Never Enough
dark.ronacher.eu88 points by reasonableklout 10 hours ago
88 points by reasonableklout 10 hours ago
This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.
> Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.
In the last big AI productivity thread I read on Hacker News the most common anecdote was people saying they weren’t more producing more at work with AI, they were just getting the same work done faster. After that they’d relax or switch to working on side projects.
I don’t think that’s going to last for everyone, but I do think it is a common response to AI. I don’t agree when you say that people are working more. I think, at this moment in time, most people are using AI to compress the time spent doing their work. Some people pick up extra tasks with some of their new free time. Others don’t.
I don’t think AI is leading to increased working time other than in the LinkedIn and X hustle and grind bubbles where posters are bragging about having 10 agent loops running constantly to launch their startup.
> AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
I think you may be in a bit of a bubble. Sure the Anthropic engineer is trying to token max. But "we" generally see AI as a step up from google search and go about our lives pretty much the same as we have.
The ones that are captured by AI, I think they're just truly excited about the technology. It's new and opening up possibilities. It's like when you first learned to program and you stayed up all night writing games or whatever your interests were.
I know without programming I would "work less" but that doesn't result in "more fulfilled lives". Quite the opposite. The most unfulfilled people I know in life work the least!
"we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.
>The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine and asks how well she performed.
Holy insanity
When you raise kids in a society that scruitinizes and measures every aspect of their existence against all ither kids, and then send those kids to a workforce where every aspect of their performance and personality are scruitinized and analyzed to attempt to rank them against their peers, why wouldn't said kids seek out such "objective" ranking in their personal lives? We have designed society to produce people neurotically obsessed with ranking and comparison in school, work, and social media, and yet we're surprised when people start being neurotically obsessed with ranking in their performance in dating? This is a problem we created.
Dating in the Silicon Valley must be hell.
The sheer thought of asking "how I performed" in one of the most subjective fields is the most ai-esque thing I read in a while
Yes. There were never any performative parts to dating prior to the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022.
Nothing new. It was not great 10+ years ago. I always found NYC to be a much more fun city in that regard. The Bay Area folks always had nothing better to talk about except work.
This reminded me of work in general, years ago I was thinking how nursery was so expensive. I could try and work harder, earn more, to pay for nursery - or just quit and look after my children. If the goal was making money to look after my children, why make it difficult?
p.s. LOVE the animated header on this blog
When we had a child, we decided that my spouse should absolutely go back to work, even though that job just barely paid for daycare. But it meant that my spouse could leave the house, have adult conversations, and not have their full life, 24/7, revolve around a single thing.
The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
Everyone lives in anxiety. Whether they use AI or not, people shout that their way is the right way. Right or wrong, I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.
I use AI, but I don't feel the need to convince those who don't to use it. Conversely, if someone who doesn't use AI tells me not to, I'll just agree and move on.
I see the ongoing AI driven transformation as part of the early adoption phase of a technology, a period where it's often 'overused.' I think there will come a time when we acknowledge its limitations and adopt a more mature approach. Right now, I feel we're still in the early stage.
I don't know if the two examples in the post are real or fabricated, but even if they are, I don't see a reason to think relying on that technology is necessarily bad. Because I've seen a 30 year old woman with the intellectual capacity of a 15 year old use AI effectively. She asked about everything she didn't know, and it actually helped prevent a crime, a case of voice phishing.
Ultimately, technology is value neutral. But society's demands can reshape themselves around technology.
If that's the case, we should first question the nature of the anxiety itself. Why does a husband earning $550,000 still cling to something despite that? Why does a startup founder want even his dates to be evaluated?
It's because society demands those values and norms. From an Eastern perspective, we often say to step away from those value frameworks and realize who you truly are. But even that value framework is itself a kind of frame and a shackle.
The real question is where most anxiety comes from. It arises whenever individuals feel the need to conform to societal norms.
Both examples show that. Society demands self optimization through performance and competition, and AI simply makes that demand cheaper and more granular. The first example is about maximizing competition for promotion, wealth, and status using AI. The second example, the startup founder, treats even human relationships as improvable metrics.
We always feel anxiety in the gap between norms and our current state.
