speaker-0: It allows them to put barriers in place. It allows them to extract data. It allows them to control who does what and so on. This was simply not an issue before. Why are we making it an issue now? The truth is of course we're not gaining really much of anything. They just want your data. ⁓ there you go. Now I can hear you. For some reason it wasn't working.

speaker-1: software in 2026.

speaker-0: Yep. It's ⁓ hard to hard to stomach all of these interesting things that can happen with software in twenty twenty six for sure. And and people people are somehow incredulous when I say like I find these things everywhere, right? Software just doesn't actually do the thing anymore. Like I I cannot, for the life of me, figure out like are you guys literally like are you just sleeping all day? I don't know what's going on. Like if you're using software, how are you not getting these things, right? How are they not happening to you, right?

speaker-1: Pruning LLMs to go in loops, they take a lot of energy, so they have to nap a lot. Yeah, so they're napping, the LLMs are going in loops in the background. It's great. So much software. It's great.

speaker-0: I had I had I was ⁓ I was listening to a video I just recently put up ⁓ yesterday because I I listened to the videos to find like, hey, did this ⁓ did this first of all like quality control, like hey, how many of these parasite words am I using in this video? Because it sort of annoys me to listen. And I listen over and over and at some point YouTube was like, you know what? You should listen to this video in Tam Middle. The like the what, the Pakistani language or something. I don't know a hundred percent, right? Yeah, and so it was auto dubbed and it switched to Tamil and I couldn't switch it back. Like literally it wouldn't let me. I had to F five, s get the tab again loaded, switch to English because it was set to Tamil. Like, hey, you're you're obviously Pakistani. I can see you know, their AI probably is like this guy looks Pakistani, has a beard. Who has a beard? Yes. Right? I don't know.

speaker-1: Ha

speaker-0: It's fucking crazy. Like how are you guys not seeing these things? I don't understand. Like what are we Are we on different fucking earths? And sometimes I feel like what what am I doing that is, you know, landing me in all these situations where I'm like, this shit doesn't work. It doesn't actually do the thing. It doesn't or it does something I didn't ask for.

speaker-1: when I, when I upload stuff in on YouTube, I have to do it for Safari because I have clients. So like I use different browsers for different, for different clients. And when I, when I upload a video for Safari on YouTube, sometimes, you know, when you have to take saying that this video was not made by AI, it's not for kids, whatever. Sometimes the text just moves by like 10 pixels for like a split second, just like that. And I'm like, I'm trying to take the box just moves away.

speaker-0: Like we can't even show things on a web page consistently. Well come on. What the fuck are we doing it?

speaker-1: ⁓ my God, we should probably do an intro. That'll be funny. Just like 10 minutes into the episode. Welcome to the Bass Academy. Today I have a really cool guest. I'm going to try to say the name again. Ricard Andersson. Andersson? Sounds great. Ricard Andersson. My Swedish. I know you have Lafitta. That's my knowledge of Swedish.

speaker-0: That's a good that's a good thing to know that.

speaker-1: Yes, he's he made a video. You made a video a little while ago that caught my eye about gatekeeping programming. I thought it was very interesting, very interesting video. A lot of people seem to agree is very popular video. And I want to I want to kind of naturally get into it through asking you an initial question. And we can kind of make our way from here. Is it worth being a professional programmer anymore?

speaker-0: I I think that's this is an open question to be honest. ⁓ a lot of people would probably expect me to say like 100%. Of obviously. I'm not actually so sure. So for context, I spent about 16 years not being a professional programmer, but still being quote unquote a programmer. ⁓ in in the sense that I programming is what I do. It's what I love, it's how I express myself, it's how I think about everything. ⁓ Not in the sense that I want to solve every problem with technology, I th I think that's actually part of the problem of the world in some sense. But rather that's the thing that sort of has been with me forever, in a way, right? It's been it's been there and it will keep being there. I can't not program in a way. It's almost like an addiction, but I would argue probably a good one, because it's the thing that sort of has centered me throughout my life. When I was at my worst, when I was at my best, et cetera, all of that programming was always there in some shape, right?

speaker-1: It's comforting in some way.

speaker-0: Yeah. So the question of working with programming, sort of being a professional programmer specifically, this of course is, you know, I think that it's great to get paid for programming. I I really do. But I think the reason this sort of has become an open question for me ⁓ is do I like where programming is going? ⁓ do I like what people are doing with programming? ⁓ what they're doing to programming, what they're doing with programming, because I'm not so sure that software should eat the world. I don't I don't know that I want software counting votes. I don't know that I want it in cars. I don't really think that we want it everywhere. I don't really trust it, especially with I know some some of you guys out there. I I know you're not good enough to do some of these things. Stop stop putting code in everything. We don't need your, you know, pause on everything. No. ⁓ jokes aside, I I think programming for you know professional purposes is a mixed bag. It's never as fun as when you actually are a motivated individual that can sort of do stuff on your own and you can explore things on your own. Learning overall is a much better thing to do exploring your own things, for example. You'll evolve a lot more if you disconnect yourself from the needs of a business. ⁓ you disconnect disconnect yourself from the opinions of coworkers who do not know. And so I think at this point it's sort of 50-50. Should be should you be a professional programmer, well, what do you want to do otherwise? That's maybe the ⁓ the main differentiator for most people is going to be, do they actually want to do anything else? It's a tricky question. I've worked in customer service. Would I choose customer service over professional programming at this point? No. There are perhaps other things that I would choose over professional programming. I think Teaching programming might be actually a lot more interesting in the current landscape of things, sort of. It depends a little bit, right? What are you expected to teach? Are you expected to teach the fundamentals of things? Are you expected to teach people the enthusiasm that you have for learning how things work and so on? Because I think motivation is something you get it you can get it extrinsically from teachers and so on. I had some excellent teachers who showed me that after many, many years they're still excited. They're still actually They're talking about something basic, but they're they're full of excitement about this thing, and you get a sense that, man, this is the best stuff. Right. This is really this is really what life should be about, right? Learning these things, learning the arcane, you know, interesting kind of spells that we can cast and to make these machines do things and so on. This shit is the closest thing we have to wizardry. And I think it is it's actually a disservice to view it only in the sense of like professional programming, right? ⁓ the truth is you can be a wizard casting spells in your own laboratory, right? Like just put on the hat and go, right? Because there's nothing that says you have to be connected to a product and so on. And I I I noticed this, you know, this is also maybe I'm not gonna get too much into a tangent here, but there's this sense that you should all be hustling and if you aren't creating a startup based on the thing you just learned, what are you even really doing? Yeah. I think that is ⁓ you know, that can be I'm not gonna call it like a it's not the worst thing in the world, but it can be a little bit poisonous to actually, you know, moving forward sometimes.

