Anger, Anxiety and Agency
lucumr.pocoo.org
lucumr.pocoo.org
People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.
(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)
I also have a very, "The world's gonna do what the world's gonna do, the best I can do is find my path through and flow with it," attitude about, well... most things. Maybe that helps? Maybe I'm talking out of my ass rn? I'm unsure! :)
Few people have anything that comes anywhere near any sort of philosophical foundation that they can rely on to weather their anxieties. If anything they only strengthen their sensibility to express—and compound—their worries.
I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe I'll need to figure out childcare, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll have food to eat this weekend, maybe I won't. Maybe my job will go away next year, maybe it won't. Today, there's work, and I'll do that work as best I can. Today, there's evidence things are changing, and I can be aware of that. Today, I can do something prudent to make myself more resilient towards whatever may or may not happen. Tomorrow, if something happens, I can react accordingly.
The mind wants certainty, but that's not always available, so I observe the "wanting". The best I can do is act based on what's in front of me, and sitting in the negative emotions around existential thoughts doesn't help me, nor my family (it's natural to have them, but I acknowledge them and let them pass by). The best I can do is to do. If things change, I change. Everything in nature/life is ephemeral, and I have done my best throughout my life to set myself up to be as adaptable as possible.
Edit: To reduce this and get a bit Tao-ish, you don't need to know the exact shape of the river downstream as long as you're capable of steering when you get there.
I take it you've never worked on realtime software. :)
For most Americans with kids, if they don't figure out childcare they will miss deadlines. By missing deadlines they risk systemic failures: failure to make enough income to eat, keep their job, pay for healthcare, etc.
It's easy to get Tao-ish about meeting deadlines when your buffer is above 100k.
That's not to say that things aren't easier or harder at different levels, but you can still approach life from that perspective no matter where you are at. I've always lived a life far from the the income levels that are common around these parts, and this is how I've to sustained myself and remained happy.
I disagree with this and the same patronizing attitude of the article. We live in an age where being anxious, unsure and neurotic isn't just tolerated but encouraged. The reason is pretty obvious, anxious people are paralyzed, self-critical and as a consequence harmless. Hence Alfred Adlers profound insight, we don't suffer from anxiety, we produce it because it's a safeguarding mechanism against conflict, it's an excuse for not acting. That's why it's everywhere today.
The author is right that anger is directed at someone, and in this AI shitshow where developers have technology shoved unto them some righteous old testament anger at the people responsible would be a very productive thing indeed. In the words of Utah Phillips The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.
Anxious people in the workplace tend to have no agency, they go to the pill doctor or ask themselves if they're at fault, angry people organize make their interests heard. It's pretty obvious why the tech 'luminaries' in charge prefer one over the other.
Maybe one day AI will make a contribution that's so awesome that we'll look back at all of the harm it's causing and say that it was worth it, but that day... zero sum day... seems distant indeed.
We used to gain status by being good hunters and warriors, and now we're trying to get it through clever hacker news comments. Believe me, "human nature" is very flexible.
People are just uncomfortable with uncertainty when they're not used to it. I think most of us have trained ourselves out of a lot of intense emotions in favor of seeing the big picture. I could give a hundred examples of this.
And how society has trained you. Most people understand the social impacts of appearing anxious and unsure. It's bad in pretty much every situation. I would say in most cases being angry will lead to better outcomes.
I really expected this sentence to read “we call it religion”.
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).
Yes, this is a school of thought I've seen in a few communication circles. It's not entirely accurate, but it's a useful exercise. They teach that anger is really a derived emotion, and is a result of a fundamental emotion, coupled with a narrative in your mind. The fundamental emotion is the real one, and the narrative in your mind maybe inaccurate. As a result, when you're angry, examine that narrative and ask: "Is this the only narrative that fits the data points?"
There have been occasions where I felt instant anger as a result of a stimulus, and there really wasn't a narrative behind it.
But those are the exceptions. In well over 95% of the cases, it is a derived emotion.
Related: A lot of people really seem hardwired to blame. When something goes wrong (at work, in their life, wherever), they seem to be incomplete if they can't find someone to blame. They often refuse to accept that "Accidents can happen."
