scruple

I moved into gamesdev in my early 40s, ~20 years into my career (which, to that point, had been embedded then medical robotics). If or when I leave this job, God willing I won't stay in this industry.

I'm not disparaging you, it's neat that you built this and it clearly solves a problem for people. But IMO, leveraging behavioral friction is simpler than dealing with all of this administrative overhead.

I treat my phone as stateless by default. I don't keep many non-stock apps installed. The obvious exceptions are authenticators, I hate it but I get it, and I need my banking app. Pretty much everything else is ephemeral and disposable to me. If I genuinely need an app, I install it, use it, and wipe it.

The imposed friction here kills the compulsory behavior. Do I really want to see what's on Instagram? No, I really don't. Do I really want to spend $7 for a mediocre latte at Starbucks? No, not really. This unintended side-effect has been great. I have no tolerance now for modern retail coercion, and opting out of the enshittified layer of everything has been great for my wallet and my sanity.

For personal correspondence? Yes. Most of what email was used for, for actual humans in their personal lives, has transitioned to SMS and other apps like WhatsApp, WeeChat, Signal, Discord, and that happened a decade ago.

You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think this is a healthy communication network for humans?

Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide, estimates pin actual human written messages at around 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and there are literally thousands of unread emails in there waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise, CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the last 2-3 weeks.

It's a fucking log dump for machines.

Cash is fungible. Living somewhere isn't. Debt is not liquidity, it's encumbrance. It carries strings and fees, in this case foreclosure risk. You're ignoring the entire human reality of housing.

It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...

And the actual margins are about 3%. No one in gaming makes the sorts of margins that Satya is demanding Xbox makes. It's pretty clear to see where this goes. I'm also not sure that the unionization pushes in their studios isn't the real story.

Certainly you realize there's more options.

My gripe is the article is acting like there's some great cultural mystery here. Suggesting anxiety and rideshares and screen time are "the problem." What about the basic arithmetic?

Outside of a handful of legacy pre-war metros / urban cores, North American development has continued to double down on the automobile. While at the same time, the costs to carry a car have exploded.

Young people today are being stranded in an environment that physically requires an automobile while also economically locking them out of even owning one.

I have a prominent scar on my cheek. It's from Mohs surgery. People in my personal life know I'm a combat veteran and used to train BJJ and MMA, so it's always assumed that this scar has some drama associated to it. Even people who knew me before I had Mohs surgery tend to forget. When people ask I play it up a bit but then I let them down with the truth.

Or, the AI convincingly responds that it "understands."

Automated proofs do sound very neat but I think they'll be constrained to a vanishingly small set of already paranoid domains like cryptography, aerospace, etc. Everywhere else is going to spend the dividends on shipping more unvetted code faster, we're just trading discipline for velocity.

The author did.

Bouncing an idea off an LLM, or an editor, or a friend, to check for plausibility isn't composition. It's no different than rubber ducking. The human still did the work.

Generating ideas or checking edge cases isn't the threshold. The threshold is delegation of the craft itself. Who is actually wrestling the thoughts into language, making the hard calls and owning the consequences of the narrative? If the human is still selecting, structuring, and writing the prose then the investment is real. If they hit a button and let the model generate the chapters resolving X, Y, and Z, they abdicated.

In PRs at work (software engineering) we distinguish between drafting, editing, review, and straight generation.

In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.

There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.

But obviously this only works when your network has jobs to offer in the first place.

I am a well networked person and I cannot offer any help to the numerous people (who are all great, many former colleagues or even alumni who could slot right in and help us) who are reaching out to me for even just a referral.

My employer has seen record breaking quarters and years and we have nothing open in engineering or even IT or support. In fact, I can already smell the blood in the water from the layoffs that are surely coming, probably shortly into 2027.

What does the FDA do when someone gets caught selling a fake medication? Do we wrap truth in scare quotes and try to make the sugar pills a philosophical issue?

Why is it so unconscionable to hold tech corporations accountable? We know (maybe I should say knew at this point?) how to enforce fraud and consumer protection. I fail to see how this shouldn't fall under commercial liability that's really all that different than run of the mill false advertising or product defects.

