Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
I was even the “lead” at a SaaS in daily firefighting mode and pushing new features out quickly on a team of three engineers and one half-time one. I was 99% sure they’d go down the next day I left but somehow they kept on trucking. We’re all replaceable whether we like to think it or not
At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.
Managers are human (at least so far). As humans they care about other people they know.
Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.
I’ve been part of organizational discussions. Every manager ive worked with has actively fought, and fought hard, to keep, promote, or get pay raises for their employees. They don’t just bend over and say “okay boss” if asked to cut people.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Well in my 30 year career across 10 jobs - everything from startups to BigTech and now working full time at a consulting company, I’ve found line level managers to be absolutely useless - not soulless.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
It’s not “bad managers” - it’s “powerless managers”. If you are a line level manager, you don’t control budgets, company wide re-org decisions, or really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor” and “do I need to come into an office?”. Those are all decisions above your head
I don't expect them to move the world for me. But I don't equate "powerless managers" with "useless managers". If they feel like they do what they can within their means, I'd say that's a good manager.
>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”
That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.
Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".
Well, the manager who railroaded me into a PIP at AWS also kept checking my LinkedIn profile. While my pre-PIP (“focus”) was 70% my fault. I was objectively railroaded toward my PIP. I kept meeting all of my goals and they kept adding more.
Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then.
A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
Careful there. You are not wrong, but you are not really correct either. Credit is a tool. Many people are using credit wrong and getting away with it because it is too easy. However that doesn't mean credit is a bad tool, just that it isn't used correctly.
Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front.
Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit.
You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.
Did you fight for raises? If your manager told you choose 30% to cut would you have? Of course you would, your “caring” meant nothing. Your first loyalty is to the people who decide your paycheck
And as a line level manager I don’t believe you are a “bad person”. Line level managers are “powerless”. You don’t control head count, budgets, company wide decisions to reduce staff etc
I'm on a break after getting run down in my last role at the EM / Director level, but I certainly gave a shit, and some of my directs (10-15%?) gave a shit that I gave a shit, and they're now better leaders. Most of this is from their hard work, but I gave them one possible template: genuinely care about your people. My hope is that what I spent of myself was more than made up with what they added. When you're a naive pessimist, leverage is the key multiplier of effective leadership.
one who expects the worst, yet is continually surprised when they get it. Sometimes secretly an embarrassed optimist.
This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?
Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all in the right half.
I read the book but don't recall any correlation to the topic of solar system alignment. Spoiler: Era 3 in the novel does speak of space exploration but this is all before the launches of Voyager (though Sputnik had launched by the books release IIRC).
> if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
Ideally cattle not pets. We are continually shooting stuff out and in 126 years it'll be as nerveracking and watching a train departure, but still exciting knowing the train is going further.
Good idea, but it's hard to get funding for cattle, people pay more for pets perks.
From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20 years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one. What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for the first two?
Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.
Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's just that the big 3 are just so impressive.
The rovers on Mars as well and New Horizons that went to Pluto. That is also at escape velocity so it will leave this solar system and most likely no human will ever lay eyes on it again. Voy 1 and 2 are still faster but hey they're all going in different directions so it's not exactly a race.
It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way beyond it's initial mission plan.
I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society?
There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo at least gave the country hope and showed that we could accomplish big ideas.
And the reason why is those things must be profitable, and once you accept everything must be profitable, there is no ceiling to exploitation. Whereas with big things like Apollo, we didn't do it because it would make money. We did it because we decided it was the right thing to do.
Stop being a capitalist hellhole, and maybe try being a country that happens to operate under bounded capitalism, and just maybe, maybe, you can see some of that progress.
The US in the 1960s was more capitalist than it is now (by governement size, spending, taxation, regulation and economic freeodm, too-big-to-fail, etc.).
There has to be profit first to be able to fund big things like Apollo. Profit is good.
Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth.
Nonetheless, interesting? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't at least interesting.
Big multi-disciplinary problems typically yield vast amounts of ancillary technology and solutions that may last generations... small sample fo things that either were invented for the Apollo program or became commercially viable:
Do you really believe we'd have "peace and food for everyone" if not for Apollo? Really?