speaker-1: really love the Harry Potter. I even have a video about, think it's close to something like Harry Potter was a vibe code or something. Sorry, I didn't mean to time that with you. it was like, think it was either George Hortz or Shkreli. I always confused them for some reason. But one of them said something along the lines of when they were kids. like all their friends were like, ⁓ my God, if I could go to Hogwarts, I would be the number one wizard. I'll be the best wizard to ever existed. And yet you have programming, which is the closest thing that we actually have that we actually have to. So clearly you were lying because if you were, if you could have gone to Hogwarts and become the best wizard, then you'd be the best programmer. You'd be, you'd be, you'd be doing like assembly and see 24 seven, like you'd be doing really cool stuff because that is the the thing that we have is you can actually cast spells you can you can get you can get sand to like do math and like sort of cast spells with it. Have you read the Harry Potter books?

speaker-0: No. No, I'm I'm I've only seen the the movies. Not not a lot. I I'll say that I am not ⁓ you know well versed.

speaker-1: We won't go too deep into this, like in, I think this is showing the films as well. Often Harry and Ron were very lazy when it came to homework. Like they did, they just didn't want to do the homework a lot of the time. And it always felt strange to me. Like if you are in that position, where would you not want to do, where would you not want to learn as much as possible? Yeah. And I guess that's most people, right? Like you have the ability to do magic. You have documentation online for everything you could possibly ever need is free. It's available. You can even get it offline. And yet most people just never really, they just don't want to look at it. They'd rather just type English.

speaker-0: Yes. Yeah. I th I think there's okay, so actually I think that there's a there's a halfway good reason for some of that attitude. Mm-hmm. At least, right? So some people have simply grown up in a world with magic. And the magic is at this point so you know, it's so wide and sort of widely dispersed that to them it doesn't actually seem like like magic. I but the way that I look at this is before like ninety-five we didn't have internet connectivity and then we got a modem and we could suddenly reach computers on the internet. I became w aware that you can actually have your computer talk to other computers. This is fucking magic. Like people don't understand. Now they have devices, of course they walk around with it, they can just sort of whatever. Like it's not even like we had phones, we have mobile phones and so on before that. Or around there I guess. And that in itself is also magic a little bit, but it was just a phone. I it was just a phone. But suddenly The the magic box that I could play games on could actually talk to computers over the internet. And I was completely floored by this proposition. I started learning network programming, how to deal with sockets and so on. This to me seemed like this is crazy. Like how on earth can these computers talk to each other? And of course I learned part of why they can talk to each other, like, you know, over time. But the the actual act of doing it your yourself making these things happen is amazing. And to a lot of people, that's just mundane bullshit. In fact, they don't want to deal with sockets. Like why would they? They want to have something that just says connect to computer. Whatever. Dial, dude. Dial another computer on the internet, right? Or something. I don't know. Nowadays I guess you're supposed to run some kind of what's it called? Firebase? Superbase if you're into the open source. Yeah. It's like a backend system that you don't actually have to do backend stuff with so you don't have to learn anything. I whatever. Obviously I'm showing my bias here, but whatever. ⁓ 'cause I I'm like, come on. You can just have a back end, just write the code. What are we doing here? Right? But okay. ⁓ but yeah, to some people it it this seems like mundane whatever. Why why should I care about this? Well you should care because this shit is fucking crazy. You know, like I don't people I don't think people appreciate how absolutely amazing it is. That we can actually just talk to other computers on the internet. And if we create a protocol to do that, we can do whatever the fuck we want. You know, I can connect to yours, you can connect to mine, we can send files to each other, we can do whatever, we can build our own chat and so on. None of this tied to any anyone else. We all we just have that power. Crazy. Magic. Wizardry.

speaker-1: I wonder if, cause I think maybe it's just in my head, but I I'm noticing a sort of, enthusiasm gap between generations when it comes to this stuff. Like despite my white hair, I'm actually 34. I just have white hair. ⁓ and just like you, like I grew up, I grew up with like, ⁓ know, windows 95, windows 98, like, like, like mid nineties, ⁓ really like sort of early commercial software and. It felt like it did feel like a magic, although it felt graspable. It felt like there wasn't too much for me. It wasn't too much to understand. It felt like it was the right size where if you gave it some amount of effort, you could actually understand most of it. I wonder if this sort of the difference in enthusiasm. I wonder if it's because there's so much stuff now. Like I wonder if maybe it almost feels like too much. compared to when we when I assume we're like a similar similar age when we were growing up it was a lot smaller maybe maybe just in my head maybe maybe there is just as little enthusiasm as there ever was it's just that it feels different because we're from that era

