Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.

If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.

Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].

I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.

You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.

Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.

Understanding things still matters.

When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.

Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.

Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.

We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.

What do you think? Still meaningless?

2. why haven't we developed organs in the lab yet?

3. why haven't we invented space travel yet?

4. why haven't we solved food, shelter, cover for all human beings on planet earth yet?

5. why don't we have absolute democracy and have hold politicians accountable for their inaction, exploit and abuse? (specifically using Software and AI). Where are the dashboards of all public info of each politicians with organization chart of each country representing top leader with nodes of people working under him/her and further down.

- nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky.

- the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.

I am unemployed and surviving since last 4 years and being creative every day. In between I am also doing what I really want to do.

I have raised my bar really high to weed out the shitty employers and companies after 16 years in the industry and focus on what I want to do. I believe the money will just follow. It always has for me.

Upgrade toward sales and management ?. At least cover our basic daily needs, so we still have freedom to explore different interesting domains.

I feel sorry for brilliant engineers who rely too heavily on their technical skills, because those skills can become almost "irrelevant" in day-to-day work.

Some of them literally refuse to adopt AI in their problem-solving process. They still can't accept that “my hard-earned knowledge from decades of learning can be wiped out in just one day.”

https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...

Holy F. elephant in the room !

Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.

What are you like when no one is watching?

Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.

Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.

The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.

Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.

Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.

Nothing will satisfy us because our emptiness was never meant to be filled with code, knowledge, or whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvOrTq4Bes

https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...

And look around you - so much pain and suffering in the world. Lots and lots of problems to be solved, hopefully helped by all this technology.

I think things will turn around by the end of next year, but not before some major reckoning. There is a lot of motivated reasoning going on right now with trillions of dollars at stake where people aren’t being discerning and honest about what AI is actually capable of, and a lot of circular cash flow that’s making it seem more successful than it really is. I think when it really arrives, we’ll see a creative explosion that enriches our lives, where everything isn’t just cheaper to make at 80% of its former quality but actually better quality too. And I believe the solutions for improving quality will surface the things that human beings can uniquely do that AI can’t and give meaning back to our lives, but right now we’re in a shitty in between phase.

Ptolemy I: "I have this 'Royal Road' AI right here."

E: "Can it tell you the precise product of pi*e?"

P: "Piece of cake."

On a similar note... the whole idea behind making your own furniture is similar to hand rolling code. You can go ahead and buy a dresser or bed at ikea and call it a day, but the quality is complete shit. Or you could build something that will last a life time and be praised for it's quality.

[1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-tool-chest

Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?

I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.

On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.

On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.

Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.

(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)

Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.

Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.

About 150 years ago, Nietzsche wrote

> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

about the secularization of society. Perhaps something similar is happening to knowledge work now, but I think it was never a great idea to derive all your life's meaning from it anyway.

Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!

Do something ai can't take from you.

I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.

idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.

One thing to keep in mind is the world probably felt this way a few times as well. During the Vietnam War and the administration at the time probably made people feel powerless to do anything. 1930s crash. Lots of other examples like this.

AI certainly seems like a unique tipping point that reaches into all aspects of humanity. So, maybe it’s different this time.

Did the universe bestow on you some right to code better than the guy who bags your groceries? This whole post oozes a sense of wounded, bitter entitlement.

This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.

Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.

I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!