’m the odd one here, but one of my requisites for getting the computer to do things is for it to do them correctly and efficiently. It needs to do the thing I want, and do it right. But it should also not waste my time and other worldly finite resources doing it. LLMs fail at both, and as such (for me) they don’t make it easier to make the computer do things, they make it more frustrating.
Worse is that now I have to deal with the increasing torrent of shit code that’s being put out by people with zero care or understanding for what they do. Meaning that now I’m being bitten even more frequently, and it’s just a matter of time before I’m affected by an unnecessary, incompetent, and wholly avoidable error. Not to mention the increased spread of misinformation, lies, surveillance, spam, and phishing, all while wasting earthly resources we do not have the luxury of spending right now.
I started on computers because I wanted to do stuff (photo manipulation and 3d modelling) and then I was fascinated by how to get the computers to do stuff (games and scripts). But just like you, I want things to be done correctly and efficiently.
Coding for me is more reading than typing, because any time I'm not exactly clear on the code I want to write, it's because there's some aspects of the problem or the tools to solve it that I do not grasp well. So, I usually have a lot of documentations around me for the stuff I'm working on. And that means I don't like LLM for that, because there's no clear signal for wrongness.
And when I'm clear on the code to write and I find it tedious, that usually means that it's time to abstract away the tediousness. LLMs won't help with that, because it's more of a perspective shift than a clear methodology.
LLMs, in its current forms of offering, is like asking a random stranger in a bar. They may know the answer or not. They may give you an incoherent answer even if they know or fabricate stuff when they don't know. But there's still a plus, is that you may still get "I don't know" or silence instead of a wrong answer. Like getting an empty list when making a web search. Which is a good signal by itself.
Neither LLMs nor popular search engines return "I don't know" often enough. They will waste your time with bad approximations to an answer instead. But as you say, "the thing you're asking for might not exist" is useful information, and lets you make faster progress with your guessing, so this compulsion to always supply an answer just slows down the process of getting to a good one.
I use my history as mich as I use a search engine at this point. For work stuff, I just bookmark docs. I also use specialized sites for some search sessions (reddit, hn, npmjs, oreilly,…)
This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things all the time. The typing out the code part becomes something that just has to be done to get to the solution, but doesn't necessarily make me better or bring me joy.
Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.
Why are you not using a snippet manager? It is significantly faster than an LLM, it’s local, consumes far fewer resources, and actually returns a correct version of what you want based on your knowledge.
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use LLMs for everything and do still copy-paste a lot from existing projects where I have an established pattern.
LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.
You don’t need to copy and paste manually. Snippet managers allow you to search for what you want and paste directly, or even type a few characters and have the text automatically replaced.
There is no LLM which could ever be faster than a well-configured snippet manager for stuff you’ve done before. Not to mention you won‘t get random bad text thrown at you.
I have never heard of a snippet manager until right now. (In good faith:) Where did you hear of them? Should I be following news somewhere else?
I see this one is popular and high on DDG: https://github.com/massCodeIO/massCode
But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.
Is it like a local search engine you install? Is it an LSP? An LSP that's lighter than rust-analyzer could be useful for this kind of thing.
Edit: I searched for "What is a snippet manager" and DDG search returned a bunch of useless-looking listicles, but their AI actually told me and linked to an article explaining it: https://www.codiga.io/blog/code-snippet-definition/
Edit 2: I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy. I don't think my favorite text editor has a web view built in, so I couldn't install massCode in there
> Where did you hear of them?
I no longer recall, I’ve been using them for something like two decades.
> But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.
See SnippetsLab for a good example of a snippets manager.
https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/
> I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy.
I prefer it as a standalone app. I don’t use VSCode nor would I want integration with my text editor. Snippet managers generally have ways of being invoked from anywhere, or you can type a few characters and have them replace the text, or you can search them from launchers like Alfred.
Because I became a programmer using LLMs to code makes it harder to make computer do things.
So you’re just a user. You don’t have to be a computer programmer to make computers do things and computer science isn’t even about doing things.
Some will go into computer science to push the limits of what is possible. That takes a rigorous understanding of the science, not just throwing stuff into an AI.
We are a cerebellum. Our brain summarizes one layer of data into insights for the layer above that and programming is one layer. AI is now forcing us to think not how things should be built but what should we built - everyone is a promoted to product manager. What should be built now can be answered by what is needed by humans, or companies, or AI, or government. All of the above should be serving humans. So what do people want or need? How can we harness AI to solve more needs.
I think of it from another angle. AI is reaching an energy limit. Companies are way overvalued and in a race to spend most of their gains on AI and that may end badly. Governments are on edge and conflict is brewing. All of that and unknown unknowns can put a stop on the amazing stream of affordable AI we have now. I am using the models as fast as possible to build things I find meaningful and to learn as much as possible. Having unlimited help with any idea that I come up with is incredible. It’s akin to infinite VC funding, but you don’t owe equity or a cent back. The world is now what your cerebellum can come up with. And what you know about the needs of people.
