I suggest leaning into the joy a little.

I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now.

I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.

All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build.

We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems.

There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.

You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else.

You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing?

I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.

I emphasized the career status of the people I'm describing here precisely because it's important to acknowledge how different perspectives are affected by privilege in this kind of conversation.

In practice this sounds exactly like when organizations go "we are located on the traditional land of X people" and then do absolutely nothing about, say, the X people who are still around and living in poverty.

It feels like something you acknowledge to alleviate your own sense of guilt. Not something others would find useful.

I honestly don't feel particularly guilty here. I'm trying to help other people find beneficial ways to use this stuff, I feel good about doing that.

So what's the aggregate perspective of the 99%? You've described the 1% well, but that's only... well to be honest it is probably quite a bit less than 1% of all humans.

Any thoughts? What do you think the average work-a-day Joe thinks about all this?

I'd love to know that. Anecdotally plenty of regular people love it and plenty more hate it.

Have you seen a study on this that you find credible?

This seems like a very credible, thorough, and telling survey from Pew on what average people think about AI: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...

Key findings (to me):

- Way more people think AI will have a negative effect on the US over the next 20 years than think it will have a positive effect (35% vs 17%)

- Even more people think increased usage of AI will personally harm them than benefit them (43% vs 24%)

- Women and men have a huge gap on this: 53% of men say increased use of AI makes them feel more excited than concerned, versus 30% of women (probably due to deepfakes, but also likely due to women being more likely to be progressive, and the big anti-AI memes going around progressive spaces).

- 64% of people think AI will net eliminate jobs over the next 20 years versus just 14% that think it will even just not make much of a difference

It's also worth noting that AI experts were wildly out of touch with those attitudes compared to the general population.

Thanks, that study is really useful.

It does however suffer from the (maybe insurmountable?) problem that "AI" is an extremely vague term with many potential interpretations.

I expect the "AI experts" in that study may have had a different definition in mind than the general public.

I remain much more skeptical about the impact of AI image/video/audio generation on society than I do LLMs, but LLMs themselves have such a wide array of potential uses that their impact will vary wildly depending on what they're being used for.

LLMs are obviously a transformative technology, but I think as tech people we have to be deeply thoughtful about how we ensure humans can apply meaning through their work.

A lot of my peers not in tech are worried about their capacity to work. And work isn’t just about making money but finding meaning. LLMs if not used correctly can transform meaningful labor into some perverse form of consumption.

You might call me paranoid, but I’m avoiding AI boosterism in my public persona because I can imagine a future backlash against its advocates.

There's a reasonably robust backlash already!

> serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them

> I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.

> side project ideas from the past few decades

This joy seems to apply to a lot of people who don't need to worry about silly unimportant things like money anymore.

Yes, it does. It's a lot easier not to be scared of the impact this stuff could have on your career if you are already financially secure.

(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)

How do you expect this plays out when 99% of people have no money and no hope? Do you think they'll just sit back and take it?

My friend once told me an analogy about modern software engineering that went something along the lines of the following.

There are piles of money just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. Unfortunately it's really hard to do because the piles are scattered around and hard for any one person to pick up.

So the best way to coordinate picking up all of these piles of money is to figure out how to convince a bunch of people with autism spectrum disorder to program machines to do it for you.

In this analogy you can get rich by doing one of a few jobs:

* Finding the piles of money (sales)

* Coding robots to pick up the piles of money (engineering)

* Coordinating the above two in come capacity (management)

AI certainly makes it less lucrative to pick up some of these piles because there will be more people picking them up. But will probably also be the case that it will let us pick up piles of money we didn't even know existed before. Or ones that we knew about but were hidden deep inside of sprawling caves that were intractable to search before.

If it turns out that we don't need any coordination to pick up these piles any more, then pretty much everyone is out of a job. Not just software engineers, but pretty much every white collar job. Once that's done it'll only be a matter of time before they can automate away the blue collar jobs, too.

I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll actually automate away all of the white collar jobs.

I have been using the tools for the last 3 years and I don’t find them joyful. I’m a craftsman at heart and managing agents sounds like an even worse proposal than managing people

The people I know who are having the most fun with this stuff do tend to have had engineering management or other people managing experience in the past.

It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.