Separating the act of "solving a problem" from the act of "blaming someone" was something I learned early in my career. It's useful to know which people you work with are those who can't distinguish.
Pro tip: Never work for a manager whose first question when something goes wrong is "Who owns this?" It's OK to get there eventually, but not the first impulse.
I worked for a company that this was never asked, because we already knew.
Every task/bug/feature had an "owner," before any work was done on it. We had this insane JIRA ticket workflow that was designed to force someone to be in charge of every item. You couldn't just put something down, and walk away.
It was a pain, but when problems happened, there was never a "blame game." We would just figure out if there was a root cause. If it was someone's mistake, they might be made responsible for fixing it, but if we felt they were in over their head, we'd pitch in, and help. Everyone was always responsible for rolling up their sleeves.
People who pointed fingers, did not do well. People who broke stuff, seldom suffered, unless it was a habit, but people who fixed stuff (including stepping up, and taking the rap) would get kudos.
I'd have a job which required some expertise. John nearby had his job with his expertise (different from mine). John is overloaded[1], and can't own everything related to his expertise. So they take things off his plate and distribute it to other people - including people like me who have almost no understanding of what he does.
Then when something goes wrong, people come to me, but I don't understand any of it. So I go to John and, generally, he fixes the problem.
This is inefficient. People should have just gone to John.
But that's not the worst of it. John can refuse to help or fix. He makes it clear he is not the owner. I am. Or he's on vacation. Or whatever. No one cares about the reason. I'm the owner, so I need to fix it.
I got a demerit on the job because I didn't go to his cubicle multiple times a day, every day to demand he fix it (he was the one who broke it, BTW).
Management has a lot of excuses to support this dysfunction: I should have harassed him. I should have harassed his manager. I should have decided to become a domain expert when it was assigned to me. I'm supposed to hustle with a "Can do" mentality. On and on.
The other dynamic it led to was trying to pass it on to other people. When something broke, the reason wasn't always clear. The person assigned to own it didn't want it to be his problem, so he'd find some trivial detail that was off, and simply forward it to that other person to fix. That person would then write a lengthy (and often obvious) explanation why that trivial detail couldn't possibly have led to this breaking and pass it back. Only then would the original person dig deeper (well, unless he found some other trivial detail to bug someone with).
It was exhausting, and the impression I got was that by making everything owned by someone, it led to a culture of no one wanting to own anything.
If it's possible to really give every task appropriate ownership, I can understand. They definitely couldn't do it at that job. Ownership was just a word management used to sleep at night.
Getting back to my original point, the first question should always be: "How can this problem be fixed?" When exploring that, you may end up with "John owns it and he's the only one with the expertise" - and that's fine. Diving straight into "Who owns this?" is often his way of saying two things:
1. I don't want to fix it.
2. I want someone to be punished for this.
> We would just figure out if there was a root cause. If it was someone's mistake, they might be made responsible for fixing it, but if we felt they were in over their head, we'd pitch in, and help. Everyone was always responsible for rolling up their sleeves.
This is good. As long as there was a mechanism to assign appropriate ownership.
[1] There was always a lot more work than people available to do it.
Also, the team is always more important than the individual. That's a concept that doesn't work particularly well, on this side of the Pacific, but it worked for them.
There were many things about working there, that I think would drive folks here, nuts, but they consistently released some of the finest gear in the world.
Software...not so much. I really tried to get them to change the way they approached software development, but never really had much success.
This seems like a pretty big problem. A lot of tasks should be put down. And, on the flip side, you absolutely need room for people to do things without needing to publicly justify themselves ahead of time.
I've been in places that try to approximate this sort of tracking, and I never felt like they were free of blame, I felt like blame was the default. There's no need to play the "blame game" if the whole system makes people feel blamed automatically!
That said, I've found a variant of this works: give people ownership of general areas, with well-defined but permeable boundaries. You only need to track the details at the interaction points, and only a subset of the work has to happen at those points. This also gives you a lot more room for overlap between people and teams; an interaction point naturally has at least two "owners" and, in a pinch, either side can come up with a (possibly sub-optimal) solution on their own. Or people can shuffle interaction points around—stop depending on one thing, move to some alternative—to work around problems.
