mrmarket

am i the only one who read this and thought 'no shit.' obviously agent hours outnumber human hours? most people operate multiple agents and function as AI nannies now. big deal.

also 'lines of code' or any other output based metric in the age of infinite slop is not a flex/indicator of usefulness or value.

and yes, everyone spends all their time reading Claude output. that doesn't mean better work is getting done, or progress is being made. i've been reviewing and fixing claude slop at work for at least a year. if anything companies/products are getting more homogonized and bloated. thanks anthropic, you are going to save the world

this essay makes a very important point - that embracing nuclear power could have given us so much more runway on climate change, and the campaign to fearmonger on nuclear power was bad - but it's hard to take in his point because it's nearly incomprehensible at times.

"RMI’s Basalt headquarters makes 114,000 kilowatt-hours of rooftop solar a year, sparing about 40 tons of CO2 (net-zero premium for the building: $1.34 million). At that pace, 115 billion tons takes 2.7 billion years. Or every building on Earth, all 2.75 billion, matching RMI’s best work (built in 2015, not 1976) for a year, spending a mere extra $3.7 quadrillion. To pay for one essay."

What the hell does this mean? It's a bunch of numbers in a row seemingly measuring stats of different units against each other? And then this disconnected rhetorical flourish, 'to pay for one essay?' what?

In spite of it all I do love human obsessives, with all their charming inefficiencies. This made me want to work as hard as I can on something important to me. I’m going to spend the night reading poems. And a great reminder of the value of a good mentor

@dang this is both an obviously AI-generated post and also versions of it have been posted ad nauseam over the past few weeks/months. why no flag?

If meta’s marketing team had any self awareness about the state of the ‘brand’, they would know the absolute best thing they could do for probably the next year at least would be to de-emphasize and hide zuck as much as possible, shut their mouths, and try to fade into the background as a silent ‘parent company’. Then they could just let instagram be instagram and hope people forget its part of Meta at all, and if at any point they wanted to spin up or buy a new product, they would not publicize that it is owned by meta. Absolutely no one likes or trusts them. One of worst brands in recent memory at this point.

tech bro delusion + influencer culture has reached a new dystopian low.

"First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys." - this line always makes me settle back in my chair. 'Something Wicked This Way Comes', Ray Bradbury. It's mysterious and nostalgic and sets the tone for the book right away, like any good first line should.

yeah, I noticed this too and thought it was interesting. Scott has always been prone to a form of what i'd call 'excessive rationality' where his quest for things to be hyper-logical and follow a perfect 'if-then' structure ends up being self-limiting, needlessly rigid, unimaginative, and close minded in somewhat random ways.

i just had a little boy (a week ago!) but i feel very certain if i'd had a daughter instead i'd still feel all the same emotions i feel now. in fact, i'm having the opposite experience he's having - my son is the spitting image of my wife as a baby.

well, this is a first. never seen someone say they prefer AI slop even when they know it's slop. fascinating.

why have a blog if you're going to just use AI for everything? at that point, just do twitter threads or something. that way you can tweet out whatever you prompted the model with. if you're not suited for long-form writing that's fine, just use a medium that favors short-form writing.

how bizarre to read this from the future. also, love your writing style.

it's funny that we all keep bumping up against this persistent confrontation with the ego because of AI. i like reading this because it reminds me, when i spiral down the long tunnel of 'who am i now that a robot does nearly all of my job', that i'm just next in line after millions of others who have had their sacred craft automated. to say nothing of the fact that we are all in the business of automating other people's careers away.

AI will bring about a lot of abject terror, but tbh i think it changing our relationships with meaning and greatness is the one thing we could probably turn into something good. if we come at this the right way, we have a chance to all become monk-like lol. we could learn to be content with a strictly personal meaning. that would be net good for society. relying on each other for validation has ruined so many things.

hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.

intellectual work (or really any discipline with a 'skills tree' that you can progress up or down) degrades over time without practice. same way that, if you don't run for a while, you're not going to be able to hit your last PR when you pick it back up.

it's definitely easier to catch up after some time away than it would be if you'd never developed the skills in the first place or didn't have a natural talent, but you'll definitely atrophy without exercise. every leader i've ever worked for who graduated to a purely managerial/'strategic' position and didn't keep up their IC skills eventually got pretty slow on the uptake.

i appreciate that this study was done (AI and its inverse relationship to human wellbeing is one of the biggest challenges of our time IMO) but this also seems obvious

Agree - organized religion is a farce. that said, the desire for community/rituals/reflection that religions exploit to get people hooked are basic desires that 'society at large' doesn't really meet any other way.

that's why i'm wondering: is there a way to meet these desires outside of organized religion? what would a non-deranged spirituality look like?

excellent essay. what a great read.

like the author said, so much of 'success' or 'progress' (in research but of course also across disciplines) depends upon temperament. just straight up having a good attitude about things. the skills that make a good researcher could not be more transferable: patience, innate curiosity, and a resilience against failure.

that said, these skills are increasingly rare/at a premium given our culture of minimizing discomfort tolerance via hyperconvenience. people have a harder and harder time waiting or failing.

this is clearly targeting either vibecoders or people with extremely limited experience in software. i feel like it would be obvious to anyone who doesn't fall into those two categories that the 'AI wrapper' product category is both flooded and has a short shelf life. so many of these products are going to get wiped out once anthropic and other frontier labs stop pricing tokens below market and charge what they actually need for profitability. this is a short term cash grab at best. but hey, they gotta move tokens.

i do this with some frequency, maybe a few times a month. i'll email bloggers/poets/researchers i like or founders of interesting companies that solve very specific problems in a satisfying way. i've gotten more responses than you'd think! even when emailing founders or writers you'd expect had hundreds of much more important emails to attend to.

not to make this yet another 'in the age of AI' comment, but i can't help myself: given how cold and barren the mainstream internet feels now, cold emailing strangers in a non-transactional way is a humanitarian act. when i get emails from strangers about my own personal blog it makes me feel a little brighter about things for like an hour after. it's why i keep my email on my blog, despite the occasional spam/anonymous hate

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.