Following Karl Popper's thinking on this topic, I'd say that our problems define us, and when we solve our problems we often discover new and interesting children problems demanding attention. “The best thing that can happen to a human being us to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.” — Karl Popper
That's not a real Popper quote, is it. The sentiment is nice, but it must be radically paraphrased, because he doesn't generate pithy quotes very often.
> To conclude, I think that there is only one way to science—or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part—unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
https://archive.org/details/realismaimofscie0000popp/page/8/...
Edit: if I heed the content of the paragraphs just before this quote, maybe I should prefer the rewritten version.
This feels right to me, but I wonder what he was thinking of when he said “problem”. For me life is most effortless when I’m working on math or cs problems/puzzles but I sometimes get this guilty feeling that I “should” be working on a problem that is useful to the rest of the world.
Yeah, there's problems, like puzzles and mysteries, and then there's difficulties, and there's no sharp dividing line but the difficulties are less fun. And are also called problems.
So far as moral duty goes, play to your strengths, you're at your best when having fun. This conveniently evaluates to "do what you like". It's not perfectly true, but you can get away with it, blamelessly. Nobody needs you miserable, usually. Then there's the wrinkle where the importance of something to humanity (or even the promise of a large cash reward) may make it fun ... if you happen to feel that way.
Unlike the author, I think that the value of writing code in my free time (or well, the joy more than the value) has diminished greatly.
I took a lot of 'pride in the craft', and I used to really enjoy hacking away on new projects with languages that I normally wouldn't use in my day-to-day. But now whenever I start something I think of how much faster I could be if I just used an LLM. Which takes away some of the joy.
I'll be honest, I struggled with this for many months.. actually years at this point (since ~GPT3.5). I hardly code in my spare time now, and am spending more time on other hobbies. I think I've kinda come to terms with the fact that I won't really enjoy coding anymore.
It's funny, because I feel like code AIs have given me a new enthusiasm for creating side projects. When I was young, I would spend so much time creating side projects and I loved it. Then, I got older, got married, had kids, got tired... I know longer have opportunities to lock myself away for 8 hours in a day to bang away on a fun project. Instead, I have small 30-60 minute windows scattered around, without the energy to bury myself in the fun problems. I don't think I am alone in taking at least 30-60 minutes to fully fill up my brain context for a problem in order to do real coding. Without longer chunks of time to be able to do that, I just stopped doing any sort of complex side project. I just don't have the time and mental energy for that in this stage of my life.
LLMs have completely changed that for me. I can actually start and do those side projects that have been kicking around in my head for years. I don't need 8 hours just to get to a starting point on a project; I can type up a spec off and on during my spare time, then sit down with an LLM and generate the framework of my project in minutes. I am no longer stymied by my short chunks of free time.
I feel like a whole world of creativity has opened up for me again.
I can relate.
I treat my coding as a craft. That has become much easier, since retiring.
I'm quite aware that doing things my way isn't commercially viable, but no one pays me to do it. I do it for myself.
That said, I find that it's important to always be challenging myself[0].
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
> I'm quite aware that doing things my way isn't commercially viable
Depends what you mean by “commercially viable”. I’ve been making high quality products as an independent software developer in the photography space for a bit over 2 years now, and while I’m nowhere near my former big tech company salary, I still make more than needed to pay for life every month (not living an extravagant lifestyle somewhere with ridiculous cost of living does help).
And I still feel like I’m far from having reached full potential in my addressable market and the kind of products I want to build - I have indie developer friends who are pretty close to their former big tech salary, after 5+ years.
So, despair not :)
Cool apps btw. The trichromy one is a lot of fun. Cool that you’re earning money making this.
Cheers! Got an update coming out soon for that one, it's actually the one that makes the least money haha. I think it's way too nerdy and weird to ever hope to reach a broad audience even amongst photographers, unlike the others that are more approachable.
But I still use it on a weekly basis myself so I just can't stop refining it. I've been obsessed with the trichromatic process for 10+ years, ever since I discovered the work of Prokudin Gorsky (even built a website about the process and history: https://trichromy.com, due for a refresh some time). Such a clever approach to color photography that results in such a unique aesthetic.
I also love Gorsky’s pictures! When I first saw his picture of the power turbines in Budapest I thought I must be looking at some ML-colorized daguerreotype, but nope it’s in true color.
I see you’re in Tokyo. If you ever end up in Taipei or if I’m in Tokyo I’d love to talk photography over coffee.
I'm not sure what your way is exactly but I also treat coding as a craft and I'd say it's far more commercially viable than what most other devs are doing. I design systems that are efficient, do what they need to do and nothing else, are well tested, quite easy to understand, work with and change etc.