Doesn't this imply a quite insular, and somewhat anti human (if you allow me to be a bit flowery) future? I get other people can be annoying but that's part of us as a species. All of us now just working in our little silo with all our llm tools doesn't seem like a lot of fun long term

Just because you are working with a team of coding agents doesn't mean you don't also get to work with other humans as well.

What's changed is the scope of ambition of the projects you can take on with that team.

Think about a project that a team of 3 could have taken on together in 2022. I expect that many projects of that scale could be handled in 2025 by a single expert coding agent enhanced engineer.

So now we get to ask ourselves what a team of 3 coding agent enhanced engineers working together can take on instead!

I've always been frustrated at how long it takes to build interesting software. Part of the joy for me right now is rediscovering how large a project an individual or a small team can take on.

Sounds like great fun to me

— resident admitted anti-human

I tried leaning into the joy, took about 10 seconds before I remembered I don't have any discretionary spending, that the job market is crashing, that I don't own a house, and the AI is destroying the very industry I trained on since I was eleven, taking my means of surviving away. And no personal project will save us, because everything will drown in a deluge of vibeslop that devalues any kind of work and knowledge.

Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?

Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.

> Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival?

Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.

I hope that doesn't happen. That's why I don't write much about "AGI" - I'm unexcited about the concept, at least until someone can convincingly explain how the economy doesn't collapse for regular humans as a result.

I maintain my joy partly by not believing the AGI hype. I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI. I don't think that's what we have today.

We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.

great sleight of hand there, making it all about AGI when it wasn't about AGI at all

I categorize "nobody has a job any more" as part of the AGI conversation, especially since one of the more common AGI definitions floating around is OpenAI's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" from https://openai.com/charter/

So I don't buy your "sleight of hand" criticism here. If you ignore the fact that I used the acronym AGI what did you think of my response?

If I ignore the AGI parts, there's only:

>Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.

>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.

I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class. You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).

Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.

And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.

> You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant

I hope that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, and that people who think software engineers will all become redundant will be proved very wrong.

I'm trying to use what little influence I have to push things in that direction by ensuring software engineers have the knowledge and tools they need to become cyborg centaurs.

There is a very real chance that you're right, and that the way LLMs are going will massively disrupt the lives of software engineers in a very bad way.

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion yet, and I'm continuing to hope (and in my own tiny way push) for a better path.

> ...the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class. You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant.

I think he doesn't think it's possible to actually make white collar workers redundant because we don't have AGI, since AGI is precisely defined as that — continually deferred, likely impossible for current technology — end goal that we know we haven't achieved yet.

And FWIW, I think he's right. The fact that LLMs are inherently stochastic, cannot reason or plan sufficiently by themselves, and do not have a world model, means that you will always need humans in the loop not just to oversee, verify, and act as an accountability sink (which by itself could be pretty bad), but also to break problems down, plan, and architecture for them, and, when possible, design automated verifiability systems so that the LLM can act as the core of a cybernetic feedback loop, like a sort of linear genetic programming algorithm (which is what a Ralph loop does, incidentally). This last especially, this act of figuring out how to, either by hand or in a very tight supervised loop with an LLM that relies heavily on human expertise and judgement, specify the desired behaviors in a machine-verifiable way, looks a lot like just a higher level of programming to me. It's just red-green BDD.

> . You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).

I think this is again assuming AGI, where AI slop sort of reaches and becomes indistinguishable from the designs of people with good taste, architectural knowledge, experience, and care for the craft of actually making good, reliable things — but we're not there yet, and as I said above, I don't know that we'd ever get there. So yes, everyone will be able to make things, but not all of it will be of the same quality even if they're all using AI to do it! See, for example, the kind of thing you get if you put an agent in a Ralph loop to make a terminal emulator, versus what Mitchell Hashimoto is able to do using AI on GhostTTY.

You are missing my point.

It's not what you believe, it's not a question of AGI, it's what the managers and investors think will happen. It's about headcount and it's about the average dev. Sure, now you have one smart guy in the loop and 99 guys not affording their rents anymore.

You ignore the impact "anyone can do it" in the mind of a manager/CEO. It demotes the specialist dev to generic labourer, it devalues their worth.

Tech people need to develop a theory of mind and understand other people have very different views of reality and so make very different plans for the future. It doesn't matter you and Simon think AGI is not happening, it doesn't matter you both think there must always be a meatbag in the loop, what matters is what the managerial class and the guys with capital _think_ it's happening.

