Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

toomuchtodo

Find something that has meaning to you.

rogerkirkness

I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.

Chinjut

Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.

bm3719

Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering. Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

kranner

I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation. I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard. If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea. Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

globalnode

make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.

allthetime

Anyone can do it? Is everyone you know making a million dollars a year with their software startup? Are you?

paul7986

Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb. Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment. I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!

throw-the-towel

Yes, but also no. On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can. On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me. Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better. (But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)

tclancy

Hey, congrats on coming up on a birthday that ends in 0. Mine was just 5-0. I can give you two pieces of possible advice: - nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky. - the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.

OgsyedIE

The thing you describe was perfectly addressed, as far as I can tell, in a piece of short fiction about AI that was written in 2021. https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...

joshdavham

I’m actually incredibly excited for the future! Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM? I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible. On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

kadhirvelm

I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place. We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end. What do you think? Still meaningless?

ab_goat

Doing what matters has become essential; discerning what that is, less clear.

chr15m

> enable cheats in a game Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1]. I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

kiddico

I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point. Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail! Do something ai can't take from you. I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider. idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.

hattmall

IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.

xyzelement

Family, community, religion are pretty timeless and universal.

chasd00

Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.

keel-control

there's still ego & competition against other humans which is what I do to distract myself