Anyways that is a long rant and this past year instead of building software i started to learn an …
… Anyways that is a long rant and this past year instead of building software i started to learn an instrument. it has been great. with software there is this notion of something being "optimal" but with music there is no optimal. Even the highest level artists are not satisfied with their work. The music is always above you.
Everyone seems so busy building or learning the next big thing, but is anyone else working on absolutely nothing lately? If not, why not?
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I've always been a curious person, interested in learning new skills and finding fun and useful ways to apply them. I don't know much, but what I do know are things I've set out to learn purely out of interest. Any success in my career has been mostly luck, and being somewhat articulate in a few key areas of IT.
But not only has my professional life become monotonous and unchallenging, my drive for novelty and improvement in my personal life has also diminished greatly. In other words, I seem to have lost that curiosity. That drive to learn and apply new things.
I'm not sure why this is, but my initial suspicion is that the lack of fulfillment I've experienced in the last ~5 years or so has left me feeling like continuing down the sam…
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> Even the highest level artists are not satisfied with their work.
Is this true, sad if true
> Its hard to work hundreds of hours on something knowing the end monetary value is going to be $0.
What else are you gonna do with your life, this is it. Fire up VSCode.
> with software there is this notion of something being "optimal" but with music there is no optimal. Even the highest level artists are not satisfied with their work. The music is always above you.
The same holds for software developers, or at least (IMO) the good ones: they always want to refine their code, or at least know where it could be further refined. The best of those just know when to stop refining and move on.
Musicians also strive for the optimal performance: they continually practice to get better. Most are smart enough to know they will never be perfect, just as a good engineer knows there is no perfect code (Knuth notwithstanding). But that doesn't stop them from trying.
> Its hard to work hundreds of hours on something knowing the end monetary value is going to be $0
Thats kind of a crux of an issue. Why not find something you'd work on regardless whether it will be worth $0 or $100?
I feel the same way. I follow the LLM/AI advancements very closely, and I find that motivating. However, the whole discussion seems to turn around long term replacement of all labor and absorption of business value into some big tech providing the AI infrastructure.
I usually had two types of motivation, technical motivation to learn skills that would eventually be useful in my career and hacker motivation to build something with the implicit expectation of eventually making it a sustainable business. But now I am not certain there is a point in learning a new skill or building a side hustle if eventually an LLM will be better than me or my business for pennies.
Maybe this whole feeling is part of the AI replacement hype, and totally false. And maybe it is just common to feel this way when technological revolutions happen, and it's just temporary and we should push through. Regardless, w…
Why you so concerned with how the public perceives "AI"? They've always been bad at it and we both know that LLMs are not the only part of "AI" that matters. They aren't really concerned with really understanding what's going on, so why entertain their fleeting thoughts?
>Unless you are working on a LLM right now nobody really cares what you are doing in software. Just seems futile.
Well it was the same for web dev 20 years ago. Then data science/big data 10 years ago. Then Crypto/NFTs 5 years ago (ugh). If that clout is a big motivator then you gotta keep following trends. Nothing is stylish forever.
But glad you have some hobbies to enjoy.