Even with a $550,000 salary, if the surrounding norm is 'a better house, higher AI productivity,' it will feel insufficient.
Even if a date was enjoyable, if the question is 'Was I empathetic and attractive enough?' then evaluation becomes necessary because you care about how you'll be perceived on her social media.
'Never Enough' isn't because desire is infinite. It's because the evaluation criteria are constantly updated externally, so we can never feel satisfied.
> I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.
This is a key point, and one that is rarely articulated.
The problem -- for me, anyway -- with the Current Era is specifically the workload, but the relentlessness.
I'm old enough to remember the Old Days of big release dates. You'd grind for a while, sometimes in a deathmarch, but after the release the organization would relax and there would be _some_ slack.
Now it's an endless river of prompts, push to prod, fix, repeat ad nauseam. Because implementation is now much cheaper but genuinely good ideas are as scarce as ever, companies are turning into a random walk optimizations weirdly mirroring training regimes. The idea apparently being that you make enough features/changes you'll eventually find the key to unlocking hyper-growth.
But unlike a training system, all these intermediate steps compound. Customers find their software mutating under them at an alarming rate. Maintainability becomes barely possible, even with Claude doing a ton of work. We're just creating technical debt we expect the future AI to fix, and getting no closer to the "revenue unlock."
Many are chained with fear to this dehumanizing and demoralizing system, and it sucks.
I'm a programmer with about 7 years of experience in programming work. I appreciate hearing this from someone with far more experience than I have. senior sir.(In Korea, the word senior is sometimes referred to as one of the positions, but it is also used as a respected adult.
I also think it's about the workload. A senior from my country (Korea) once told me something similar. He had 25 years of programming experience. He said to me:
'Back in the day, inefficiencies reduced the workload. People weren't used to email, or getting approvals took a day or two. Those inefficiencies actually meant people worked less. These days, there's just too much work.'
Hearing your words reminded me of what that senior programmer who hired me said.
It's true—once you start using AI code, it becomes hard to write your own code. Because the machine's abstraction and your abstraction are different. So there are points where maintainability becomes harder.
It feels like we're chasing efficiency so much that the resting points humans actually need are disappearing.
Anyway, I agree with you, senior.
I’m not one of those people that have agents running 24/7, but I am someone who always feels like they’re behind. The final paragraph of the post resonated deeply.
For what it’s worth, allowing agents to just run in the background provides me with more time to play with my child than I had in the past. Some stuff deserves to be automated, isn’t that the purpose of code in the first place?
But overall premise is on point, people are being pretty goofy about this tech; it’s just another tool - nothing to go into psychosis over, which seems to be happening in some cases, unfortunately. Touching some grass certainly helps.
You shouldn't be surprised if you consider this simple fact:
We listen to tech bros trying to shape a distopian future, who spent more time with their computer then with their familly and friends.
Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.
Pure rage bait.
Strong claims require strong evidence - which isn't offered here.
And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.
Maybe alternatively it's that person's way of experimenting with these new tools to explore what they can do. Maybe that person will discover something - for example, ebay was a terrible idea when it was first brought up!
It'd be unsound to assume if you're playing with agents you don't also talk to humans.
> And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.
Sure. But assuming that he's referring to Emmie Chang, it's very weird to record every conversation you have in general, and extra weird to be doing it on first dates.
If I went on a date and realized I was being recorded, I would immediately leave. This isn't normal, this is a wild choice to make. I will absolutely yuk this yum, the same way I would yuk the yum of someone who follows their date home and records them through a window.
Aah, sweet first dates. Pick a place, pick a time, swap each other's GDPR/CCPA consents. Who doesn't know it?
> Strong claims require strong evidence
I wish more people viewed things this way.
Feels like a lot of the public discourse now is "strong claims, vibes as evidence".
Evidence for what? That Silicon Valley has lost the plot? Or rather that its vision of "the future" turns out to be pretty horrible?
Weren't the past years - from attention economy, surveillance capitalism and enshittification over crypto grifters to rationalist cults , "existential AI risk" that they're simultaneously warning against and building to Thiel's "Antichrist" to every Big Tech company pivoting from progressive to conservative the moment Trump comes back into power - enough evidence?