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- Hacker News
- technology is just a red herring. GTA-level whacky NPCs will have NPC behaviour regardless of what situation you throw them in.
The same "person" that shows absurd behaviour like that, assuming it's not just rage/clickbait, has absurd behaviour in a completely technology disconnected world as well.
The only thing that might differ is that it's not as outwardly obvious. Those behaviours are a result of who they are at a person (whether this be because of genetics and environment, poor soul RNG, or something else).
To that extent all technology does is make it more obvious. Basically the average NPC has more opportunities to reveal themselves as such. It's not indicative of a fundamental problem.
by yeoyeo42 - > The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them.
Damn, this could have been me. I used to want something like this. I was in my late teens, heavily into computers, on the autistic spectrum but didn't yet know what the hell that was, and I felt deeply disconnected from my peers. I dreamt that perhaps, there could be some kind of robots that could help me with figuring out how is all that socialisation shit supposed to work. But that would only appear in some faraway sci fi future, and I might not even live to see that time.
Some fifteen years pass, and the sci fi future is now. The feeling is rather disconcerting.
- For what it’s worth, allowing agents to just run in the background provides me with more time to play with my child than I had in the past. Some stuff deserves to be automated, isn’t that the purpose of code in the first place?
But overall premise is on point, people are being pretty goofy about this tech; it’s just another tool - nothing to go into psychosis over, which seems to be happening in some cases, unfortunately. Touching some grass certainly helps.
by cpursley - I get this same feeling when I see people taking photos for social media. I see the number of photos people take and I think of how sad it is that they are ruining their own experience for a photo that they might not ever see again.
Even the purported reason for these photos existing is sad, that they want to be able remember or relive the experience. Just get new experiences? That idea is much more uplifting to me.
Caveat, this obviously doesn't include once in a lifetime experiences that in my opinion it's justified to take photos of like marriage or things involving milestones of children etc.
by vmg12 - I'm amazed how many people I see taking photos of their coffee. Like "this is the one I want to remember". It's like the joy of novelty has been replaced by the potential and short-lived dopamine of a social like.by pedalpete
- This is still not as weird as the valley was in the late 1990s during the first Internet bubble, with the exception that housing scarcity, which was notably bad then (I had to pay my year's rent up front to secure an apartment in San Francisco), has been left to fester for 2 decades.by tptacek
- What was weird during the first Internet bubble?
- The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
- >Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them
This is part of what turns grasshoppers into locusts. They're attempting not only to eat the insect in front of them, but escape the one behind that is attempting to eat them. I'll leave it up to the reader to complete the metaphor.
by itintheory - But we're not insects, we are civilized and there is enough resources to be shared among everyone, isn't it ?by cthe
- > Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin.This causes the locust to change colour, eat much more, and breed much more easily. [1]
Fascinating.
by jcarrano - > Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.
It's been downright spooky to watch people I know personally or been familiar with totally fall down the rabbit hole.
That said, like with everything, it depends on the person. Some people are taking the Jack Nicholson route, others are finally taking time off and enjoying their life (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
by rglover - > Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.
It's not like we hadn't been warned by decades of sci-fi work, and researchers, and historians, telling us everything that would be wrong with AI
> I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs
No you're not. You could very likely organize your life to have your nights and weekends without AI. It's just a choice you made not to do it before
by oulipo - > (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
Why weren't you taking them off before?
- What is "the Jack Nicholson route"? I happened to watch The Departed last night and am genuinely asking, something to do with working a lot?by dieselgate
- > (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).
What did the LLM's speed up that was taking that time away from you?
by MisterTea - I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs
Research has repeatedly shown that people can only be productive a certain number of hours in a week. People who work more then a healthy number of hours are probably doing busywork.
I have always taken off nights and weekends and I have built a lot of things I am proud of. I am also very happy with my career so far.
I'm in my forties now with a teenage kid and I often realize how fast life flies by and we only get one shot at it. So I'm very happy I chose to work part-time some years, so that I could spend the afternoons with our kid.
by microtonal - This reminded me of work in general, years ago I was thinking how nursery was so expensive. I could try and work harder, earn more, to pay for nursery - or just quit and look after my children. If the goal was making money to look after my children, why make it difficult?
p.s. LOVE the animated header on this blog
by mulhoon - It's like the century old fable about the businessman and the fisherman.
Nothing new.
by antisthenes - FWIW, in some countries it's very normal for both parents to work part-time. E.g. both work 32 hours, so that one of the parents can be at home during the afternoon four days a week. Then the grandparents fill the remaining days. From 8:30-14:00, the kids go to daycare (or later school), good for socialization with other kids.by microtonal
- When we had a child, we decided that my spouse should absolutely go back to work, even though that job just barely paid for daycare. But it meant that my spouse could leave the house, have adult conversations, and not have their full life, 24/7, revolve around a single thing.by pavel_lishin
- >The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine and asks how well she performed.
Holy insanity
by amarcheschi - Dating in the Silicon Valley must be hell.by kubb
- I weep for the futureby datakan
- When you raise kids in a society that scruitinizes and measures every aspect of their existence against all ither kids, and then send those kids to a workforce where every aspect of their performance and personality are scruitinized and analyzed to attempt to rank them against their peers, why wouldn't said kids seek out such "objective" ranking in their personal lives? We have designed society to produce people neurotically obsessed with ranking and comparison in school, work, and social media, and yet we're surprised when people start being neurotically obsessed with ranking in their performance in dating? This is a problem we created.by markovs_gun
- It's hard to say how common that is though. We can't really extrapolate from one example.
I hope that person finds more confidence and especially starts having fun, because that's what dating can be.
by microtonal - This really captures the danger of turning every technological gain into a new expectation. AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
Throughout history there have been predictions that the next technological breakthrough will lead to us working less and living more fulfilled lives, that has never happened. Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.
by raychis - "we" don't reinvest into working harder. Institutional shareholders, who control the large-scale structure of society, reinvest us into working harder.by inigyou
- > AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?
I think you may be in a bit of a bubble. Sure the Anthropic engineer is trying to token max. But "we" generally see AI as a step up from google search and go about our lives pretty much the same as we have.
The ones that are captured by AI, I think they're just truly excited about the technology. It's new and opening up possibilities. It's like when you first learned to program and you stayed up all night writing games or whatever your interests were.
I know without programming I would "work less" but that doesn't result in "more fulfilled lives". Quite the opposite. The most unfulfilled people I know in life work the least!
by bko - Exactly. That's why the goal is to share the means of production among everyoneby oulipo