The only thing about my way of working that I have commercial viability issues with is when I take over someone else's work and insist on basically rewriting the entire thing before actually continuing the work. I don't always do that, some projects are just too big and some are just fine, some projects don't need me to rewrite them. But most systems I've inherited have been absolute ass and I just refuse to build on a total shit foundation. First I fix the foundation, then I build on it. You want a code monkey to duct tape things together and add workarounds on top of workarounds until the codebase looks like Escher's stairs painting you'll have to find someone else to do it. I fix problems I don't just paint over them.
That has been a problem in some situations in the past but for the most part my work has been appreciated.
The biggest thing, is that I insist on doing things my way, which is a hideous chimera of cutting-edge, buzzword-compliant techniques, melded with ancient techniques I learned when I was programming in Machine Code.
Also, I insist on doing extremely high Quality work, and that seems to be very much out of favor, these days.
Just try starting a discussion on improving software Quality, hereabouts, and see how it goes.
For some reason, folks are actually actively against improving code Quality, and that is something that I can't comprehend, so I have to admit that I'm very much a "dinosaur."
The effort is up to you on your own time. I have an e-bike and a regular bike. The regular bike gets way more use because I prefer the satisfaction I get from it.
Also, speaking as someone that uses LLMs every day, they take effort! They cannot spin straw into gold. The terrible work I see coming from AI is usually from someone who doesn’t realize that.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's not essentially the effort, it's the satisfaction. The former is the means, the latter the ends. If something is satisfying then the effort seems worth it. If using a push-bike satisfies you then carry on. If you have only five minutes to catch that train and the push-bike's not going to get you there on time, then use the e-bike and catch that train. That's satisfying too; this time as an outcome, but still satisfying.
I can relate. It is important to meet this head-on, and not gloss over it, explain it away, or shame people for feeling this way.
I even feel this about the wargame "Warmachine", where in the past you could not measure distance before committing to actions. Deciding if model A and B were 10" or 14" apart was a critical skill, and called "weaponized geometry". I was good at it. The game has changed, and you can now measure to your hearts content, making this skill basically pointless. I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about it.
Dublin in the Rare Old Times - The Dubliners
Like my house that fell to progress//My trade's a memory
Amish communities have rejected “modern” technology convenience in exchange for good hard work for centuries and never looked back
> never looked back
Obviously there are very many Amish people who leave their communities to join the modern world - according to various sources this attrition seems to be between 15-25%. And even amongst those who stay, it's likely that a central reason is the fear of excommunication/shunning, rather than an inherent desire to reject modern technology.
It’s worth mentioning that the Amish aside, there are many groups of people who understand that work has to be done, but do it in a way that elevates the idea that humans can seek transcendence through work. The Shaker communities in my part of the US come to mind. They were not anti-technology by any stretch of the imagination. But they did care about work’s role in being a part of a whole. There are still remnants of that mindset here. For example, I have lately been spending time with people who like to build houses using traditional techniques; while hand tools often play a role, it’s not because they hate technology. There are lots of power tools being used as well. Instead, it’s about asking “what is best?” and “how do I want to spend my working life?”
I vaguely recall a childhood acquaintance who was from a shaker family and they had a computer. I'm very tempted to look them up and see their take on computing and ai. Thanks for the memory stir.
Also many Amish people engage in rules lawyering to access forbidden technology without violating the letter of the rules. And even abiding with the spirit of the rules, they use more technology than outsiders realize.
Yeah, people romanticize them, but they're basically a cult.
Cults usually recruit new members and extract profits or push some motive, wanting to be left alone is hardly a cult
> For myself, in the last 10 years, my work of writing code has largely defined what I do with my working time. Now I experience large swaths of that work being created and done by AI (sometimes amazingly well, sometimes poorly), and I find myself thinking of the photographer above.
Which is ironic, because smartphone photography is astonishingly average to someone who actually understands photography. Phones try to handle every scenario for the user. It has been optimized for bright outdoors, low light conditions, even specific stuff like sunsets. So most people never realize how difficult it really is to shoot in bright daylight with the light source behind the subject. Only when you pick up a traditional camera do you realize that’s one of the worst conditions to take a photo in.
Maybe coding is headed toward the same place. AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
Having done photography with Sony-a6000, I’ve found that it made me more skilled with a smartphone camera. So, I am still optimistic that knowledge gained through deliberate effort has value, even in a world that increasingly prizes “effortlessness” in everything. But only time will tell how much that belief really holds up.
> AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
The computers is a very dumb machine. It does exactly what you tell it to do and nothing else. Complexity in programming stems from the need to formalize things and specifying every single detail of the algorithms.
Using AI can give you patterns for the most common things, but everything common is likely to be soon a library or a framework. So what you're instead doing is reinvent the wheel, but differently and the result is likely broken. Good enough for short runs (scripts), but anywhere you want something to last, then the cracks will start to appear.
The things with photography is that it's a spectrum. But software is discrete. It either works or it doesn't.
One up for a6000! Definitely taught me the same things you mentioned. A great entry level camera.
