- > Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every “saved” hour is returned to a race with no finish line.
I think this is true. I've recently heard Tim Ferriss say: Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.
This is so true with AI. You can do a lot of things with AI, but that doesn't automatically make them worth doing. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. If the benefit of something is (effectively) zero, it doesn't matter how low the cost is.
AI isn't useless and there are beautiful, enriching use cases for it. But the idea that AI must consume our lives so we don't get left behind by those who brag on LinkedIn about operating 12 concurrent agents in self-perpetuating loops seems faulty to me.
- > Just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing.
I'm not sure if there's more context to this quote, but on the surface: what a dismal take! Letting some measure of worth dictate what you do feels pretty limiting to me. I understand that he's not saying "make sure you attach worth to everything you do," but there's an implicit judgement process in what he's suggesting.
If you do something well, and you like doing that something, maybe you should enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it.
- I read it the opposite though; that it's the act of doing, not the (perfect) result, the thing that is valuable. e.g. it's better to paint a canvas badly because it's fun, than to have an AI generate a perfect image. It's not the image that is "well" that is worth it, it's you having fun while doing it that it's worth it.
I feel like you're conflating "having worth" (value) and "being worth doing" (it's good to do it) in here?
- I know a few people who refuse to get jobs even though they are suffering financially because they can't find something they think is "worth" doing with their skill set.
I tried to tell them that having a job would mean they get to meet new people, they get to escape their financial despair, and that it would add structure and organization to their disheveled and disorganized lives. I explained that work itself has value for the worker outside of the simple return of the paycheck, the activity of being engaged completing a task having direct psychological impact on the task completer.
Both of their responses, taken months apart, boiled down to that if a day of work didn't make them so wealthy that they never had to work again it wasn't worth it for them.
So I gave up.
- True! And the point isn't that you shouldn't base whether you do something on how much economic value it produces.
I think the judgment is more that if you're doing something to produce some kind of outcome (e.g. work), don't get stuck on things that don't impact that outcome.
The point isn't that you shouldn't do things well. It's that just because AI makes it effortless to ship some random new thing nobody asked for, that doesn't mean you should ship it.
I think that calculus changes completely when you do things for fun, where the only outcome you're trying to produce is doing more of the activity.
If you're doing something for fun, the doing is itself the reward.
- I don't think he's talking about personal fulfilment. His take is more simple. He's saying don't do the following: "I created a piece of software, and it works pretty good, but I have no customers. Should I work on coding to get it to work 5% better, or try to do some marketing? Well, I'm really, really great at coding, so let me do more of that."
- >and you like doing that something
I think your attempt at a counterpoint accidentally reinforced the main point: there are more criteria beyond simply being able to do something well that determine whether it's a good idea in the first place. I can make lead balloons faster and cheaper than anyone else but that's not enough to make it worth spending my one and only life making lead balloons.
- Yes, and I even think this applies to generally valuable skills.
I can be really good at organizing projects, but I shouldn’t channel that into spending hours creating the perfect Jira template with 18 integrations just because I can do it well because that’s a lot of energy spent on something nobody may ever use.
Meanwhile that skill may very well be extremely valuable elsewhere.
- Okay, what if you're good at arson?
- This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.
- > Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.
In the last big AI productivity thread I read on Hacker News the most common anecdote was people saying they weren’t more producing more at work with AI, they were just getting the same work done faster. After that they’d relax or switch to working on side projects.
I don’t think that’s going to last for everyone, but I do think it is a common response to AI. I don’t agree when you say that people are working more. I think, at this moment in time, most people are using AI to compress the time spent doing their work. Some people pick up extra tasks with some of their new free time. Others don’t.
I don’t think AI is leading to increased working time other than in the LinkedIn and X hustle and grind bubbles where posters are bragging about having 10 agent loops running constantly to launch their startup.
- I don't know any knowledge-worker role that gives you a fixed X amount of work to do, and lets you chill if you get it done in Y amount of time. If the expectation is that with AI you should be doing your work in Y/2 amount of time, they all will just require you to do 2X the amount of work.
