I only post on Sundays, but I felt like I needed this introspection, so I broke the rules. I made them after all, so I can break them just as well.
Chesterton's fence comes to my mind: every rule exists because a person once set it. Who knows if it's still valid? Make up your own mind.
Two days of my week went to a client I'm talking out of a build. He came asking for AI. I'll end up telling him to buy the boring thing that exists, and to point the smart stuff at his mail and his documents, not his core. The advice is free, the build he'll pay me for. More than half of them get that same talk. It's honest work, and a strange way to spend scarce hours: being paid to tell people no.
The hours I love most, the building ones, are changing under my hands. Given a good frame and a test harness, the machine codes better than I do these days. I say that as someone who has been paid to code for over twenty years. The thing I was good at is becoming a solved problem while I watch. For now, being early to that is my arbitrage. I know it won't last.
And it does something funny with the reward. A build used to pay out once every few months, when the thing finally shipped. These days it pays out by the afternoon. Even building, the longest game I had, is becoming a fast hit.
The evenings went worse. An endless stream of AI video shorts has already proven for myself that a machine can easily keep me engaged for hours by providing me small dopamine hits every n seconds. Will we turn into mind-numbed machines, chasing one hit after another? I don't know. I do know where Tuesday evening went.
Because underneath everything, we are a machine too, a wet one, running on chemistry instead of code. And I know exactly how mine gets fed. The shorts give my system a tiny shot of dopamine every few seconds, that's the whole business model.
A gadget gives it a bigger one: I've bought enough of them to know the routine by now, a week of checking the track & trace, one nice evening of unboxing, and then a drawer. Cars, boats: bigger gadgets, same result.
A client that says yes is good for a week or two.
Same machine, same trick, different price tag. Keep it fed and tuned, and you get what people call a happy life. Hormonal balance, in other words. But I'm just an armchair expert, so take this with a grain, or maybe better: a bag of salt.
However, hormones are the short game: instinct, impulse, the next few minutes. The longer term is a different animal: safety, trust, the upper floors of Maslow's pyramid. That one could be rational. Mine doesn't seem to be.
There's an old line in my trade: walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy, if both are frozen. And even then, software lasts a decade, if you're lucky. How about longer term accomplishments? What about a roof above your head: security, trust, a place that's yours. Houses are forever, no? Look at the Taj Mahal, the pyramids, ...
How about my own house, my own plot of land? Buy a piece of land now, put a nice house on it, and be extremely proud of what you have achieved. But the odds are someone has done it before you, maybe even on that same piece of land, that has now long gone and disappeared in oblivion.
And I know myself: I still can't get rid of this feeling "what's next?"; a constantly nagging feeling of "is this good enough, is this what I should be doing?". I have always lived seeing the future, launched some things a few years before they became a rage or a trend, and abandoned it long before it actually broke through.
And then there's the longest term of all.
There's only 2 certainties in life: death & taxes. And I'm not sure about that first one.
The first half is three centuries old. Everyone credits Franklin; Christopher Bullock had it in print in 1716, seventy-odd years before him, and even he was quoting a proverb. The doubt is mine. Maybe.
My memento mori remains, as well as the bitter lesson. What I'm doing today won't matter in a few years. Think longer timelines: decades, centuries, and it won't matter at all. Everything I learned and will learn will be surpassed by an AI, potentially impersonating me.
Unless you think about Einstein: you could somehow come to the conclusion that you can figure out a way to get more time through energy, although that might just be an odd brain-fart from yours truly.
Or maybe you don't stretch the time. Maybe you stretch yourself.
Say you found a way to leave something of you running. Something that keeps learning, keeps answering, keeps sounding like you, long after you've stopped. Would that still carry you, or would it just be something wearing your name? I can't make my mind up. I'm not even sure I'd want to know.
Anyway. It's late. The house is quiet. Tomorrow there's a client to talk out of a build, and an evening to lose or not lose to the bubble game on my phone. The wet machine will want its payouts either way. Might as well keep it tuned.
What's left? Hormonal balance? Although, last time I checked, my hormones didn't fill my bank account.
To be continued...
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
— Gone with the Wind