Posted by PinkG 11 hours ago
I jest, but not really. There were already a ton of reasons tech might burn someone out and AI was the cherry on top.
Maybe a consultancy of people who have seen and done it all before - Very selective of their clients.
Ah yes. Romanticizing the noble savage. It's as old as, I don't know what exactly (I could ask a LLM but fuck it).
Why stop at killing outsiders? We can do better...
We could also romanticize cannibalism that was all alive and well when europeans discovered the americas (yup, both in north and south america there was cannibalism).
What about we forget about the enlightenment and the great philosophers and just take a shortcut: why don't we start writing articles about how we should we should start eating each other? Yup, just eating. Because, you know, the myth of the noble savage. So why not?
And let me one-up that: what about torturing kids as much as possible (which was a thing in southern america before it got conquered), to extract as many tears as humanly possible? What about we venere the noble savages who were doing just precisely that. Oh but it was "contextual". Yeah: explain me the concept, please.
Wait: I can one-up that. Cannibalism? Wanna me to romanticize slitting the throat of your enemies and then raping and then turning into slaves their wives and daughters?
Oh wait I've got an even better idea: combine that with eating their boys. Rape the daughters, eat the boys. Not many lost calories.
Rape and enslave the daugthers and wives, torture the boys so that they cry as much as possible, then eat them (alive, because why not).
Such noble savages.
Very connection to nature.
Much simplicity.
Deep down all of us (well, you mostly really) aren't we (well, you mostly really) deeply connected to these wonderful noble savages?
/s (just in case it is isn't clear that this is sarcasm... I wouldn't want to end up in trouble)
The reason he, and others, are "retiring" from tech now is because they have the wealth to do it, in big part due to being at the right place at the right time in life. That’s it.
AI has nothing to do with it, they just want a small ego stroke.
The end result of it is that the average dev position becomes seen as dispensable, competition goes up, workload goes up, compensation stagnates.
Being able to escape the rat race and retire is a privilege though. The rest of the rats gotta keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
I'm fortunate with regards to the timing and being able to do it, but if I could have a job like the one I had ten years ago I'd still be working.
I personally like using AI tools and experimenting with local models, but I hate being subjected to the output of AI from other people. There's such a large competency gap that exists in the human operators, and AI does not ameliorate it, it makes it worse, but so many have drank the koolaid that it solves everything and eliminates that gap. I won't become a luddite, I will still build technical things at home, but I miss being able to see the tangible fruits of my labor and getting an honest thank you from another human being I've helped out through my work. I miss the permanence of physical things. I'm also tired of arguing with people who think their incompetence + AI outranks my competence and expertise.
"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"
yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.