- I certainly work more, and I don't post on LinkedIn or X.
There is nothing wrong with trying to build a business and taking on large projects with AI.
It seems like the smart thing to do when our employment as software engineers is foreseeably threatened in the near future.
- I'm somewhere that does stack ranking so it's a prisoners' dilemma. As long as someone is running Claude constantly and producing PRs, we all get negative performance implications for simply allowing ai to help us be more effective at what we were already doing.
Honestly it's driving me mad and I'm thinking about looking for different work.
- Meeting your quota this month just means a bigger quota next month.
- This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.
- People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away.
Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened.
It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global average income is around $10K per person. If you make more than that, you’d have to give up a lot. That’s not even accounting for the sharp drop in production of things you need that would happen if the upsides of working hard were removed, leading to people working less.
- A transition away from competition could also be implemented by capping the standard of living to what it currently is in the richest countries and then waiting for others to catch up. After that production would slow down yes, and that's the point. People could spend more of their time on things that really matter to them instead of things they're forced to do by competition.
- "one of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations."
Yuval Noah Harari
Think about email. There is usually an expectation of a response within minutes/hours and not weeks/months like mail of the 1900s
- On the other hand, my wife wouldn’t have survived to this age if not for technology that wasn’t available in the 1900s.
I can answer those emails from my air conditioned office or house.
I have time to answer them because we’re not spending all of our effort just trying to survive or working the farms.
Seems like a good trade to me.
- Until kill bots start blasting your neighbors, or we heat the climate to the point vast areas are not survivable.
Quite often the conveniences we take have a long horizon before they bear their true cost.
- > AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
I think you may be in a bit of a bubble. Sure the Anthropic engineer is trying to token max. But "we" generally see AI as a step up from google search and go about our lives pretty much the same as we have.
The ones that are captured by AI, I think they're just truly excited about the technology. It's new and opening up possibilities. It's like when you first learned to program and you stayed up all night writing games or whatever your interests were.
I know without programming I would "work less" but that doesn't result in "more fulfilled lives". Quite the opposite. The most unfulfilled people I know in life work the least!
- Exactly. That's why the goal is to share the means of production among everyone
- "we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.
- If you keep your quality of life stagnant, then you don’t (generally) have to work harder.
If you want access to the cutting edge medicine, electronics, and other “new” stuff, then you do have to keep running on the treadmill.
Although, things like natural disasters and wars can shake things up.
- >The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine and asks how well she performed.
Holy insanity
- It's hard to say how common that is though. We can't really extrapolate from one example.
I hope that person finds more confidence and especially starts having fun, because that's what dating can be.
- I weep for the future
- natural selection rather quickly fixes this, don't worry
- Natural selection in humans is a very long horizon problem.
- It also doesn't care about what humans feel to be desirable.
Sure, humans like being healthy and strong and sociable.
But natural selection doesn't care about that either, per se. That's just a small slice of what natural selection can result in.
- Dating in the Silicon Valley must be hell.
- The sheer thought of asking "how I performed" in one of the most subjective fields is the most ai-esque thing I read in a while
- sure, and there are obvious pitfalls, but IMHO it's much better than going to a 100+ dates and not reflecting on what went wrong/well after any of them.
(tangentially related recommended reading https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )
- Yes. There were never any performative parts to dating prior to the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022.
- I didn't say it wasn't performative before
- When you raise kids in a society that scruitinizes and measures every aspect of their existence against all ither kids, and then send those kids to a workforce where every aspect of their performance and personality are scruitinized and analyzed to attempt to rank them against their peers, why wouldn't said kids seek out such "objective" ranking in their personal lives? We have designed society to produce people neurotically obsessed with ranking and comparison in school, work, and social media, and yet we're surprised when people start being neurotically obsessed with ranking in their performance in dating? This is a problem we created.
- > We have designed society to produce people neurotically obsessed with ranking and comparison in school, work, and social media
Comparing ourselves to others is probably built into our DNA. Most primates also have a social hierarchy. A human who didn't somewhat obsessively socially compare himself to others and/or self reflect on his behavior might have been thrown out of the tribe because he would never self correct.