speaker-0: Be, could be. ⁓ I'm I'm slightly older you, but not by not by much. Almost forty, so thirty-nine. I think, you know, one thing that I have noted on on the channel, ⁓ it's actually in one of my I guess it's on the home screen or whatever of your YouTube channel. It's like ⁓ what what is the channel about? And in in that video, I think it's that video, I talk about how no one owned my experience when I was learning. ⁓ there was no like, hey, you should go learn React and React is this little, you know, it's just a little package that you learn and then you learn the trivialities of React. Right. And then you're like, ⁓ I can make React apps, right? No one actually owned my experience in that way. I wasn't, you know, led really anywhere except, you know, by my own sort of I want to do this. How do I how do I do that? And like you said, I there was certainly less stuff. Like there wasn't we didn't have this ⁓ Paralyzing choice to make. What do I do? What do I learn? What do I actually focus on? We had more of a a buffet of things and you went and you you went in one direction, you learned a thing, and then maybe that wasn't for you, but you were like, Okay, I'm gonna do some graphics programming or whatever, or I'm gonna do some other stuff, or you know, it wasn't it wasn't overwhelming to most people, I think. I don't know. This is like you said, it's hard to tell. Like We don't know what people felt back then, of course, about all of this stuff, right? But certainly I felt like this this is all just sort of there and you can go and you can just take it. At the time when I was learning socket programming, Beeja's guide to network sockets or BSD sockets, I suppose it was Bee Gees Guide to Network Pro programming maybe. It already existed. It was already there. You can just go and learn these things, right? Did I understand all of it immediately? Absolutely not. But There was a sense of just going and getting the the stuff, right? This is also why I've never felt I I can't I can't really relate to the idea that programming has been gatekeep so much because I feel like so much of it has just been out there. You know, you just go and and learn it. It's ⁓ difficult to for me to sympathize with the the chorus of people who feel like ⁓ people are c gatekeeping programming or you know, like knowledge is being gatekept because this and that. I don't know about that. If you know sixteen year old Ricard can s you know, write ⁓ a model viewer in OpenGL, I'm pretty sure you can get where you're trying to go. You know, I s it's really not that crazy. I'm not gonna go h too hard on this, but I think maybe people are a little bit ⁓ they want excuses ⁓ for a lot of these things usually. It's why how how it seems to me. I'm I'm I'm not gonna say that's the absolute truth because I don't know these people. I don't know what they've been through and so on. But it seems a little bit silly to me to say we're anyone is really gatekeeping programming and that's for other reasons as well. But certainly the knowledge I would say. It's just sorta out there. If we don't know anything, if there's something that we don't know, it's mostly because either we haven't really cared to look or ⁓ we might be bad at looking and that's a that's fine. It's c it can be difficult to get where you're trying to go with stuff like that, but ⁓ I think it is it it's important to understand that a lot of this is in our hands. We have to take responsibility for ourselves, right? The the whole gatekeeping dynamic is ⁓ it's a way to offload responsibility more than anything else, is what I would say.

speaker-1: The idea that the knowledge is being gate kept is indeed quite silly. mean, I remember 2002, I didn't have internet home. We had internet cafes back then. And I had a computer at home, there's no internet. So I would borrow some of my mom's floppy disks. is, I bought some of her yellow floppy disks and I go to an internet cafe. I would find websites that had information on computing that I wanted to learn about. And I just copied the text and I saved it on a floppy disk. And I would then take it home and I would read it. I would devour that text when I was at home because that's all like, that's what I could do. I couldn't, you know, I was in a small town in Romania. couldn't get books on the topic. There was one book about Linux in the entire, like the, on the, in the local bookshop. And so I would just go on the internet, just save stuff on floppy disks. 34 year old boomer, by the way. ⁓ And that's how I learned and information was freely available. It was just for free on the internet, you just have to just have to look for it. So this idea that especially now that any of this information is gate kept is is very, silly. You know, like you can you can buy courses, the information is organized for you very neatly logically, that's essentially what you're paying for it. But the information is freely available. I would love to know about how you got into it because when I was my parents noticed that I was very much into computers when I was a kid around age seven, and they got me a tutor for which I'm very, very grateful. I started with basic and Pascal back in the day. Again, just complete boomer, but it's fine. And my very first lesson, I have my computer, okay, my computer is ready. It's here. My tutors are going to bring whatever I'm going to learn how to program is going to be great. And he shows up and he's like, okay, you can put the computer away. And he pulls out pen and paper. And we start, we start, he he starts to teach me how to break problems down into logical steps, which is essentially what every program is, right? You have a problem, you break it down into very small instructions, then the computer executes the instructions. And that was, that was, that was a beautiful introduction. programming. I think it was unlike that of most people. I think most people now Google like Python tutorial. And they just they just start with like, Hello, world or something missing. Like there's this famous, ⁓ there's this channel called coding Jesus. And there's this famous meme from Ed where he had a college student on and he asked him something basic, like what's in what's in array or something very, very basic. And the guy said, I don't know, I skipped the basics and went straight to machine learning. And I think that most people now have a very bizarre introduction into this. want to know more about how you were introduced to it, how you got started.

speaker-0: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it wasn't your average I I think we have pretty irregular kind of entries into this, both of us, I suppose. I don't know how many people have my experience though. But ⁓ Yeah, when I was a around twelve, thirteen, I I wanted to be a hacker. You know Yeah. And at some point I sort of just I said this on IRC ⁓ to in a in a channel sort of

speaker-1: really just want to it. We're using MIRC by chance. Classic. Sorry to interrupt. Mirk. Yes. ⁓ Yes. Sorry to interrupt.

