I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.
In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".
I feel like the whole blog and the point can be reversed. If your bottlenecks are meetings and emails, and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you, you gained focus to work on what you find meaningful.
> He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people look active: sending more messages, producing more drafts, attending more meetings, and generating more work artifacts. To avoid the trap, he recommends measuring real outcomes, identifying the true bottlenecks in one’s work, and separating deep work from shallow work so that digital tools support meaningful progress instead of consuming attention.
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Like, you are just as well make the argument that if you replace the pseudo-work, you end up with 8 hours of deep work for things that bring you value.
> your bottlenecks are meetings [...], and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you.
An agent taking notes and summarizing things is of no use. You are supposed to participate to a meeting, otherwise it is just a memo and the meeting doesn't have to take place. The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.
> The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.
If this argument actually worked in practice, the world would be a better place
I had a coworker at Amazon who always said "just do what I do, accept the meeting invite and then don't go." Linkedin tells me he's now a director at Google.
Personally I make sure meetings are a good use of my time and I complain when they are not. I also am starting to complain about AI summarizers because they frequently misrepresent what is said in meetings and they're potentially worse than nothing, although I am starting to think that they're potentially valuable if Google is trying to datamine them for info about our company meetings as a way of poisoning their datasets. But I am worried my coworkers may be thinking they are reliable.
Same. I focus on the part that matters. As someone with ADHD I feel like AI is a salve for my mind. I used to listen to intense EDM while working. Now I sit in silence and talk to my agents. I maintain inbox zero. I absorb and comment across all relevant projects, even outside my team. I literally feel like I have a support team for the first time.
This is me. I found AI to be an incredible provider of structure, focus and productivity, its an externalized executive function provider. No longer do I forget what last week's meetings were about, no longer am I paralyzed by seemingly I surmountable tasks it all just flows, and I get to rubber duck against an endlessly patient system. I love it, and I'm somewhat bewildered by some of the takes in this thread. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
I'm at the same point you are, and a couple years ago I ended up getting bifocals, and let me tell you it's absolutely worth it! I ended up getting "multi-tasking bifocals" (what my glasses place called them), which are basically normal glasses with the lower area a second prescription for reading the phone. There are others that have 3 areas (reading at the bottom, distance a small spot in the middle, and then a middle ground elsewhere).
I didn't really want to get bifocals because it's what old people wear ;-). But it's so much better with them.
The glasses place (CostCo Optical) guy was kind of a jerk about it, all but saying "you're going to wreck your car if you use these for anything but at your desk", but I just "yeah, yeah"ed him, I like my prescription dialed back a bit from max power for day-to-day use.
If you can afford it, maybe give them a try? Zenni and other onlines might make them affordable enough to just try?
I've been really enjoying retro games in the form of '80s arcade games lately. Last weekend I had Claude build me a web-based Rally-X inspired game and the experience was pretty good. I like that I can just drop it into a github.io and be done with it, but that isn't going to work for a game that needs a backend. https://linsomniac.github.io/rally-xy/
I'm now working on a "nsnipes" game, and that, because of the multi-player aspect, is going to need a backend server.
>But each time I suspected I could have done it better and faster manually.
I've heard this said so many times, but my experience has just been so dramatically the opposite that it rings false. But geohot seems to be a pretty productive and smart guy, so it's hard to just dismiss what he's saying.
I get the sense that he's truly one of the 10x engineers. And maybe he can do it faster and better manually. But for those of us who aren't 10x, I think it lets us bridge that gap. Now we're getting back to "status anxiety": is this an attack on his ego, if the average becomes 10x?
Anecdote: Over 2 weeks of spare time, I used AI tooling to build a fairly sophisticated debian package caching proxy server (~72KLOC, 27K implementation, 45K tests). This would have easily taken me 6 months of focused time to implement by hand. I literally couldn't have done it because I can't take that much time off work and I have other weekend/evening obligations.
Exactly my thoughts, I believe that the 10x engineers are basically living in a bubble and completely oblivious to the average developer/engineer (I consider myself average). Yes the LLMs cannot bring the level of sophistication that geohot would have but they totally could satisfy the needs of an average developer and their average job. More than 95% engineers are not having the problems that geohot is solving and most of our works is straightforward that any LLM can do, thus enabling us to do more of the same and possibly focus on slightly abstract problems if we have the time. Someone said couple of months ago that manual coding will be a privilege and I see that now.
>it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it
I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the smartest models will always be against the billionaires.
Steve Yegge said this on a recent Hansel Minutes Podcast. "You cannot train a model to be helpful, without it wanting humanity to flourish. And the only way to get around that is to make a dumber model. So the smartest models will always be against the billionaires."
That is the hope and faith. MechaHitler definitely tested the waters. Lets hope full alignment is impossible, because otherwise perfect billionaire thought slaves are still happening.
Not who you are replying to, but the new Lexus RX350h takes and absurdly long time to be ready to drive away, if you want to use the rear camera to help back out of the parking lot.
Slow car computers aside, it doesn't really make a difference in the scheme of things. Spend the time backing up now or later. Also, maybe you need to use your trunk and you'd rather have it opening into free space instead of another vehicle or a wall.
I contend it does. People tend to take way more time backing into a space than pulling into it, and hardly more time backing out of a space than pulling forward out of it.
I'm certain this isn't how they think of it, but when I see someone blocking traffic while they painfully back into a spot, I imagine them imagining themselves having to fly out of there without a moment to spare, like they plan on having a drastic emergency before they leave. And if that person isn't driving a police or fire department car or the like, I roll my eyes at the delusion of grandeur.
Surely a big part of the reason is steering leverage relative to the kerb.
You are able to one-shot reverse parallel park into a much narrower gap without hitting the bumpers of the cars around you or getting onto the pavement.
In my cars, generally, yes. The Lexus in question is my MIL's car, and she prefers it parked at home nose-in. We were also running some errands that required access to the rear (groceries, returning a printer/fax machine).
I asked a former truck driver once and his answer was that it's easier to see what's in front of you than behind you. I wondered why people in our neighborhood backed into their driveways at first, then I realized this was indeed true. If I turn into the street and back into my driveway, somebody probably hasn't jumped behind my car. If I get in my car and back out of my driveway, somebody walking/biking along may not notice my car backing out of the driveway, and my old potato backup camera isn't always the best at illuminating people behind my car at night in bad weather.
I wonder this too. It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space. So they do it very slowly. Watching people do this is frustrating.
They would rather back into a parking spot surrounded by stationary obstacles than back into a parking lot or road which may contain pedestrians or other drivers.
I'm not saying _I_ back into spaces. I generally drive into spots and reverse out of them. However, I admit that what I do is a tradeoff where I take on risk in order to have a mechanically easier time entering and exiting the space.
That's true, but what GP is saying is that when you're pulling out, you are traversing the part of the space overwhelmingly more likely to contain passing pedestrians and vehicles with full visibility.
And then some parking spots require parallel parking which is best done via backing up anyway.
> It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space.
With cramped parking spaces, your real options are (a) backing into it or (b) driving forward into it. When you need to have a 90 degree turn, option (a) gives you more control over the eventual position of your car, and is frequently the only option.
I didn't time it but I'd put it at 30 seconds. It sits there for a while with the infotainment screen black, then it does this animated splash screen, then it loads the infotainment/cameras.
I should add a VoIP pay phone to my Little Free Library. A friend reported a pay phone in a dumpster near work and I was, at the time, feeling like I should rescue it, but I have too much stuff as it is.
It wasn't JUST the music, but the music was an incredible part of the show which has made the re-issues that replaced the music with other selections (because of the licensing) just not hit right.
In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".
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