Or is this an unserious argument you can use to nitpick anything? Why is my local government building another playground when they could be feeding African orphans??
I cannot take anyone making this argument seriously unless they are similarly furious at the expenditure on arts, humanities, historical preservation, luxury goods, entertainment, or other similar vanity projects.
Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures are held to a much higher scrutiny?
I hate this argument. Every time there is some big and expensive technical achievement, someone is going to say that the poor are dying somewhere in the world. As if not going to the moon would have saved them.
I would argue that a healthy population is what allows great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't develop when you are struggling for your life, you need good conditions like health, confort and stability to be able to focus on your craft.
If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the US had a healthier population during the cold war than the USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.
Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
They had pretty good results post WW2. The problem is that they ended up lagging behind the western bloc because of a lack of resources and innovation. Basic healthcare doesn't mean much if you don't have good treatment in the first place. It is a common problem with communist countries, they usually have good access to healthcare, but they don't have the resources to give proper treatment.
Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)
Bunch of napkin math: you'd need something like 10 kilowatts and 140 km/s detla-v to catch up to Voyager in a decade, assuming a New Horizons equivalent Earth escape velocity. The amount of xenon is technically possible, however even assuming impressive 8000 Isp thrusters, your fuel mass fraction ends up being 90+% fuel which doesn't leave a lot of mass for that reactor and radiators.
A 20 year intercept would be pretty reasonable though. It needs about 15 km/s delta v after that NH style escape, about a kilowatt of power, and maybe a 25% fuel mass fraction at 6000 Isp. That's all very reasonable by current standards.
I understand that celestial mechanics are involved, because "stuff in space do not fly on straight lines", but why is the delta V budget 10x smaller for 2x more time? That feels counterintuitive :/
No, that's more than napkin math but I feel the numbers stand for themselves that we can't really do better than decades. A few km/s won't change that.
Could we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.
Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there.
New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
Yes, yes! I got really into the Voyager-inspiration vibes for a while and wrote this little short story about a secret "Voyager 3" mission - thought you might enjoy it: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier.
We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they could be reading our screens right now in realtime from across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics) that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try to annihilate us.
The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic, no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor.
> The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic.
Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
Analogue TV would not be much better. How would the aliens know they're supposed to shoot an electron raygun left-to-right 486 times across a screen, then ignore the next 39 lines, then repeat this 29.97 times a second? And that's before you get into interlacing, horizontal blanking intervals, line 21, luma and chroma (encoded by reference to human eyesight), or different standards altogether like PAL or SECAM, etc.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
You can still see from far away that our planet's atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's far out of equilibrium.
We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
> The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.
The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.
So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.
Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.
(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)
(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately?
Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
>>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel.
Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel.
And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.
And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?
Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a sentient race exists, were possible, going to war with another sentience in their home turf (which, remember, must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is groundless paranoia.
Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.
For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
It's still very impractical though. Sniping everywhere that intelligent life might exist is very low probability, low stakes, and for what reason? You don't have any reason to kill anyone you're unlikely to ever meet. And with a weapon which, by the time it arrives, your civilization might be gone. And for what? You cannot compete for resources you cannot reach. War doesn't work like this, it requires anger and an adversary that you can meet in your lifetime.
Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.
That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.
> That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space
I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
> It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.
It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.
They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here.
Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.
Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.
First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0]
While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.
If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.
That's a transiting detection, there's other detection methods for exoplanets. Even a coarse grained survey with a ground based traditional telescope can find our solar system thanks to Jupiter's gravitational influence on the Sun. Doppler shift's in the Sun's spectra come from Jupiter tugging at it gravitationally. With interferometry and coronagraphy spectra of planets in our system can be gathered without needing to see our system edge-on. Then of course for aliens on the ecliptic there's transiting spectra of Earth.
The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.
I haven't been in cinema in the past ~10 years and to be honest I wouldn't care if no more movies were ever made, simply because there are hundreds, if not thousands, amazing movies made since the beginning of the cinema that I didn't watch. Most of the new movies are crap anyways, so why waste time and money when I can watch a classic movie instead which has a much higher probability of me enyjoing it.