No smartphone can match the bottom tier super-zoom camera I have for bird photography. Even with the frankly microscopic sensor on the super-zoom the power of depth-of-field on an adjustable zoom lens is amazing.
At some point -- sometimes early, often too late -- we realize we're going to die. Our time is finite. We have only so many days to do anything, let alone something that matters.
Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time.
When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value, and then optimize our entire lives according to that myth.
The idea that AI destroys meaning is a false framing. Many people are already experiencing a meaning crisis, and AI is simply an easy scapegoat.
Purpose comes from discovering our own values through living, not from accepting meanings imposed by others.
While you make good points, I wanted to quickly counter this narrative with the fact that majority of people are chasing money because it provides them the basic necessities.
Money gives you food, shelter, healthcare and relationships; all of which are required for happiness.
I think we need make the distinction between a startup founder missing his daughter's birthday because he is at the office chasing money and the average Joe working double shifts at Walmart.
Most people don't even have the luxury of optimizing their life for money.
If this is really the end state of humanity then we should stop all automation and reel things back 10 thousand years or so. This is, modern people can imagine the end of the world before they can imagine a world without money based capitalism.
Go back far enough in history and money disappears. We had barter and trade and happiness still existed without money.
Go back further and trade becomes les important and violence/cooperation to achieve what one wants becomes greater.
Trying to shove money in a post labor world won't make sense and will just lead to war/genocide if we don't find a way to transition.
Post labour is still resource constrained.
How do you efficiently allocate resources? Especially when you have a wide spectrum of preferences.
I think if you spent long enough thinking about that problem you'd just end up inventing money. You'd have to call it something else so it sounded rebelliously anti-capitalist though
Barter still exists. It is largely inefficient as we don't see things having equal value. Even in barter, often some intermediate that was a form of money emerged, such as a staple food that could be stored for a relative long term. In smaller communities, there was a bit of not seeking equal exchange because belonging to the community was more important, but that doesn't scale well to larger groups and can lead to some people being taken advantage of and thus leaving the community if that is an option.
Violence is problematic for self evident reasons. Cooperation I already touched on about the community involvement, with all the same problems.
It isn't that we can't imagine a world without money, but that we quickly see the problems with it given the scale of modern day life.
As for post scarcity, it really depends upon what is post scarcity. Money becomes meaningless for things that are not scarce, but some things remain scarce.
Meaning can be found yes.
But just remember, we are the only observed entities that _create_ meaning, complex, rich, nuanced meaning. We are the meaning generators of the universe.
If the universe has a random forest walk to create meaning, to try new cool stuff, to hold a mirror to and understand itself.
We are it.
We don't know and ex ante can't predict which human(s) might reverse entropy, alter the topology of the universe, prevent an asteroid from wiping us out, escape the bounds of this reality.
None of those things may ever happen, but as far as I know they haven't been strictly ruled out yet.
It's early days yet.
Sorry to repeat but I felt a bit of Eureka
If I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes (when he basically discovered calculus) motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "yep that works!"
(That was long ago, but I'm sure it also happens today)
Information is physical and part of the physical entropic universe, Landauer showed that.
When we imagine something in our brain we are physically testing or creating something even if ephemeral, these thoughts you make have meaning and are real just with low distribution.
They can be very complex thoughts, you can invent worlds and objects and play around with them in your mind for relatively low cost, this is the root of humanities power, the ability to create meaning, to create arbitrary coherence (even if it's just internal coherence)
You can distribute this meaning to others, as a written or spoken word.
You can investigate if your thought has correspondence to something that exists in the exterior world. This can be science and discovery.
But you can also create something that you know doesn't exist and then work to have it realized in the external world.
What's the casual path from Gene Rondenberry to the iPod? Hard to compute.
We create meaning. It's what we do.
The funny thing is this, we keep talking about people's search for meaning, but if we look at the observable facts, to speak poetically, if the universe was sentient (and I don't personally believe it is) it would be looking to us to see what meaning we create and new shit we discover and why it works the way it does.
Maybe all i'm suggesting is that AI can help us quickly check that what we humans are working on is indeed insane ( and switch to something else if it passes their sanity checks)
The causal path from Rodenderry to the ipod .. is.. easy to approximate compared to the causal path from Zen Monks to Darth Vader.. (though they are in roughly opposite directions)
There's this related phenom which seems paradoxical to me but maybe you can help figure:
Things that are built with money (& not by say, intrinsic motivation alone) seem to have a high ratio of (traction) to (resources invested). Not sure if marketing alone can explain that?
Obvious exceptions come to mind , eg the Linux kernel, but even that was massively boosted by commercial interests.
(One other class of exceptions could be tentatively named "winning the zeitgeist lottery")
If you would agree that this phenom exists in the short to mid time frame: without the likelihood of traction, how can intrinsic meaning alone provide motivation?
I would guess a lot of intrinsic motivation is driven a lot by hormones and things like dopamine release when you do something that is really interesting or exciting. I play tennis and absolutely love it, I will never make a dime from doing it, and that's totally okay with me.
