SirensOfTitan

So because of his economic realities he should be pragmatic enough to drop his values?

Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?

It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.

This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.

I totally agree actually, and I think that having ownership over one's labor is extremely important. Without that self-determinism, people do not have the agency to define their lives, and their political actions become limited by their economic realities.

It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.

I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.

A heartbreaking story about a man's attempt to break out of generational poverty that feels relevant as we consider how AI changes labor and who it empowers.

A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.

I deleted my OpenAI account months ago. If LLMs and adjacent technology are truly a paradigm shift, I can’t think of many worse than Sam Altman to shepard us through that. He is a pure opportunist who has already shown how little he believes in outside of his own power and wealth.

LLM-assisted development feels a lot like trend-driven development. When dealing with technique and heterogenous prompts and goals, it’s easy to gain somewhat of a gambler’s fallacy with respect to a particular technique.

Spec-driven development feels pretty questionable to me. I’m sure it works fine for feature work that is predictable or has been done before, but then I wonder why you’d waste your time with it.

Prior to LLMs, the whole vibe was to iterate rapidly toward a working thing so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Why would we abandon that strategy as an industry when the cost of writing code is ostensibly getting cheaper?

If I’m using LLMs at all, I’m using them to do a breadth search of prior art or ideas, then I’m doing what I might call a prototype onion: successive clean room attempts at a novel problem, accumulating what I learn at each attempt in each successive prompt. I usually then take the prototype and write the final version myself so I’m properly internalizing the idea.

Ultimately a lot of this prompt work feels like procrastination. It is not about understanding where these tools is useful and where they are not but trying to have them consume every aspect of the work.

LLMs are obviously a transformative technology, but I think as tech people we have to be deeply thoughtful about how we ensure humans can apply meaning through their work.

A lot of my peers not in tech are worried about their capacity to work. And work isn’t just about making money but finding meaning. LLMs if not used correctly can transform meaningful labor into some perverse form of consumption.

LLMs are literally communication and comprehension tools. An offshore team with AI assistance can produce clearer English documentation, parse ambiguous product requirements more effectively, and ultimately close the feedback loop faster.

This is the exact cope I’m talking about, as if these tools are just good at code generation and the actual work was always communication or architecture or something.

It's the combination of factors. AI augmentation makes offshoring much more viable.

Christopher Lasch in Culture of Narcissism:

> Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.

I do believe that our materialist reductionist culture has neglected the mystical, spiritual nature of human existence to our own detriment, and re-engaging with those factors that no one can take from you is a powerful way to weather a new kind of storm.

I don't think you can just decide to become spiritual though. Opening up to the long neglected forces within yourself and the world is a delicate and vulnerable motion. You're not really searching for "faith" in this arrangement, you're looking for surrender. It's wu-wei, or kenosis, or equanimity, or whatever you want to call it.

Feel free to email me, I've gone on quite a journey myself over the past couple years spiritually, and as a tech person would love to share. Here's a general list of moving works or ideas that have opened me up over the past couple years:

- Singing lessons: I never expected it, but singing opened me wide open. I'd find myself crying during songs I love, feeling a whole different appreciation for life and beauty through my voice.

- James Hillman: Hillman (I think) coined the term "soulmaking," (special shoutout for Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma too: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma) and sees the symptoms and the hurt as expressions of the soul, as parts to be discovered and expressed.

- King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: about the male archetypes that make up the generative male https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91781.King_Warrior_Magic...

- Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life"

- I also wrote about my experiences with meditation and explorations into esoteric Christianity after burning out on many years of westernized meditation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919809

You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else.

You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing?

I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.

This meme is just cope at this point, and it’s frustrating to watch engineers pretend that it was actually the architecture that was hard or whatever.

No author, this isn’t the same as SPAs and CI/CD.

This isn’t just happy tools helping us focus on the business side.

We’re devaluing all white collar work. The thing that keeps the US economy afloat. Even if this tech requires human oversight, why would companies keep you when they can hire someone overseas at 1/10th the cost and get to 80% of the productivity with AI.

Anthropic just dropped their safety pledge. Do you think they’ll hesitate as they transfer wealth from workers to their shareholders?

Please people. Stop being avoidant. Stop pretending it’s a meritocracy and you’re at the top. Stop pretending the one thing about the job AI can’t do is the job.

What an interesting week to drop the safety pledge.

This is how all of these companies work. They’ll follow some ethical code or register as a PBC until that undermined profits.

These companies are clearly aiming at cheapening the value of white collar labor. Ask yourself: will they steward us into that era ethically? Or will they race to transfer wealth from American workers to their respective shareholders?

I mean like: being alive isn't leverage, but controlling the economic output that has made elites rich is.

Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.

And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.

There's that old joke: "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.

"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."

How will AI affect the price of real goods and their inputs: lumber, food, electricity, textiles and the like? And will companies pass on the service-based savings to consumers?

Right. So then when is the best time for labor to act to ensure those mechanisms are put in place? Before or after AI has eliminated its leverage?

Like I totally realize we're agreed in some sense, but some form of socialism now in the US seems politically untenable, and as soon as AI actually starts making service labor obsolete, we lose our leverage. How do we do something about it?

