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Does the company owe a living to those people that it doesn't actually benefit from having on board? Sometimes it sounds like people think so.

It will calm down once the dust starts to settle and there's some kind of consensus on how the chips have fallen.

Also there is an irony that talking about being sick of talking about AI is still talking about AI.

You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.

Perhaps we're immensely valuable - sparks of divinity. Perhaps we're not - mere bags of sentient meat.

I don't know which of those statements is more true. Either/neither/both?

Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.

We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.

And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).

But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.

On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.

But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.

I can totally picture and feel how she would feel. I understand the jubilation of falling in love, and I understand the pain of losing loved ones - especially when it's sudden, unexpected, and tragic.

I've felt all of those things before in my own life. We all do, sooner or later.

But pain is also what imbues things with meaning. All of the greatest human stories are about suffering and how we as humans respond to it. That's why it puts a pep in my step - because it's meaningful, provocative, evocative, and inspiritational.

Life would be dull without loss.

It's a radical perspective maybe, and maybe even an irrational one, but hey - it works for me!

But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.

And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.

It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.

The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.

The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.

Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.

It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.

> People stop learning programming.

> Programmers become scarce.

> Programmers become valuable again.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.

The hype cycle's distasteful of course, but I've accepted that this is how humans figure out what things are. Like a child we have to abuse it before we learn how to properly use it.

I think many of us sense and have sensed that the promises made of agentic programming smell too good to be true, owing to our own experiences as programmers and engineers. But experts in a domain are always the minority, so we have to understand that everyone else is going to have to reach the same intuition the hard way.

Bit I still never bothered with the later approaches because it looked like I was going to lose out on speed and ease of development. WinForms may have looked ugly but you could bang things together pretty quickly.

But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.

The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.

I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.

And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.

And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.

Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.

And that's what a lot of transitioning actually is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.

It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.

A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.

It's a passion project, no idea how it will do on release, time will tell!

Thanks for asking by the way!

One method I did have a lot of success with was a time spent spreadsheet I created. For any given date I'd enter individual times I started and stopped working on it - so it might be 10am until 11.30am, 2pm until 5pm, and so on.

For each day I'd sum the hours spent, and then I had a target hours to hit each week - 20 at first, then 30, and eventually 40. This is while also working a day job, otherwise I'd probably have tried increasing it by 1.5-2x.

A key rule I followed was this: once I hit enough hours for the day to be on track for the weekly goal, I could then do whatever I felt like with my remaining time. Ironically I'd often keep working on it as the momentum was already going, but just as often I'd go relax.

Pretty good system all in all.

As does the reductionist idea that human thinking is something crude in comparison.

For instance, two things I'm currently working on: - A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo for four years. - A basic web API exposing data from a legacy database for work.

I can see how the API could be developed mostly by agents - it's a pretty cookie cutter affair and my main value in the equation is just my knowledge of the legacy database in question.

But for the game... man, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very particular when it comes to performance and the logic flow. An example: entities interacting with each other. You have to worry about stuff like the ordering of events within a frame, what assumptions each entity can make about the other's state, when and how they talk to each other given there's job based multi-threading, and a lot of performance constraints to boot (thousands of active entities at once). And that's just a small example from a much bigger iceberg.

I'm pretty confident that if I leaned into using agents on the game I'd spend more time re-explaining things to them than I do just writing the code myself.

A lot of the ads basically go along the lines of: 'you could win big and have a great time, awesome! (disclaimer: will probably ruin your life)'.

It should be like it is with smoking - photos of lung cancer patients on the package. People will still do it of course but at least it's not falsely advertised.

So the gambling ads should be things like, that moment where your wife finds out you've drained the family's savings and the house is about to be re-possessed. Yeah.