I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone

For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with

"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."

AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.

Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.

So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.

Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.

I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”

Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.

I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.

The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.

Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.

I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.

Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.

I’m still very conflicted about it.

I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.

Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?

At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.

There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).

Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.

I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.

It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.

I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.

But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.

I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.

In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.

But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?

Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with.

Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.

On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.

If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?

I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.

It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.

I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.

If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.

The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.

AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.

As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.

We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.

For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.

I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.

It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.

> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.

This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.

I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.

As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.

I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.

On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.

After a year I could no longer write for shit.

Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.

Now I don't even write near a computer.

Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means to be human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?

That's my take from the poem, anyway.

Something that has a worse outcome for most people is worse for society.

Yeah it might be some antisocial hustler opportunity to get a leg up on everyone else. Huzzah.

Can SV Tech just make something that makes things better for society overall? No, impossible.

I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.

Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.

So much to unpack here!

First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.

The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.

Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.

Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)

And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.

It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.

Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.

You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:

* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media

The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.

I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.

The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.

Mot everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.

Not every dad is good at everything.

I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish

You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.

I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.

Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.

So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.

Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.

Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.

Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.

Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.

And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.

Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.

AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.

I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.

Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).

I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.

Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.

-Max Frisch

Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.

But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):

1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.

2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.

The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.

Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.

I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.

It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.

This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.