6 ms·

Never Enough

nelsonfigueroa 3mo ago
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.
amarcheschi 3mo ago
>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
- kubb 3mo ago
  Dating in the Silicon Valley must be hell.
  - amarcheschi 3mo ago
    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
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Yes. There were never any performative parts to dating prior to the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022.
      - amarcheschi 3mo ago
        I didn't say it wasn't performative before
    - pas 3mo ago
      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/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )
  - infecto 3mo ago
    Nothing new. It was not great 10+ years ago. I always found NYC to be a much more fun city in that regard. The Bay Area folks always had nothing better to talk about except work.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      And burning man.
  - pas 3mo ago
    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-t...
    - kubb 3mo ago
      Wow what a screed. Comfort-seeking through analysis, categorization, and grand theory of society based on personal experience. It could be more valuable and interesting to just provide dating anecdotes. I’m not sure there’s value in presenting that experience as a half-digested diagnosis about what’s wrong. Especially when it comes with so many hidden assumptions about how things have to be and the inevitable projections of their own experiences and expectations onto the lives of others. Why would you just link it without a comment?
      - joenot443 3mo ago
        > Why would you just link it without a comment? I would imagine they linked it because it's a great read and they figured others would be interested. ACX is extremely well known around here, I'm surprised you're unfamiliar. Scott runs creative writing contests for his readers, this was one of the finalists. I think you're reading far more seriously into a writing exercise than necessary, which I'd imagine is why you were left bothered by it.
        kubb 3mo ago
        I see, so it's not meant to be taken seriously. Missed that context, thanks! I don't know Scott, I'm sure he's a great guy.
- datakan 3mo ago
  I weep for the future
  - pas 3mo ago
    natural selection rather quickly fixes this, don't worry
    - pixl97 3mo ago
      Natural selection in humans is a very long horizon problem.
      - moritzwarhier 3mo ago
        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.
- markovs_gun 3mo ago
  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.
  - weatherlite 3mo ago
    > 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.
    - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
      We didn't have to turn the dial up to eleven though.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- microtonal 3mo ago
  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.
  - Balgair 3mo ago
    I can see doing this for job interviews, and even then only for certain types of jobs too. But yeah, if I learned that a potential match did this to me, well, I think that would change a lot in my evaluation of that person as a partner.
cpursley 3mo ago
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.
mulhoon 3mo ago
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
- pavel_lishin 3mo ago
  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.
- antisthenes 3mo ago
  It's like the century old fable about the businessman and the fisherman. Nothing new.
- microtonal 3mo ago
  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.
  - bbkane 3mo ago
    What countries do this?
    - microtonal 3mo ago
      I live in The Netherlands where this is pretty common. E.g. in our kid's class all parents (moms and dads) work and most of them work part-time (stay at home 1-2 afternoons or one full day).
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
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.
- dalvasorsali 3mo ago
  > 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".
  - antisthenes 3mo ago
    Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
- xg15 3mo ago
  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?
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Their vision for the future was California Forever and it was shot down.
- pavel_lishin 3mo ago
  > 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.
jdw64 3mo ago
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.
- golddust-gecko 3mo ago
  > 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.
m0llusk 3mo ago
Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.
collinmcnulty 3mo ago
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.
mcrk 3mo ago
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.
raychis 3mo ago
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.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  "we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.
  - lotsofpulp 3mo ago
    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.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      That is not true. Prices for necessities keep increasing faster than inflation.
- bko 3mo ago
  > 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!
itintheory 3mo ago
>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.
- jcarrano 3mo ago
  > 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust
  - forlorn_mammoth 3mo ago
    > breed much more easily. Humans seem to be forgetting this step. Birthrates are down
- cthe 3mo ago
  But we're not insects, we are civilized and there is enough resources to be shared among everyone, isn't it ?
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    Our behavior can be colony insect like when we are in crowds. A person might be smart, but crowds quickly devolve.
rglover 3mo ago
> 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).
- microtonal 3mo ago
  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.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
  > (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?
  - rglover 3mo ago
    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).
- MisterTea 3mo ago
  > (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?
FinnLobsien 3mo ago
> 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.
- ttd 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - FinnLobsien 3mo ago
    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.
  - 3mo ago
nchmy 3mo ago
This is insanity. p.s. Very annoying when people link to paywalled articles.
- nchmy 3mo ago
  whats with the downvotes...? I am agreeing with the article that this is all insanity. and just adding a ps that its annoying when people link to articles that very few people can actually read.
cushychicken 3mo ago
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.
pjerem 3mo ago
> 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.
shibaprasadb 3mo ago
Really appreciate the authenticity of the site design in the age of AI but damn! It is hurting my eyes!
tptacek 3mo ago
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.
- reasonableklout 3mo ago
  What was weird during the first Internet bubble?
ofjcihen 3mo ago
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.
vmg12 3mo ago
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.
- pedalpete 3mo ago
  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.
yeoyeo42 3mo ago
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.
quaddoggy 3mo ago
Perhaps some members of society will choose to swear off LLMs entirely. "Clauddites"?
whereistejas 3mo ago
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.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
AuthAuth 3mo ago
>The husband asked his wife to take over almost all parenting so he could spend days, nights and weekends becoming his company’s top user of AI. Its so dystopian these people are souless ghouls.
throw-the-towel 3mo ago
> 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. Damn, this could have been me. I used to want something like this. I was in my late teens, heavily into computers, on the autistic spectrum but didn't yet know what the hell that was, and I felt deeply disconnected from my peers. I dreamt that perhaps, there could be some kind of robots that could help me with figuring out how is all that socialisation shit supposed to work. But that would only appear in some faraway sci fi future, and I might not even live to see that time. Some fifteen years pass, and the sci fi future is now. The feeling is rather disconcerting.

