Comment by embedding-shape
4 hours ago
> They're busy building small inconsequential side projects
Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy.
Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy.
So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
Nothing has been eroded for me, in fact it had the opposite effect. It's easier to get into new hobbies, easier to develop skills, I value reading on my own more than I did before. At least for me, LLMs act as multipliers of what I can and want to do, it hasn't removed my passion for music production, 3D, animation or programming one bit, if anything it's fueled those passions and let me do stuff within them faster and better.
Nothing I could make would be very good. So the only reason I would, say, write, is in order to write, not to have produced an essay. Hobbies are ways to pass time productively. If it took less time, it wouldn't be a better use of time, but a worse one.
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