You don't say what kind of work you would look for, where in the large geography called the Bay Area, or what kind of living standard you expect. So no way anyone can give a meaningful answer, as reflected in the lack of responses.
In the software business for over 40 years. I never thought serious programmers would use words like "describing the vibe" and "watching it manifest." Or to see pseudo-meaningful phrases like "dopamine hit" and "hyper-flow" in an article about programming.
The humblebrags alone turn me off: You think too fast and have too many ideas pouring out of your "speed of thought" brain. Mere software design and coding impose "drag" and "friction," like a shark forced to swim in mud with the rest of us with less-hyperactive minds. Lay off the Adderall.
I raised three kids. Children go through a period of intense curiosity where they try to make sense of the world, ask what feels like a hundred questions an hour, and present random thoughts and ideas and theories at the "speed of thought," or a speed faster than an adult can pay attention. I think of that as fun and charming with children, not aware of what they don't know, and interpreting their random theories as novel ideas. Then they grow up and learn to focus their mental faculties, and with some luck and skill discern signal from noise.
@dang I appreciate the tireless and thankless work you do in HN, sincerely, but I don't always agree.
> Don't be curmudgeonly.
I feel flattered to get identified as a curmudgeon in company with Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, and George Carlin. I might take offense at the implicit ageism but at my age I roll with it. HN teems with unchallenged insults directed at the elderly, grating on us old people, but in line with the HN demographic.
> Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
No one can "be" those things since that implies an identity. One can write in a negative tone. Accusations of rigidity and genericity would require a large sample. No one who knows me would describe me as "rigid or generically negative" so I will let that go as an ignorant judgment.
> please don't cross into personal attack.
Refuting the OP's claims can't count as personal attack, unless we hollow out all argument and rhetoric. I apologize for the Adderall comment, should have left that out.
> That is in no way allowed here.
Ironic given the personal nature of the moderator scolding, attacking my age and identity by telling me what not to "be."
I realize it's a distinction without a difference in this case, but the reason that guideline says "Don't be curmudgeonly" as opposed to "Don't be a curmudgeon" is precisely to avoid giving the impression of labeling the person themselves. It's a transient quality that anyone can have. But I get that it didn't land that way and I'm sorry.
Actually you put it quite nicely when you say: "No one can "be" those things since that implies an identity" - I quite agree, and that's exactly what that guideline was trying (but evidently failing) to avoid. To my ear it sounds analogous to the "Don't be snarky" guideline. If I say I was "being" snarky at a certain moment (or impatient or rude or what have you), it doesn't follow that I "am" a snarky (etc.) person. That's how I meant it anyhow - I hear your point and do not mean to persuade you out of it.
The Adderall comment was the worst bit, but 'You think too fast and have too many ideas pouring out of your "speed of thought" brain' was also crossing into personal attack, and so were the last two sentences comparing the other person to a child that failed to grow up. The trouble is that these sorts of swipes accrue like mercury in the bloodstream and the ecosystem can only handle so much.
@dang Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I abandoned all other social media years ago, I stick around on HN largely because of the moderation.
You probably know that I did not actually feel insulted or attacked. One of the few advantages of getting older: I care less and less what people appear to think about me, or what they say. And I don't think you intended insult. I alert at language using forms of "to be," to the annoyance of people who argue with me.
I understand how my comment can read like a personal attack, and I could have interpreted the OP more generously, or kept my mouth shut. I will try to do better. Something about the "I have too many ideas popping into my head" and "I think too fast" -- posted daily in one form or another, or spouted in co-working spaces, sets me off. My problem, which I will blame on cognitive decline and general feeling that I have reached the end of my road in the tech industry.
You’re fair to call out the wording. I agree some of it reads more buzzword-y than intended.
My point wasn’t that thinking fast is inherently good or that coding is “drag.” Quite the opposite: the friction of implementation used to be a form of thinking time for me. Typing forced pacing and reflection.
What I’m noticing now is that when iteration becomes extremely cheap, the bottleneck shifts from “can I build this?” to “should I build this?” That’s not about hyperactivity. It’s about decision quality.
The “dopamine” part wasn’t meant as a brag but as a caution. Fast feedback loops can encourage shallow iteration instead of deeper design if you’re not careful.
So if anything, I’m arguing for more deliberate thinking, not less.
Grift of the month. How can anyone take this seriously year after year? Didn't we get promised robots building colonies on Mars by now? Or at least Starship carrying a payload and not exploding?
I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting that a machine, or chatbot, never tires or gets demoralized. You have to anthromorphize the LLM before you can even think of those possibilities. A tractor never tires or gets demoralized either, because it can't. Chatbots don't "dive into a rabbit hole ... and then keep digging" because they have superhuman tenacity, they do it because that's what software does. If I ask my laptop to compute the millionth Fibonacci number it doesn't sigh and complain, and I don't think it shows any special qualities unless I compare it to a person given the same job.
You're a machine. You're literally a wet, analog device converting some forms of energy into other forms just like any other machine as you work, rest, type out HN comments, etc. There is nothing special about the carbon atoms in your body -- there's no metadata attached to them marking them out as belonging to a Living Person. Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention.
So, since you're just a machine, any text you generate should be uninteresting to me -- correct?
Alternatively, could it be that a sufficiently complex and intricate machine can be interesting to observe in its own right?
If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties.
>Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention
Evolution doesn't "teach" anything. It's just an emergent property of the fact that life reproduces (and sometimes doesn't). If you're going to have this radically reductionist view of humanity, you can't also treat evolution as having any kind of agency.
"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."
Wrong level of abstraction. And not the definition of machine.
I might feel awe or amazement at what human-made machines can do -- the reason I got into programming. But I don't attribute human qualities to computers or software, a category error. No computer ever looked at me as interesting or tenacious.
LLMs do not have grit or tenacity. Tenacity doesn't desribe a machine that doesn't need sleep or experience tiredness, or stress. Grit doesn't describe a chatbot that will tirelessly spew out answers and code because it has no stake or interest in the result, never perceives that it doesn't know something, and never reflects on its shortcomings.
You mangled Jefferson a bit. He wrote about education, not news. He didn't imagine the the non-stop firehose of slop and advertising and propaganda we endure and call news. What passes for news today describes the opposite of critical thinking and education.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
Why not sell dragon rides in Westeros? What a scam. Starship yet to achieve orbit or carry any payload, and it won't have lots of room inside supposing it ever gets to the moon. This looks like a sure thing to bet against on prediction markets.
You don't say what kind of work you would look for, where in the large geography called the Bay Area, or what kind of living standard you expect. So no way anyone can give a meaningful answer, as reflected in the lack of responses.