Google's 20% 'project' has become AI's 120% 'attention'
scottdbuchanan
37 points
22 comments
June 09, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (6 comments)
fwip
Is this more AI writing, or are my sensors just on the fritz ?
astro-lizard
Distracted by the LLM-generated style of writing. Not sure whether the author truly writes like that (unlikely) or there was heavy AI assistance in drafting this.
giancarlostoro
I never worked at EA, but they had "Friday Afternoon Project" at least someone who worked for EA here in Florida told me so. The unfortunate thing about Friday Afternoon Project being its shorthand acronym or "F.A.P." not sure if that was intentional or just a "happy accident" but a coworker found one such Friday Afternoon Project and had sent me a youtube of it, it was pretty funny looking, thing of a really bare bones game concept basically. I guess it was a way for EA to let employees have some downtime. I was always jealous of the 20% off concept, because there's so many jobs and places where I'd use that time to solve things nobody wants to "fund" within my org, sometimes there's some really dumb bug somewhere, or easy to solve for internal tooling need (I'm sure Google has had this resolved many a time internally) that could be met if I could even have two hours on a Friday to work on anything.
0xWTF
Artists and actors could point the LLMs at programmers by developing their own apps, doing their own engineering. Do they? Who's doing it already? Tilly Norwood's creator seems like a decent start.
johnhess
I worry the answer to "new surplus. who will it go to?" is a foregone conclusion. the surplus is the most surveillable technology imaginable.
apalmer
The article didn't do a good job explaining the 120% attention angle, I kept reading waiting for that and it never really came. I definitely had the impression it was heavily using AI in the writing which I gave up on being against, but it just didn't explain the thesis well. I guess the idea is AI gives you back time so you could now do the 20% but you still really can't because you have to still think about it even if the code is generated? Not even sure after reading all that text what the idea is .