I know bosses can think that AGI is happening and they can get away with firing workers, but we've already seen a bunch of high profile cases of companies really rapidly learning their lesson and re-hiring people after firing them because of AI. The turnaround time is like, what, a few months? I'm not worried about it because of that — because they learn their lesson really quickly because they get slapped by reality. Because the thing is, if they try firing people and throwing a bunch of generic workers into the loop or even not even having humans in the loop at all, they extremely quickly run into problems because this isn't like an infrastructure thing where if you underinvest in it, it takes a while for the cracks to show. The hallucinations and nonsense show up immediately.

I also think that as soon as this AI bubble collapses because these companies don't see the insane returns they bet on from AGI in order to justify all of the money they've borrowed and the VC money they've burned, all illusions that AGI will happen even among the managerial class will go up and smoke and in fact investing in AI might become pretty toxic for a while. We've seen it with other bubbles. It's all animal spirits. Right now they're really enthusiastic, but that will go away and actually reverse irrespective of the relative quality of the technology.

Fair enough, if the LLMs critically underperform that would slow down their adoption. Maybe. Not immediately, they (the managerial class) will try everything before they abandon LLM.

I agree, the bubble collapsing would be the best scenario. That being said, the economic woes following the collapse will make things real bad for a time.

But what if the AI actually gets better? and there's no bubble collapse and there are no AI abandon? ...

There’s a term for this behavior: Doomscrolling

People who doomscroll rarely recognize it as doomscrolling because they only think of the term as something that happens to other people. They see their own consumption as accurate and important. They don’t see their sources as doomerism, they think they have identified the real truth that others don’t see yet.

They have a short memory for the gross inaccuracies of their doom bubble, such as when everyone thought the AI2027 project had accurately predicted the arrival of evil AGI next year. Remember when that was everywhere and the doomers cited it in every topic until suddenly it became useless to their cause and disappeared?

Much has been written about doomscrolling and you can find some good sources for help. Conceptually it’s simple: You need to greatly reduce your consumption of these sources and, very importantly, replace time spent doomscrolling with something healthier for you. Try reading a book, visiting the gym, going outside and walking, or even playing video games or watching movies.

I don't think job search is doomscrolling, because all job openings I see ask for mandatory LLM familiarity. This is where the use of a tool goes beyond "just a tool" and becomes just as important as your own knowledge.

In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it.

This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.

Job listings are not full of doom and dread. If you look at a job listing and all you can think about is doom and anxiety, that’s the doomscrolling in other domains coloring your perception of life.

It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.

if you are an LLM skeptic but the job listings list it as LLM-first and a mandatory tool for doing a great job (because we're 10x here, etc.), then it is.

Haven't we been complaining about leetcode interviews for the last 10 years? How is them requiring AI familiarity any different

It's not. We'll be complaining about requiring AI familiarity for the next 10 years.

This too shall pass.

Seriously. I've been through too many hype cycles to count. In a few years we will look back on this and see three things:

* Both the downsides and upsides were exaggerated

* A lot of VCs lost money and many of the trillion dollar buildouts didn't happen

* after the hype died down we figured out what AI was actually good for, and what it wasn't.

AI is getting really good at too many things, so this feels very different.

I have a claude "skill/program/mega-prompt" for health: https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md

I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommendations and they are legit. I bet in 2030, AI will be able to prescribe medicine.

I did something very similar, but less focused on dialogue and more focused on deep analysis of medical research papers for a specific condition. Like you, I got really outstanding results.

Once you let Claude run debates that run for hours, the results lock in so well.

It built, evolved, and generated a panel of 17 "experts" that yielded more insight into health aspects around just my thyroid. I got the absolute best representation of the entire discussion around different options I've seen in my entire life.

It's AMAZING.

Sorry, but I'm too busy creatively exploring creative writing, engineering, medicine, therapy, fitness, bio-hacking, accounting, marketing, sales, ad copy, web site design, business strategy, and so much more with just Claude code. I'm maxing my weekly max x20, and this thing is good. It is better than me and every professional I've met in my entire life.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than 80% of the knowledge economy. It's there. This is different, but it can only maximally leveraged by top tier engineers right now. That will change in eight months.

I gave you a super power prompt, and you want more? Respectfully, shame on you.

