What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
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Only issue was nobody sends mail anymore -- the elderly, Christmas and spam -- so when there was no mail, you'd work an hour and then you'd only get paid one hour. So most people were students, or their spouse did the heavy lifting.
Other than the pay, it was a great job though. I worked in snowstorms (and regular storms!) and in >37C (~100F) -- I got a big sombrero which looked a bit silly but did the job.
Then I'd go home and work on genetic algorithms. And then when the pay arrived at the end of the month -- 800 Euros (909 American), I had to wonder if I wasn't doing it backwards -- I should be getting paid to work on genetic algorithms all day, and then at the end of the day I should run up and down staircases for several hours for free.
Surely the irony isn't lost upon you that they literally are advocating for getting a life.
I design games. I can't even count the number of times something someone said, or a game I've played or watched a review of, has sparked an idea for new game, especially a board game (which most of the time doesn't work out once it gets in front of players, but that's okay). It's probably been over a hundred times by now.
People love highlighting quotes from poems and stories that they find inspirational for their own lives somehow. You want to know how I know? Kindle used to tell me, with saying how many other people highlighted a specific passage (it might still do that, but I mostly listen to audiobooks right now, so of course I won't see them). Also social media is flooded with people sharing quotes from various books or poems or sayings from people.
That's all this is.
But because it's said by someone who works with A.I. and thus is thinking about the quote with that frame of reference, you had to twist it into some anti-A.I. sentiment, implying that he's doing something perverted or not normal by daring to find inspiration in a quote.
> “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.”
No one can say what he would have thought of AI for sure but I think he would have appreciated ability to reduce drudgery on this thoughts on factotum[1] work.
1. Why yes, that is a cheesy reference to his book of the same name. ;)
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer - https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-bukow...
—Philip Pullman
Wouk elaborated on that predicament. He said that writer William Faulkner was asked, ‘Mr. Faulkner, do you write on inspiration or do you write on a schedule?’ Faulkner replied. ‘Well, of course I write on inspiration. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at a quarter past nine.’
> This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: Must I write? Dig into 1 yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity..."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Meanwhile Rilke gives no sympathy saying don't write because it is easy, hard, or your job, write because your existence demands it.
I've found writing software for domains is agnostic; there isn't much difference between make a CRM for Real Estate or ERP for car mechanic shops. It is curious that I know one person who is as passionate about the event ticket industry as Rilke is about writing -- they would rather die than not scalp tickets.
I would have to read `Letters to a Young Poet again`. Rilke addresses the difference between being an artist (Rilke a Poet apprenticed under Rodin to learn not sculpture but guidance to live as an artist) and entering a structured profession.
Charles Bukowski said something similar…
> /…/ no baby, if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare, you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you’re going to create blind crippled demented, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire. baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it and don’t create anything except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for.
It seemed logical, at the time, to postpone such frivolous affairs until life was more orderly. But it sure didn't help speed things along.
On another note, I have also heard it said that one must suffer for one's art, but I haven't found much correlation personally between suffering and art... except perhaps to the degree that JavaScript is involved!
The first few posts had some actual substance (a kind of backlog I suppose), but eventually I realized that I was just posting because I had decided to post and I didn't actually have anything left to say.
So I just stopped posting. I guess it'll probably be a few more years until the next one :)
(Gosh, just imagine if YouTube operated on this principle...)
I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.
If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.
If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]
I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?
What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?
A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.
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[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.
And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!
(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)
Doing things like this for yourself is how you make automation work for you instead of against you. Then you can take some of your extra time to automate even more. Or, if you're a dev, to clean up code so it's easier to work on later, or to improve your skills.
How that applies in the vibe coding world, I'm not sure. Maybe by getting better than average at vibe coding. (I'd be interested in your further thoughts on your last paragraph.)
You have to decide whether your time is your own, or your employer's. The latter is a road to burnout. I always viewed myself as a one-man business, with my managers being my only customers. I decided for myself how best to keep them happy, while also keeping myself happy.