speaker-0: Yes, of course. Yeah, we call it Mirk in the So basically I I sort of I'm sorta thinking out loud or whatever in the channel on on IRC and ⁓ a guy in that channel, I I really have no idea who this guy was. Right. I I had talked to him many times or whatever, but I don't know anything about this guy. What was he doing at the time? Like was he ⁓ what age was he or whatever? But he basically told me like if you wanna be a hacker, don't just be some kinda script kiddy bullshitter who just runs scripts other people write. I'm assuming, based on what I know now, that he or he he had some insight into all of this. But he certainly didn't really sort of inform me that hey, I I actually know how to do some of these things. You should stop being shitty or whatever at this, or you should learn the actual proper way and so on. So he tells me you have to you should learn programming. Like if you want to actually be a hacker, right? You should learn programming. And so I started learning C. ⁓ Later I understood. maybe that I was l actually learning C. ⁓ I was writing in C<unk>, but it it really had nothing to do with C<unk>. I I don't think I had ⁓ an inheritance hierarchy or whatever in my programs until way later, like down the road, right? In part this was because first of all, I I realized actually I'm not so interested in hacking so much as just making things with programming na now. It's because I I sort of s got this taste for You can actually make things that you can then run on your computer and that's really, really cool. Right? It's actually more cool than breaking into systems and so on, is what I kinda started to believe, right? It's also a lot more available, obviously. It's also not illegal. I I got this sense this taste for programming all of a sudden and I felt like, you know, this is actually what I want to do. I want to to create programs. I want to, you know, do interesting things with them. And I I was hanging out in this IRC channel at the time called C plus plus dot se for, you know, Sweden, obviously. Most of those people this is also part of why I wrote mostly C in C. Most of those people worked at game studios, the ones who were active in that Channel. So of course they're not going to be like, hey, we're full blast on C. It's the best language ever. Most of them actually disliked C. It's just that they're just using it because, you know, whatever. It's what's out there, it's what you have compilers for, and so on on Windows and so on. So I end up learning essentially C and C. This was sort of how I got into all of this stuff. And I found, you know, network programming, got really into just making up bullshit protocols for doing things like, hey, if I want to send ⁓ Send and request files from different computers, how would I do that? Right? Looking at FTP as a protocol, just saying, well, what if I do something different here? And and all of those things, right? Making servers, ⁓ making clients, mostly for just the fun of it. Like whatever. Just do stuff. No real thinking about, ⁓ if I learn this, I'll get somewhere doing that or whatever. It was never part of it, to be honest for me. That's also where I got because for a long time I had a sense of I don't really want to work with programming. C<unk>. SE was in part re the reason for that because I I would say that there was a certain feeling in the in the channel that I got that ⁓ so some of these people don't like programming so much because they do it for work. And and I'll say that's sort of where that seed was planted. And that's sort of i I kept that with me for quite some time and I th this shaped my decision making to some extent. ⁓ eventually I got over it. I started working with programming and so on, but ⁓ This definitely was part of it.

speaker-1: there's definitely a seed of truth in this idea that it's more difficult to enjoy your hobby if you if you start making money from it. mean, for just for context, so I'm a recreational programmer, I it for fun. I've never worked as one of those in it. I haven't worked as a programmer professionally. But I've been a freelance video editor for like the past eight or nine years, which has allowed me to travel pretty extensively. And like I have what many would consider a dream job. I edit videos for big YouTubers and I get to travel because of it. And some days I wake up and I'm like, ⁓ I guess I gotta get the video done. I gotta keep my word. I've got like a 2000 video streak I gotta keep. I don't wanna miss a video. ⁓ And so even to most people this would seem to be a dream scenario. The human mind gets used to things very quickly, for better or for worse. So when you start monetizing something that was once a hobby, it can lose some of its luster as a result. You can still do a really good job. You can still like it. You can still be really good at it. But yeah, when you do something as a hobby, you can do it whenever you want to, whenever you feel like anything. Like for example, I started working on a spell checker in C for no other reason other than I just thought it was interesting to do that. And I felt like it was just outside of my comfort zone, just outside of my capability zone that I would grow as a programmer if I do that. Right. So I, I didn't look up anything. I didn't look up distance algorithms, nothing like that. So, okay. If I had to invent spell checking. If this was like 1950 something and I want to whatever I want to invent, want to invent spell checking, how would I do it? And it works fairly well. It's fairly fast ish. The code is a complete mess. But the reason is because I did this meme on my channel where I said I'm going to learn like the boomers like the boomers did. So I'm not I'm not using AI models. I'm ⁓ I'm allowed to occasionally Google something. kind of like asking a professor a question essentially. But the rest has to come from reading books, reading documentation, like manually finding my way through stuff as if the year was 1970, 1980 something. ⁓ And with each, like every few months I get really excited about it and I improve it dramatically. And then I kind of like leave it for a while and I focus on other programming stuff or other things. And that is more enjoyable. If I had to work on it daily because that was my job, ⁓ I don't think I would have the same level of excitement for it.

speaker-0: I think, you know, it's the it's the sort of the freedom to come and go, the freedom to abandon, the freedom to take something in a direction that is entirely your own. Right. The it is ⁓ it's a lot about being able to to do whatever you want, including walking away, right? Including rewriting the whole thing. Of course. I mean, for example, right? You can make these decisions about stuff when you're when you're just doing it for yourself. It is inherently a a much more enjoyable experience because you're in the driver's seat. Well, ⁓ g I think it is a more enjoyable experience. You're in the driver's seat, you're you're you're deciding what to actually do with the thing, right? And also there's a certain level of satisfaction, I think, that in in many cases we're not building the whole thing if we're working professionally. We might come in later. We might, you know. And there's a certain satisfaction with having built something, essentially all of it. Or at the very least significant parts of it, right? I think a lot of people underestimate the also the power of having built something yourself, the insight that you actually have, the ultimate control you have over it to make it do whatever and and so on. This is a casualty of modern development to me, the the ability to to fully understand and control a system. It is weird to me how people Okay, so my view on this is that people have adopted a viewpoint that is essentially only good for business in that they they are like, well, we have to use dependencies. We should focus on like if this is not part of our core blah blah blah, then we shouldn't implement it. Okay, Mr. Guy in a suit from the eighties, like w what do you mean? I I don't understand why programmers are essentially sitting there repeating what what could be I mean it's just corporate propaganda basically. To be honest, a lot of it. It's it's just viewpoints you would hear from some pointy haired boss, you know. It doesn't make any sense coming from real actual programmers.

