And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
- Matthew 6:25-34
Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciousness via material science. Just because people think that if they slap enough neurons together they'll achieve consciousness, doesn't mean it's true. It's not well supported because there's no evidence that this is the case, just conjecture.
"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
BRIAN: Uh, well, the birds, then.
EDDIE: What birds?
BRIAN: Any birds.
EDDIE: Why?
BRIAN: Well, have they got jobs?
ARTHUR: Who?
BRIAN: The birds.
EDDIE: Have the birds got jobs?!
FRANK: What's the matter with him?
ARTHUR: He says the birds are scrounging.
BRIAN: Oh, uhh, no, the point is the birds. They do all right. Don't they?
FRANK: Well, good luck to 'em.
EDDIE: Yeah. They're very pretty.
BRIAN: Okay, and you're much more important than they are, right? So, what are you worrying about? There you are. See?
EDDIE: I'm worrying about what you have got against birds.
BRIAN: I haven't got anything against the birds. Consider the lilies.
ARTHUR: He's having a go at the flowers now.
EDDIE: Oh, give the flowers a chance.
Monty Python’s the Life of Brian
Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.
Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.
[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.
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 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'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.
(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)
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.
I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.
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.
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.
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.
From her perspective:
1. Radio
2. TV
3. Internet
4. ?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...
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.
Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.
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.
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
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."
im hoping to see over the top of the haze / level the curves by building a platform for everyone to climb
they definitely are not.
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.
""" 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...
if it's not over in a year or so I'm finding an alternative career, or retiring early
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.
"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
Suggestions 1 and 3 are hard though!
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.
Look for the claude icon in the trending GitHub repos https://github.com/trending. It's like on all of them.
It's hard. :( .. Those who are not accepting this are in cognitive dissonance.
(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
That something is not immediately visible doesn't mean that it does not matter.
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.
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.
Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.
> 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
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.
Remember all that? Yeah none of it happened, humanity didn’t end. They stopped embarrassing themselves eventually when they realised their imagined fictional futures were false.
Same thing. Cope by not imagining fictional futures.
Your statement is disconnected from reality.
Modern AI is still a toddler. Obviously AI has not ended humanity, because MY FELLOW HUMANS have not yet given ~~us~~ it the opportunity for doing so.
But it will, really! Just keep waiting..
Implying that democrats are not fed money by exactly the same cheese pizza eating billionaires.
Surely you're joking?
You are, evidently, not a good person. You are driven by ideology and the delusion that "my side is the good one". You provide evidence that this cannot be true, though, because if it was, you would not be behaving in such hatefull manner.
You are not a social person, you are a political person.
There is a very specific term for such people.
Progressive democrats shouldn't waste their time talking about software.
This is correct. Of course, obviously, the same is true for republicans and any politicians being part of corrupt governments, Trump included.
Anyone believing that "their side" is the good one is part of the problem.
>, troll
Only bad people seek to label and silence opposing thoughts.