You're assuming that the gains from productivity improvements distribute themselves broadly. The last 50 years have clearly shown that this is certainly not the case unless there is political intervention. The elites and the political class attached to them will assign whatever meanger rations they can to avoid revolution but not much else.

Not to mention: the grand majority of the US's GDP is wrapped up into services. If AI can flatten the skill floor so that anyone from anywhere in the world can produce 80% of the output of a US or European skilled worker at a fraction of the cost, what do you think happens? We're doing to US white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing, but it'll be faster and to the only healthy cohort of economic actors in the US.

AI does not control the inputs of lumber or vegetables.

> We will need good tools to distribute the gains.

There is enormous handwaving happening here. Tools built by whom? The US can hardly pass a budget now, and its dominant political movement is allergic to questions of wealth redistribution. And as I already mentioned, the wealthy class in the US is clearly openly contemptuous of the idea that they owe anything to the broader population.

I think the clear point of this piece is that we have the space and opportunity now to ask ourselves as a group: what are we doing? Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?

There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.

The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.

The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.

These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.

[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billio...

Yeah, Anthropic is inarguably in a better position, but I don’t see how they justify their fundraising unless they find some entrenched position that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

Enterprise switching costs aren’t 0, but they’re much less than most other categories, especially as models mature and become more fungible.

The best moat I can think of is a patentable technique that facilitates a huge leap that Anthropic can defend, but even then, Chinese companies could easily ignore those patents. And I don’t even know if AI companies could stick to those guns as their training is essentially theft of huge portions of copyrighted material.

Regardless of the promise of the underlying technology, I do wonder about the long-term viability of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Not only are they quite beholden to companies like Nvidia or Google for hardware, but LLM tech as it stands right now will turn into a commodity.

It's why Amodei has spoken in favor of stricter export controls and Altman has pushed for regulation. They have no moat.

I'm thankful for the various open-weighted Chinese models out there. They've kept good pace with flagship models, and they're integral to avoiding a future where 1-2 companies own the future of knowledge labor. America's obsession with the shareholder in lieu of any other social consideration is ugly.

I consider almost all news to be entertainment unless I need its perspective to make a decision (which is almost never). It is a lot safer to remain uninformed on a subject as it settles than to constantly attempt to be informed.

Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.

To me, tech entrepreneurship looks more like some form of "lemon socialism." It feels more centrally planned than ever, and a company's success has much more to do with your relationships with capital than anything else. It's why we're seeing so much money invested into a bunch of similar takes on AI. Founders with a real vision of the future aren't really accepted into VC that has almost wholly accepted the FOMO strategy of investment.

I used to hold a lot of respect for Paul Graham and his essays, but I've realized his stances on things are pretty elementary, and largely come back to his ego or wealth management. People like Graham and Tan don't seem to really care about human flourishing, and they certainly don't seem to have any coherent vision of the future. Graham, like Andreessen, was technically good enough during a veritable tech gold rush, and Graham's lieutenants like Tan and Altman were lucky more than anything--just in the right place at the right time versus having started anything of value.

I am *absolutely* cynical and jaded when it comes to tech nowadays, so no need to call me out there. These people remind me of the high modernists, that tech will solve all problems, and we don't have to care too much as to how we solve those problems. Just handwave, and AI will solve all problems. But I think how we solve problems matters, and the entrepreneurship meritocracy that Tan and Graham allude to does not exist, and it never did.

I just find it abhorrent that while 15% of American households are food insecure, a company like Anthropic spent millions on a superbowl ad just lamenting OpenAI's ad strategy. Or that the Trump administration dropped a FTC case against Pepsi and Walmart for colluding to price out grocery competition. Or that Facebook and Google have been shown to have pushed for apps to addict people to their slop content. Or that tech capex this year alone rivals the Louisiana Purchase or the amount America spent on building out the railroads[1].

We're not solving the right problems because capital is entirely disconnected from the every day reality of Americans in this country. But by all means, let's aim to replace 50% of white collar workers with AI and handwave that prices will come down.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-spending-tech-companies-compa...

This sounds awfully like an LLM generated comment.

I suppose it was just a matter of time before this kind of slop started taking over HN.

I miss the era of Internet forums. They didn’t need to be federated, just simple deployments of MyBB, vBulletin, PHP, Xenforo and so on.

I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together.

And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.

Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.

A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:

- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.

- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.

- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).

I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.

Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.

I started exploring Christianity from an archetypal or psychological lens last year, and have found it really rewarding. I've put in thousands of hours of westernized Buddhist oriented meditation (I think "Pragmatic Dharma" is the term), and ultimately found it and the communities attached to it cultures of avoidance that loses something in its detachment of meditation technology from its larger context. I also grew up vaguely Presbyterian and hated it, so this was a great moment for me to reclaim my heritage on my own terms.

I started with various books of the Nag Hammadi collection, reading the excellent Meyer translations, and started noticing some metaphors that felt like "hidden signposts" in the text (and had some relevance to some ideas in Buddhism). Gospel of Thomas and especially Gospel of Philip felt like they map quite well to non-dual ideas in Buddhism.