Things that are built with money are often done so for scale. Successful things that are built with money often also have people who have some interest in the thing they are building.
Thanks for helping to refine the thinking. I guess the other side of the coin that would be make the paradox interesting is that, in the long term, it has to seem that most of the stuff built with money (but without intrinsically motivated managers) lose out to the stuff built on pure passion. After discounting for a heap of survival bias.
So "traction", as in, many people using your creation, is the only form of worthwhile meaning? Sounds like you believe external validation is the only form of worthwhile meaning?
Edit: if I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes, motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "it works!"
More like survival. I think of Archimedes' letters to the librarian of Alexandria, describing his secret technique of infinitessimals. It seems clear that he knew his work was meaningful but he wasnt going to die without telling anybody about it. He wasn't looking for validation, he didn't need it
This is, as I see it, the tension between wisdom and power.
Wealth, in the modern era, has been a vehicle to achieve power. It is certainly not the only path, but it is the most culturally universal path to influence the effort of others available today. When we set our ambitions towards lofty outcomes that require power to accomplish, we inevitably run into the capacity constraints involved with being a single person.
Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power to realize goals. Power itself is amoral, and the idealist with good intentions must inevitably conclude that power is a requirement to realize big dreams.
But, effort is also power. For our sanity, wisdom would have us focus on our efforts, with every moment we have, rather than whether or not we achieve the goal. I'll also add that AI is increasing the scope of what our efforts alone can accomplish, for good and bad.
To achieve large goals, pragmatism would require us to derive meaning and purpose from the effort put towards those ends, rather than the attainment of the goal. Think this is best described as an 'open purpose'.
Edit: if I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes, motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "it works!"
>Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power
Power and money are almost interchangeable, and I'm taking a wild guess that better questions are hidden in that "almost" (as you say, "wisdom+effort", but I'd have to sleep on that for a few nights in order not to casually one-up that with "precience")
I'd tend to disagree they're interchangeable, although it may feel like it for many things. Our culture certainly wants people to equate the two, because if people believe in the myth that money = power, money has more power.
However, I'd encourage you to contemplate all the things that money can't "buy."
I categorize power not as the sum total of capability to dominate, or purchase, but influence belief, shape motivation, and inspire action.
Our body can develop power over the physical world. Our mind can develop power over the world of myths and information. Our ability to communicate can develop motivation in others through belief, inspiration, and hope.
Money can out-source, to acquire the power and resources of others.
There are many ways to power - Money is a centrally dominant one, today, but is predicated on a certain order to the world and is not universal.
I've realised far too early. The death of my college age sibling has me constantly scanning and checking for life threatening illnesses. Sometimes the odd ache or a pain sends me into a days long spiral. The fear extends to my spouse and children.
Financially, I'm completely free, very comfortable, want for nothing, but still don't feel any sense of achievement.
I need help
I’ve been in the exact same boat for a decade. What helped me was working out; it’s pretty much a hobby now. Endorphins are a hell of a drug.
I’d also extend this by saying that you can just exist and be happy and then die. There’s no need to be defined by some effort you’re putting into some kind of work or hobby.
If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation.
And that’s a bit of a problem with this article. The photographer that wants to quit because of digital photography? I find that odd, it seems to me like the film community has a really great time with the craft of film photography in the digital age. If anything, the massive shrinkage in available professional labs should make the art of developing your own photos even more validating.
Why didn’t this photographer want to quit when Kodak made disposable cameras and CVS would develop your photos in an hour? I submit that it isn’t digital photography that killed their hobby/passion.
It’s okay to not love doing something anymore and take a break or move on to something else. I think this idea that it defines you is a bit of a toxic validation mechanism.
> If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation.
This is written from a different values perspective than mine, but I can understand it. I think you’d have made a stronger point if you’d focused on internal validation, though.
For many, the ideal is internal integrity driving oneself forward. I say ideal, because we’re imperfect creatures - external validation, greed, etc. slip in.
Overall though, a life on the beach sipping coconuts sounds immediately appealing, but long term empty. I’m not going to tell you it’s working 996, either. For me, the journey is finding what makes me whole - through many failed starts.
The reason I didn’t focus on internal validation is that I think the article is ultimately not talking about that. I think the article is almost exclusively talking about external validation.
"If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts"
This seems like a dire situation for most humans and probably isn't the status quo for human operation. Its perfectly fine to sit on the beach, but eventually a light should go on that would say "lets go build some tools", "lets go see if I can catch a fish", "lets build a hut". Which would all be fine and admirable things to spend your time doing.
Obviously I don’t mean it literally, I mean a general situation where one’s needs are met and they decide to spend their time generally idle.
I know that one day I'm going to die, but it's just incredibly difficult to find meaning in life. The more I try the more I fail and the more depressed I get. I can't find meaning in work because toxic corporate environment is what pays most. I can't find meaning in hobbies because the mind just gets bored of them at some point, whether it's productive hobbies or doomscrolling. I can't find meaning in other people because talking to 99% of them leaves me frustrated rather than fulfilled, and the other 1% has better shit to do than talking to me. I can't find meaning in meaninglessness because mind starts to wander.