If you call an Uber and it's 30 minutes late almost causing you to miss the flight, the fundamental emotions could be anxiety, fear, annoyance, distraught, dismayed, restless, nervous, etc.
Anger arises from the narrative your brain tells itself to explain those emotions. Such as: The Uber engineers didn't model rush hour traffic in this area well! How are they paid so much more than me?
Fundamental emotions don't require the existence of another person.
After spending the last year in and out or rehab, and intensive outpatient dealing primarily with alcohol addiction, I've been told by many different people that anger is the emotion, its unhealthy to just ignore it. That's one of many things (anxiety for me) that keeps people in active addiction. Your statement is close to my belief and experience, except that Anger IS an emotion and all emotions are neutral, neither good or bad. Its how you respond to the emotion that can become the problem, weather its violence, drugs or any other harmful activity. Processing any emotion in a healthy way and being able to understand the reasons you feeling the emotion is the gamechanger. Speaking only from my own experience.
I spent the first ten years, in an almost constant state of anger. Giving it up, was almost as difficult as giving up other stuff, but it was definitely a watershed in my life.
However, I think that's all I'll say on the topic. These types of discussions are always best done in small groups, not in public, on a tech forum.
I sincerely wish you good luck!
Maybe anger helps draw attention to you. Maybe it garners some form of sympathy. Maybe people get out of your way when you're angry, giving you a certain kind of power.
The reason why you want to stop being angry is because you want to accomplish things without all the negative side effects too.
Being very honest about what you're getting out of something can give you the bigger picture on why you rely on it, so you can more effectively find solutions.
I know it's much maligned here on HN, but you've articulated one of the key principle of NVC (Nonviolent Communication): Being able to articulate your needs, and map your emotions with your needs.
The steps it recommends (not necessarily in this order):
1. Understand the facts
2. Label the emotions you're feeling (anxious, concerned, jubilant, etc)
3. Figure out the needs that are related to those emotions (e.g. purpose in life, shelter (usually income), hunger (usually income).
Even if you don't follow NVC, pretty much all communications books emphasize all 3 above. Another book had it this way:
1. Label your emotions.
2. Gather the facts.
3. Examine the narrative you're telling yourself based on the facts.
4. Explore that narrative (Is it the only possible narrative given the facts? What is missing in your life that is part of that narrative?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493179
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493147
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22759368
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19090712
In my experience, people who are heavily critical of it have not read the book, and are arguing either against articles espousing it, or have encountered what I call "The cult of NVC" at work.
The NVC book is incredibly simple. But there is a sort of cult around it. People greatly expand what's in the book to things the author never claimed. I've even attended an NVC chapter in my city and it was somewhat off putting.
If you're at all interested, read the book and avoid the cult. It's not a perfect book/framework, but I've yet to read a better framework. The downside of the book is it's relatively prescriptive, and doesn't cite research, or do a good job of explaining why the method often works. Other books do that, though. Had I read NVC by itself, I too would be a bit of a skeptic. It's only by reading other books that go deeper did I understand why NVC (usually) works.
But I think you're talking about anger creeping into daily life and everyday interactions - and in that regard I agree with what you've said. I suspect it also goes hand in hand with victim mentality, which in turn justifies the anger.
I see a lot of people can conflict the two, but they are distinct as label labels and mechanical processes in the mind. Anger surfaces when there is someone to blame. Or something to blame. Something you can pin the emotional and surge on.
For your hypothesis above to be true, you generally need some sort of risk involved for fear to be the actual emotion. Anger can appear with zero fear and simply something blocking your way.
So I’m just not sure that I really agree on anger needing fear. There are plenty of situations where it doesn’t hold.
The most destructive fear, is fear of not getting what I want. That is the fear that is most ubiquitous, and manifests in all sorts of destructive behavior.
It's still fear, though.
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
I felt this way very recently about the one projects I am focusing on. I kept seeing others explore the same space already ahead of me. I thought I'll never make it here because why use my thing when you can already use those things?