speaker-1: Well, there's something very interesting here. ⁓ This idea that like I was talking about this in chat with my stream yesterday, and some people agreed with the idea of like building projects that you find interesting. And others were more like, well, why are we reinventing the wheel? If it already exists, just use it, just use the packages with dependency, use something that already exists, right? I'm thinking about rewriting the spell checker in assembly. just because it just sounds incredibly interesting. I'm aware that it likely won't be necessarily much faster given how efficient ⁓ how efficiency compilers are now. But I want to go through the process of doing that because it scratches a part of my brain that nothing quite nothing else quite does. I want to, you know, I was joined with the idea of writing my own programming language in assembly. And Some people in chat were like, yeah, that sounds fantastic. And others were like, well, what's the point? We already have C, we already have Rust, we already have Zig, why would you write your own thing, right? And I think that there's something about this mentality, which makes good programmers. I'm not calling myself a good programmer, because I'm not, but I think that there's something about this mentality of like, not caring about the economics of something, but doing it because it interests you. I think that there's something to that. I think that the people who really adopted the corporate propaganda, the do everything that's in the interest in the short term interest of the business do that. I think that the people who were really pushing for that might be the people who just were never that interested in computers to begin with. ⁓ The same reason why I tell people if you want to learn how to program, start with C, because it's harder. Because if you start with Python or Ruby, They're fun, you're going to get programs that work, but you're not going to know the difference between something that is being interpreted as something that's being compiled. You're not going to know what's actually happening behind the scenes. not going to know about memories management. You're not going to know about all this stuff. And if you start with C and you stick with it and you get through it, that's actually a filter. It shows that you're actually interested in this stuff. And I think we need more people who are interested. I think we have enough people who are pushing for more dependencies. especially what's happening right now with with that being weaponized. I know you mentioned the was the left pad. In a recent video, like, I mean, there's malicious pack, there's malicious packets being pushed all the time. There's the penises are causing a bunch of problems. And I think we need people who are actually interested. But and I because I want to I want to take this into the into a certain direction. Recently, you also spoke about how programmers never unionized and they felt like maybe they had a lot more power than they actually did. And I have this thing, and I'm going to end my talk right now in a second, I'm trying to kind of drive in a certain direction. I think that end stratification will accelerate because programmers have less power and the less power that they have, the more likely they are to just agree with whatever they're being told to do. Like 10, 20 years ago, you know, they could just walk out and find another job that afternoon. Now, no longer the case. I want to know if you agree with this idea of what your thoughts are on the topic.

speaker-0: So first of all, I want to go back to something you said before, talking about good programmers and so on. it's not so much the absolute value of sort of someone's programmer goodness, so to speak, their actual sort of skill level. It is the trend that matters. Some people never trend upwards. Those people you don't want to work with. That's what I'm gonna say about that. And you are not gonna trend upwards if if you don't want to learn anything. So I I would say the ⁓ absolute most important aspect of a good a good colleague and a programmer that you might actually put some confidence in to me is they want to actually be better. They want they want to reach for something more. And this ties into what we were talking about before. What is the point of doing projects? If I want to know how a wheel works, I have to actually build a wheel. Yeah. This is simply how it is. You you're not going to sit there with textbooks just trying to intuit how the fuck a wheel works. Just go build a wheel. In fact, build a couple, see what the difference is. Build a square wheel. For all I care. You're gonna see, hey, this sucks. This is not a wheel. Perhaps I have now discovered the essence of what a wheel actually is and why this one works, this one doesn't. It can be, you know, you can view anything like that. Right? If you want to know how something actually works, go build a version of that. It doesn't have to do everything that the original thing, whatever you have. you're trying to replicate actually does. But in order to understand the essence of something and how to build things, you have to actually build things. You can't just s glue together things and sort of call it like, ⁓ I know how this works now. That that's really not you're not gonna get where you're trying to go with that attitude. Unless where you're trying to go is just wherever, right? It's sort of like whatever to you, then fine. You are not going to trend upwards. Wanted to note that because it's never about how good you are right now. It's actually never. I have met so many programmers where I just I can see this unbridled potential in them. It is it doesn't matter that they don't understand what we're doing right now. They will. And they will be great programmers because of it. Right? They will I can see in them that they want to do more. They want to actually learn and evolve. As for ⁓ Hang on, what was your question again? 'Cause I I really needed to say this because people need to understand that part of everything.

speaker-1: I definitely made a mistake. should have, yeah, I kind of led the conversation a bit too far, too fast on that one. So the second point that I went into was the idea that, I mean, I first saw Corey Doctorow make this point, ⁓ but I saw you make this point as well in a video recently where he said that programmers never unionized and how, this is my point that I've been making is that intensification will accelerate because programmers will no longer be able to say no to silly ideas said by 80s businessman with spiky hair.

