>Why bother playing when I knew there was an easier way to win? This is the exact same feeling I’m left with after a few days of using Claude Code. I don’t enjoy using the tool as much as I enjoy writing code.
My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.
I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.
Everyone has different objective and subjective experiences, and I suspect some form of selection will promote those who more often feel excited and relieved by using AI than those who feel it more often a negative, like it challenges some core aspect of self.
It might challenge us, and maybe those of us who feel challenged in that way need to rise to it, for there are always harder problems to solve
If this new tool seems to make things so easy it's like "cheating", then make the game harder. Can't cheat reality.
Without AI, I have been in a company where the general mentality was to "ship bad software but quickly". Without going into the debate of whether it was profitable in the long term or not (spoiler: it was not), my problem was the following:
I would try to build something "good" (not "perfect", just "good", like modular or future-proof or just not downright malpractice). But while I was doing this, others would build crap. They would do it so fast I couldn't keep up. So they would "solve" the problems much faster. Except that over the years, they just accumulated legacy and had to redo stuff over and over again (at some point you can't throw crap on top of crap, so you just rebuild from scratch and start with new crap, right?).
All that to say, I don't think that AIs will help with that. If anything, AIs will help more people behave like this and produce a lot of crap very quickly.
My experience from these projects is the opposite. The projects are always secondary priorities for participants, and the difficulty of coordinating some dozen entirely separate organisations towards something actually productive is immense. In practice each participant independently spends the money they get on something lightly relevant, and the occasional coordination meetings are spent on planning how to fulfill the reporting requirements of the grant.
Business and research are difficult enough even when done by tightly knit teams and constantly tested against real world systems and customer feedback. The idea that a hodgepodge of organisations can achieve poorly defined yet aspirational goals on a low budget is massively misguided.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
For myself, my imagination and view of reality merged. My senses were fine but all of the processing and my imagination started writing to the same memory spaces.
I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.
That's what happens to kids. Up to eight years old, if I recall correctly, they're unable to tell apart imagination from reality. If they think of something, say a monster hiding at home, it exists in reality. Which is a big problem while watching movies that can have scary parts as they now think they're real.
A six year old can perceive normally. They really don’t see people who aren’t there. They consciously know the difference between seeing a monster and thinking it exists. They can mis-attribute information by categorizing something they see as a monster. They play and they get really invested in it. Children are not psychotic. They are using their imagination to explore reality.
I see the monsters in the room. I spent four months as a bipedal wolf feeling wind in my fur and the motions of my tail. I truly believed I wasn’t human and the humans would kill me as soon as they found that out. My childhood memories were replaced by imagined ones.
Well, the part of believing they are something they aren't, I agree, it doesn't happen to them. But I have kids and they positively believe there are monsters in the house, and they positively believe toys are alive, because they saw toy story. Nothing I can say will move them from that belief.
I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
* Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
* Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
* Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
* Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
* Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
* Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).
How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?
My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
There is a market for technical due diligence consulting, but the work is typically done by friends of investors; it's a difficult and tiny market to get into.
Seriously: it's time to get an MBA if you've ever considered it. Why? Because an MBA teaches one how organizations operate, from non-profits, to government agencies, to startups, and all the transitions to a major conglomerate. As AI proposes to change how all this is done, those of us that understand the essentials of designing, implementing, and maintaining dynamic automated systems that incorporate AI to operate organizations are in the positions to change how business is done for a very long time. It's an extreme power seat, if and only if you also have the professional communications to convince, create collations, and manage the confusion that is sure to arise as AI changes fundamental methods of running organizations.
In my albeit limited experience so far… ChatGPT4 is surprisingly good at “doing the MBA bullshit” as I call it. Vague thoughts go in from me the user, coherent business jargon comes out and I can even ask for an explanation if it tosses me a term I’ve never heard before so I can make sure I actually understand the suggested MBA bullshit that I loathe thinking/writing like and can then use it properly.
I wouldn’t be betting like the GP that an MBA will somehow help more than other skillsets… the fact that it already seems like ChatGPT4 is at least capable of MBA ish things at at a quality level that approximates at least basic levels of competency in the field of business management… should not really be a surprise when you think about how much gets written about management by managers to other people in business and management, lots of training data.
But a senior engineer with an MBA is neither, they are both and more. A senior engineer with an MBA is far more capable than the majority realize. They can optimize within a business to the degree entire departments are automated. Serious: we all work in complex organizations, and knowing how they are composed and how they interoperate, and how all that is boiled into an accounting soup is what an MBA teaches. If we're supposed to be automating all that, having an MBA is essential to not be a mindless minion working on processes without knowledge of how your work fits into the whole during this gargantuan transition.