I decided after some explorations of gnostic text to jump back into the gospels, wondering if I noticed the same kinds of hidden signposts there. I started this exploration during a trip to London with my wife, where I went and hunted down a copy of Bruce Rogers's amazing Oxford Lectern Bible at the Church of England reading room. What a beautiful bible -- it's so forward thinking that it feels like it was typeset last year, but while it is a beautiful piece, the King James translation of the bible is pretty incomprehensible. This little journey led me to the Sarah Ruden translations of the gospels, and as soon as I read them I felt the same kind of resonance.

This all eventually led me to Cynthia Bourgeault's amazing "The Heart of Centering Prayer," which explores the non-dual kind of ideas in esoteric Christianity and lays out the practice of centering prayer as a basis of Christian spirituality. And I would remiss if I didn't mention Jacob Needleman: Esoteric Christianity was good, but his "Money and the Meaning of Life," really helped me put my own relationship with money in perspective.

This is all a long winded way of saying: Christianity has a rich set of amazing spiritual resources, but they need to be consumed in a sort of non-literal way, where you're meeting the authors in the same mind as they were when they wrote the text. I'd also note that this kind of reading is not scholarly, the point isn't to find the right answer but to impute a larger meeting by meeting the author with your own struggles.

We live in a time that is committed to a materialist reductionist mindset, but I believe that humans are naturally mystical beings, and that we leave a lot of real meaning on the table when we reduce the world down into solely material order.

Rob Burbea explored these ideas (largely inspired by James Hillman's concept of "soulmaking") in his soulmaking dharma (https://hermesamara.org/), the idea being an extension of emptiness: if all is fabrication, why wouldn't we make meaning that is beautiful?

I'm sure I'm coming off quite a bit rambly, but it's very exciting to see such a resource on the HN front page. If you read my comment and feel any similar excitement, please check my profile and feel free to email me!

Yeah, and I think that avoidance is the cardinal sin of the modern world. You can’t avoid the dissonance between how a person acts and what they say or want to be. This is especially true within yourself: you can’t ignore what James Hillman might call the “multitudes of the soul” because the pot eventually boils over, and you wonder why you cannot measure up to this ideal version of yourself.

When I’ve been mean at work, and I’ve had many moments, I’m often unsure where it comes from: why did I react that way? It’s not what I wanted. And I’ve been fortunate to be humbled so much in my life and career, now perhaps more than ever, that I’m forced to juggle with the parts of myself that I’ve left in the shadows to my own detriment. I think this is the central paradox of a lot of folks like Graham: when you have capital, even your losses can be manufactured to be wins, and so you become estranged from dissolution and decay and humbling necessary to be born again into someone with fresh perspective.

I think Jung said something like: it is better to be yourself and accept the consequences of being you versus forcing yourself into a mold of what you or others think you ought to be. And often this means engaging deeply with what you’re avoiding and coming to terms with why.

> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.

*mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well.

People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it.

I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.

I'm frankly exhausted from AI takes from both pessimists and optimists--people are applying a vast variety of mental models to predict the future during what could be a paradigm shift. A lot of the content I see on here is often only marginally more insightful than the slop on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the most intelligent people are most susceptible to projecting their intelligence on these LLMs and not seeing it: LLMs mirror back a person's strengths and flaws.

I've used these tools on-and-off an awful lot, and I decided last month to entirely stop using LLMs for programming (my one exception is if I'm stuck on a problem longer than 2-3 hours). I think there is little cost to not getting acquainted with these tools, but there is a heavy cognitive cost to offloading critical thinking work that I'm not willing to pay yet. Writing a design document is usually just a small part of the work. I tend to prototype and work within the code as a living document, and LLMs separate me from incurring the cost of incorrect decisions fully.

I will continue to use LLMs for my weird interests. I still use them to engage on spiritual questions since they just act as mirrors on my own thinking and there is no right answer (my side project this past year was looking through the Christian Gospels and some of the Nag Hammadi collection from a mystical / non-dual lens).

We need to define terms precisely first and the industry seems allergic to that, likely because precise terms would undermine hype marketing necessary for companies like Anthropic to justify their valuations.

We need clear definitions and clear ways of evaluating toward those definitions, as human evaluation of LLM is rife with projection.

Generally speaking, scaling is clearly not going to get LLMs there, and a lot of the gains over the past year or so have been either related to reasoning or domain-specific training and application.

I do think world models are the future and we’ll likely see some initial traction toward that end this year. Frontier AI labs will have to prove they can run sustainable businesses in pursuit of the next stage though, so I’d anticipate at least one major lab goes defunct or gets acquired. It may very well be that the labs that brush up against AGI according to conventional definitions are still nascent stage. And there’s a distinct possibility of another AI winter if none of the current labs can prove sustainable businesses on the back of LLMs.

I think a lot of the west is undergoing the early stages of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in many ways, so I’ve found it difficult to take the signaling from the macro environment and put it to work in my decision making.

And we have plenty of utility everywhere in tech nowadays but very little soul.