Rui CarmoIt’s been (inexactly) 46 days since my last rant, and the place wouldn’t feel the same if I wasn’t (mildly) furiously hammering my current train of thought into vim, bare-brained, like the semi-civilized ape-like creature that we all are when bereft of our AI crutches.
Even as (finally) Z.ai puts out something that is close enough to Claude and Codex and the bemonied digerati gushed all over Twitter (yes, I still refuse to call it “X”) that finally they can run something comparable to cloud models locally (for the cheap price of a kidney or two), I have to ask myseilf why the fuck we are doing this (and yes, that is an expletive–if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I am usually much more restrained than this and that it was by no means gratuitous).
I mean, just go and watch Gergely Orosz’s presentation1 and tell me if any of the stories he tells make sense in anything but this timeline, where the only thing that matters is exposure/hype, individuals vie for social media presence, everyone is out to sell you something (even if they don’t have a business model) and AI has raised the stakes to a point where the noice is deafening–opening any social media timeline these days invariably results in a torrent of:
- Advertising for things that, inexplicably, are made better by including AI
- People (random word)-maxxing something related to AI even though their solutions don’t actually deliver anything of value
- Developers pitching their latest micro-niche AI-generated tool that only they can use
- AI-generated dopamine hooks that are fundamentally indistinct from the above
- A random CxO saying that AI did something for them that a fresh business school graduate would question was even sensible to do to
- People complaining about AI because they have become mentally incapacitated to the point they can’t turn their phone off
And the list goes on. Invariably, a select minority of these becomes important enough to get funded/acquired or just marketed to a point of ubiquity and you get a small flash of uniqueness amidst the Cambrian chaos, and people cheer them on even though, unlike the Cambrian, there is (as of yet) no emergent specialization and stabilization of niches, even though it’s pretty certain that all of this is going nowhere fast and some kind of mass extinction is (in a parody of Zeno’s Paradox), infinitely far away yet clearly too close for comfort.
I’m tired of the way this industry works, very tired of the noise around the whole thing, and in dire need of a vacation, which despite being still formally forthcoming I can at least try to enact in principle by (again) removing distractions from all my devices.
So I’ve gone back to a terminal window and, amazingly, realized that:
- I can still code with my own fingers, thank you very much
- I actually don’t want to do it without purpose
- AI has, over the past few months, been an amazing enabler not just for my ability to “ship” things, but also for completely shattering my focus by giving me too much ability to make quick progress on things I would otherwise clearly rate as not important enough for my (limited) time.
- I need to do less (preferably more fulfilling) stuff.
If this reads to you somewhat like Mario Zechner’s post2, but a bit more ranty, well, yes, congratulations, you’ve got the gist of it. And if you’ve been nodding along as you read any of it and you’re still planning on using your computer to talk to datacenter-resident ghosts to “achieve” stuff that you can only experience through it, well, then, you’re too close to the problem to notice.
Shut off the bloody thing and go touch grass, then come back and try to think of all of these things as tools. And decide what you want to do with those tools that will make you happy.
That said, I am now going to try to step back from this entire mess for a few days, focus on the hardware I have here on my desk to test, and try to make it past Summer, possibly followed by a period of doing something more meaningful with my time in general.