Having more-or-less recovered from what turned out to be an unusually rough reaction to the covid + flu jabs earlier this week, I think I’m going to break out a Pi CM4 I have lying around and do some recreational bare-metal osdev to see if that can help me haul myself out of depression.
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tomorrow i’m getting my covid + flu shots. If earlier experiences are any indication i’m most likely going to be wrecked for a day or so afterwards
aside from that: exhaust myself further by desperately trying to demonstrate that i still have anything meaningful to offer in an AI world.
(and hopefully sleep. insomnia’s been hitting me hard for the last couple of weeks.)
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i’m “okay” in the sense that i’m physically safe, though I fully expect that this will change within the forseeable future, when i am eliminated from the economy and the social safety net breaks down.
i’ve abandoned all creative and technical projects except for work, because there’s no point anymore. as i said; a few years ago I deleted all my code, art, short fiction etc. from the last 25ish years, in recognition that AI has made it all worthless
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i hope you enjoy that.
i don’t believe i will personally still be here in a few years; society is rarely kind to the superfluous
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Current-day models seem to have solved the “regression to piss-yellow ghibli” problem.
I’ve been rather badly made fun of in an offline community I used to frequent because i could spend an afternoon pixelling only to have someone get a diffusion model to spit out something in a couple seconds. and the same with the coding projects i used to do.
I agree that a lot of AI-“assisted” work doesn’t teach anything - but isn’t the entire point that nobody needs to teach or learn anymore? I know that I have former students who feel like they got tricked into a dead field by people who ought to have known better (though I don’t think any of them blames me personally).
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I had nothing else in my life. Now I have nothing.
I still cling to my job - but soon that will be gone too, and then my existence is a net negative. I haven’t yet decided how to face that.
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To a large extent, AI has already replaced me. It didn’t just destroy the monetary value of said creative projects (which was zero, because I never intended to monetize anything), it made it culturally irrelevant. Who gives a fuck that I can make a game when you can get Unity Spark or Google Playground to shit one out with no effort? Sitting down and pixelling a pixelart work now only gets you ridiculed, as does writing programs.
I am completely literal in that AI has eliminated all value my life could ever have had. I’m a disabled weirdo who lives a largely solitary life, my technical skills were largely all I had to offer.
I’ve wasted my entire life, and the years I spent teaching CS are now a source of deep shame and guilt for me, because all I did was trick young people into wasting years of their lives too.
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Do I, though? I bet you wouldn’t notice if I died tomorrow.
I live a largely solitary life, for various mostly disability-related reasons, and all I’ve ever really had to offer was now-worthless technical skills.
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This is largely where I’m at. I still cling to my job as best I can, but I’m well aware that it will soon be gone. I hope a social safety net of some sort will survive when there is no longer a taxpaying middle class to fund it, and American AI companies have taken all the money. There probably won’t be, though.
The first thing I did when the LLM wave started picking up steam and it was evident where this was heading was to destroy all the various work-in-progress “passion projects” I’d been working on. I deleted an approx. 25-year-old accumulated pile of code, (bad) art and short fiction, precisely because I was well aware that there was no longer any point. There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.
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It is hard to face having wasted one’s entire life.
As for Amazon: They’re pivoting to robots, so that’s not likely. Personally, I think my own most likely future prospect is starving to death under a bridge.
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Aforementioned lizard is a blue-tongue skink. When I was a kid most care guides said they live to 10-20, but now their lifespan is more commonly put at 20-30. We actually don’t know how long they live in the wild; shingleback skinks (a closely related species) surprised everyone when it turned out they can live into their 50s. Some shinglebacks caught and tagged for a 1982 study on their migration patterns still turn up today!
Mine is in very good health. He’s in great shape, almost exactly in the middle of the healthy weight range for his age and length, and has above-average musculature. He doesn’t really “feel” like a senior animal. Also, he’s probably the friendliest and most contact-seeking reptile I’ve ever met (including other skinks I’ve kept).
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being a software developer is getting more and more depressing for every day that goes by.
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17 year old goldfish
There is something very satisfying about caring for healthy senior animals. My pet lizard is 18, and it sort of weirds me out that he’d be old enough to vote or take a driver’s license - and it simultaneously feels like he’s always been there and that I got him yesterday.
He’s as active and outgoing as he ever was, keeps getting an excellent bill of health at his annual vet checkups, and has no signs of the geriatric diseases that sometimes affects his species (they’re prone to arthritis and cataracts).
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I’ve kept reptiles for distressingly close to 40 years by now, and in that particular little world, building trust in just 3 weeks would be an accomplishment! (and with them, breaking trust before it’s well-established is back to 0).
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