I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.

I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.

They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.

Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?

Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...

I think it’s possible.

Okay!

found the prompt "engineer"

If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.

But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).

Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.

Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.

>Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.

>Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.

In the situation being discussed, is it even a conversation if one party is not even actively engaging with the other person?

Also, respect is earned not given. If you don't respect me enough to put time into communicating in your own words, you can punch sand because I'm not reading your AI slop.

I had a colleague I really enjoyed talking to. Until all the AI hype and them getting into that bandwagon. Now whenever I ask something I get a huge markdown response with unaligned ascii table or being told to ask <llm name here> instead (with much enthusiasm). I am sure they are not doing it with bad intentions or ignoring me. That said I still can’t help but find it cold though. I would rather prefer if they just ghosted my messages

Good intentions don’t excuse bad behavior, and shouldn’t oblige one to silently accept it.

No, but they obligate you to be kind in your response despite your annoyance. The other person was trying to help, but failed. Keep that in mind if you feel the need to correct them.

Hence:

> If you encounter a slop grenade, share this page

Culture is cultured, it isn't the wilds, and requires pruning.

This is the sort of thing that only someone on the spectrum would consider doing in a professional setting, and they will end up getting coached by HR.

Oh, the irony.

I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.

What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.

Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.

So, so much of human history is just us trying and failing to find reasons we're unique, as if uniqueness is somehow the source of value, meaning, or joy in life. We really seem to react strongly against the widening of our consideration for the experience of non-human life (or human life, if it looks just a little different).

Isn’t racism similar? The attempt to prove that people of a certain skin color have unique capabilities? The fear of extinction of a skin color.

Redheads are in much greater danger by that logic.

Ironically the most racist people I know are those who are the best travelleled and most adventurous.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see this! Last year a few people I know in person, and a podcast I enjoy, talked about or to Ed Zitron and I felt like I was going crazy because so, so much of what he argued was either woefully outdated, or just a fallacy. It's also annoying because it'd be such an interesting topic to explore rigorously and without motive. As mentioned in the article, those analyses _can_ be found. But man, Ed Zitron just seems loud and silly.

yeah

I'm in the same boat. Tailwind always seemed insane to me, even after really giving it the benefit of the doubt and trying it out. I use it now only because its so easy for the LLMs to use, so I don't need to actually interface with it at all.

I didn’t follow the mission much as it occurred, but it’s striking to me how much I understand what the author means. Feels like the first event in many, many years that doesn’t amplify the feeling of being in the absurdist nightmare timeline. Artemis II felt like a 2013 event, not a 2026 event!

the drone that gives hugs, right??? right????

Let me think about that...

Yes. Resistance puts the possibility of hugs on the stool, so to speak.