If we fail to do this we subsidize the operators and externalize the cost of fraud onto the general public.

Once this provenance trail, that humans use to trace claims back to an accountable source, is dead and buried under automated sludge, "just pick people to trust" stops working as a viable strategy. How do you even tell who is actually talking?

A lot of people are throwing their hands in the air and suggesting that this is all just some sort of unavoidable consequence of physics, rather than something that is being pushed on us without any ability to confront it.

Of course, and I'm really not trying to move the goal posts here, but I agree that that's what (most) humans are going to do. But we're rapidly moving in a direction of agent-to-agent flow and "they" seem to lack the degree of discernment the average human does. They certainly don't have the same incentive structure we do to detect fraud. They happily regurgitate and build off of lies because, to them, the lies are not lies, and they can't be. They're just a pile of geometrically close labels from the perspective of the model.

How do you get the poison out of the water in the well? I understand the way this is supposed to work on the web, there are support channels to deal with this sort of thing. But if the deceit is baked into the model, what is your recourse?

White-collar work was sold as the primary vehicle for personal meaning and legitimacy for decades. Now all of these institutions around us have collapsed and it seems like our utility to the market is the sole measure of human dignity.

I think that by reducing this to an identity crisis we will, to our own detriment, ignore the economic system that engineered this dependence in the first place, and is currently trying very hard to brand obsolescence as an individual moral failure.

> I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”

That's easy enough with a bullshitter in your private life.

A professional bullshitter is a different thing and you might not always have the luxury of just walking away and never encountering that person again (or the problems they create).

> the past couple generations adapted

That concedes the point. Their descendants adapting decades later means the generation that lived through it absorbed the full shock of the transition. For displaced labor in the 1810s, adapting meant overworking in factories with horrible conditions and a permanent collapse in their living standards across the board. The dispute was never about accepting or banning automation, they were identifying that capital would absorb all of the gains while labor would be forced to absorb all of the shocks.

It's vibes all the way down.

I'm seeing this failure mode at work and it's not limited to non-technical folks. The results are compounding around different verification chokepoints and creating massive backpressure on integration/infrastructure.

And the top 10% of earners pay something like 70% of the tax receipts. Cratering that tax base is going to wipe out social programs and payrolls back and forth across the entire country.

It's strange to me to cite Land and the CCRU, yet also endorse a podcast that epitomizes the very insular Bay Area EA / rationalist worldview. Which has, I think, in the last 3 years since the podcast released, shown itself to be little more than technobabble bullshit.

Capitalism is not an alien machine that has achieved consciousness and hijacked humanity. Framing it that way is anthropomorphic and gives far too much credit to wildly incompetent financial and political institutions, while also treating wide-scale political and moral cowardice as some sort of inevitable Math trap we just happened to fall into. It also very neatly lets the technocrats off the hook, after all if it's an emergent Lovecraftian horror then none of this is their fault. But this isn't a cosmic Greek tragedy. All of this is happening because of decades of institutional negligence, and the core grift of this entire discourse is laundering the culpability of very people who are actively pushing "AI" through every corner of civilization.

This is all going to be massively disrupting because of how destabilizing it is to the very same institutional foundations that modern capital depends on. It is much more like a solvent. We're basically pouring acid directly into the foundations of society.

I was homebrewing for years in the late 00s and early 10s. At the time I was living in Santa Barbara, and there was a great community there, the Santa Barbeerians, and it was a lot of fun. At the same time I was roasting my own coffee beans and really into coffee. My wife and I floated the idea of opening a place with another couple but it never panned out.

Anyway I don't disagree, in retrospect it was all a way to drink more beer in different styles than I could readily get from a store. It's easy to justify in the moment but having many gallons of beer around all of the time is dangerous...

Not to be a downer. It is therapeutic, and I exercise 5-6 times per week between strength and conditioning, but it's not enough. It's a short distraction, it helps me temporarily. The truth is there's something very wrong with the world today and the pressure we're all feeling, speaking personally here, leaves me feel like I'm ready to crack constantly. But I have a wife and kids and elderly parents, and they all depend on me so I need to keep holding it together. Somehow.