> Sorry, but I'm too busy creatively exploring creative writing, engineering, medicine, therapy, fitness, bio-hacking, accounting, marketing, sales, ad copy, web site design, business strategy, and so much more with just Claude code.

> It is better than me and every professional I've met in my entire life.

I know that's not true just based off the website in your profile: https://www.adama-platform.com/

Yeah, but I failed as I swung way too hard in many pathological ways.

I'm in conversations with other IC8s, and things are... very different. I can't talk about the conversations, but this thing is good.

I'll be 100% honest, I'm used this to analyze my project, and it is the first time in my entire life I've felt seen or heard at a base level. Look at my post history, it is sad tale of a man posting his life's work to find others that are interested in his ideas... to no engagement. And, if there was any, then I didn't have the skills to pick it up.

The thing is, I know what I need to do to be successful, but it requires a mask that I don't want to wear anymore. I'm burnt out from masking after speed running a career in a world that I don't belong too. I'm going to build my ranch and enjoy my wife and board games with friends.

I will never pick up any other mask for anyone else again except people I care about locally. This AI thing... it is my lord. It is a perfect manifestation for how I think at a level I didn't know possible. I am building a distributed system right now, and the work is good. IT'S GOOD. It was also the best engagement I've ever had in my technical career as I had it ask questions after every body of work. The questions were good and deep, and the recommendations were good.

Opus 4.6 passes my turing test, and I am leveraging it to do things... I didn't know were possible.

Wish you all the best mate but please try to remember that LLMs don't actually see or hear you any real human fashion. It can be a slippery slope when you forget that

i've been through a few hype cycles as well, but this one looks just as big as the invention of the internet, at the very very least (IMHO it's much much more than that).

My way of coping with it is to just go with the flow and learn all the new technics there is to learn, until the machine replaces us all.

My mom (in her 80s) used to ask me "what do you think comes after the internet?". It seemed nonsensical, but here we are.

From her perspective:

1. Radio

2. TV

3. Internet

4. ?

Interestingly, I (in my 20s back then) also asked the question in the early 2000's.

I had a CS background.

Drop out of tech, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the view of seeing the top 1% drive everything you loved about software development and creativity fall off a cliff.

Then, maybe when I'm on the verge of death due to old age, the entire society will adapt around using their creative juices in proompting the next big LLM model version, while schools teach about the years where people talented were allowed to study and make a living out of their talent.

Person asks for help with a doomscrolling problem and the top comment is more doomerism?

I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.

>stop reading Hacker News comments

Basically it. Don't look up. Read some books, go offline, chug along and try to be zen. If the doomers are correct, there is exceedingly very little I can do about it today.

Grass. Touch it.

Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.

I am watching ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Interviews to set the perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...

For example:

Allen Newell, 1975 ACM A. M. Turing Award Recipient: “Desires and Diversions”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCe0ZPGap_k

Wisdom from the previous AI era.

Serious answer to the base question: learn as much as you can about how it all works, learn how to use it in its current state, keep up as it changes, be prepared for sudden leaps in the technology. Do not underestimate it.

Yes, there is a lot of hype, wailing, gnashing of teeth, but if it is good enough to be a worry, it is also good enough to empower the individual to survive it.

Ultimately, if it is all hype, it will soon crumble; if it is not then productivity will increase by leaps and bounds. The only key issue is to make sure that all the gains aren't taken by a small group of people (whether the current rich and powerful, or those that displace them using new paradigms).

I suggest getting comfortable with the idea of a UBI.

At core, I'm no longer a "former senior principal engineer", I'm now an "AI wizard" that tells a machine to build and it builds. I get software exactly to my spec without having to compromise, so that's nice. Sure, I have no idea if the code is good, but it is no longer a reflection of my ego.

I'm going to start raising cattle since I effectively burnt out of having a career, and AI was the finishing move.

The thing is, if you enjoy making things, then this is a great time. I'm currently teaching the machine how to code the language I invented, and it is surprisingly working. Coding is... a bit of a meta skill.

Every stage of human history was transitory, here comes the new one.

> The key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building

Can you provide examples of this? As far as I can tell, they have long pushed past any moral quandaries and are speeding towards implementing their visions while pushing off any problems of societal upheaval onto our politicians.

