It’s just as questionable to declare victory because we had a few early wins and that time will fix everything.
Lots of people had predicted that we wouldn’t have a single human-driven vehicle by now. But many issues happened to be a lot more difficult to solve than previously thought!
> Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility.
I don't _think_ it is accurate. I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. Case in point, this article: as you realize that fixing everything is a never-ending game with marginal ROI, you end up burning out.
If overresponsibility alone caused burn out, I think that every parent out there would be impacted. And yes, parental burnout is a _very_ real thing, yet some of us may dodge that bullet, probably by sheer luck of having just the right balance between effort and reward.
Throw this tradeoff off balance, and most parents just burn out in weeks.
> I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning.
That'd mean that people who are burned out all did so because they did stuff that didn't have meaning? Ultimately, I think you can get burned out regardless of how meaningful it is or isn't. People working at hospitals (just as one example) have probably some of the most meaningful jobs, yet burn out frequently regardless.
More likely that both different people burn out because of different things, and it's a mix of reasons, not just one "core" reason we can point at and say "That's why burnout happen, not the other things".
I'd argue it actually makes things worse. When you can have a higher-purpose job (an ICU or ER nurse who is saving patient's life everyday) and you're spending most of energy on administrative overhead, the effect is just magnified.
Meaning is a subjective thing. That's why some people thrive in some environments and some may burn out. If you put your average IRS auditor in a hospital, they might actually find more meaning in filling forms than exchanging with patients.
I think meaning can't be imposed externally. What society finds meaningful and what any individual finds meaningful can differ. And what an individual finds meaningful will vary over time. A meaningful activity, repeated often enough, can become routine and lose its meaning.
I suspect that if you dig deeper, the underlying cause of burnout being forced to spend a lot of effort over time and not being able to feel that you are living up to your values in return. You are running a marathon but never reach the finish line of the satisfaction of living according to your own moral code.
* That can come from overresponsibility if you have a value that says you should fix things that you see are broken.
* It can come from meaningless bullshit jobs if you have a value (which almost everyone does) that says your effort is meaningful.
* It can come from isolation if you have a value that it's important to be connected to others.
It can probably arise from any other value you might hold as long as you're forced to strive and yet can never reach it.
Honestly, I feel like values are deeply underconsidered in our current culture's thinking around psychology.
Doesn't often come from a lack of meaning though? Or maybe the meaning is more micro in this instance, and you wonder what the point is of telling them to pick up their dirty socks for the... 327th time.
the meaning of `overresponsibility` in this case, IMO is taking / considering the matters as something that we take responsibility of. That way of thinking itself (taking the responsibility) is causing a burden on the mental health of OP. Being ignorant or able to let go relieve the burden, thus preventing burnout
I guess this is one of those things where you actually expect an AI model to work really well (in their current embodiment). As highlighted by other comments, it takes a lot of pattern matching to make a good guess at this game.
Love it, such a nice idea coupled with a flawless execution. I think the future of AI looks a lot more like this than half-cooked agent implementations that plagues LinkedIn…
Selling services like support or consulting is fine, since that's generally independent from FOSS licensing/copyright concerns. Anyone can do that though, not just the creator or contributors. For example, there are lots of third party database consultancies that offer support for major databases, both FOSS and commercial.
Customization is also fine, but the purchaser of the customization must still abide by the AGPL: the end-users of the customized software need access to the customized codebase. If the customized product is only being used internally (e.g. for employees of the company that purchased the customization) then there's no problem. But if they're offering it in an externally-facing SaaS, or embedding it in externally-distributed software, the customized code must be made available to the end-users of the software.
With FOSS often it's simpler to do this as "sponsored development" where someone pays for a new feature to be made directly upstream, rather than having a customized fork.
That all said, services and customization are generally difficult to scale as a business. Even with a fairly large userbase, the percentage of companies who are willing to pay for support or customization tends to be disappointingly low.
I think most people miss the bigger picture on the impact of AI on the learning process, especially in engineering disciplines.
Doing things that could be in principle automated by AI is still fundamentally valuable, because they bring two massive benefits:
- *Understanding what happens under the hood*: if you want to be an effective software engineer, you need to understand the whole stack. This is true of any engineering discipline really. Civil engineers take classes in fluid dynamics and material science classes although they will mostly apply pre-defined recipes on the job. You wouldn't be comfortable if the engineer who signed off on the blueprints of dam upstream of your house had no idea about the physics of concrete, hydrodynamic scour, etc.
- *Having fun*: there is nothing like the joy of discovering how things work, even though a perfectly fine abstraction that hides these details underneath. It is a huge part of the motivation for becoming an engineer. Even by assuming that Vibe Coding could develop into something that works, it would be a very tedious job.
When students use AI to do the hard work on their behalf, they miss out on those. We need to be extremely careful with this, as we might hurt a whole generation of students, both in terms of their performance and their love of technology.
It is quite fascinating to think that Galois lived only 20 years in the early 19th century, yet he conceived a theory of profound significance and impact 200 years later. Imagine if he could live 80 years!
I’m inclined to agree, but who knows… maybe he just happened to have his big insight early on, and if he’d lived longer he’d never have done anything quite as significant. Plenty of people do great things only once.
Lots of people had predicted that we wouldn’t have a single human-driven vehicle by now. But many issues happened to be a lot more difficult to solve than previously thought!
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