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.

amarcheschi 3mo ago

>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

kubb 3mo ago
Dating in the Silicon Valley must be hell.
- amarcheschi 3mo ago
  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
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Yes. There were never any performative parts to dating prior to the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022.
    - amarcheschi 3mo ago
      I didn't say it wasn't performative before
  - pas 3mo ago
    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/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )
- infecto 3mo ago
  Nothing new. It was not great 10+ years ago. I always found NYC to be a much more fun city in that regard. The Bay Area folks always had nothing better to talk about except work.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    And burning man.
- pas 3mo ago
  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-t...
  - kubb 3mo ago
    Wow what a screed. Comfort-seeking through analysis, categorization, and grand theory of society based on personal experience. It could be more valuable and interesting to just provide dating anecdotes. I’m not sure there’s value in presenting that experience as a half-digested diagnosis about what’s wrong. Especially when it comes with so many hidden assumptions about how things have to be and the inevitable projections of their own experiences and expectations onto the lives of others. Why would you just link it without a comment?
    - joenot443 3mo ago
      > Why would you just link it without a comment? I would imagine they linked it because it's a great read and they figured others would be interested. ACX is extremely well known around here, I'm surprised you're unfamiliar. Scott runs creative writing contests for his readers, this was one of the finalists. I think you're reading far more seriously into a writing exercise than necessary, which I'd imagine is why you were left bothered by it.
      - kubb 3mo ago
        I see, so it's not meant to be taken seriously. Missed that context, thanks! I don't know Scott, I'm sure he's a great guy.
datakan 3mo ago
I weep for the future
- pas 3mo ago
  natural selection rather quickly fixes this, don't worry
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    Natural selection in humans is a very long horizon problem.
    - moritzwarhier 3mo ago
      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.
markovs_gun 3mo ago
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.
- weatherlite 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
    We didn't have to turn the dial up to eleven though.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
microtonal 3mo ago
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.
- Balgair 3mo ago
  I can see doing this for job interviews, and even then only for certain types of jobs too. But yeah, if I learned that a potential match did this to me, well, I think that would change a lot in my evaluation of that person as a partner.

cpursley 3mo ago

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.

mulhoon 3mo ago

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

pavel_lishin 3mo ago
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.
antisthenes 3mo ago
It's like the century old fable about the businessman and the fisherman. Nothing new.
microtonal 3mo ago
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.
- bbkane 3mo ago
  What countries do this?
  - microtonal 3mo ago
    I live in The Netherlands where this is pretty common. E.g. in our kid's class all parents (moms and dads) work and most of them work part-time (stay at home 1-2 afternoons or one full day).

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

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.

dalvasorsali 3mo ago
> 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".
- antisthenes 3mo ago
  Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
xg15 3mo ago
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?
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Their vision for the future was California Forever and it was shot down.
pavel_lishin 3mo ago
> 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.

jdw64 3mo ago

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.

golddust-gecko 3mo ago
> 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.

m0llusk 3mo ago

Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.

collinmcnulty 3mo ago

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.

mcrk 3mo ago

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.

raychis 3mo ago

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.

inigyou 3mo ago
"we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.
- lotsofpulp 3mo ago
  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.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    That is not true. Prices for necessities keep increasing faster than inflation.
bko 3mo ago
> 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!

itintheory 3mo ago

>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.

jcarrano 3mo ago
> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust
- forlorn_mammoth 3mo ago
  > breed much more easily. Humans seem to be forgetting this step. Birthrates are down
cthe 3mo ago
But we're not insects, we are civilized and there is enough resources to be shared among everyone, isn't it ?
- pixl97 3mo ago
  Our behavior can be colony insect like when we are in crowds. A person might be smart, but crowds quickly devolve.

rglover 3mo ago

> 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).

microtonal 3mo ago
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.
ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
> (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?
- rglover 3mo ago
  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).
MisterTea 3mo ago
> (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?

FinnLobsien 3mo ago

> 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.

ttd 3mo ago
> 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.
- FinnLobsien 3mo ago
  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.
- 3mo ago

nchmy 3mo ago

This is insanity. p.s. Very annoying when people link to paywalled articles.

nchmy 3mo ago
whats with the downvotes...? I am agreeing with the article that this is all insanity. and just adding a ps that its annoying when people link to articles that very few people can actually read.

cushychicken 3mo ago

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.

pjerem 3mo ago

> 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.

shibaprasadb 3mo ago

Really appreciate the authenticity of the site design in the age of AI but damn! It is hurting my eyes!

tptacek 3mo ago

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.

reasonableklout 3mo ago
What was weird during the first Internet bubble?

ofjcihen 3mo ago

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.

vmg12 3mo ago

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.

pedalpete 3mo ago
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.

yeoyeo42 3mo ago

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.

quaddoggy 3mo ago

Perhaps some members of society will choose to swear off LLMs entirely. "Clauddites"?

whereistejas 3mo ago

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.

deleted 3mo ago

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AuthAuth 3mo ago

>The husband asked his wife to take over almost all parenting so he could spend days, nights and weekends becoming his company’s top user of AI. Its so dystopian these people are souless ghouls.

throw-the-towel 3mo ago

> 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. Damn, this could have been me. I used to want something like this. I was in my late teens, heavily into computers, on the autistic spectrum but didn't yet know what the hell that was, and I felt deeply disconnected from my peers. I dreamt that perhaps, there could be some kind of robots that could help me with figuring out how is all that socialisation shit supposed to work. But that would only appear in some faraway sci fi future, and I might not even live to see that time. Some fifteen years pass, and the sci fi future is now. The feeling is rather disconcerting.