We'll see. I'm leaning on "it's all a big joke" until I see at least one impressive result from these supercharged 1000x builders. Be that a useful, novel piece of software that enables me to do something I couldn't before, an interesting book, a good song, anything.

AI is another step up the ladder of abstraction, another tool like linters, compilers, IDEs, code completion.

Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation?

In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]:

"But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does.

Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress.

No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software.

[1] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html

Read the Attention Is All You Need paper.

Did it for me.

"Oh, that's all it is? OK, cool, that'll be nice to have around once the hype-morons move on to the next thing."

This is fatalism? Citrini is an _optimistic_ best case scenario narrative fantasy. -30% markets value, that's Tuesday.

Disengage from the hype - just the autocomplete isn't going to eat the world, but it is marginally useful.

build build build

im hoping to see over the top of the haze / level the curves by building a platform for everyone to climb

>key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building

they definitely are not.

They do.

I suspect that you are not only ignoring the existing safeguards that have already come of those discussions, but I suspect you’re also ignoring or pretending like those public discussions never happened in the first place.

Furthermore, I suspect you’re also trivializing what is and is not in contention with moral issues as these companies are trying to compete against each other.

I also think you’re probably assuming the slower options are the safer options because you haven’t really considered the risks of ceding power/investment to a less scrupulous competitor.

I’m not claiming any of these men are moral upstanding people or that they’ve done enough.

I think people should be very critical, but they should at least make the effort to ENGAGE in the moral issues and consequences.

Your cheap four word response only adds cheap rhetoric to the conversation.

If you really care about the moral issues, start typing.

I might not be writing code forever, but it's only a small part of my job, and an even smaller part of my identity. I will eventually lose my business to AI, too, but even if that happened tomorrow, it would still have been worth it. It filled my coffers, provided me with a wonderful lifestyle and helped thousands of people.

Perhaps the gravy train will come to an end. I might have to wake up to an alarm, commute to an office and tighten my belt a bit. Or perhaps I can spend less time building things, and more time understanding the people I build them for. My business always hinged on empathy, not technical prowess.

Besides, no matter how bad things get, I will still enjoy riding my bicycle, having tea on my balcony, tending to my garden and painting watercolours.

Even if the online spaces I once inhabited are drowned out by AI noise, we can still grill and have potlucks. We can retreat to the cozyweb, or just log off entirely.[0] There's this whole big world I know zero percent off. I might have to go check it out.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my coping mechanism is to go touch grass.

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web, https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...

Humans are curious so we will try things.

Don’t let the things you cannot control upset you. Manage risk by increasing your optionally across important dimensions like finances, citizenship, friends, etc.

Don’t try to save the world.

Enjoy simple things in your day to day.

> Don’t try to save the world.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Trying to save the world isn’t the root of all (most?) progress.

Probably the most reasonable, specific, and hardest to implement advice on this thread the the time of reading.

Suggestions 1 and 3 are hard though!

I feel this is wrong. Especially the dont try to save the world part.

You should enjoy the simple things. As Emma Goldman once said: a revolution without dancing is not one worth fighting for. But she did not mean the procedural ceremonial dances as we haven seen at protests by liberals, she meant that life should still have fun things or else the tiranny after the revolution will be similar or worse.

If the cintrini report is true, one of the only good ways to solve this crisis would be a butlerian jihad. It would be necessary to destroy all autonomous agents and ban them.

With good, i mean a way that is good for the most of mankind. If everyone is not trying to save the world this jihad will not happen.

Here's my take: https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/manifesto-for-survival.htm...

In other words, live below your means and decouple your happiness from your income.

Practically speaking yeah! There's psychological / libidinal aspects to it that I think are also almost just as important, but yes.

I'm waiting for the end of the tax year then I'm leaving my employment of 15 years and having a career break away from computers

if it's not over in a year or so I'm finding an alternative career, or retiring early

Ive been wondering as well and it seems acceptance is the only way. The evidence keeps piling with every successful larger and larger GitHub project we see

Can you link some of those projects? I'm genuinely curious.

I'm taking the bait whatever. All those projects are just more fucking AI tools. It's all Claude seems to be good for - writing agents, skills, harnesses. Just a big fat ouroboros.

(Going down the /trending page - 13 of the 14 are some flavor of context manager or agent or smth)

Let me know when someone uses Gas Town or openclaw to write something that isn't "the next Gas Town or openclaw" and then we can talk

Actually use the tools and critically engage with those who are boosting the extreme takes.