- We didn't have to turn the dial up to eleven though.
- > Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.
It's been downright spooky to watch people I know personally or been familiar with totally fall down the rabbit hole.
That said, like with everything, it depends on the person. Some people are taking the Jack Nicholson route, others are finally taking time off and enjoying their life (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
- I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs
Research has repeatedly shown that people can only be productive a certain number of hours in a week. People who work more then a healthy number of hours are probably doing busywork.
I have always taken off nights and weekends and I have built a lot of things I am proud of. I am also very happy with my career so far.
I'm in my forties now with a teenage kid and I often realize how fast life flies by and we only get one shot at it. So I'm very happy I chose to work part-time some years, so that I could spend the afternoons with our kid.
- > (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
What did the LLM's speed up that was taking that time away from you?
- Just the building process. I maintain my own full-stack JS framework and build apps on top of it. LLMs have significantly sped up my ability to take an idea and ship it (I do turn-based work via Cline + Claude).
Case in point: I was able to ship this [1] in one month flat at a quality level that doesn't make me squirm to release. That same product would have easily been 60-90 days (if not longer) purely by hand for me in the past.
- > Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.
It's not like we hadn't been warned by decades of sci-fi work, and researchers, and historians, telling us everything that would be wrong with AI
> I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs
No you're not. You could very likely organize your life to have your nights and weekends without AI. It's just a choice you made not to do it before
- I could have, but my lifestyle at the time didn't demand it and I could get away with working long hours, most days of the week. Now I'm married and yeah, AI has basically kept me at my original pace (hand coding) while taking time off. I can't quantify the delta there but my body sure as hell feels the difference.
- > (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
Why weren't you taking them off before?
- That's how I fed myself for the last 15 years (freelance, products/services, and the occasional contract). For the better part of that I was completely alone so I filled the time by working a lot. There's also the whole never ending anxiety produced by online hustle culture that makes you think you're falling behind (far worse to deal with when you're indie/solo and not working a job).
- This reminded me of work in general, years ago I was thinking how nursery was so expensive. I could try and work harder, earn more, to pay for nursery - or just quit and look after my children. If the goal was making money to look after my children, why make it difficult?
p.s. LOVE the animated header on this blog
- FWIW, in some countries it's very normal for both parents to work part-time. E.g. both work 32 hours, so that one of the parents can be at home during the afternoon four days a week. Then the grandparents fill the remaining days. From 8:30-14:00, the kids go to daycare (or later school), good for socialization with other kids.
- What countries do this?
- When we had a child, we decided that my spouse should absolutely go back to work, even though that job just barely paid for daycare. But it meant that my spouse could leave the house, have adult conversations, and not have their full life, 24/7, revolve around a single thing.
- It's like the century old fable about the businessman and the fisherman.
Nothing new.
- >Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them
This is part of what turns grasshoppers into locusts. They're attempting not only to eat the insect in front of them, but escape the one behind that is attempting to eat them. I'll leave it up to the reader to complete the metaphor.
- > Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin.This causes the locust to change colour, eat much more, and breed much more easily. [1]
Fascinating.
- > breed much more easily.
Humans seem to be forgetting this step. Birthrates are down
- The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
- This is still not as weird as the valley was in the late 1990s during the first Internet bubble, with the exception that housing scarcity, which was notably bad then (I had to pay my year's rent up front to secure an apartment in San Francisco), has been left to fester for 2 decades.
- What was weird during the first Internet bubble?
- I get this same feeling when I see people taking photos for social media. I see the number of photos people take and I think of how sad it is that they are ruining their own experience for a photo that they might not ever see again.
Even the purported reason for these photos existing is sad, that they want to be able remember or relive the experience. Just get new experiences? That idea is much more uplifting to me.
Caveat, this obviously doesn't include once in a lifetime experiences that in my opinion it's justified to take photos of like marriage or things involving milestones of children etc.
- I'm amazed how many people I see taking photos of their coffee. Like "this is the one I want to remember". It's like the joy of novelty has been replaced by the potential and short-lived dopamine of a social like.
