The Value of Things

I feel like the OP was so close to the epiphany that meaning and utility are orthogonal values, but then they retreated back to the safe ground of avoid-efficiency-if-you-want-meaning.

They talked about it with knitting: obviously, buying yarn is a time-saving efficiency compared to spinning your own, but that didn't destroy the meaning of the gift. Nevertheless, if I spent time spinning my own yarn and gifting it to my mother, I bet she would find it meaningful.

Similarly, they talk about how they could use a mechanical knitter to save time, but that would reduce the meaning. I think that depends. If I designed a beautiful pattern and then used a mechanical knitter to create a blanket, I bet my mom would find it meaningful.

The epiphany is that meaning doesn't come from how hard I work. It comes from personal relationship and how my actions interact with that relationship. If I knew my mom was looking for a specific, somewhat rare purse, and one day I happened to find it at a yard sale and give it to her, that would be a meaningful gift, regardless of how much effort it took me.

Meaning is not an intrinsic quality of objects. It is not an arrangement of atoms or a quantum field. You can't see meaning in a microscope. Meaning is only in our heads. And because it is only in our heads, AI can't destroy it.

AI is just a tool, like a mechanical knitter or a jackhammer. Sure, maybe not all tools are equally useful for creating meaning, but no one ever worried that meaning was under threat because jackhammers got invented. AI is no different.

I'm literally considering a career switch from software engineering to electrical engineering and electronics, and naturally going back to school, because the AI and the way it's used in writing software has sucked out all the meaning in it for me.

The screenplay part made me think. While it's true that an LLM could potentially generate a better^ script, while writing scriot the author would probably had had many ideas that did not make it to the final draft. Yet those ideas would definitely influence the final product, the movie. There's probably only so much you can put in the script really.

Meaning for the brother is one thing, but as a potential watcher, I would almost always prefer a movie that someone really cared about^^.

^: depending on the definition of "better"

^^: as a fallible human being I am not perfect at detecting that care, but there had definitely been cases in my life when someone was talking about a thing that I would not really care about otherwise, but their passion made the talk extremely interesting and memorable

I really enjoyed the article and want to both praise and encourage the author.

You get it. It’s about value. Keep you eye on that north star and you won’t go wrong.

Whose value? How do I value? Can I reconcile disparite value? Yep, those are the right questions.

For me, I read this and want to give a shout out to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that’s just me.

I enjoyed the read, thank you.

I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It didn't take me that long. The value in the thing is that I could see what she wanted and make it like she wanted. And on the receiving side, a friend of ours knitted our daughter, Astra, a quilt with her name on it and with this lovely star motif. It must have taken her and her mother, a seamstress, ages. But if she had done it instantaneously, I think I still would have loved it.

As for the other side of things, there is one thing that gives me a mild twinge of envy: I grew up on the command-line and when I write on it, I can knock out a full bash pipeline literally at the command-line super-fast. Many of my friends are far better engineers, but this one thing makes me great at any sort of debugging and all that. Now everyone has that! I'm USELESS.

Well, not really, but it's funny that this unique skill is meaningless. Overall, I've found that AI stuff has let me do more and more things. Instead of thinking, at the end of the week, "Oh man, I wish I'd made progress on my side project" I think "Damn, that wasn't such a good idea after all" which is honestly far more satisfying!

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs

The author attributes meaning for the giver and hopefully receiver to time spent by the giver. They argue less time spent for same utility lowers the meaning.

I see something very different:

1. The government post shared as an example of efficiency to utility increase has glaring errors: “journey-level developers”. You will never achieve any improvement on government code bases if the people leading the effort can’t pay attention to the most basic and broadcasted elements of the job. AI used by junior developers will only compound the massive complexity of government systems to the point where they are not fixable by seniors and they are not usable by humans.

2. The time spent doing something, meaningful or not, with care is a training for that person into attention to detail, which is absolutely critical to getting things right. People who lazily lean on generating more without attention to detail, don’t see the real point of the work - it’s not to add more stuff to less space (physical or mental) faster. It’s to make the existing space better and bigger by needing less in it. The rest is just mental and physical complexity overload. We are about to drawn in that overload like hoarders next to a dumpster.

3. If you ever live in a small home you may noticed that the joy of getting things (usually derived from dopamine-seeking behaviors like shopping or making, or shopping for ingredients so you can make things, or from getting toys for your kids or other people getting toys for your kids) will quickly overload any space in your living quarters. Your house becomes unbearably small and it becomes impossible to find things in piles or drawers filled with other things if nobody ever organizes them. We all have become dopamine adduces or the world has turned us into such and there are few if any humans willing and capable of organizing that world. So most people today will be paralyzed with a million choices that were never organized or pruned down by the owner or their predecessors. The overwhelming feeling would be to escape the dread of organization into more dopamine- generating behaviors. We need more of the “moms” who clean up our rooms after we’ve had fun with all the legos we can now generate. Or we will all be living in a dumpster before too long.