speaker-0: Yeah. Right. ⁓ yeah, so my my vantage point on this is ⁓ not necessarily, you know, educated or whatever, it is simply a a ⁓ an intuition, if you will. But I have always felt like programmers were sort of like ⁓ they're sort of like cats, right? ⁓ you can't really hundred percent control them. There's a certain level of endearing arrogance to ⁓ to a l a lot of it, ⁓ where programmers have certainly misunderstood where their power came from, is my position right now. The power of program programmers as a group came from the fact that programmers were in the loop, ⁓ more than most other people in the process. The programmer was the filter between this thing, we are thinking about doing it, and then actually having it be delivered, which meant that essentially everything had to go through programmers. Can we do this? Is this a good idea? Will it work with our current, you know? And and there's this really fun sketch by what are they called? Yeah, literally every feature that someone suggests or whatever is you see, the way our backend is structured, it won't actually do this. Or, you know, it will take two years to do this. And this is of course like a joke, but reality has been essentially that to a much lesser extent ⁓ for a lot of companies. And of course to them, this seems like, well, programmers are ruining everything. Programmers are really the biggest obstacle we have is that we have these programmers sitting over there being so important. And of course, that's what they're trying to solve now. They're trying to essentially remove programmers from the equation. That's that's that's the whole purpose of what we're seeing right now. And programmers, by and large, I guess they thought essentially like, I am Jesus. Individually, they all think I'm Jesus. I'm really super important. I the the th the stuff that I do is so important. And you know, it's really about programming itself. Right? That's why I'm important. Ignoring completely the the fact that it's It's where we fit into the process of making things that has made us important. We were the the hurdle that some people felt that we were, essentially, to making software. If we change that process and we somehow say, ⁓ the hurdle is no longer me but pumping out code, right? It's me just sitting there, losing my soul, essentially thinning out like the Nazgul here and just talking to an LLM, like becoming a shell of my former self. Then if if that's what how we do stuff now. That is a lot faster because you people give up more and more. They stop reading the code. They stop reviewing it. They stop b feeling like they're accountable. They stop caring. We see this a lot. I've seen some very sorta you know, some confessions from people that I don't care anymore. I don't care about the code. I don't feel any accountability for this code, right? And of course that's a problem because if you're not accountable, who the fuck is? ⁓ previously your name was on this code, and I guess it technically still is, but we know. We know you're not feeling responsible for this code. You we know that you're just sort of going through the emotions at this point, right? You are the final form of the Nazgul. You are not visible in the real world anymore. You are essentially just a specter. And so, you know, at that point, I th I I think once we've given this up, we have lost essentially all of our leverage. All of our leverage, ⁓ our bargaining power has essentially now gone away. ⁓ because programmers thought They somehow were the the secret sauce in all this, right? But it was of course what we did and how we stood between thinking, ideas, and implementation. Because we gave this up so willingly, we have now sort of lost all of that leverage. And of course, yeah, predictably things are gonna get a lot worse. Like you pointed out, intutification is just gonna be way more of a thing. Because of course, programmers can't actually it doesn't matter if we leave the company anymore. Before, one of the biggest problems was How on earth are we gonna replace Steve? If Steve leaves, we're fucked. That's just not tenable. Pay Steve. Treat Steve like a human being. Or, you know, better, perhaps just like treat Steve well. That's maybe the level we we were at before. That's simply not gonna be a thing anymore. The point I made in the latest video was everyone is becoming more like a cog in this new way of working, right? A cog doesn't have feelings. It shouldn't really have opinions on what's going on, obviously. And we can slot someone else else in. It's not a problem. Steve, you can leave. Right? Steve can leave and we'll just get Kyle to do whatever Steve was doing before. And the truth is, Steve didn't understand what was going on before as well, because he's been prompting LLMs for the last six months. Like he has no idea what's in this code base. He you know, every every few weeks he asks the LLM how the code base is structured because he doesn't know. And of course, Kyle can do this as well. It's not a problem for Kyle. Kyle can in fact type. And He can press enter and get a response from this LLM. This is this is what's going to happen. If we I mean, this is gonna sound incredibly depressing, but I think we we're far along this road now where we can't actually go back. ⁓ it the it would take some catastrophic failure of LLMs to to get us back to where programmers are now part of the the actual like loop more. We perhaps there's gonna be some kind of apocalypse where and I don't mean like global apocalypse or but software apocalypse where the the right move for companies is to have programmers clean up the mess. ⁓ perhaps that's going to be a situation we find ourselves in. But I I I don't I'm I'm not seeing how it will happen. But then again, the amount of things that I've been wrong about when it comes to all of this stuff, like I would never have believed that CEOs, CTOs and so on would behave so irrationally in the presence of such obvious Fact, do you know Warhammer forty K?

speaker-1: I'm loosely aware of the sum of the lore behind that.

speaker-0: Right. So there's this thing, the orcs in Warhammer forty K, they have this ability to if they all believe really hard in something, or even at an individual level, it actually happens. Right. I feel like CTOs and CEOs currently are trying to orc their way into making LLMs work at scale. It is they are just trying real hard to just re a hundred percent if we mega believe this, it will come true. But i it just sorta doesn't. Like I mean, we can't actually unfortunately we can't change reality by hoping really hard, right? I I think a lot of people would love for that to be the case. But that's what I feel like a lot of people in sort of leadership positions ⁓ are doing where it's this ⁓ mega hope that no no no. If it's not now, it's actually the next ⁓ the next generation of models is gonna be so good that ⁓ we we're just gonna be fine. They're gonna in fact they're gonna clean up the mess we have right now. Because we've of course we've been we've been vive coding for a year at this point or whatever. And ⁓ the next model is actually gonna be smart enough where it can just take all that and make it nice. But it's just coping.

speaker-1: I have a theory regarding the CEOs being irrational. I have a theory as to why this is. I mean, first of all, money makes makes everyone very irrational, or the promise of money promise of great riches promise of not having to deal with those silly meatbags that you have to pay to write the code for you. But I think that there's a fundamental issue that we're running into now, which is that technology is no longer grokable by average people. So if you look at up until fairly recently. If someone brings you a tool, the tool is immediate. It's immediately obvious whether it's useful or not. Okay, it's a hammer. can hammer things with it. I can now nail planks together. The plow is obvious. Even early computers are obvious because you can now make spreadsheets automatically. You don't have to make them by hand anymore. That was the promise. You can now connect people with each other over the globe. Okay, I get it. I get how translates to more product, more service, more money. But we're kind of in a weird point where a bunch of things have converged up until here. So one of them is the fact that people have been primed by science fiction to expect this to happen. As someone who writes science fiction, I'm very aware of the fact that most most science fiction authors are guilty of this to some degree, where they've created this this they've tapped into this notion of the of the automata, which has been around for a very long time. ⁓ And they've created this sort of this idea of a mechanical God that will do everything for you. There's a convergence of that there's the fact that technology is becoming very difficult to understand by normal people. It's essentially just a magic box. AI is a magic box as far as most people are concerned. And it's not even AI. But again, that's the marketing, science fiction aspect of it calling it AI. And then you also have the fact that many of them seem to be out of ideas. You had social media, you had smartphones. That was a big one. ⁓ App stores. Then you had crypto. Everything's going to be smart contracts in like two years, bro. Don't worry. Buy ADA right now. This is not for natural advice. I'm joking. ⁓ Now it's like the mechanical God, maybe quantum, maybe. adult dolls for people like this is like the pinnacle of technology. This is where it all ends. Unless we get into space mining or something, right. That's why I think they've become so irrational.