- technology is just a red herring. GTA-level whacky NPCs will have NPC behaviour regardless of what situation you throw them in.
The same "person" that shows absurd behaviour like that, assuming it's not just rage/clickbait, has absurd behaviour in a completely technology disconnected world as well.
The only thing that might differ is that it's not as outwardly obvious. Those behaviours are a result of who they are at a person (whether this be because of genetics and environment, poor soul RNG, or something else).
To that extent all technology does is make it more obvious. Basically the average NPC has more opportunities to reveal themselves as such. It's not indicative of a fundamental problem.
- As someone who is a victim of never feeling he has done enough, I totally empathise with this blog post. The incentives which got me into tech were completely intrinsic and altruistic. Over time, I have felt them warp into something which can be best as "capitalist greed", everything is now about wanting more. The first and perhaps the easiest, thing to be sacrificed at the altar of wanting more, is mental health and relationships. Thankfully, I'm conscious of this now and is something I actively work on.
However, this is something I can only do at this point in my life, in my early 20s I was much more of a grind person and even if I could change things I wouldn't change that.
- Perhaps some members of society will choose to swear off LLMs entirely. "Clauddites"?
- I wouldn’t describe the people this blog talks about as “normal people”, or “average people”.
Most people don’t behave this way or have these kinds of problems.
A reminder: tech jobs are their own kind of filter bubble. It’s worth taking a step out of this space every now and again to see what other people are thinking and worrying about.
It’s one of the things I love about my rec hockey games. People there have much more tangible worries: when they’re gonna fix the dock at their vacation homes, if the girl they texted will text back, when will their kid grow out of their threenager phase, etc.
Most of the world is not nearly as preoccupied with AI as this community is. It’s refreshing to see when you can access it.
- I’m not one of those people that have agents running 24/7, but I am someone who always feels like they’re behind. The final paragraph of the post resonated deeply.
- > If the valley shows us what it means to live in the future
Luckily, never have been. From thousands of kilometers away, Silicon Valley have always been a special place of its own, sometimes in a positive way, most of the times in a pretty awful way, but only people living in the Valley think they leave in the future.
- Really appreciate the authenticity of the site design in the age of AI but damn! It is hurting my eyes!
- For what it’s worth, allowing agents to just run in the background provides me with more time to play with my child than I had in the past. Some stuff deserves to be automated, isn’t that the purpose of code in the first place?
But overall premise is on point, people are being pretty goofy about this tech; it’s just another tool - nothing to go into psychosis over, which seems to be happening in some cases, unfortunately. Touching some grass certainly helps.
- I really enjoy these short blurbs about something the author realized, felt, or just experienced.
It’s the same feeling as finding meaningful graffiti but on the internet. And yes, I mean that in a good way.
- Everyone lives in anxiety. Whether they use AI or not, people shout that their way is the right way. Right or wrong, I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.
I use AI, but I don't feel the need to convince those who don't to use it. Conversely, if someone who doesn't use AI tells me not to, I'll just agree and move on.
I see the ongoing AI driven transformation as part of the early adoption phase of a technology, a period where it's often 'overused.' I think there will come a time when we acknowledge its limitations and adopt a more mature approach. Right now, I feel we're still in the early stage.
I don't know if the two examples in the post are real or fabricated, but even if they are, I don't see a reason to think relying on that technology is necessarily bad. Because I've seen a 30 year old woman with the intellectual capacity of a 15 year old use AI effectively. She asked about everything she didn't know, and it actually helped prevent a crime, a case of voice phishing.
Ultimately, technology is value neutral. But society's demands can reshape themselves around technology.
If that's the case, we should first question the nature of the anxiety itself. Why does a husband earning $550,000 still cling to something despite that? Why does a startup founder want even his dates to be evaluated?
It's because society demands those values and norms. From an Eastern perspective, we often say to step away from those value frameworks and realize who you truly are. But even that value framework is itself a kind of frame and a shackle.
The real question is where most anxiety comes from. It arises whenever individuals feel the need to conform to societal norms.
