We employees need to remember that most software projects fail. So the work we produce should have lower value than we give it.
We also need to be motivated to stay in our jobs.
Most developers like their projects and value their work. But the chances are that it's for nothing.
Many developers know they work on bad products (gambling industry, military, surveillance, whatever) and so it's here that they focus on their technologies, tools and frameworks rather than the work they produce.
"Agentic engineering" for example.
Id be curious to see what and how Googlers are doing with their 20% time.
Although advocating to have less empathy generally isnt considered good there are ancient and modern schools of thought that explicitly says that empathy can be bad.
To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.
Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.
Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.
Agreed. It's telling that the ads for speed upgrades all seem to focus on families: when all are uploading and streaming maybe at the same time. The marketeers know that 1
individuals and couples are not the target market and 2 they want everyone to be using as much as possible.
I'd be interested in the rabbit hole of flow state. Also with regards to the dopamine rewards of solving a bug as motivation.
Sometimes using a LLM can assist these and sometimes it can feel like cheating myself out of a good thing and I'm not entirely sure where the borders are. It could also be related to a sense of ownership or pride in ones work and seeing the value in doing quality work.
If you like videos, I saw an interesting video yesterday about systems thinking, software as ecosystem particularly with AI. More of an overview but gives an insight into seeing where we might be able to experiment with different ways Its more focused on teams and companies than individual developers but I think it could be applied to the single dev.
> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
On HN many comments under many threads are about whether the submission was written by AI. You could say I have noticed a pattern in Hacker News comments!
In these comments there's a common pattern where some users argue that they do not agree that the submission was LLM written and they often focus on specific details to refute it (e.g em-dashes) and some users see the overall pattern clearly that it's totally obvious. For me it's a kind of smell, it's off putting and it's obvious. The article says to "trust your gut". But it's also something that comes with practice and time, it's not some innate thing. People may have better things to do than expend mental energy noticing patterns in a bunch of social media posts. The more I see it, the more I see it.
The take away I get is that it's okay to notice patterns and it's okay to not notice patterns. Remember that other people may be noticing patterns and associations in things that you might miss. Be charitable.
Far more interesting questions are:
1) If you cant see the patterns of LLM writing, does the idea that the thing you liked was written by LLM worry you?
2) If you can see the patterns clearly is the fact that it's LLM written worry you?
Because in our comments there's many who do not care that LLM's are writing content and theres many who do care. But are these correlated with those who can see the LLMs or who are blind to them?
It's easier to take a look via change of dates in google street view, they have almost 20 years coverage. You can see how the data ages and decays or doesn't because it's tied to the place it represents.
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
If things right now are hard to tell, it will be easier in the future to tell looking back. So, in the future lets say 2030 we can look back at the things people write in 2026 and that they swear are "my own words" and that fool almost all of us and see clearly that they were not actually their own words after all.
It's going to be like when we all used cat meme pictures in our slide decks - in the future it's going to be obvious and cringe and a liability now.
It's like postponing a major credibility and trust failure event to yourself by a few years in the future for some feel good attention now.
"Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect"
Some can't and that's fine.
I also find it comically easy to detect, but it's a kind of pattern recognition, a skill that takes a bit of investment of time and energy on some internal disposition. It also operates on the unconscious: if it feels off it might well be off. Like map reading, or like listening to jazz, some people just don't can't seem to do it and that's fine. Most people around me can't read code and thats fine.
Also: some others don't care about what they see or how they write and levels of literacy are also lowering, and some others are enthusiastic users of the new technology so have to protect their investment.
From the article: "When tasked with coding, writing, editing, or summarizing, ask the user up to three targeted clarifying questions. Proceed with the task once you've received answers and understand the prompt fully. If the task is a simple factual question or conversational message, respond directly."
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it.
But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
counter intuitively criminal ransomware gangs operate on trust. They have to ensure that we believe they really will shred it, otherwise no victim will ever pay a ransom ever again.
Therefore one way to weaken these criminals would be to weaken this trust factor. In a way therefore comments like "can we actually believe they will really shred it" goes towards this aim.
I have to wonder what criminal hacking gangs that do not operate on trust would do. Would it be like the replacement of organized crime (mafia) with the arguably wider damaging unorganized violent drug gangs?
There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?
To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?
I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time?
But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?
Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.
Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.
Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?
So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
We also need to be motivated to stay in our jobs.
Most developers like their projects and value their work. But the chances are that it's for nothing.
Many developers know they work on bad products (gambling industry, military, surveillance, whatever) and so it's here that they focus on their technologies, tools and frameworks rather than the work they produce.
"Agentic engineering" for example.
Id be curious to see what and how Googlers are doing with their 20% time.