If only we all could rise to the level of not doing stupid things on company property (praise), or company time (praise), then we would want for no privacy for there was never any to be taken in the first place.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
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I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
I would just like to lightly push back on that point. That bad code? That dead end? That month’s worth of tokens spent on a runaway loop? Those weren’t dead ends. Those were learning points. Experiences carried forward, etched in your mind. So take heart. We need both successes and failures to grow as people. And you are growing. I can see it.
Speaking of things that I don’t buy. Metaphorically yesterday this site would gatekeep over enjoying the process of coding itself. People who merely programmed for a 200KUSD paycheck, pphew, disgusting.
Made a post about how you learned to touch type? Or improved something keyboard-related? “I don’t think that typing code was ever the bottlenck”.[1] Now we’re supposed to be grateful for non-deterministic code completion, ah it saves us millions of keystrokes a year.
Some will cry Goomba Fallacy. Yeah of course. Could be that many lurker accounts started posting more, displacing the gatekeeper typist hackers. Now it’s all of a sudden an even split. Huh.
The OP was not about AI. But thankfully there was a top-level meta comment to drag us down into that pit.
[1] The non sequitur of it all is a separate topic
> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question.
Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring.
> These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?
As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism.
But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose?
Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense.
- Who benefits?
- Who will be left standing?
And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people.
And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left?
Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level?
> Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading—
No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts.
> So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight
So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight?
> My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise.
Platitude nonsense.
Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest.
> The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.
On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever.
On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets).
> So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.
The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization.
> In that old essay I gave that center a definition
How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that.
In fact I didn’t read most of this piece.
> This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too.
Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations.
> The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual.
The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder.
Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective.
> To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night.
Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset.
> Back to the question in the first letter:
Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here?
> But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built.
The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler.
> The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend.
Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest?
> The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window,
Beyond embarrassing.
Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.
> Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end.
Poor companies missing out on consumer money.
It’s funny to think about. One might lose their apartment because they can’t pay rent. Then they’re homeless. What does that mean? As long as they are eating, at least some moeny is circulating. Maybe not as much because of dumpster diving and things like that. Meanwhile what was lost? One less family to pay for rent. Which means that an apartment is vacant. And rent is mostly not productive. It is mostly rent on estate ownership.
The first level of destituness (for renters at least) might not lead to less productive money circulating. But less rent money. Then when that happens to enough people you simply have more vacant apartments. Okay, a little loss of productive circulation since no one is wearing out the floors etc.
Becoming homeless is probably not the right approach to think about that. Most people will somehow be able to continue a regular life.
They move to smaller houses or multiple families share a house. => landlords and real estate companies make less money. CEOs might not be able to upgrade ther yacht => more layoffs in the yachting industry
Parents, spouses or relatives will often chip in for rent and food. => less money spent on consumer goods and services. It's easy to cut cost for things like hairdresser, eating out, gardeners, smartphones. Instead of redoing the kitchen, the old one can be DIY fixed.
It's just a downward spiral in all parts of the economy. And in the end a lot of businesses have to cut their AI spending as a result.
Carmack seems arrogant[1]. Which is why I take that statement as high praise.
It’s also a nod to his own fame.
[1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.
Nestlé can give us our daily allowance of baby formula and [AI corporation winner] can give us our daily allowance of free compute. These years will bring interesting times!
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
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