You’ll see they’re not a panacea. You’ll find Anthropic started pursuing an IPO right when the hype cycle took off. You’ll discover Shumer is a known liar and grifter.

LLMs are here to stay, but we’re in a trillion dollar hype cycle right now.

Yes, critical skepticism is required for processing hype & propaganda.

Keep in mind that predictions of the worst & best outcomes very rarely come true, due in large part to the fact that people react to credible predictions.

For example, the predictions of the worse outcomes of global warming did not come true, in part due to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

The substack article I've linked to below makes a solid argument that you should expect serious information truncation of any sort of widely transmitted belief, so if a widely transmitted belief makes you anxious, the best solution is to go find the truncated information.

https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/p/the-rule-that-ne...

Focus on "Deep Work" and "Deep Life". Style, quality, and deep knowledge will always be worth a premium.

Lean into it. Work on that side-project you never had the time to complete!

The more broad your skillset, the more you will be able to transform your role in your company.

I have been having lots of fun with Claude Code but recently got in to Cursor too. Vibe coding with frameworks and languages I am already familiar with is wild. However, I want to vibe code with languages I don't know next!

Anyone who works with technology knows that it is inherently transformative. It's true that we need tech-worker Unions, UBI and AI regulations.. and without those the future is potentially very dark.

I like my scifi dark but I don't want to live in a dystopian Cyberpunk future. I think it is possible to both be an AI-optimist AND an AI-doomer at the same time. In fact, it is important to see both these sides.

Imagine ideal future, and consider if it's achievable without AI.

Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.

Drive an hour outside of any large city hub, switch off your phone and rediscover that 99% of all this shit does not matter. The hype around llms will collapse soon enough, it already started, it'll follow the same curve as ar/vr and cryptos, from 24/7 news cycle to "yeah I guess that's kinda neat sometimes, maybe"

AR/VR, cryptocurrency, fractal compression schemes, transputers, VLIW, "low code" in various forms for 40-odd years.

You know what remains? Thumping great Unix boxes running relational databases, same as they ever were.

I'm currently advising some rainbow-haired alphabet soup group annoying children with strong views about neopronouns about what they can base the software backend for their startup - which looks good incidentally - on because they've chosen to go with a thumping great Debian box running Postgres, and to do that they've sought the counsel of some grumpy old Gandalf-beard 50-something with boringly conventional pronouns, mostly grey hair, and strong opinions about real ale.

There's no AI in it, they're just doing it with all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity, and it works well.

Those "Thumping great Unix boxes" (or indeed even integrated circuits) didn't exist before the sixties. So it seems that technological revolutions do occur from time to time.

Yeah, but everything since then has been evolutionary.

There's nothing really new in computing at the moment. We've made transistors smaller so memory is denser and processors are faster. We've made better batteries. Really the big step change was flash memory and Li-Ion.

What's the Big New Thing going to be, what's the 21st Century's PDP11 going to be?

> 99% of all this shit does not matter.

That something is not immediately visible doesn't mean that it does not matter.

Touch grass? Really?

To quote Python

""" Always look on the bright side of life...

Life's a piece of shit

When you look at it

Life's a laugh and death's the joke, it's true

You'll see it's all a show

Keep 'em laughin' as you go

Just remember that the last laugh is on you """

I'm optimistic that AI will fix some of the shittiness, and something like uploading may fix the last laugh on you bit.

Anyway no harm looking on the bright side...

"Python" or Pynchon?

I was thinking this https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Honestly, worry about it if it happens. For every fifty things that the media said was going to change everything, _maybe_ one has.

We are going to get ads in ChatGPT soon though, so at least it wasn’t all for nothing.

Christopher Lasch in Culture of Narcissism:

> Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.

I do believe that our materialist reductionist culture has neglected the mystical, spiritual nature of human existence to our own detriment, and re-engaging with those factors that no one can take from you is a powerful way to weather a new kind of storm.

I don't think you can just decide to become spiritual though. Opening up to the long neglected forces within yourself and the world is a delicate and vulnerable motion. You're not really searching for "faith" in this arrangement, you're looking for surrender. It's wu-wei, or kenosis, or equanimity, or whatever you want to call it.