By the power of sheer discipline I keep moving on. I have my daily routine which encompasses a variety of activities that theoretically should push me forward as a person. But I can't escape the profound sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. It's terrifying for me to think that this is how I'll spend the rest of my life and then I'll die, but at the same time I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged.
I’m hearing this argument from a lot of people. I think it’s more of a feeling that anyone can contribute, and now it’s a matter of taste and stamina—who persists and who fizzles out.
Probably also tied to changes in neuroplasticity, I guess. Humans are generally good at adopting new behaviors.
Some friction required for enjoyment. AI too slippery a lubricant
>If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value. What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless? And what happens if that original effort was a foundation on which we saw value in ourselves?
I found the flaw.
Effort is the process of converting energy into value (the state of something being effortless in the future). It's not the efforts themselves that have intrinsic value, but the work ethic that drove the effort in the first place.
As others have mentioned, LLMs require a lot of effort to get it right. Personally, I still prefer writing code over writing LLM prompts but I’m trying to find the right balance. I will always enjoy refactoring so I tend to have the LLM get me most of the way there and leave the polishing for myself.
What we believe defines us. What we believe directs our efforts.
"And I tell you, you may only avoid an effort in the name of a greater one, for you must grow"
Antoine de Saint Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), in Citadelle
> If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value.
By definition this is instrumental value rather than intrinsic value.
Middle class people can't distinguish their work from their identity. They seek a perfect harmony of purpose and output, in order to be the perfect servant. They need to sustain this for a lifetime, so their pleasure must come from the work (or they can supplement this with a hobby that is extremely job-shaped.)
If they fail at this, they will be ejected from the middle class, and their children will not be properly educated, therefore never beginning the middle class journey. If you're born poor, it's easy to stay poor all your life; if you're born rich, it's easy to stay rich all your life; the middle class is the class that has to reproduce itself every generation and sustain itself by constant service and sublimation of their desires and dreams. That's why they're simultaneously overpaid and overtaxed - just to keep them caged and desperate, a layoff away from a family annihilation. Loyal to death.
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich is a good book about this.
This essay is pompous. Just say: I'm afraid my job is going to leave me, and it makes me feel insecure. Maybe sympathize a little when all of the storefronts on Main Street in some small town are empty after the dog food plant got obsoleted by Chinese imports, instead of telling them they should learn to code like you and to move to where the jobs are.
Interesting perspective, I believe its way more valid for US than say Europe which has way more job/career obsession and sort of class system based on career/wealth status.
Middle class is squeezed everywhere, that's true. But I sincerely doubt young generations 'can't distinguish their work from their identity' en masse. Thats a recipe for disaster, at latest during retirement, probably with first firing from the job and generally a big stupid no-no. But don't expect state will drill this into you in the schools, its up to everybody to look around and figure these things out for themselves, just like rest if life (TM).
> just to keep them caged and desperate, a layoff away from a family annihilation. Loyal to death.
> This essay is pompous
Pompous he said.
When you can rattle off reams of code that may or may not solve the right problem, you’ve just shifted the effort.
This was written by a dev so it has the usual hallmarks of ascribing some anecdote to a generalized statement about people, their life’s purpose and so on. Take it with a grain of salt.
I can relate to this thought process and had my own conflicted thoughts about AI and the role it (and I) play in the SWE future: https://medium.com/@kev.jackson/two-months-of-an-ai-partners... - I'm still conflicted
Was the pleasure of writing code that the author describes tied to the actual practice or its profits?
My impression is that many white collar workers felt that their jobs and accompanying status were immutable. They’re not. Couldn’t they have seen this coming?
Nothing prevents people from continuing on with their trades or interests how they did before the AI bubble bloomed. But if they want to earn a living doing it, I guess they need to start thinking outside of the box. I believe prolonged contact with insulation induces hive breakout.
I'm not sure we are built for this on a societal scale. I understand the reasoning rationally. Sure, nobody pitied the horseshoe-maker blacksmith who was proud of his craft when the car was invented. Or the tailors when clothing became cheaply mass-produced. Or even the miners after many mines closed. Yeah I get it. "You learned a craft and it's no longer needed. Sucks to suck. Try to be useful in some other way or get bent."
Having to reinvent your career when you are 30+/40+/50+ is not so simple. You studied something, amassed experience and tacit knowledge, taste and work habits.
It used to be the case that you learned as an apprentice (or simply grew up on a farm and saw the work) and then continued it the rest of your life.
We will be more and more efficient at pumping more wealth to the owner classes, but people will be spiritually ground down.
The loss of self that comes with being effectively severed from society through labor exclusion is…a radical process.