speaker-0: This one is tricky because it's like I I think we all we all understand ⁓ if we've heard about the singularity, we understand the concept. Like it's an it's an incredibly graspable thing. But it being graspable does not mean that somehow this is inevitable, especially not with the current technology. I don't know exact because almost immediately when LLM started producing text, people were like singularity. The singularity is now i inevitable. Yeah. And I'm just sitting there like ⁓ w why? How on earth can you look at what we have currently? And and I say this even I I'll be honest, even now, I don't understand how people think that somehow it's inevitable that these things are gonna reach, you know, some level of like, okay, they they now you self-improve themselves to the point where it's just a matter of time before they are far beyond anything we can understand. And they become this mechanical god in a sense. Right? Because that that's the the the idea in in in a way, right? Certainly no one looks at the current stuff we have and they're like, ⁓ this is already a mechanical. Come on. They they can't even make sense of like limited physical space. Like, hey, is he holding that pen or or is it just folding in midair? They have no concept of any of those things. Like let's let's let's say that, you know, the mechanical god is perhaps something that we are like, Well yeah, it understands everything I understand, at the very least. Right. Probably it should understand far, far more and actually be much more, you know, advanced. It should be it should feel like an alien organism at that point. Yeah. And that's that's that's when I will be like, yeah, okay, fair enough. This thing is so far beyond what, you know, what we can understand even we can't even grasp the level of intelligence this thing has. It would it just blows everyone out of the water. At that point, yeah, okay, we have the mechanical goal, whatever. Sci fi is real. Let's all just wait for d you know death at this point, right? Because we are we are we are no longer the the the quote unquote sort of top organism on earth. It's not even an organism, let's be honest. But i we are not the top entity on earth anymore at that point. We have now created our our own master. I don't know how people think that we're gonna get there with just like, hey, token generation, go. It's really, really impressive token generation at this point, I will be honest. It really It does stuff. Okay. Right? But ⁓ we have a few we have some time, I think. And I don't know how much time, because of course, like they're putting so many trillions of dollars into stuff that they are definitely doing things, at these AI labs and stuff, right? But I don't know how much time we have, but i we have some time at least until we we see this level of intelligence where it's just ungraspable.

speaker-1: I think the problem is that when you you set about meeting this entity, it's almost like alien like I just imagined that scene from Mass Effect when they meet sovereign if you've ever if you've ever played Mass Effect.

speaker-0: I have not but ⁓ yeah. Okay. Unfortunately I have not.

speaker-1: There's like, without spoiling anything, there's like, they need the super intelligence. And it has like a very sort of, am beyond your comprehension. I am sovereign. Right. And it's like, the problem with this is that you can, you cannot understand something that is outside of your mind. So would we even recognize meeting a super intelligence? Because if it were by definition more intelligent than us, how could we tell that it's more intelligent beyond just like a physical demonstration, like, I'm now gonna make a city evaporate. And then and then you go, okay, cool. Okay, cool. Yes, sir. I'll do whatever you want. But outside of that, like I get why people look at a statistical word generator function. And they go, ⁓ my god, this is like a GI, right? Because it's you, most people wouldn't even have wouldn't even know what what to look for. in terms of what super intelligence would even look like. It's almost like my interpretation would be that if I were to speak to a super intelligence, I wouldn't even understand its reference points. know, like when you, not to be mean, but when you talk to someone who just isn't particularly smart and they just have no idea where you're like, like they think you're, they think you're stupid because you just, you're not making any sense to them. they like, it's the famous breakfast. experiment 4chan breakfast meme. you know of it? Supposedly someone on 4chan said that they were working on this experiment where they went to prisons and they asked prisoners hypothetical questions. If you didn't have breakfast this morning, how would you feel? And supposedly, if you're below like 100 IQ points, it's difficult

speaker-0: I don't know.

speaker-1: to grasp theoretical scenarios. So when they ask them, how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning? Their aunts of people who were below 100 IQ would say, but I did have breakfast this morning. And then you go, no, no, no, but what if you didn't have breakfast? And they go, are you dumb? I did have breakfast. So they think that you're asking them, they think that you're questioning the fact that they had breakfast. They don't understand that you're actually posing a theoretical question. So I think that an interaction with the legitimate super intelligence would feel very jarring, would feel very, you would have, you would almost think of it, you will almost think of it, you almost think that it's stupid, because it would appear to you like that it's not grasping something very basic, when it's in fact the opposite. So having an experience with a machine where you think it's a super intelligence actually means that it's within your realm of comprehension. meaning that it's probably not a super intelligent being. Does that make any sense?

speaker-0: Yeah, no, no, no. It it makes perfect sense, right? And I think, yeah, like you said, you'll have to find proxies for like is this thing smarter than me in some ways? Or like a demonstration. Some of those proxies will be like, okay, so I know some stuff about this. Is it making is it making reasonable connections between things that I don't even know about? That would be my proxy, right? Yeah. If I know about something and I'm like, I think that this is sort of state of the art thinking about this, right? And then it tells me like, well, no, actually it's that it's actually like this and and this is how that relates to that. I'll be like, fuck, that makes sense. No one has taught that before, but it actually yeah, it makes sense. It it is seeing through bullshit nonsense that we think. Right. That that would be my proxy, I guess, right? Where and and truth be told, most people, first of all, aren't aren't super great at any given thing. Like because it it can be difficult to get really into stuff, right? And then You can only ask about stuff that you know about. It this is nothing about like the sort of general intelligence level, right? Because you could imagine, of course, that this first of all it has like wide knowledge and then deep into those actual branches. And you can only examine a very, very small part of this branch. The actual information that would be housed in in a being like this, right? Would be so immense that you can you can pick at leaves in in parts and that's it. Right? It would be incomprehensible how much this thing knows about so many, many, many, many things. Right? Understanding even even understanding of our our history to a level that our people don't have, and so on, stuff like this, right? So yeah, that would be, of course, incredibly difficult and it would likely end up in these situations like you, you're saying, where we wouldn't understand the intelligence level of this thing because we are simply not equipped to understand the connections that it's drawing. Right. Most of the connections that it's sort of making between things would seem we wouldn't even understand why it makes sense. We can't get to that point because we simply haven't seen through the problem on that level.