This is a boring opinion. It's the equivalent of what happens to many older adults when it comes to music. All of the best songs came out in their teens to about 30 so what's the point of listening to anything new? It assumes there is no innovation and the person just traps themselves in the past.
You could say there hasn't been any good new music since 1970 and humans have been making music for thousands of year. Or you could try out the many new genres and eventually find something new and exciting.
it just seems like a very boring way to live out your life.
That's funny. I was having this similar discussion with my 16 year old niece, and I was asking her what she's been listening to as a 50 year old trying to broaden my musical horizons. She pulled out her Spotify and shared some of her playlists with me, and I was astonished to see that most of the music that she had been enjoying was produced in the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. We had a good laugh about it, and bonded over some of the classic music that I love that I was suprised to find that she loves. There were some modern things interspersed, and I did learn about some new artists and experimental genres. Seems like a clear example of the Law of diminishing marginal returns in the cinema and music industries in Southern California — leading to those industries collapsing. AI and generative crap being a big evidence point for the argument.
To test whether you’re right, please list 10 movies made in the last 10 years that will stand the test of time as truly great movies. If fewer than one per year is worth watching, it’s a hard sell to say that we should spend our time sorting through the chaff trying to find it.
It’s entirely possible that we’re in a period where most of those with creativity have just stopped making movies. Interestingly, I find TV has everything movies are lacking, creativity, originality, even big name actors that used to make movies.
List ten movies that will stand the test of time in the time frame of the decade after you turned 25. This will make it less biased to stuff you think is good just because you had never seen anything similar.
Any list will be subjective so instead of taking your initial bait for you to subsequently tear down, people (but probably AI) can construct a list to your personal taste.
I don't even think I'd have the right to tear down anyone's list -- I actually think that even if an 22-year-old replied with a list of ten movies from 2016-2025 that he went to the cinema to see, and which he would be happy to recommend, that'd be enough for me!
I brought up this list: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-2000s-m... and scrolled through, and I think I saw at least half these movies either in the theater or as rentals, and most of the ones I saw I loved. Furthermore, I think at least a third are major contributors to the American cultural canon, both as being in the zeitgeist in the season of their initial release as well as being remembered going forward. For instance, people still today make references to "Mean Girls" or "The Dark Knight" or "Minority Report" that only fully make sense if you've seen those films or at least know they exist and their premises. And I think it would be pretty easy to make a list of 50-75 significant movies each from the 80s and 90s, but I'm focusing on ones during my adulthood to follow the spirit of your ask.
This is what I can't imagine finding ten of in the past decade. I'd be tempted to put "Barbie" on that list potentially, given how many memes I've seen using frames from it. Also, honestly, several Pixar films deserve to be on the list too, though I admit that I'm biased because they're some of the few that I've seen.
I didn't say there're no new great movies coming out, I simply stated that there are enough of great old movies than I PERSONALLY don't need new movies.
> it just seems like a very boring way to live out your life.
Quite the contrary, I constantly discover interesting old movies from a wide variety of genres and different parts of the world.
>Quite the contrary, I constantly discover interesting old movies from a wide variety of genres and different parts of the world.
The entire point was that sounds like a very boring way to live your life.
You can still watch and enjoy old movies without shutting yourself off to the present because you don't feel like putting in any effort to understanding or discovering new things.
Theatres don't just show new movies. There's something very special about being locked in a dark room with a big screen to watch Alien or Barry Lyndon. Older movies especially look great in a theatre and some of the magic is lost on a smaller screen.
90% of any content is crap but you're missing out if you like movies and you haven't seen Sinners, The Bone Temple, or NOPE (to name a few recent great theatre watches).
I regularly go to a nearby cinema that also shows older movies. Watching a movie like "Ran" (Akira Kurosawa) in a restored 4k version on a big screen is quite an experience. (Tickets are 10€ btw.) Often I go with a friend, but occasionally I also go alone. There's something about spending 2 or 3 hours in a dark room entirely focussing on a piece of art.
There is very little incentive to make good movies now, especially when zoomers' attention spans are maximum 2 minutes. I still enjoy a classic movie or two but I'm running out of movies to watch even then.