I read in a book titled The Technology Trap about how in the past, rulers withheld technological advancements and gave strategic deference to the people whose labor would be most affected by them, so as it not put their own necks at risk.
That doesn’t seem to be a concern today.
The AI debacle is unusual as it's alive in disinformation at a scale that penetrates every status class.
Of course AI is a failure of imagination. But so were symbols, which cannot reference, they can only represent, if at all.
The real function of AI appears to be the transition away from symbols, metaphors, folk science cause and effect ideation.
We're only barely sensing this, but if you listen to Gary Marcus, Rich Sutton and those willing to see the larger scales, they are bellwethers that are actually sinking their own approaches as well as LLMs.
In effect, labor is about to reap the benefits of the AI debacle. I see this in the AI at the major teaching hospital my sister is a department head of. In lead developers in gaming, in media. AI does not function well, it's essentially wax fruit, it's not even mimicry. That's going to lead to an analog rebirth.
Curious what your take on this piece might be. I recommend the last 1/3 of it if you’re pressed for time or wits.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/lessons-of-babel/articles/...
I found it a bit pretentious and name-dropping more than having a cogent point. AI is not simply going to take jobs where you just have to blabber stochastically. It can execute commands, call tools, write code etc. I think the author got caught up too much in the fact that the "Word" in the Gospel of John seems to align with the fact that LLMs process words. But it's really not a very deep connection.
Thanks for sending, I read it all. I think it keeps its feet in two incompatible realms. Ultimately LLMs turn us into wax fruit, not stochastic parrots.
The word is an arbitrary form, as myth is, (as symbols, money, news, states/politics) both are ultimately evolutionarily suspect in terms of animal signals, and we haven't found a specific workaround to that arbitrariness. That's extinction. The world is only specific, as is survival.
I suggest the only function of arbitrary signals is to refute themselves into replacement. The good thing about the AI debacle is that it's about speeding that up.
That is not how people work, especially if they want to do good work. You need to imbue your career with a little bit of your identity, a little bit of your soul. Coding, auto-repair, horse-rearing, plumbing, accountancy, what have you.
You do well to limit this somewhat. But it is inevitable, if you want to achieve anything. You are going to end up smelling somewhat like your work clothes, no matter your industry, no matter the year.
We can't all have the mission statement "to make money", if the machines of money-making are to function. You would never have the nevessary skills that way.
Not saying that we do well to spend the next 30 years griping, we don't. But don't shame people from being hurt by the whims of business. People need to grieve lost stuff, goes for AI, goes for "auto plant went out of business", goes for anything.
Online people have this redditism that it's some American weirdness that people "live to work", while in Europe people "work to live" and stretch this too far. People (especially men) throughout the ages and regions have seen their work as a critical component of their identity, whether it be a craft or farming. The honor in completing the day's work, being valued for having a skill, honing that skill over the years, etc. It's not by itself a symptom of a workaholic. This can leave space for family and friends and neighbors too. But the idea that your job is supposed to be purely superficial is way overblown. It's a symptom of the generic alienated work that is full of useless meetings and business-buzzword-bingo-lingo and you can't coherently formulate in words to an outsider what even that job is, or how it concretely contributes to the betterment of the community/world/people (aka bullshit job).
I reckon that shame was once an effective method of communal correction and accountability. But it wasn’t my intent to affect it.
So no, I agree, don’t shame people for being hurt by the whims of business. But I would say, encourage the newcomers to this experience (who I suspect are exceptional in their sociopolitical status compared to their predecessors) to re-envision themselves and the ways that they render their service beyond prior cushiony contexts.
Businesses may not need you, you may make much less than before. But society sorely does need you in some capacity and the unfortunate case is that, to be frank, not too many people are going to be quick to boo-hoo with you over your loss because they’ve gone through something like it before already. Them or a loved one.
This is an American phenomenon. Join and be of aid to your countrymen. But don’t get SaaSy.
I went through something like that transition the first time I moved into management.
It took me by surprise how much I tied what I did to who I was, and how much it bothered me that I could no longer so easily articulate what I'd done during a day at work. It was no longer I made this, I made that, I added these features, I fixed those bugs. It was all relational. It was all meetings and conversations. It felt like anyone could be doing it. So I felt like I had no value. Like I was a spare wheel. Three or four years and in all that time I never made my peace with it.
So burned out and dejected[0] I went back to software development and performance consulting. I did that for about 3 years.
The second time I went into management was different. Maybe I was just older. Maybe I'd done a bit more reading and thinking about management and leadership. I certainly knew what I liked and disliked, and what I admired in other leaders. Because of the consulting I'd seen a variety of leaders at work in lots of different contexts, with different challenges, different styles, and different personalities. At any rate, I had a different and broader view of what good looked like.
I also had a clear and strong remit and room to operate: build a new product, build and lead a new team, open an office, rearchitect and rebuild our platform, become CTO.
But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).
This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.