There was this extreme sense of urgency, as if I needed to do nothing else in my life but finish this project and get it out there. One day it hit me, and then over the course of a few weeks it settled in, that I was thinking of this from a place of extrinsic motivation. Basically, I was not doing what I wanted, I was doing what I thought others would want from me.
The project now has only two goals.
1. Build the project I want to use for myself, but in a way that will benefit others who happen to want the same thing.
2. The outcome of the project is not the code/app, it's a "changed Me", having learned everything I needed to to build the project.
Eventually I want the project to have a hosted paid platform version. I am not making this platform because I want to make money (I do, but that's besides the point). I am making this platform because I want experience in doing the types of things that can make money.
The whole thing now has become internally oriented in a way that allows me to no longer feel time pressure or be outcome oriented.
I went from feeling burned out spending all my time on this (I shed all other hobbies and activities), to having a great time spending all my time on this. The same amount of time/effort now feels indefinitely sustainable.
Framing is really one of the most powerful methods of emotional regulation. Whatever you are doing, make it relaxed and fun!
Historically, no. But historically we didn’t have computers that could do my ostensible job 50x faster than I can.
As in the huge majority of entrepreneurship cases, your company fails and then you're in personal financial ruin for the rest of your life ?
Who's we? The impact this has on society at large is such an enormous, pervasive topic in my life - headlines in city newspapers, conversation at the dinner table - that I feel like you'd have to be living in a bunker to think nobody is engaging with it. This guy comes across as entirely disconnected from the world, but somehow thinks he knows how people who actually live in it should feel.
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
That's what's frustrating.
It reminds me of (for the pedants out there, I'm not saying it's equivalent to) the consume product meme. "Don't ask questions, just complete assignment and then get excited for next industry trend."
>I don’t know what the future of this industry will look like, and I don’t know who will benefit from it and I don’t think I’m alone with that. However I can only urge anyone who feels anger and looks for a villain right to instead remain curious instead. To be curious enough to understand what is changing, excited enough to experiment with it. And then, from what we learn, earn the right to decide when resistance is warranted and where to direct it.
Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.
Like the one from the author, who has never written in this style before AI.
Author here: maybe I wasn't too clear about this, but I have seen people direct their anger about about what AI does to their jobs at people who themselves are not in a situation to do anything about it (eg: line managers or leaderships in businesses who are trying to roll out AI based coding tools).
I would even say that being angry at the wrong person is as bad as not being angry at the right person.
Being angry is a societal tool to put limits on what can or cannot be done. If there is no anger when people crosses the line, then there is no real signal for them to not cross the line. And, no, "a peaceful rational argument" is not an alternative. This is not at all the same signal, this is a signal that is sent way earlier before that specific line and it is exactly how the overton window shifts.
This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.
>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?
The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.
You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.
Tell us what we can do against the mindless slop! DDoS Anthropic?
I say "tech" in quotes because they aren't "tech" companies anymore. They surveil, exploit customers, and engage in anti-competitive activities to maintain their golden egg laying geese.
I have a whole lot of reasons to be... UNSURE about being in tech. VERY UNSURE.
>Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame.
I know this isn't the "hacker mindset" or whatever. But my anger is well placed and justified. It is pointed at a very specific set of people who are actively doing everything in their power to turn the world into a surveillance spam slop hellscape while massively enriching themselves and destroying the biosphere.
They are using this technology TODAY to build a surveillance state. They are using this technology TODAY to spam the ever loving shit out of every place on the internet with a comment box. They are using this technology TODAY to fool people and to distance people from one another. They are using this technology TODAY to bomb schools and designate people terrorists and fly drones into gas stations. And they are doing all of this TODAY, right now, while literally stealing and burning books, cooking the biosphere, and making everyone's electricity more expensive. It is not a "bet" or something they are unsure of. It is something that they are doing, today.
Sorry, I am going to be unsure, curious, and anxious about this technology when the people in charge of it cease using their basically unchecked authoritarian power to immiserate myself and everyone else, literally billions of people, who are in my social class.
I am not curious or uncertain about any of this, I know exactly what is happening and I hate it and I hate the people who are responsible for it. They have names and I'm confident that when this is all over, they will burn in hell.
