Posted by PinkG 10 hours ago
Even if you are already wealthy and don't actually need to work anymore, going off the grid completely is still the wrong move. There's a lot of ways to spend less time online, improve your privacy and reduce tracking, and still benefit from some of the actual, real advantages of tech.
And the last and maybe most important thing is, we are currently on a roller coaster of disruption and frankly some daunting prospects - but we don't know what's right around the next turn. What the development landscape might be like in a few years, or maybe what kind of new problems will emerge that are not yet clear.
The right move is to take some time off, clear your head and decide if you stopped liking tech altogether, or you just needed a break. If you still like problem solving, limit your AI use, stay effective and skillful, and find ways to enjoy your skill.
I've never met an engineer who actually stopped enjoying problem solving.
I do find occasional pleasure in personal projects, creating exotic programming languages that are not text-based, compilers and stuff like that, but otherwise coding work makes me wanna puke.
Internet is nice, connectivity is good. We just need self control.
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)
I find it intellectually alarming (but not surprising) that someone would say something like "[the north sentinelese tribe] are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday".
"way of life" is doing a lot of obscuring here.
It took centuries of hard work to leave that behind.
We may need a close connection to that way of life again and not have to relearn it from scratch.
This strikes me more as one of those things that is shocking to hear but not incorrect. People get more upset that someone said it without actually having a counterargument.
He's not saying that we _should_ live that way but that we might need to.
But in no way is "their knowledge" (which I think is an overly generous use of that term) - acting in the role of a knowledge seed bank.
Can you do it and sustain hundreds of people? I doubt it. At least they're here to be potentially observed. You don't have to _totally_ wing it. People living like that through history had bigger day to day survival concerns than documenting the finer details of sustaining their continued existence to us.
The last closest analog we have to them would be the Hadza people and they've had agriculture since 500 CE...
Not to mention all the time they spent in nature which is impossible now.