Another part of all this was estimates. Early in my career I just estimated my median expected time, which meant half the time my boss got mad at me. Later I gave estimates I was at least 90% likely to meet, and worked extra hours on the few occasions it took longer. Managers were happier because I hardly ever missed a deadline, and usually I had extra time, which I also kept to myself fairly often.
For the owner of the business, all this might not have been ideally profitable in the short term, though I think it worked out pretty well in the long term. It's a virtuous cycle if you spend some of your extra time productively. I ended up with a pretty easy job most of the time, but occasionally being the guy they called on to save a failing project, and then I was fresh enough to work like a maniac.
> the best writers have said very little and the worst, far too much. > bag over his head in a bathtub full of water. what Hitler couldn’t do, he did to himself. happy journey.
Throughout reading the "Betting on the muse", I had plenty of "what an asshole" moments.
But regarding work produced for the marketplace, I think it is naive to think any productivity gains will ever produce more time on the beach for workers. The market is competitive. Some gains will be seized by capital, and others realized in the production of some combination of more stuff, cheaper stuff, or better stuff.
This is the natural continuation of "90 hours a week and loving it!" https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html
Because the environment mentioned earlier in the post - Silicon Valley - has absolutely nothing to offer but value creation. The people who rise up to leadership and success in that environment aren't particularly awesome human beings. The point isn't to make it better to be a human, it's to make all of the money.
All of the discussion about open models here of late offers a backdrop for what OpenAI was supposed to be versus what it turned out to be, and that offers a pretty good demonstration of the problem. Originally OpenAI was supposed to be a public benefit corporation that offered open models with a focus on ethics and safety. Their investors could expect "only" 100x return on their buy-in.
That, of course, didn't fill up the pockets of investors in SV to their liking, so the models became closed, the focus on safety and ethics went out the window, and the company became a typical for-profit corporation. The bet is now that they can hyperscale the deployment of closed models in a way that will generate an absolutely enormous amount of revenue and pay off the training and serving costs.
Meanwhile, Chinese developers of open models are taking the role that OpenAI was supposed to fulfill, with the obvious intent of undermining OpenAI and its ilk. They'll likely succeed, at least to some extent.
AI as it is now, at least in the major US labs based in SV, is almost purely for profit. The bet is huge and there can't be room for a penny to not be earned, for that tequila on a beach. It's an all-consuming philosophy in that region. If we want to see AI in the US have a sustainable path, you'll have to toss the people from that regional echo chamber. Maybe that'll happen if the monetary losses are big enough. Maybe not.
Stylistically, I find Bukowski's "I know it / will" linebreak to be offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities as an excellent writer.
Nowadays when we can build software 50x faster, there are even greater benefits from spending time to speak with our prospects/customers.
This is the "working subconsciousness" take-away from Earnest Hemingway I wrote about here: https://galjot.si/what-ai-developers-could-learn-from-ernest...
If AI were marketed like this it would not be appealing to employers. So of course AI marketing is wrapped in hustle culture. Gotta keep the worker bees busy.
Cursor: Do you wanna mess me up? Do you wanna screw up the works? You wanna blow my token sales in Europe?
Judging by his writing, I get a sense that he became a bit more socially pleasant towards the end of his life?
I'm still building the discipline to put the important stuff first!
By my own admission, I often place importance on the wrong things. I am building the discipline of putting the truly important things first.
This has been part of the critique of technology by primitivists for a while now; "labor saving" technology simply stops us from laboring on things we used to and we just move to laboring on other things on the newest level of abstraction with our freed up time / energy.
If society has uncurbed "greed", there can just be a constant "996 grind" on the cutting edge of whatever technological development currently exists.
> instead of forcing himself to write more slop (or ill words in his world) he stands up, moves away from his computer notebook and goes downstairs to his wife and 6 cats
or we could work on other projects, but yeah, take a break of some kind
spending time with family is the only other project that's worth it, besides the one that's paying the bills