Comment by sqeak

Do you not see a benefit in coding for the mental exercise and challenge?

Most hobbies are impractical... Machines can produce clothes much faster than a knitter, no chess player will beat the best computers, a boat can bring more fish to port in one trip than you can in a year, etc.

Try see if you can find some physical hobby that has nothing to do with computers.

Mine is gardening. With relatively little effort, I can grow a decent amount of foods, much of it interesting varieties that are not grown commercially anywhere. I really doubt that we're going to see affordable humanoid robots out-competing me in this hobby any time soon.

>Anything I write will be outdone in 2 seconds by someone else.

Then it's not really a hobby, no? Sounds more like a weird competition.

>But before I could, many many others had an LLM do the same thing and my work was obsolete in a moment. There went that hobby... so now I'm hunting a new one...

That sounds more like a job, at least with your perspective.

>I gain no joy from that, the joy I would have gained would be from other people using my work. Now they can produce my work without me entirely...

That's a job, man. Even if you're not getting paid money for it, you're not really doing it for yourself.

The point is a bit moot cause it's the same difference: you can get joy from a "job" and AI making that job obsolete sucks regardless. But if that's what you think a hobby is, then you don't have an actual hobby.

Go take up gardening.

> and there's no point to it. Anything I write will be outdone in 2 seconds by someone else.

That's OK, you don't have to be the best at any one thing. The important thing about any hobby, be it programming, skateboarding, or playing the piano, is that you feel personal satisfaction in doing it, not in the reactions of people to your work. Your enjoyment of a hobby should never be based on whether or not people like it, or even whether or not they want to use the thing you created. If you feel that a project that you are working on could be summed up in a single prompt that can be given to an LLM, then your job is not to work on the project directly, but rather to find what makes what you are doing unique. It doesn't even have to be technically interesting or bring any new ideas to the table, just the fact that somebody has put in effort into making something (regardless of completion or quality) gives it value.

A hobby is something you do for yourself. Whether it's code, or painting, or woodworking.... you don't care if someone is better or faster than you. Unless you really see the hobby as a potential business, in which case you might want to reevaluate because with LLMs it's possible for an individual to do more by himself than ever before.

Hey maybe publish it anyway. There are still some of us who are specifically looking for human-made things.

I keep wanting to say the same thing. In fact, how other people describe hobbies is why I don't like the term hobbies.

I think music is a good example of sometimes you need to not have fun to have fun. Practice isn't really fun, but if you can put up with it you can have a lot of fun. So you can say that the not fun parts are part of the fun parts because it's what gives you the payoff. But when people then go and send you a Suno generated song, and say it's better than yours, it is them devaluing the "not fun" parts you had to put up with. I've had people do similar things to code projects I've done. It's a real buzz kill.

I also really value when musicians critique my songs, even when I feel defensive about it. Because then it's not about them devaluing my time, it's about them helping me grow, and they know how it feels to go through that process.

Not liking being bad at your hobbies is much different than not finding joy in them because people do them better than you. I work harder to be a better cook, it doesn't mean I'm in competition with people who cook better.

Sure. But AI doesn't make you bad at hobbies. It just makes others better at it, and even that is a stretch.

>I've been learning the piano recently and striving to play more difficult songs is what makes it fun.

And are you going to give up learning piano because now AI can just generate piano music better than anything you can ever produce? No? Then what you're doing is a proper hobby, which contrasts with the OP who feels their efforts are no worthless because AI can just do it better. That's not really a hobby; it's a job.

How did AI make you "bad" at your hobbies?

(Apologies if I'm missing your point)

Not the author you're replying to but I don't understand this reply at all? What variables? What oversimplifying?

They simply said

> Why do you imagine yourself you be in competition with others while doing hobbies? Do you not find pleasure in the doing?

Which... I don't understand how that is oversimplifying. If your hobby is golf are you unable to enjoy golf because you're not as good as the pros? If your hobby is music can you not enjoy it because you aren't going to win a Grammy award?

If you enjoy programming or working on something an LLM can do... can't you just enjoy doing it without an LLM? Heck there are plenty of people that will probably seek it out because of how many people hate AI being used in programming.

There are your Paul Feyerabend s and there are your reddit atheists which the HN crowd tend towards, who simplify all complex relations in the world to Scientific, Testable, Linear logic. It may as well be as a result of the education system or the Industrial Revolution, but that is the prevalent logic in the world. Unfortunately we do not live in a time of philosophy anymore

>I'm sorry, but this is not realistic.

It's realistic to want to be competitive. But as soon as your "hobby" becomes competitive, at least in this sense, it ceases to be a true hobby. It effectively just becomes work.

Nothin' wrong with the OP feeling disheartened by AI taking away his "hobby"/job, but AI will never be able to take away a "true" hobby because a "true" hobby is something where such external factors are irrelevant.