I think book sales are significantly down compared to most periods in the last 50-100 years? Still a culturally significant thing, but economically not what they used to be ...
Young people are going to prefer content that caters to their cultural zeitgeist and worldview. This is why new media is continually made and we don't all just listen to Mozart.
Everything changes and evolves. Fashion, music, games, young adult fiction, memes.
You wouldn't limit yourself to your grandparents' taste, would you? (I didn't say parents because some kids are instilled with parental preferences. I grew up around kids in the 00's who said the Beatles were the peak of music - obviously learned preferences straight from their parents.)
You might not understand youth culture because you grew up before them and have different tastes. We're imprinted with preference and nostalgia for our youth, and we can see changes to that as a hideous affront. The next generation is meanwhile going through the same cycle we did.
One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.
I think this is the main point where many people’s work differs. Most of my work I know roughly what needs changing and how things are structured but I jump between codebases often enough that I can’t always remember the exact classes/functions where changes are needed. But I can vaguely gesture at those specific changes that need to be made and have the AI find the places that need changing and then I can review the result.
I rarely get the luxury of working in a single codebase for a long enough period of time to get so familiar with it that I can jump to particular functions without much thought. That means AI is usually a better starting point than me fumbling around trying to find what I think exists but I don’t know where it is.
I've heard people say that these coding agents are just tools and don't replace the thinking. That's fine but the problem for me is that the act of coding is when I do my thinking!
I'm thinking about how to solve the problem and how to express it in the programming language such that it is easy to maintain. Getting someone/something else to do that doesn't help me.
But different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
I'm similar, but I do find some natural places where LLMs can be helpful.
Just today I was working on something that involves a decent amount of configuration. It's in Python unfortunately and I hate passing around dictionaries for configs, I usually like to parse the JSON or YAML or whatever into a config class so I have a natural way to validate and access without just throwing strings around.
As I was playing with the code for the actual work that needs to be done, I was thinking what configs I needed and what structure made sense. Once I knew what I needed I gave the JSON to an LLM with some instructions regarding helper functions and told it to give me the appropriate Python code. It's just a bunch of dataclasses with some from_dict or from_string methods on them, not interesting or difficult to write. Freed me up to keep working on the real problem.
Yes, it's often faster if you sit around waiting. What I will do instead is prompt the AI to create various plans, do other stuff while they do, review and approve the plans, do other stuff while multiple plans are being implemented, and then review and revise the output.
And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it, but my time is more expensive than Claude's time, and so as long as I'm not sitting around waiting it's a net win.
I do this too, but then you need some method to handle it, because now you have to read and test and verify multiple work streams. It can become overwhelming. In the past week I had the following problems from parallel agents:
Gemini running an benchmark- everything ran smoothly for an hour. But on verification it had hallucinated the model used for judging, invalidating the whole run.
Another task used Opus and I manually specified the model to use. It still used the wrong model.
This type of hallucination has happened to me at least 4-5 times in the past fortnight using opus 4.6 and gemini-3.1-pro. GLM-5 does not seem to hallucinate so much.
So if you are not actively monitoring your agent and making the corrections, you need something else that is.
You need a harness, yes, and you need quality gates the agent can't mess with, and that just kicks the work back with a stern message to fix the problems. Otherwise you're wasting your time reviewing incomplete work.
Your point being? A proper harness will mostly catch things like that. Even a low end model can be employed to do write tests plans and do consistency checks that mostly weed out stuff like that. Hence: You need a harness, or you'll spend your time worrying about dumb stuff like this.
Glancing at what it's doing is part of your multitasking rounds.
Also instead of just prompting, having it write a quick summary of exactly what it will do where the AI writes a plan including class names branch names file locations specific tests etc. is helpful before I hit go, since the code outline is smaller and quicker to correct.
That takes more wall clock time per agent, but gets better results, so fewer redo steps.
>And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it
This is exactly the sort of future I'm afraid of. Where the people who are ostensibly hired to know how stuff works, out source that understanding to their LLMs. If you don't know how the system works while building, what are you going to when it breaks? Continue to throw your LLM at it? At what point do you just outsource your entire brain?
