Never Enough
dark.ronacher.eu
dark.ronacher.eu
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.
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 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 feel like you're conflating "having worth" (value) and "being worth doing" (it's good to do it) in here?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Honestly it's driving me mad and I'm thinking about looking for different work.
Say you were expected to complete a task in 10 hours. Now you can use AI with it and you do it in 5.
What incentive would you have to raise your hand at the 5 hour mark and go "Done, please give me more work!"? Maybe do it at the 9 hour mark or maybe 8 if you're feeling brave and use the extra 3-4 hours on something else.
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.
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
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.
Quite often the conveniences we take have a long horizon before they bear their true cost.
Holy insanity
(tangentially related recommended reading https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ )
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?
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.
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.
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.
I hope that person finds more confidence and especially starts having fun, because that's what dating can be.
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.
p.s. LOVE the animated header on this blog
Nothing new.
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).
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.
Why weren't you taking them off before?
What did the LLM's speed up that was taking that time away from you?
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.
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
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.
Fascinating.
Humans seem to be forgetting this step. Birthrates are down
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s the same feeling as finding meaningful graffiti but on the internet. And yes, I mean that in a good way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Its so dystopian these people are souless ghouls.
We listen to tech bros trying to shape a distopian future, who spent more time with their computer then with their familly and friends.
p.s. Very annoying when people link to paywalled articles.
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.
I wish more people viewed things this way.
Feels like a lot of the public discourse now is "strong claims, vibes as evidence".
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?
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.