* I agree with much of the article. I worry about the present and the future, the socio-economic upheaval, and the possible arrival of the "Idiocracy" (prescient movie), as even the most intelligent people around me are falling into arguing LLM outputs with each other rather than engaging their own knowledge/critical thinking. Slop is everywhere, from entertainment to management to programming to marketing to politics to social networks to human communication to everything, and it doesn't seem to be getting better. And I miss, miss, miss people who understood a piece of technology comprehensively and made wonderful things that are optimized and clever and cool and took effort and exemplified the best of "hacking". Even before LLMs I worked with architects who didn't know what a network port is, developers who genuinely didn't know which RDBMS their software ran on, sysadmins who barely understood what their servers were used for, and none of them cared. LLMs have accelerated all that the way only Vernon Vinge's technology singularity / asymptotic vertical growth can properly illustrate.
* But... after months (years?) of despair and anxiety, last few weeks something broke in me, possibly for the better. I am trying to focus on the here and now. I've bought a C64 and I plan to learn it in massive depth with my 8 year old son. I've started water-colouring, because in a world where AI perfection is cheap, I suddenly find value even in my extremely crappy but hard-earned scraps. I restarted playing guitar, poorly. I'm trying to stop myself, in my private life, from calibrating to YouTube Influencers and TikTok Content Creators and despairing that everything I could do, hundreds of people on the internet are doing better. I'm trying (it's a work in progress:) to focus on "What do I actually enjoy?" and do that, rather than focus on the runaway chain reaction our society is apparently hell-bound to follow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still massively anxious not only about my on job, but also about my kids - they are 5 and 8 and I have NO idea anymore what job market will be like in 15-20 years, now that we are eradicating knowledge workers at massive pace. But now, the hand-made get-well card my cousin made for my wife's recovery, the hand-written piece of super-cool C64 code, and a cool but genuine and sincere clip somebody made in their backyard with a crappy camera are what I'm focusing on rather than massive, massive amount of AI generated stuff out there.
NikolaNovak · · focus · HN ↗
* But... after months (years?) of despair and anxiety, last few weeks something broke in me, possibly for the better. I am trying to focus on the here and now. I've bought a C64 and I plan to learn it in massive depth with my 8 year old son. I've started water-colouring, because in a world where AI perfection is cheap, I suddenly find value even in my extremely crappy but hard-earned scraps. I restarted playing guitar, poorly. I'm trying to stop myself, in my private life, from calibrating to YouTube Influencers and TikTok Content Creators and despairing that everything I could do, hundreds of people on the internet are doing better. I'm trying (it's a work in progress:) to focus on "What do I actually enjoy?" and do that, rather than focus on the runaway chain reaction our society is apparently hell-bound to follow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still massively anxious not only about my on job, but also about my kids - they are 5 and 8 and I have NO idea anymore what job market will be like in 15-20 years, now that we are eradicating knowledge workers at massive pace. But now, the hand-made get-well card my cousin made for my wife's recovery, the hand-written piece of super-cool C64 code, and a cool but genuine and sincere clip somebody made in their backyard with a crappy camera are what I'm focusing on rather than massive, massive amount of AI generated stuff out there.