What happened was the set of available moves and rewards has incrementally changed. What has not changed is that nerds are humans, and humans are terrible at resisting increases in status, power, wealth, etc. If the glorified nerds of the past had been offered the same roads to status and power, they would have taken them.
This reminds me of the way people think of the olden days when stuff was made of real wood and metal as "we had integrity! people built things to last!", projecting intentionality and generosity onto to the same machinery that built agent orange or rube goldberg machines for cigarette smoke to avoid liability for killing millions of people. We didn't build things out of metal because we had integrity, we did it because we didn't yet have advanced petroleum-derived plastics and shit. If they did, they'd have done that instead.
Reminds me of the difference between "peaceful" (capable of harm, electing not to be harmful) and "harmless" (incapable of harm even if you wanted to). I think it's a mistake to imagine the nerds of the past as peaceful. In terms of status, power acquisition, etc, they were harmless. Had you handed them the tools and understanding of today, they'd have acted no different, IMO.
Humans are good at resisting things outside their comfort zones. Strong incentives select for people who don't have to leave their comfort zones to pursue them.
Most of the nerds I knew when I was young were nerds because they valued their interests more than the "boring mundane stuff" around wealth, status, and power. Some of them changed their minds later, but most of them didn't. Once you start seeing yourself as a "person interested in X", it gets difficult to become something else.
'Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.'
completely agree re: the average human, of any time period, with the same options, will make roughly the same choices - especially in the face of powerful incentives.
the tl;dr though of my article is that, DESPITE these absurdly attractive short-term incentives, it is in each individual company's best interest as well as the best interest of the tech industry as a whole to return to the public narrative of nerd values: passion for niche interests, obsessive, loving relationship w/ one's intellectual work, and humility re: talking about yourself/being 'in the spotlight'. the Founders' Fund MAFIA video in particular was a bad move because it ran counter to the idea, however delusional, that founders would prefer to spend time on their work than being influencers.
It is hard. Much harder than regular software work. A few things need to line up: model iteration speed, task chunk size, and your own context window and comprehension abilities. Too slow and you lose interest. Too easy and it's just tedious riffing. Too large and you're burned out by reviewing giant complicated walls of text. Etc. The bites have to be the right size and speed for both you and the LLM.
In the few instances I've been able to achieve really joyful flow state, there are usually two simultaneous workstreams, plus or minus one. They're usually working towards a large goal that I roughly know how to judge, in digestible bites.
For example, sequentially modifying the UI in a series of operations towards an overarching goal, where it's easy to tell if a step worked, and what the next step should be, but where you're not sure exactly what you want, so there's some curiosity and discovery rather than just feeding the bot tiny instructions. I try to keep the two workstreams from overlapping. If both streams start fighting over a file they both dirty, things go south fast.
Adjusting your prefs/harness/etc for model terseness goes a LONG way. Context quality is absolutely everything. A good context "seed" can go back and forth for many turns cleanly and with focus, and even compact successfully once or twice. A bad seed will be annoying to work with from the jump, will thrash towards compaction faster, at which point it gets even worse. This is difficult to troubleshoot objectively, but I'll frequently restart conversations if I don't like the vibe of the first couple turns. It's made harder by constant model churn. Until opus 4.8, I ran opus/sonnet 4.5 high for a long time in large part for continuity of intuition, if that makes sense.
There are also many elements of human knowledge management that make a difference. I've found "append only" to be a magic word, generating markdown logs of changes, or learnings, etc. Whatever workflows create visibility and resumability so that you can return from a spell away and get up to speed effectively. Manually keeping your own dev log alongside the session sometimes helps, makes things sticky and ensures you understand what's happening.
But it's hard. Feels incredible when it goes well, but going well feels very nearly random, and whittling towards reproducibility can be very mentally draining, in terms of both energy and morale.
This just makes sense. A normal day contains dozens of experiences that could be bettered by cheap actions that I am awful at predicting or imagining. I had an argument with a partner at one point where I was baffled and basically at a loss, asked chatgpt, and it spit back a response that seemed... okay. I adapted it into my own voice, keeping only what was sincere, etc (not just dumping LLM slop at another human, which is fucked, more like using it to coarsely choose a vector/filter through a big cloud of things I actually believe). My partner's response was incredible. It completely diffused the situation and my they were pleasantly surprised. Without the LLM, I would have been entirely unable to conceive of and walk that happy path.
The problems we have with our psychology often involve deviation from the normal or desirable state, so a robot that spits out a cheap reversion to the mean can be really helpful.
My flavor of this is somewhat autism-coded, but it generalizes well. EG people who aren't used to negotiating, valuing themselves, etc. Obviously LLMs output hallucinated dogshit and occasionally dangerous nonsense.
But it must be admitted: a lot of our psychological hiccups can be solved by the thoughtless, typical advice.
38% putting them over professionals is nuts though. I would much rather have the real thing, but it's $200/hr and asleep at 3am.\
Worked great for me. Big recommend. "Cured" is mostly an unspecifiable state, and while certainly there's lots still wrong with me, I am healed far beyond my expectations at the outset, so increment your count by one.
Is a person with a crutch healed? No. But they can walk, when before they could not. Therapy can't erase the past, but it can give people tools to live more capable and rich lives. A crutch doesn't regrow an amputated leg, but it does help that person handle the injury, so in that sense, it 'works'.
Rich people aren't scared of plastic guns, that's completely unrelated. This is drone legislation in disguise. They passed a bunch of import laws on new parts, motors, etc from overseas within the last year or so too. The US is wholly unprepared for the drone warfare of 2020, let alone 2030, and is playing catchup, but cannot come out and say as much, because then everyone would get ideas. Just as "think of the children" is understood by all to be a fabricated excuse for what is actually "systematically deanonymize and surveil all inconvenient adults", this is using a less objectionable goal they don't care about as a foothold for a thing that would be difficult to argue for directly.
Google has given a public statement about this category of incident (to wit: cloud provider imperils customer's operations by way of automated decision deliberately designed to withhold recourse).
The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.
Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?
If you’re building for the "love of the game", aren’t you unlikely to post an artifact that is produced towards the end of your project and targeted towards a publication (e.g. hacker news)? I recall Mitchell Hashimoto was saying he used to browse GitHub as if it were a social media (which it is) - perhaps that’s your jam.
These comments are not only clearly, poorly botted, but they're uniquely botted, which IMO shifts blame away from general botting of HN, and towards ombedzi purposefully botting his own post after it failed to get organic traction.
This is worsened by ombedzi replying to most of these comments as though they were made in earnest: any person who can't identify these comments as bots is a person whose code I have no interest in running.
This reminds me of the way people think of the olden days when stuff was made of real wood and metal as "we had integrity! people built things to last!", projecting intentionality and generosity onto to the same machinery that built agent orange or rube goldberg machines for cigarette smoke to avoid liability for killing millions of people. We didn't build things out of metal because we had integrity, we did it because we didn't yet have advanced petroleum-derived plastics and shit. If they did, they'd have done that instead.
Reminds me of the difference between "peaceful" (capable of harm, electing not to be harmful) and "harmless" (incapable of harm even if you wanted to). I think it's a mistake to imagine the nerds of the past as peaceful. In terms of status, power acquisition, etc, they were harmless. Had you handed them the tools and understanding of today, they'd have acted no different, IMO.
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