* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.

* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?

* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.

* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.

* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.

* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.

100% now discuss AI.

No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.

Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.

Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.

You are showing disagreements with your priorities (mostly money) as unintelligent. You're showing a lack of care and conscientiousness as unintelligent.

You're reducing intelligence to alignment with money and following instructions. Under that framing the argument is already won in favor of AI amd some vague effective maximizing of a cost function.

Many jobs are like this, so it's fine for employment. Maybe the vast majority of mankind was never suitable for reliable employment of the "cost function" style.

But I know two things:

1. Centralization should be avoided. The reality that AI can do most jobs is not a reason to concentrate power behind those portraying that or building AI. We still want local, ideally individual, empowerment. I don't see enough said about this. Maybe we can even say the system must be one people wish to opt in to, to maximize profit.

2. Intelligence is being very narrowly defined and humans value more than an INT score in the RPG sense. The more I meet people outside my belief circles, the more I realize the intelligence of some actions, in the sense of "logically deduced from a higher principle" not "aligned with my western white collar principles". The ultimate role of culture and humanity IS this principle exploration and to say we've reduced that exploration to "maximize X" is crazy.

At some point deciding fate of the company or system or state flows from principles embedded in cultures and that's in danger of being flattened away by optimizing outcomes with machines.

Vague and wishy washy, but its the clearest I can state it.

Instead, focusing on policies that harm (or do not help) those factors you rightly point out sure does seem like a better way of handling it. Otherwise what, you have to choose between housing costs and mental health (when clearly housing costs contributes to mental health??).

Choosing to focus on everything is choosing to focus on nothing.

    She said: “The evidence is clear that successive governments have failed to deliver on their promise to reduce suicide rates and make suicide prevention a priority. Today must act as a wake up call. The current approach is not working; we need meaningful action and proper funding if lives are to be saved.”

I was thinking just today about how, if I could hire my competition's lead designer/programmers, have them design a system for me cleanroom, that I'd effectively know everything there is to know about my competition's limitations. This is trivial to do with LLMs.

"Make me a thing that does X" is going to come out implemented basically the same way most of the time, as a kind of stack-overflow, well commented, internship project. (or, if undirected enough, as a collection of those based on a bog-standard architecture)

Same-y enough that you could train an adversary on it? Or hack it afterward? I am beginning to think so!

And suddenly we're looking at people who read ticker tape or by following with their finger for insights into neuroscience?

Of course, attention is almost certainly a heuristic readers use, but to even bring it up as key to intelligence begs so many questions about LLMs and the mind...

For some reason this is controversial, but it remains true.

It takes me generally 3 months to find a good job, and while the industry is changing I suspect you'll be ok. Nobody I know is hunting for jobs.

Hang in there

Combine this with a growing sense of being "left behind" and a highly publicized collapse in software jobs coming any day now and any proof of contribution is highly prized. So why not?