Let's cut through some of the noise here. We only talk about these things behause we fear becoming obsolete and losing our livelihoods.

Using the scarf example - nobody's paying you to knit it. Knitting it probably won't put food on your table. Maybe for tribal humans that kind of thing did, hence the psychological reward wiring, but not now.

Here's a reality: we do all become obsolete. It's called aging. I don't know how exactly to fit that into that puzzle, but my brain told me it's a relevant reference point, somehow.

A hiring company just wants you to make the thing with an optimal balance between quality and efficiency.

As I see it, one has a few options. A common one is just hoping everything will be okay. Often that turns out to be the case.

Another one is to proactively 'adapt or die'. Master the new way of making the thing even if it tastes bitter. Harder to do with age, but in some sense the obvious choice if you want to be competitive.

Speaking of, I think we often forget that - the world is one big competition for resources and survival. Happiness is a luxury, but we've converted it into a requirement.

I'm not saying I like any of this - I want to be secure for life following the same old patterns I've already learned as well.

But I consider that thought a comforting fantasy to be eyed with suspicion.

That said, thankfully, AI is still pretty good at enshittifying things, so I have a suspicion that one may not need to always adapt that enormously. I work with a lot of legacy software, and have seen that a lot of companies are full of old school tech debt for which hands on programming is still a must have.

Claude code or what have you is a little limited when you're writing code for obscure software packages which nobody knows the name of anymore, but on which some companies still depend for their core business logic.

Will it all dry up eventually? Sure. But slower than we expect methinks.

Whether Nystrom realizes it or not, and I think he does, this piece is shot through with Marxist thinking on use value, exchange value, socially necessary labour time, and the general structure of capital social relations.

Capitalism has been a fantastically productive system that has also produced a great deal of labour alienation. Nystrom has a deep need to labour for those he cares about, he needs to make the scarf, slowly and badly, for his grandmother.

But the socially necessary amount of labour to make a scarf is now extremely small, and so Nystrom labours in software to earn a higher wage.

The wage doesn't fulfil him so much, because it's for labour power directed for the purpose of value valorization (aka. profit), not to help those he cares about.

He's skilled and lucky, so he has plenty of excess after labouring to poorly make a scarf. But if he does not already have plenty of capital, he has to work, and his capital has to be put to work too, on things other than badly making scarves, lest it too whither away.

I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we grow in the making of them, and I worry that in a world where we accept generative slop, we'll never have the opportunity to woodshed enough to become excellent at a craft.

I'm a good engineer because I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? Does anyone know or care?

We're in the anthropocene now, and while probably everyone who knows what that is understands we have the largest effect on the Earth, it also means we now also have the largest effect on ourselves. We're so, so bad at taking this seriously. We can unleash technology that idiocracies western civilization inside of a generation, I know this because we keep lunging towards it with ever increasing success. But we can't just shamble around and let Darwin awards sort things out. We have nukes and virology labs, not to mention a climate change crisis to deal with. If the US political system falls apart because Americans under 65 spend between 2-3 hours on social media a day, that's a failed state with a lot of firepower to shoot around haphazardly.

And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? Did we need easier access to delivery food and car rides, or did we need easier access to nutritious food and more walkable neighborhoods? Did we need social media with effectively no protections against propaganda/misinformation? We know that cognitive ability and executive function decline with LLM use. Can it really be that we think we're actually too smart and we need to turn it down a notch?

There are actual problems to solve, and important software to write. Neither algorithmic feeds nor advertising platforms fall under those categories. LLMs are supposed to solve the problem of "not enough software"--Nystrom points at this explicitly with the Washington Department of Ecology ad. But we never had a "not enough software problem", rather we had a "not enough beneficial software" problem, i.e. we'd be in a way better place if our best minds weren't working on getting more eyeballs on more ads or getting the AI to stop undressing kids.

Generative AI isn't empowering us. We don't have people building their own OSes, (real, working) browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs, their own DAWs or guitar amp modelers, their own Illustrators or Figmas. Instead you have companies squeezing their workers and contractors, while their products enshittify. You can't even run these things without some megacorp's say so, and how are you gonna buy time on the H100 farm when AI took your job?

I'm too tired to write a conclusion. I'm pretty sure we're fucked. But hey look, the cars drive themselves.

This is a really good piece especially the part on what and why makes sense to build with AI or not