The naive disney approach to anger is "you should not be angry, it is baaaad". But anger is an important signal to put limits on what is not acceptable to do in society. If my neighbour throw their garbage over the fence in my garden, me being angry at them is the uncomfortable situation they will be faced with and that will teach them it is not acceptable. Alternatives don't work: any other response will signal that what they've done is in fact "not that bad afterall, otherwise people would have been angry".
As per the article, it does answer why I should be anxious. Not why I should be angry.
I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying
When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.
In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat
And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.
So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.
Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.
I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult
So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.
I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water
Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform.
Now? Its all gas no brakes. Just shove AI into everything. No vetting, no testing, just shove it into everything and see what happens. This is not software development to me - this is sprinting towards a brick wall.
I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy. Talk to people about your skills and see if what else is out there. Look at going into adjacent fields, etc. When I went through the first dot com bust and then the 08' crash? The only thing that saved me was networking. I had a few friends that I was talking to who were getting me interviews and telling me about openings that weren't being published.
Keep your shoulder to the wind and keep pushing, there's light at the end of this, I just don't know how long the tunnel is.
> I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy
I have been very bad at making friends and networking throughout my life, but it's something I'm working on. Appreciate the clarity that I am probably doing the right thing
I have pretty similar feelings to what you are going through.
I was so stressed like seven or eight months ago that for two weeks I was constantly sleep deprived. Then I just asked myself "What is the worst that can happen?" The answer helped me relax a bit. I will just move to some small village somewhere, open a shop for anything and get by. Life will go on.
I seriously think software is / was hard. That means people that thrived in it were smart and disciplined.
And which other profession has so much change? My father is a civil engineer. The tools and formulas he uses has not changed in 50 years while I have to pick up whatever hype tech is asked of me. Many people are similar to me. So we are very adaptable in my most honest opinion.
If it comes to _worst of it_, smart and adaptable people is where I would put my bet on being able to find their footing in the new world.
I don’t really think that AI will destroy the field of software development, but there’s a constant sense of urgency underlying every working hour where I have to second guess whether I’m using the tools right and how much longer they’re even going to need a human in the loop (my gut says forever, but I’ve been wrong before …)
If I could go back in time, I would pick a different career. I’ve learned that I value consistency and predictability in my life, and tech is clearly not where you’re going to find that. If this was just a hobby, AI would be a godsend. But I always saw software development as my ticket to a decent life, and I’m left guessing everyday whether that ticket is still valid.
Never Be Angry at Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396811 - Aug 2026 (14 comments)
However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.
In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CHLavYHn-BG/?hl=en
Duration - how long will things take?
Path - how will we get there?
Outcome - what's at the end, or how I think of it, what does done look like or where do I want to be?
Things like anger and anxiety are IMO, when our brains take an unfortunate offramp instead of solving for these. I've used this as a analytical framework to calm myself and make a plan to get out of a jam many times: physical pain, pressure-cooker work stress, interpersonal conflicts.
I have also had significant success using it as mini-framework to help break down problems people have come to me with. There's a lot to emotions in general far beyond "psychologists HATE this one trick" - don't let me oversell it, but it immediately came to mind reading the article.
> [...]
> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.
With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.
It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.
So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.
That’s really the thing. If you understand how badly a few people are accumulating resources and power through the build up of AI, with the very explicit goal to make most people’s life worse, you have to be angry. Its a rational reaction. It doesn’t have to be tamed through an analytical process
At the same time you can't being angry at your boss because of AI if they're not directly doing something unethical to you, and just using it or asking you because pf productivity.
From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.
Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.
If you make a statement like that, I will have to ask you to reread the article. He's clear in saying:
1. Anger and anxiety should not be conflated.
2. Anxiety is OK.
> You can’t control your emotions like that.
The thesis (by him and other sources I've read) is that anger is an emotion that you do create (most of the time). It's a result of a narrative coupled with another emotion (anxiety in this case). You can't control the anxiety. You can control the narrative in your brain. With certain narratives, you get anger. With others, you don't.
I've known many who've made that journey. It seems the author has as well.