There are many layers to "knowing how stuff works". What does your manager do when your code breaks?
> Continue to throw your LLM at it?
Increasingly, yes. If you have objective acceptance criteria, just putting the LLM in a loop with a quality gate tends to have it converge on a fix itself, the same way a human would. Not always, and not always optimally, but more and more often, and with cheaper and cheaper models.
I also tend to throw in an analysis stage where it will look at what went wrong and use that to add additional criteria for the next run.
If anything, it's the opposite. With a proper harness you stop having to spend so much energy reviewing every little intermediate step, and can focus on the higher level.
I'm actually working on a project now where the biggest problem I need to solve is that the verifier that reviews the test harness is too strict.
I keep being told that a proper harness makes agents better, but no one has shown me exactly what is it that gives them such amazing results.
Yesterday Gemini burned 40 minutes trying to diagnose a failed Expo build and going into loops of changing the Podfile and re-running the build, when the issue was that Xcode needed updating (quick Google search for it).
But my comment on burnout stands. The lack of downtime and dynamic thinking modes (admin, planning, review, actual coding) seems like it would conspire to make you either cram out more work or disconnect from it. Both of these become dangerous, after a while.
(Information workers were productive 4–6 hours a day, and the economy did just fine.)
For me it _can_ be faster to code than to instruct but it takes me significantly less effort to write the prompt than the actual code. So a few hours of concentrates coding leave me completely drained of energy while after a few hours with the agents I still have a lot of mental energy. That's the huge difference for me and I don't want to go back.
Thats interesting. While i do get mentally tired after a session of focused coding, i feel like i have accomplished something. Using AI for coding feels similar to spending hours doom scrolling reels. Less engaging but Im drained as hell at the end.
My way of phrasing this: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to really figure what is it that I truly want to
write.
I definitely agree with this and have experienced it as well. Having said that I wonder if the prevalence, and usefulness of AI will make those types of features fewer as intimate knowledge of the codebase decreases.
But can you mentally "keep hold" (for lack of a better term) of those tasks that are getting executed in parallel? Honestly asking.
Because, after they're done/have finished executing, I guess you still have to "check" their output, integrate their results into the bigger project they're (supposedly) part of etc, and for me the context-switching required to do all that is mentally taxing. But maybe this only happens because my brain is not young enough, that's why I'm asking.
I think the difference is that you're applying a standard of correctness or personal understanding of the code you're pushing that is being relaxed in the "agentic workflows"
I have the AI integrate their results themselves. That's if anything one of the things they do best. I also have them do reviews and test their own work first before I check it, and that usually makes the remaining verification fairly quick and painless.
I delegate to agents what I hate doing, e.g. when creating a SaaS web app, the last thing I want to waste my time on is the landing page with about/pricing/login and Stripe integration frontend/backend - I'll just tell Claude Code (with Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8 running locally on RTX Pro 6000) to make all this basic stuff for me so that I can focus on the actual core of the app. It then churns for half an hour, spews out the first version where I need to spend another half an hour to fix bugs by pointing errors to Claude Code and then in 1 hour it's all done. I can also tell it to avoid all the node.js garbage and do it all in plain HTML/JS/CSS.
So the suggestion here is that instead of using battle tested libraries/frameworks, everyone should now build their own versions, each with an unique set of silent bugs?
The "built a browser" example you gave reminded me how I've "built a browser" as a kid in the 90s using Visual Basic (or something similar) - I've simply dragged the browser view widget, added an input and some buttons that called functions from the widget and there you go, another browser ready :-)
Depends on the type of tourism you prefer, I absolutely love roadtrips because "journey is more important than the destination", it's an adventure and the best memories from trips I have are from the journey itself, the destination is just a cherry on top.
Same here, using Alpine.js is a breeze and it made working on frontend fun again, everything is so easy and intuitive to implement and manage, even on large projects. It's definitiely my favourite frontend framework right now and a default for new projects.
I wonder how this will affect the burnout rate among IT workers in the long-term, which already was quite high. I guess a lot of people force themselves (or are forced to by their company) to use LLM in fear of being left behind, even if they don't enjoy the process, but sooner or later the fatigue will catch up.
Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.
