What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
> quietly enjoying nature on a day off
You seem to have your concepts mixed up!
I for one much prefer to do work at a desk instead of wandering around.
Put another way: if my twin and I are both working at competing firms doing the same job, but I do it via satellite phone while hiking the PCT and he does it from in front of a keyboard, there is no way he's not getting more done, even with AI. The bandwidth of voice/text to speech is a tiny fraction of visual.
Believe it or not, it was not practical to take my gear into nature haha. But with the advent of agentic coding (and stt solutions like handy), I can be productive with much less typing and equipment.
I have considered leaving the tech sector because of the aforementioned friction, and just like in my message above, I don't think we are considering the same dilemmas. OP said work vs contemplation, I said indoor work vs outdoor work. You mention productivity trade-offs, but for me working in tech used to feel physically unsustainable.
Cheers
OP: "I had an amazing time doing something. "
Commenters: "No you didn't."
In the end it was just a hassle and a distraction. I’d rather have 5 solid hours of work and 5 hours of non-work, rather than 10 hours of an awkward hybrid.
Not sure when you last tried, but I feel I would not be able to do what I do today with last years models.
Of someone’s carried my ass around all day I’d be a physically atrophied and mentally addled maniac, on obese to boot if I’m stuffing my face the whole ride
Part of the dilemma with modern culture is that most people seem to be striving for and hoping technology will provide pleasure funk laziness and glut. But these things in and of themselves produce bad outcomes. I get why people really stressed out might daydream about that, but this is probably more indicative of being overworked than of the virtues of laziness and glut
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
- George Bernard Shaw
The choice is do you want to walk or sit behind a desk when doing a task that needs human attention. It doesn't have to replace a nice "offline" outdoor activity.
It reminds me of the 7-minute abs scene in Something About Mary.
No, the next step is the employer to ask "why are you walking on a beach when you could be working?" and won't accept the answer that they are just orchestrating agents.
The only part the employer will focus on is "walking on a beach" and think "I don't pay you to walk on a beach."
(Caveat: OP might be running their own business. That's different. Also makes me rethink my life choices a bit).
Shocks Opencomm 2 headset or my Sony xm6 earbuds connected to a custom Android app. Android local Supertonic model for text to voice, private whisper on the server for voice to text. Local Nvidia Glider LLM for PII filtering of CRM related data. The Android app controls codex app server instances (mostly working with latest GPT model on high), switches between projects and threads based on voice commands, a ton of little tweaks to optimize my workflow. Every service except the public facing website runs behind a Wireguard VPN.
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).