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> “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said in the statement.

Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.

I tend to think of this “character” as part of craft, bordering on art.

Deep artful craft requires inhabiting work beyond basic professionalism and requirements. You set aside self and ego and commit yourself as a tool to create.

It’s a value system created via example and culture. We have to be ready to prioritize reflection and learning, meaningful feedback, dialogue, certain kinds of humor even.

So it’s sadly not healthy or sustainable in many settings.

Edit: thank you for this post. It was a nice humanist reaffirmation.

My latest armchair theory is that bullshit jobs might be like “junk” DNA, which researchers learned isn’t actually junk and influences various cellular and genetic behavior, just not through direct protein instruction.

Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.

I have an x3 and love it. It’s so small I don’t think twice about taking it everywhere. I have the crosspoint firmware on it, and I sync it with calibre.

I’m no expert on self improvement, but my ambitions tend to be a lot lower on vacation. Instead of trying to cultivate better habits, I mostly just try to interrupt the old dumb ones. Instead of phone in bed, it’s a huge win if I’m in a hammock with a fun book. Instead of checking email over coffee, maybe I can sit outside with that coffee and listen to birds. Etc etc.

I’ve found “burnout” is often shorthand for a feeling that something broke and there’s no complete fix. It’s a scenario where we can’t just get some sleep or take some vacation and be good as new. Even if we go back to the job and look normal-ish to colleagues, there’s a weakened seam where we did the repair, and going back into the environment where the break happened puts stress on that same spot.

So the solution tends to be learning how to avoid injury (boundaries, mental health), and/or a bigger change in the conditions. I think this post is mostly about the latter.

Weird, I’m usually sensitive to telltales, but I didn’t read it as AI generated enough that I stopped reading, and I found it relevant. I felt like it had a pretty substantial human input behind it, maybe because I related to the stories.

What a lovely mini journey. Turns something possibly stressful into something weird and fun.

There are many things that no one will think to later attribute to “career success” that were in fact foundational to their learning and development.

In my experience it’s designed around a make/build/experiment pedagogical approach, not as a bootcamp system to get kids into programming careers

The absurdity is the point. Comparing the merits of scratch vs game modding in children’s eventual programming career success is such a silly overly serious adult thing to do. If kids experience fun and exploration while learning along the way, that’s what matters.

And plenty of great authors start with fanfic. Like actually. But apologies the snark landed that way. I was not intending to diminish people learning via game modding at all.

What I found irritating in the post is the premise that what we put in front of kids should be judged by counts of attributions to career success.

I still see picture books as an introductory path to literacy for kids, but unlike posting fan fiction on AO3, I have never heard a “success story”, where someone credits their early experience with picture books as key to a fulfilling career. Anyone?

As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.

Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.

Why not just bake an agent into every service and chat with it? Sounds more fun at least.

Please keep researching and report back!

It’s not just solo developers. Startup teams with limited time that are focusing their energy on finding the right product to build also use openrouter.

I think the bet is that you offer enough value-adds that companies who find traction don’t want to switch to something enterprise grade, and you grow into being enterprise grade with them.

Very similar to Stripe’s trajectory, incidentally.

> Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.

Yes, I’m curious just how much of the scaling issues might be self-inflicted.

Also I’d like to see the distribution of usage. I’m guessing a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.

What an inspiring post! So much surprise and depth in each selection.

> Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.

Well said.

Hi, thanks for reading and your comment. Reviewing now, I can see why the final paragraph might have read this way.

What I was hoping to convey in the last two paragraphs was that I was trying to be thoughtful with where I use AI (work project where I did the initial thinking and setup and the agent does a lot of review and aggregation and reports back) and where I don’t (reflecting and writing). And the hope is that if I pay more attention to my values and priorities, I will make better decisions about my goals and how to achieve them, and maybe I’ll get more value out of both the tech and the process.

None of this is strictly new or limited to effects of AI. There has always been a process vs outcome calculus. But some of the parameters have changed in the past few years and I think we need to adjust.

This metaphor slaps. And folds!

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I was hoping others might relate to this experience in some way.

I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one.

But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.

No, but a lot is.

You see a version of this in every tech boom cycle, but this one is way more reflexive.

Mature technical software projects are slow moving because they have real users building other real software and businesses with them. Their engineering involves navigating the ecosystem and dep and compatibility constraints.

Any project moving super fast pumping out PRs either isn’t burdened/blessed with real usage OR doesn’t care about (reap real value from) the users it has.

Related theory is that the LLM “labs” are actually not particularly incentivized to prioritize stable API surfaces. They want machine interfaces to constantly rapidly change so that we must depend on model based natural language surfaces to navigate the complexity.

> Everyone can make anything. Almost no one can tell you what is worth making. That was always the harder skill. It is now the only one left.

But people can and do tell you what is worth making. Taste is largely set by class and power. The “skill” is having the right context (wealth, education, network) and then pattern matching on it.

And a population that seems content being manipulated.

What a weird title.

Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.

Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.

Do we just want parchment?

No. We want paper.

> A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”

Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.

Don’t worry, the 100x boosted harness wrote it