Fountain pen + fancy paper sounds like I am tied to a desk again. Stephenson is probably doing way more intense sit down grind out some pages type writing sessions though.

The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social media deleted my brain reaches out for something: Hacker News or Zillow or even stock market tickers get swapped in as the void-fillers.

I wonder if life was always sort of boring and lacked meaning and people used to just sit in that reality patiently or if modern life has siphoned meaning off of it so we have had to replace it with these mindless activities.

That is why I would be hesitant to review complex Rust or some other code I have no experience in, sure the language has ways to handle things like async, garbage collection, etc. but I would just be assuming the AI is doing it right or even worse trying to steer it to handle it in a Javascript or Go manner.

I understand the feasibility of this and sometimes in my lazier moments I skim the code changes and trust automated/manual testing to validate changes, but to just like... you don't even see what it did?

Big surprise they all got skin cancer. Then they swung the pendulum all the way back and now preach 24/7 sunscreen and never letting the sun touch you.

The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.

Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.

The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.

That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.

For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.

If the goal is to be good that is fine, but there is little correlation with salary.

In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.

I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.

From 18-28 life was sharing apartments with various friends just wiling our time away working easy jobs, rock climbing, video games, girls, etc. Then the looming pressure of "you are wasting your life!" drove us all into serious careers and relationships one by one.

Is it societal pressure that pushes us out of that life? It would be considered an "empty" existence, but being a part time bartender who just meanders around and spends time with friends/family until their time is up would be a weirdly buddhist lifestyle.

Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.

I hate to be a "tech elitist" or whatever, but goddamn it seems like software is one of the most learning intensive careers you can pick. A little dabbling around the house has made me an amateur plumber/HVAC/handyman/gardener/etc. I should have gone into a trade, just for the comfort of having a skillset that doesn't need to be updated every 3 months. I guess my brain plasticity will thank me.

The problem is that sucks, even if all software engineers keep their jobs and salaries, the floor is still pulled out from under us. Imagine if a surgeons job was to supervise robot surgeons from a remote computer, or a woodworker just signs off on work before the machines do all the cutting and assembly. Sure they still have important jobs in their field but the soul & humanity of their skill is gone.

Lawyers, Finance bros, Accountants, Doctors are all still barely being scratched at compared to the massive investments into AI tools for tech workers. I don't think they have had their "oh shit" moment where you realize you either need to adopt to this new world or be left behind, but it is coming.

Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.

I agree that automation is good when it frees us up for higher pursuits, but what is the end goal? All human labor is replaced? No human can produce anything of value relative to a machine? What does our life look like then?

They don't seem to realize that 100X the resources have been dumped into building coding/design tools as other industries. As soon as that hose gets turned towards their industry they are going to be in a similar or worse boat.