In my case that took for-fucking-ever - I've always been something of a late developer[1] - and many people reading this have and will adapt much more quickly. I'll say this: it's much easier to let go when you have a stronger idea of what "next" looks like[2], so figure out what that is. Software development is changing, for all of us, and even now nobody really knows what that means, but it doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities.
It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the more extreme viewpoints published online regarding AI and software development are no better than noise: they're just clickbait designed to generate reaction and engagement. Their real informational value is close to zero.
That is obviously not the case with this piece, which describes the author's personal experience in our new AI enabled world.
And I get their point about the craft. You really do feel that. But what you have to realise is the craft doesn't go away: it moves to a different level of abstraction. What can you (what can we) do now that you couldn't do before? What do the wrinkles and contours of that, where your (our) finesse will be needed, actually look like?
This all reads more like a pile of scattered thoughts than I'd intended, but hopefully there's some value in there for some of you.
[0] Not just for these reasons: there were other things - including one or two other major contributors - going on that I don't want to talk about here, but my lack of comfort with the nature of my role was certainly a somewhat chunky factor. Just don't overread or assume too much from what I'm saying.
[1] No pun intended - nobody should read anything delivery related into this comment.
[2] This touches on some of those issues I didn't want to talk about. Within that organisational context I'd reached a ceiling and no-one, including me, was grown up enough to be real about that. So I kept trying to push on and break through and, well, I guess we all wasted a lot of eachother's time although, from my side, I don't feel too bad about it.
These passages, right here:
> But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).
> This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.
> Represent the perspectives I was hoping to invite with my comment. The paragraph immediately following these was equally great.
I’ve read a lot of interesting remarks about people who’ve gone back and forth between programming and management positions in tech and I can relate to the experience in some ways.
What you and the author are describing is legitimate. And I think that your experience occurring while making an apparent step forward in your profession (as opposed to the step backwards that AI imposes) indicates something…special about man, his craft and its relation to himself and his perceived value to others (or lack thereof) while practicing his craft.
I think this is a common thing, generally speaking. On one end, there are plenty of people in other (less-paying, less-appealing) industries who have gone through these kind of experiences—past and present—so it’s easy for someone like me to feel apathetic in this case.
For better or worse it’s a privilege that there are some people who are able to articulate their particular circumstances, under a shared shade.
I guess this is the point where the Marxists begin to revel in the bourgeois gaining “class consciousness”. I haven’t checked on all the literature to be sure how that often turns out in history.
In all honesty I value my craft and doing things without AI and id have much less of an issue with LLMs if people were more understanding of their capabilities and limitations. The tech environment is pushing AI into everything because its a fancy buzz word that's used to increase corporate share value.
Personally I am pretty conflicted about using it considering its built upon theft and cheap labor. Making money isn't that nice if its unethical, and id keep that out of my company for as long as possible.
Speaking of efforts, Japanese woodworking and carpentry are completely different https://www.arch2o.com/how-japanese-wood-joints-work-without...
Just because you like to paint does by no means entail you'd like doing photography.
> Is it worth the effort?
It was.
“All that was will always have been somehow never again”
I have a feeling that these feelings come from culture.
Protestantism or Japanese cultures really value effort in a way mediterannean culture (for instance) does not.
Think about Flemish paintings that have all these very intricate details, while Italian painters invented the messy sfumato.
I don't like that digital cameras took over, because I don't like the quality of digital pictures, but I love that LLMs are taking stuff off my plate / brain. I have absolutely zero romanticism associated with effort. I do romanticize smartness.
Gauss finding n*(n+1) / 2 because he didn't want to sum numbers by hand is my absolute hero. Of course he was protestant so what I just said really doesn't make much sense.
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I sometimes identify as "ex-programmer" these days, just because whatever coding i could do is now irrelevant due to LLMs, but this isn't entirely honest. Programming was never my job. My job was "convincing people to transfer money to my account under various pretexts, most of which involved me writing some code", and as such, the thing is pretty much alive.
Don't know your area but llms are not taking many software dev jobs around here. Its like saying clueless juniors who sometimes produce good snippets of code and sometimes struggle to distinguish left from right are taking jobs of some seniors... not happening en masse anytime soon. Some other types of jobs sure.
You don't program at all now? It's all generated?
I only ask because I find myself on the tools most of the time still. The difference in how different people experience this tech is astounding sometimes.
I debug a lot. LLM tools still can't figure how to use a debugger. That's about it. I'm sure they will soon.
Claude Code with Tidewave mcp as well as Playwright mcp get pretty close to the debug cycle.
Have you got good results with LLMs for low-level development? For embedded I've found them mostly useless.
I have reworked a lot of code i built myself with AVX2 and Neon, to become much better, more maintainable and faster too, with LLMs.
The internet evolved as programming became a sought after path. But with the internet, a irreversible change happened in our society. Old facts are being questioned and it is imho just a matter of time until they materialize „in the real world“. This might include questions of status, achievement, the idea of self worth and the role of work.
We should not insist to measure new things with old rulers.