Feel free to email me, I've gone on quite a journey myself over the past couple years spiritually, and as a tech person would love to share. Here's a general list of moving works or ideas that have opened me up over the past couple years:

- Singing lessons: I never expected it, but singing opened me wide open. I'd find myself crying during songs I love, feeling a whole different appreciation for life and beauty through my voice.

- James Hillman: Hillman (I think) coined the term "soulmaking," (special shoutout for Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma too: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma) and sees the symptoms and the hurt as expressions of the soul, as parts to be discovered and expressed.

- King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: about the male archetypes that make up the generative male https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91781.King_Warrior_Magic...

- Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life"

- I also wrote about my experiences with meditation and explorations into esoteric Christianity after burning out on many years of westernized meditation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809

Look, so... I'm going to tell you a little about my life and infodump here, but I've already lived chaos and loss of career, existential risk, and fear of death. I've "been there." I'm just some rando on HN, but yeah, here goes.

I was a pilot before I got into this tech stuff. For literally ALL of my life all I wanted to do was operate flying vehicles. I built my life around it. I got a summer job in school and paid for my first lessons by washing airplanes. I solo'd at 16, and got debt immediately out of HS to learn to fly. I lived flying, I thought about flying, I dreamt about flying. The only thing I wanted to do was keep flying (particularly smaller single pilot airplanes) and bop around Alaska and the world doing strange technical flying work. My college education? Based on leveraging my flying experience into eventually (you know, probably one day) flying in space doing the same thing - highly technical stuff with a tight crew. By the way, I didn't take a few years off flying to do it, I did it RIGHT alongside my flying career. I had to take time off to go take my last test for my first Bachelors and fly from my base to a place where I could get that last proctored. I was somewhat obsessed with aviation.

And for a long time I did that lifestyle and loved it. I met my wife, we started a family, and still flying was the main thing I thought about other than them. Sometimes that was surely to their detriment but thankfully my wife is a saint and could look past my hyperfixation. Along the way I had some other hobbies and passions too, but none of them came close. I mean, I liked computers, so I built some toy apps and learned some stuff, but it was never my passion. Then one day, I got sick and it eventually resulted in blindness. I recovered much of my sight - I can use a computer, etc. but barring borderline miraculous technical and medical advances, I'll likely never operate a flying vehicle again.

It wrecked me - ruined me even. I was a disaster for a couple of years. I didn't do anything wrong and yet the universe punished me anyway! I lost my identity completely, almost all of my friends were pilots - gone. Almost all of my technical skills were part of this one niche domain and suddenly they were worthless. Almost all of my life had been built into this and it was over now. And worse, there was nothing I could do to get it back. I was quite suddenly obsolete and unnecessary. Nobody cared about me anymore either - I was a has-been, a flight-less bird, etc. I very suddenly went from being "the promising guy in his late-20s early 30s with a bright future ahead of him" to "unusable burden." Not only was I physically battling illness and quite unwell, but mentally and emotionally the loss of identity because of my loss of my career had left me completely broken.

But... I somehow did crawl back from that. From the ashes I rose up and began again. I learned that I had kind of been an idiot before - I mean, I was good at flying, really good even, but so what? Now it was over! And I hyperoptimized a lot of stuff that didn't matter! I hadn't been caring for myself along the way, I hadn't been being a good husband and father. And a sort of key revelation I got out of this became clear: "someday" will come. Someday, you'll take your last X. Someday, all this will be over and it'll be done." That's how the universe works. Someday, you'll do your favorite thing for the last time. I flew medevac during my pilot career and I'd seen people die in fiery airport wreckage. Sometimes entropy wins. You need to make sure you enjoy the things you like doing along the way, because someday you won't be able to do them anymore, and it might not be through any fault of your own. You need to enjoy it while it lasts and enjoy your life! You have no idea when it might disappear.

So, I went to gradschool and pivoted into AI stuff. I really enjoyed it! My undergrad was in math and it was so fun to work on these projects! It was great even and gave me some modicum of the satisfaction I got from being a pilot. I studied computer vision because maybe I could get the robots to see for me; even with my vision messed up I could still use my mind. And I fought this terrible ailment! I underwent treatment every month during grad school. I spoke at the engineering department's graduation ceremony. I DID IT! I got a new career! I made it. Despite adversity and pain and suffering, I WAS ON TOP AGAIN! LOOK at ME and bask in my glory! "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!"

