stuff tagged with "work"
The AI Vampire
🔗 a linked post to
steve-yegge.medium.com »
—
originally shared here on
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, the new workday should be three to four hours. For everyone. It may involve 8 hours of hanging out with people. But not doing this crazy vampire thing the whole time. That will kill people.
As an individual developer, you need to fight the vampire yourself, when you’re all alone, with nobody pushing you but the AI itself. I think every single one of us needs to go touch grass, every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.
I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.
I’m so glad somebody is saying this out loud.
You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.
It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well–this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
I'm never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I'm thinking, could I do something with that? [That may sound torturous.] Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with.