Now if your argument is that it's OK to be angry (you've made the narrative clear in your comment), I won't disagree.
He showed two pictures at a frustrating situation. The first WHY is this happening? Shaking a fist at the sky in anger. The second why IS this happening? Curiosity.
The second leads to revelations and growth about the company. It also doesn't endanger your job or make people want to work with you.
Work is a social game. Best to learn its rules rather than rage against the machine.
Say your company is acquired. The acquiring company promises how much better the world will be, how many resources they'll give you, etc. etc. Your companies get merged, hiring is basically all but shut off, management never lets another product release occur, and the entire acquisition is strangled until the day that the employees — but of course not the management responsible for this — is laid off.
I'm supposed to not be angry, while my co-worker sits there sobbing because her entire life is now in turmoil?
I sort of want to agree, in that, yes, it is generally fruitless to argue with corporations. In the above case, I'm laid off, no amount of screaming or tears is going to change it. But seeing people get away with such levels of incompetence — if not anger, what emotion should I be feeling? There's certainly some anxiety, but that's separate: I'm anxious about my coming lack of income, and needing to find new employ, sure, but that's what I feel towards my own impending future. But towards the management? I certainly don't feel agency: absolutely nothing I could have said or done would have changed things. The anger stems from the injustice of having to suffer the consequences for someone else's mistakes.
It's a borderline "how's the boot taste" attitude, in that we should never be angry, and just accept whatever bilge comes down from on high.
With regards to the AI stuff, we're watching the world (rightly) revolt against being told that glorified RNGs should dictate the outcomes of their lives in various imperceptible ways. And that leaves me feeling that, it wouldn't matter if we were building a "traditional", small-scale datacenter — the AI enthusiasts are going to so poison the well that we can forget about building anything ever anywhere ever again. All the while, the product being hawked is simply a garbage out generator, and I think the layperson gets that.
This is the deeper narrative. Some things apart from anger you could do: 1. Inspect this narrative and see if it's right? Or is there something you don't understand. It's happened for some reason. Disallow easy answers. 2. Learn that, so you're better prepared for the future.
Uncertainty is much more useful. Uncertainty helps us prepare. We don't know what's going to happen, so we start to plan: If X happens we do Y; meanwhile we'll stock up on Z, just in case we need it.
The problem with anger is that it feels good. It's easy--you don't have to do anything--but it feels like you're doing something. You can convince yourself that being angry is enough. Once people realize how angry you are, the problems will cease. And if they don't, well, you already know what to do: get angrier. No thinking required.
Anger is your genes' way of psyching you up to throw a punch. If someone steals your food, or hurts your mate or your children, you get angry and fight back. I get that. But you can't punch AI.
After reading both posts, I find myself still wholeheartedly agreeing with both of them.
Maybe there are lots of people out there who are so vague about what they're angry about that this isn't just massively condescending to the rest of us so much as mistargeted. At the same time I've found that folks who really don't believe in these downsides sometimes don't hear you when you bring specifics.
It's like the petro-campaign of "drive as much as you want, burn fuel non stop but if you recycle then everything is good...." then you put paper in one bin, and "the other garbage" in the other... two different trucks pick it and ends up in the same landfill (google "recycle end up same landfill apple tag" and pick one)... and by the way, the whole recycle thing was a diversion to keep your focus away from the actual issue... google "recycle was a scam by petro" and pick your poison
like when you start reading... we should start getting used to earth warming... how to tolerate more heat... and yes just google
Personally I'm glad this change is happening after I've already had a couple decades experience. Conventional wisdom is younger people adapt to change better, but in this case I feel some perspective on hype cycles and how they play out is helpful. So far the only thing that is clear is that AI can read and write code way faster than a human. However what I haven't seen is that AI can actually understand human goals, read between the lines, and answer the question: why are we writing this code in the first place?
Obviously with the pace of advancement, it's reasonable to think AI could get there, but here's the thing: so far AI has primarily empowered technically-minded people. Don't get me wrong, it can help many job functions (legal, product management, customer service, etc), but it's really a force multiplier for strong technical minds who can reason about the possibilities and limitations.