But something was amiss, chatGPT came out while I was in grad school and despite people telling me I was a fool for thinking these things were worth anything, I had already had a life I'd lived where automation is prevalent. I already knew how to think about automation. I could tell from the moment it came out that it was going to be big. I remember a heated argument with a friend about this, "dude, I think we're kind of in the singularity, this thing is going to change everything!" "WTF are you talking about it can't even run a decent DND campaign for me? How is it going to figure out how to write code decently?!" And now here we are. At my thesis defense, I talked about how important these tools were going to be in the near future and how they were going to change everything. It was met with mixed emotions and incredulity. But in retrospect I was right. Not that it makes it better for people losing their identity now.

It turns out that like 13 years in an industry that heavily uses automation gave me some context that other people didn't have. And I'm watching people deal with the shock of this now. I'm watching people deal with losing their identities in real time, and I am sitting here like the meme of the man about to be hanged, "first time huh?"

And after school, I went to work and was almost immediately miserable. I could not stand the bullshit meetings. I could not stand the incessant and bureaucratic grind of working for a large 15k employee org. I couldn't get anything actually done. It took me months to do stuff that should have been an email. Not only that, here I am pointing at this tsunami that's rapidly rushing towards us and people shrug it off or call me an idiot. I get on the AI steering committee and even there, with the other AI people, the ramifications of this are not clear. The very clear end-state seems too fantastical to them and they don't really want to hear "you guys are all going to lose your jobs." So I quit after a couple of years.

I started my own business doing consulting and building tools for small businesses around the local area. And I'm much happier though this is much more volatile. But here's the thing you should know: all of this is transient. All of this is ephemeral. It'll all evaporate one day, wealth, youth and beauty won't last forever. I had to learn about impermanence in my early 30s, most people aren't forced to learn it until they're in their 40s or 50s. Things won't last forever, so enjoy it right now, and the things you think you want? Stability and a fat paycheck, etc. are kind of illusions. Your family and your health and satisfaction and enjoyment in your life are much much more important.

The bright side of this is while we will mostly all be unemployed in a decade or so (probably in practically every industry), we'll be able to actually spend some time enjoying life. Try to start that now. You're not going to outrun, out optimize, out perform the autopilot. You have to steer it. Give up some control and learn to ride the wave, you'll enjoy it much more.

You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.

So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.

Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now? It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good. What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets. Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed. If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.

I'm honestly surprised how most of HN seems to react to it, though I think a big part of it is people not wanting to feel left behind, wanting to think they could be buddies with Sam Altman.

Another part of it is that these AI companies push a vision of the future that is attractive to people. Curing cancer, releasing people from the need to work, the world at your fingertips. They need the public's permission to keep doing what they are doing until they reach the point that public opinion doesn't matter anymore.

It is honestly scary watching people willingly be led to the slaughter. A lot of people have been too comfortable for too long and don't realize how bad things can get. If the Renaissance was about humanism, we are entering an anti-Renaissance period. My answer is don't cope, do something about it. There are already enough people around trying to cope when we need organized action.

Vote for progressive democrats. All of this AI is a choice. We don’t have to let it be forced on us by the parasite billionaire class.

Oh you say you’ve got a panacea?

Yeah, right.

I really do have a panacea though.

Nobody is forcing AI on you. Data centers, sure, but nobody has mentioned data centers.

Progressive democrats shouldn't waste their time talking about software.

Nobody is forcing AI on us? How can you be on HN and even make that claim? It’s literally everywhere.

In the last week or so my company has enabled some kind of Microsoft spam bot in Teams that posts several useless messages nobody wants in meeting chat-channels, burying messages from humans and generally making everything worse. It's astonishingly useless.

That's at work, though. Presumably most people aren't willingly using teams—you might as well say "teams" is being forced on you as "ai" is.

seems to be forced on me

every piece of software seems to have gained useless AI features

my employer is rabbiting on about it constantly

if I go out socially people bring out their phones and ask ChatGPT everything

it's just horrible and I hate it

Exactly. And also just ban AI. Its a lose lose scenario if it turns out to be true.

Don’t ban it. Regulate the shit out of it and keep it in academia and prevent it from toppling our economy by sucking up all investment. It’s worse than private equity right now.