At that time, there still will be a "A100/H100/successor replacement specialist" probably necessary. Or any other variant of a data centre hardware admin
Pinboard was nice and simple once, but nowadays doesn't seem to be maintained and is broken in many ways. I've been trying to export my archive backup for almost a year without success.
It feels more "complete" than "unmaintained" to me. It's pretty basic in what it does, but it does that well. I haven't noticed any bugs as such - what did you find that's actually broken?
I am a long-time user and archiving broke on my account at least half a year ago. Despite two support emails I did not get any replies. Feels quite "unmaintained" to me.
I'm in a similar situation. I think if you read a lot of HN and are reasonably successful, your expectations for life can get detrimentally high. And what happiness and meaning you experience largely depends on what you expect. You're already quite successful yet you're probably very unsatisfied. We read so much about startups and these amazing projects other people are doing, but it's hard to understand what you should actually expect from yourself and your life — are these reasonable things to aim for, or even to just dream about? We're only seeing the survivors and successes, not the (how many?) others.
You could try planning for a longer break or vacation to see how you feel with more freedom, do you still want to do something "more meaningful" or do you actually miss work?
Even more than HN, what meaning you find tends to depend on the people around you. Imagine how some people in objectively much worse positions than you can despite that find much more meaning in their lives than you; usually because of the bonds they create with other people. (If you ever watched Star Trek or Futurama, remember how it wasn't the stuff the characters did that made it meaningful, but rather the characters themselves and their relationships..) Your social influences can be hard to change, but that's how it is. Meaning comes from being a part of something. Stuff you do on your own requires so much more effort to reach that same level of meaning.
OODA loop is often hyped, but really it is just a description of how humans (and animals) behave in almost any situation. "Look, Think, Decide, Act" in other words.
It's not valuable in the sense that you can "practice" or "apply" the loop and perform better. Your behavior already follows this model. Its real value probably came from presenting this common decision making process in a way that appealed to upper military management, which made it easier to develop processes and practices that help decision makers (like pilots) in critical situations.
While I agree that the OODA loop is most often presented as a (fairly obvious) decision model for individuals, the model itself is not the big idea. Rather, the primary value comes from the realization that in a competition (like war, or business, or sports, etc) between two or more individuals/groups the ones who can "cycle through" the OODA loop will be able to adapt faster and often gain the upper hand through superior decision making.
In the context of the military, there are ways of reorganizing your command structure to enable faster OODA loop cycling. For example, a major driver of the "slowness" of traditional armies is their centralization of command. Propagating new intel up the chain and orders down to the troops takes a lot of time, especially when intermediate nodes keep dropping out. If you can delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level, this will make the average decision slightly worse, but because you can make each decision much faster you can still come out ahead overall. This is one of the ways an organization can "practice" the loop. (And coincidentally, one that growing startups often struggle with since it is very difficult to transition from direct command to delegation based command)
I also don't agree with your claim that you can't "practice" the loop on an individual level. Anyone who suffers from indecision in the face of uncertainty and overwhelming options ("analysis paralysis") should know that it is something you get better at over time, especially when you need to be doing it under time pressure.
Source: Was a Navy officer for 14 years, we had tons of discussions of "how to get into the opponents loop" during briefings and trainings. Note that in the military it is sometimes possible to actively slow down the opponents OODA looping, something that is probably illegal for most civilian companies. (Though see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ for a legal example)
>I also don't agree with your claim that you can't "practice" the loop on an individual level.
To further agree with what you are saying...
In many sports: people put work in to run their OODA loop faster even they don't call it that. People watch videos of their opponents to learn how to more quickly orient their opponents actions with the context of the sport.
In engineering: unittests, debuggers and IDEs are all designed to provide information that allows a faster OODA loop.
The idea of rapid iteration is based on the idea in exploratory settings with low information a faster OODA loop is often better than a smarter but slower OODA loop.
One of the best ways to slow down an opponents OODA loop in soccer is to choose inconsistent actions from play to play. As a forward receiving the ball from defense: dribble (with speed changes), pass back, pass across, etc.
It was pretty awesome hearing my son's team making this type of observation on the field as the opposition repeated the same offensive play, and adapt their response.
>If you can delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level, this will make the average decision slightly worse, but because you can make each decision much faster you can still come out ahead overall
This is insightful. Each node in the chain is a self-correcting loop. The trick is to make sure that information is sent up the chain more rapidly so that each node can use it to act on its own within the broader objective. Note that "information loss" is a function of both the number of nodes in the chain and time.
Great point and part of why I've increasingly developed a preference for Kanban and optimizing cycle time at organizations I've worked at. There's a great blog post [1] that popped up in my network which I think does an excellent job of describing this in a very visual, tangible manner.
> delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level [...] this will make the average decision slightly worse.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Information going up the chain of command will always be a bit outdated, distorted, and incomplete (unless you can just live-stream video with sound to your command center). So with properly trained soldiers decisions made at lower level can actually be better than those made by higher-ups.
The soldiers on the ground can make better decisions about their own situation, yes. On the other hand, they will never know whether they could be even more useful 100 km further down south unless HQ tells them. Whether that kind of information actually matters changes from operation to operation.
That's a bit underselling it, like saying "E = mc^2 is just a description of how light behaves" and sweeping it under the rug as if the explanatory model provides no additional benefit.
The value comes from the ability to consciously influence the various stages of the process instead of it simply being subconsciously driven. In fact, you can practice and apply the stages of the loop better - for example, making a list of questions you'd like to ask yourself during the observe phase in a given scenario. You practice consciously asking yourself observation questions enough and in time the brain integrates that into the subconscious processing loop.
As long as you keep the "act" small in scale (and you continue to loop through the steps), this is probably the best approach in most circumstances. If for no other reason than is break you out of the initial tendency many people have to freeze when confronted with crisis.
I'm sure I've been told by someone who had been trained as an officer in the British army that they were very much trained to have a "Bias for Action" - i.e. the worst thing you could in most situations would be to get caught in their version of "analysis paralysis". Of course, he told me this with impeccable self deprecating humour (presumably also part of their training) - so difficult to tell how serious he was being.
Yeah, my take also comes from prior training (as a firefighter/paramedic). Start moving towards/away from the problem (which direction depends on your own personal defaults and risk tolerance). You don't need to figure everything out before you start moving.
The reason the OODA loop was useful, though, is because it took a decision-making process that was normally used by individuals and brought it into organizations. It seeks to answer the question: how do we minimize the overhead cost of making decisions in large organizations without compromising on effectiveness? Given that it originated in the military, the lack of a "wait for orders" step is what's notable.
I've never been in an organization that needs this sort of model, but my assumption was it was more about what not to do. Don't second guess yourself endlessly, don't panic, don't reminisce about what could have been, don't blindly repeat your last action, don't freeze, etc. In high stress situations people tend to do dumb things, this sounds to me like an attempt to say "don't do that" without saying the word "don't" or specifying the "that".
Sufficiently large organizations easily panic, second guess themselves, etc.
Formalizing the decision making process helps get to the point where you can make a decision. In risk averse organizations, this is extremely valuable.
The loop is not (usually) executed sequentially, in nature or in human tactical training.
Boyd’s thinking was useful in the military bureaucracy to make the right types of aircraft that would support high maneuverability and rapid decision making. Training to excel in use of new aircraft only came naturally to the pilots to a certain point, and this is still true today.
However, it’s true that OODA skills like rapid re-orientation are often best taught to humans by putting the right kind of pressure on them so that their instincts will be honed in a useful way, although mastery requires thinking about and tuning those instincts as well.
I agree that the OODA theory is in line with what any behaviour is. I think the real value of it is with its implementation : "Fail fast, fail often" and agile mentality is born from this original theory, and I think these tactics are invaluable for rapid progress.
I think this also makes OODA an effective strategy: being able to conceptualise the whole system/problem in a holistic manner, and being able to quickly ascertain what are the important variables/factors, and therefore what you need do to to achieve the greatest impact/effect in line with your goal. This is, in my view, the whole point of OODA, and this takes a shrewd intellect and a lot of practice to get good at!
This kind of goes beyond the basic OODA acronym, but consideration of approach through each of the OODA stages is where the value of this theory resides. Indeed I try to implement this approach in my work as a scientist each day!
People were doing manoeuvre warfare for thousands of years before Boyd, as well. People think nobody had any idea what they were doing before OODA. And don't get me started on people who think manoeuvre warfare was invented by Ender...
It might be overhyped but that doesn't mean there's nothing valuable in the model. While it might describe how the world works, it is also intended to bring your attention to specifics. For instance, maybe you don't do a great job of actually looking (observing as it's called in the model). If you have this model in your head to refer to, you can stop and think "Wait, I need to make sure that I'm considering all the relevant evidence before acting".
My experience has been the opposite. I've enjoyed working on hobby projects more than ever, because so many of the boring and often blocking aspects of programming are sped up. You get to focus more on higher level choices and overall design and code quality, rather than searching specific usages of libraries or applying other minutiae. Learning is accelerated and the loop of making choices and seeing code generated for them, is a bit addictive.
I'm mostly worried that it might not take long for me to be a hindrance in the loop more than anything. For now I still have better overall design sense than AI, but it's already much better than I am at producing code for many common tasks. If AI develops more overall insight and sense, and the ability to handle larger code bases, it's not hard to imagine a world where I no longer even look at or know what code is written.
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