Both examples show that. Society demands self optimization through performance and competition, and AI simply makes that demand cheaper and more granular. The first example is about maximizing competition for promotion, wealth, and status using AI. The second example, the startup founder, treats even human relationships as improvable metrics.
We always feel anxiety in the gap between norms and our current state.
Even with a $550,000 salary, if the surrounding norm is 'a better house, higher AI productivity,' it will feel insufficient.
Even if a date was enjoyable, if the question is 'Was I empathetic and attractive enough?' then evaluation becomes necessary because you care about how you'll be perceived on her social media.
'Never Enough' isn't because desire is infinite. It's because the evaluation criteria are constantly updated externally, so we can never feel satisfied.
- > I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.
This is a key point, and one that is rarely articulated.
The problem -- for me, anyway -- with the Current Era is specifically the workload, but the relentlessness.
I'm old enough to remember the Old Days of big release dates. You'd grind for a while, sometimes in a deathmarch, but after the release the organization would relax and there would be _some_ slack.
Now it's an endless river of prompts, push to prod, fix, repeat ad nauseam. Because implementation is now much cheaper but genuinely good ideas are as scarce as ever, companies are turning into a random walk optimizations weirdly mirroring training regimes. The idea apparently being that you make enough features/changes you'll eventually find the key to unlocking hyper-growth.
But unlike a training system, all these intermediate steps compound. Customers find their software mutating under them at an alarming rate. Maintainability becomes barely possible, even with Claude doing a ton of work. We're just creating technical debt we expect the future AI to fix, and getting no closer to the "revenue unlock."
Many are chained with fear to this dehumanizing and demoralizing system, and it sucks.
- I'm a programmer with about 7 years of experience in programming work. I appreciate hearing this from someone with far more experience than I have. senior sir.(In Korea, the word senior is sometimes referred to as one of the positions, but it is also used as a respected adult.
I also think it's about the workload. A senior from my country (Korea) once told me something similar. He had 25 years of programming experience. He said to me:
'Back in the day, inefficiencies reduced the workload. People weren't used to email, or getting approvals took a day or two. Those inefficiencies actually meant people worked less. These days, there's just too much work.'
Hearing your words reminded me of what that senior programmer who hired me said.
It's true—once you start using AI code, it becomes hard to write your own code. Because the machine's abstraction and your abstraction are different. So there are points where maintainability becomes harder.
It feels like we're chasing efficiency so much that the resting points humans actually need are disappearing.
Anyway, I agree with you, senior.
- the resting points are disappearing and so are humans, if we look at the natality rates.
- Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.
- You shouldn't be surprised if you consider this simple fact:
We listen to tech bros trying to shape a distopian future, who spent more time with their computer then with their familly and friends.
- Pure rage bait.
Strong claims require strong evidence - which isn't offered here.
And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.
Maybe alternatively it's that person's way of experimenting with these new tools to explore what they can do. Maybe that person will discover something - for example, ebay was a terrible idea when it was first brought up!
It'd be unsound to assume if you're playing with agents you don't also talk to humans.
- > And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.
Sure. But assuming that he's referring to Emmie Chang, it's very weird to record every conversation you have in general, and extra weird to be doing it on first dates.
If I went on a date and realized I was being recorded, I would immediately leave. This isn't normal, this is a wild choice to make. I will absolutely yuk this yum, the same way I would yuk the yum of someone who follows their date home and records them through a window.
- Aah, sweet first dates. Pick a place, pick a time, swap each other's GDPR/CCPA consents. Who doesn't know it?
- > Strong claims require strong evidence
I wish more people viewed things this way.
Feels like a lot of the public discourse now is "strong claims, vibes as evidence".
- Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
- Evidence for what? That Silicon Valley has lost the plot? Or rather that its vision of "the future" turns out to be pretty horrible?
Weren't the past years - from attention economy, surveillance capitalism and enshittification over crypto grifters to rationalist cults , "existential AI risk" that they're simultaneously warning against and building to Thiel's "Antichrist" to every Big Tech company pivoting from progressive to conservative the moment Trump comes back into power - enough evidence?
- Their vision for the future was California Forever and it was shot down.