You'll notice that people who lift weights, run marathons, maintain a garden, tinker with models, etc., are effectively immune to AI. An AI won't lift your weights for you or tend to your garden for you. Maybe one day it could technically do that, but it doesn't matter, because you simply wouldn't have it do that for you. And it wouldn't matter if AI is doing that for others, because you're not competing with others. You're doing it for yourself.

Hehe yeah. Perhaps I exaggerate with "I _loathe_ every. single. minute. of weightlifting." More precisely, I never _look forward_ to a workout.

I don't hate every squat. In fact, it's (I can't believe I'm saying this) somewhat satisfying in the moment whenever I do decide to go RIR=0. I'm wiped, but like, in a "hell yeah I did that" way.

But starting a session? I'm still as reticent as I was on day 1 lol. Maybe someday I'll pick up a sport or something as the others suggest, but I love programming too much to pick up other hobbies >_>

1) Opportunity cost mostly. I suffer from a _debilitating_ case of zero-sum thinking. "If I'm doing X, I'm not doing Y." Weightlifting isn't (overly) boring/painful; I'd just much rather be programming, by far my favorite activity. It's uncomfortable, but my physical pain tolerance is fairly high. Boring is solved by having a podcast/audiobook going, but for the "big lifts" I prefer silence to focus.

2) I don't use motivation or discipline. I use habit. I'm fairly busy, so my mantra is "bias towards action". I could sit there and stew about how much I hate the upcoming workout... or I can wake up, do my morning routine to an audiobook/podcast, eat breakfast while happily programming, NOT thinking about the day's workout, then transition sharply into it. When it's time, I just fucking do it. It's like flossing. I don't even have it on a schedule, because I don't want to think about "gotta start at X time". It starts when I reach a natural stopping point shortly after breakfast, whenever that is. I have literally never missed a workout in years so _something's_ working. (To be clear, there are obvious exceptions for travel/holidays/etc, I'm talking missing a workout due to a lack of "character".)

It helps that my gym is literally in the same room as my devbox. I launch a Claude prompt/whatever, do a set, repeat. Instead of doomscrolling between sessions, I bias towards action. I keep myself too busy to think about how much I don't want to exercise. The only time I let myself think about "god I hate this" is when I'm seconds from psyching myself up for a big lift. I know that if I let myself, I'll just stew and stew and grumble and bitch and make excuses. So I don't give myself that mental space. There's virtually 0 time between my favorite activity, then context switching to "alright let's get this". No space for the "ulgh" emotion to creep in.

To use an MCU Avenger's analogy, I'm _always_ angry. I'm always hate exercise. But I box it with what I love (programming), so I switch back and forth with zero time for the emotion to permeate. For a moment I'm a normal happy programmer, then seconds later I stand up, take a breath, and go Hulk mode.

Is that discipline? IDK. It doesn't feel like I'm bare-knuckle-holding-on-perserevering-despite-all-odds. I just don't mentallay dwell on it, and when my non-vibed custom exercise tracker beeps (it predates LLMs), saying it's been 3-4 minutes and I need to do the next set, I happily ignore it, finish my thought/prompt, then do the damned lift.

---

Negativity over, my favorite exercise is Zone 2 because the inclined treadmill is at my standing desk and I can happily work while being in The Zone (in both senses). Zone 2 is the best. A cheap $50 Craigslist treadmill + standing desk will burn an absolute fuckton of calories once you figure out how to walk (really its more a march) and type at the same time. Honestly I could (and have) Zone 2ed for up to 3hrs/day for weeks at a time. I reduced that because I got tired of eating so much food lol. Zone 2 is the best.

Then there's the weekly Nordic 4 by 4 which I apply the weightliftng mentality to.

You can't do any exercise due to the condition? No possible entry point at all? That honestly sounds incompatible with daily life.

Not everyone needs to rip barbells off the floor, there's infinite ways of doing resistance training; whatever you can manage is likely to help your symptoms.

Perhaps my advice was too narrow/specific to my situation. If you can't deadlift, then don't. But there are many other things you can do, as the other commenters have suggested.

But if you're in the mentality of _not wanting_ to have anything, then all the advice in the world will bounce off you.

My suggestion, then, is to work on that mentality. Do something to get you anything, to get you out of that "Many of us have nothing" mindset. Build momentum. Physically doing something is often what it takes to break a mental barrier. The mind spirals and digs a hole, especially at night. But you get to participate in life/society/people during the day, which is why doing bodily things affects the mind and can break its loops.

You won't "win" on the first attempt. But you'll make progress. And the real win-condition is to keep playing.

The first step is always the hardest. I wish you the best.

I like JRPGs from the early 2000s. I haven’t settled on one that I like enough to specialize in yet. It’s a bit of a time commitment, as you can imagine.