For this reason, I think it's premature to think of the end of software engineering as a profession. As with all the other job replacement talk, I think this becomes a political issue where if AI companies are truly capturing a significant share of the labor workforce, then we need to have that discussion as a society. Also, if you really love hand-crafted artisanal code for every random CRUD app under the sun, then yes there is a reckoning coming. But overall, I don't see AI as fundamentally different from many technical advancements that came before. It's uncomfortable, but I don't see the existential questions it raises as being fundamentally new. As software engineers we've been living at the peak of a technological pyramid of advancement that challenged many equally worthy humans before us for quite some time. I think wrestling with the current implications and moral questions is entirely fair play, and gets to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy.
I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).
The hard part (where I work) was never the code, it was all of the other BS that needs done (a lot of which happens in crusty old systems that look like they're from the mid 2000's)
Perhaps this would be far more exciting if I were younger. But right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can survive.
I find it great for experiments to throw away but I wish everyone remembered step 2 more often.
"Electronic drudgery" is how I earn my income which pays for my food and shelter. That's why I'm not excited.
The end result for me has been that I am now a gatekeeper trying to prevent AI slop making its way into systems which I care about, and failing, and getting dragged into meetings with my boss about how my performance has gone down now that I'm chained to this stupid thing and forced to use it for even the most trivial tasks.
I haven't been this upset with PayPal mafia overlords since crypto.
Over time, I suspect both human and AI writing will 'converge'. Humans are good at adopting/imitating language from a variety of sources, so I won't be surprised when we start using "load-bearing" in conversation. Simultaneously, LLMs will start sounding more natural.
Those problems are much worse in languages other than English, by the way. I'm not a native speaker but I always interact with LLMs in English because their prose in Italian is terrible, it often reads as though the text had been written in English and then translated.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with each of those stylistic elements in abstract, exactly like there's nothing wrong with em-dashes or the word "absolutely", but I would argue that writing well means choosing styles that match the content; what LLMs appear to be doing instead is forcing the message into a default pattern, which we percieve as forced and therefore tend to dislike.
To be clear: their writing is fine. The primary goal of writing is to convey meaning, and LLMs have been perfectly adequate at that pretty much from day one. I can get over their quirks.
The bar I set was "significantly higher quality than the median literate native speaker".
The bar you're setting is expert use of metaphors, restrained use of bullets and tables and parataxis, proper emphasis, and avoiding dense technical prose.
I suspect you have a higher opinion of the median literate speaker than is warranted.
It is worse because it fails to communicate information well. When I say it can barely speak English, I mean that it produces sentences which are incomprehensible on the first few reads. I have never found the median literate native speaker to be so difficult to understand, partly because they use a limited vocabulary and avoid waffle.
It can barely speak English in a new and exciting way, one unlike all the previous humans who could barely speak English.
Most people write quite badly!
I believe the median person who comprehends English to PIAAC level 3 literacy or above, and writes accordingly, would be more comprehensible than an LLM, if we controlled for correctness and for their own understanding of the subject matter.
There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.
Right-wing minded people are often fine with you being angry at people. As long as you don’t look up.
> We have access to magic machines, and we can poke at them and see what happens. The second way is to feel genuine excitement. Once you move beyond curiosity, you can come away with a newfound feeling of power and freedom.
Brother, these self-improvement speeches where you shift your frame of mind from half-empty to half-full to thinking of the aswesome potential of the negative space of the cup are supposed to be held on a weekend on some retreat in front of people who have their basal needs met and have the psychological constitution of someone who knows that they have decades left in them for their job or career unless they get hit and disfigured by a car. They are not fit for people who have been told, oh maybe you will never have a job again ever after six months, two years,—who knows?
> A lot of the gains from AI aren’t turning into productivity gains that are reflected in company profits but they’re showing up instead in the number of side projects shipped by everybody not on their company’s time.
You might be out of that thing that put food on the table in the long run. But right now you can use the mAgiC mAchIne to make side projects, ya know? What?
What kind of a GitHub-star poisoned response is that? Log off the green checkmarks for a few days, please.
Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.
Like this author who is invested in AI.