speaker-1: or even we may not have the capacity to hold enough information in our heads to even reach that conclusion ourselves, right? Like we'd have to take, like if the rule was that we can't take a leap of faith, it might even be impossible because the amount of tokens, amount of context that you'd have to have in your mind to even reach that, to even logically follow the steps of the conclusion might be impossible. which in which case it would be impossible to verify the validity of the conclusion without some sort of visual demonstration, something that would feel real like, okay, cool. You can actually make disease evaporate. Cool. I don't know how you're doing that, but clearly that works. Like it would have to be, we may not even be able to reach like without augmenting ourselves. This is getting into transhumanism, but ⁓

speaker-0: We're going places with this.

speaker-1: Actually, if he pivots lightly

speaker-0: Actually, there's a there's a point I want to make about that actually, because the thing with disease, the thing with with disease is great because that would be like, okay, you can eradicate all of our disease, just do it. I mean, of course that could have consequences we don't know about because we don't we can't think far enough, you know, but whatever. You know, that would be great because then we can see it and we can be like, huh, yeah. Actually it did. It was really, really good at this, right? The the tricky thing about knowledge work, for example, the reason knowledge work would become useless. in this world with this superintelligence. It's actually because we would have taken so we would have to take so many things as as axioms, right? As as just truth. Yeah. That we don't actually understand. Right. And of course we we s we do this already. We there there's lots of fields that are based on axioms that you don't actually have to prove the axiom. You can use the axiom to do productive work already. This is true. We know it to be true. It has been proven by someone to be true. So we can then take that and and move forward. But the axioms that this superintelligence would come up with, we would never understand. We would have to take them as truths, and that's the only way we can actually use this for knowledge work. But of course, it has already done everything that we were gonna do with that knowledge anyway, if we apply it. So knowledge work in this world would become essentially useless. We would all be doing administrative work, pretty much.

speaker-1: It will become useless, also there will be, I mean, this has been explored by science fiction a lot, there is, you would never, you'd have to trust that this entity would have your best interests at heart. And then you'd have to agree on what your best interest actually is. You know, is it, is it in the interest of humans to live for 10,000 years? Maybe, maybe not. Like even if you had the technology to do that. And the AI went, Okay, I can I can enable you to live for 10,000 years. What are you going to do with that time becomes an immediate question. But then the question becomes what is what is the reasoning behind this? Why would this entity want me want to enable me to live for 10,000 years? What does it have a plan that maybe doesn't serve me, but it appears like it is in the moment. And I think that as people's ability to think goes down, as people use these tools more and more. I don't think most people would even be equipped to even consider the motivations of ⁓ such a creature. would simply, because I think if they're right about token predictor, put more money and gets better AGI soon, we would reach that point after potentially decades of simply accepting output from the machine. without thinking about it, increasingly so, not initially, but increasingly so. To the point where we would essentially be primed to simply accept whatever the machine says. There's already been cases with police officers where they arrested people who didn't look like the photo, but the AI said that this is the guy, so you'd be better arrest them. Okay, well, the machine said it, so I couldn't possibly disagree with it, right? It's smarter than I am. I think that would be... This is an interesting tangent because I've noticed when I worked in IT in an office, which is a small portion of my career, I've successfully avoided offices in general, I'm very happy to say. I've noticed that a lot of people were using LLMs very happily, to the point where I would wonder what the point of them even working there was. Because if you're a manager, like LLMs are great at being, LLMs have to just say bullshit. You are a valued member of our family. Hello, welcome. Yes, we value you a lot. Like, it's really good at that. It would have to do basic, what like, conflict resolution. And it would have to do a bit of like time management, hey, Billy can't come in, can we get can we get Steve to come in today? Like, that's essentially the job of most managers. And most of them aren't even particularly good at the job. And to see a lot of these managers very happily use these tools, like you would get, I get like paragraphs of texts with muscle emoji, rocket emoji. ⁓ my God. We see synergy like, like see clearly ⁓ AI. Yes. my God. Streamlining like seeing clearly AI generated text and then seeing colleagues opening chat, jeopardy in a private window, pasting the text inside of it and getting the bullet points was beyond insane. I wonder. I'm trying to put myself in the mind of these people. And my only conclusion is that it must either be stupidity, fear or nihilism. ⁓ They either don't understand the fact that they're making themselves essentially redundant by using these tools and how they're using them. They're afraid and they're trying to buy time. So like, I'm going to try and make as much money as I can until they fire me or they've just given up and they're just like, I just don't care. Whatever use tool, whatever.

speaker-0: Yeah, I I think it is probably the the third the the nihilism, the it it's sort of this ⁓ regrettably, we have to work. Yeah. Right. The the I I would say this sort of summarizes most most relationships people have with their their sort of work situation. Yeah. I I would say I would say with a certain caveat, I have the same thought. I I love being useful. To people working on interesting things. That is what I what I actually love doing. But the reality of the situation is, of course, I have to ultimately ⁓ accept whatever situation comes and then learn to live with that and do my best to to move forward with that, right? So it's not that I love working as a concept. I think it is actually, you know, I would rather not. I would rather actually do things that were, you know, uniformly interesting and allowed me to evolve as a wizard, so to speak, instead of, you know, working for someone and and getting money that way so that I can, you know, not worry about things. And I think the way most people relate to this situation is complacency, nihilism, and essentially doing the bare minimum as a as a sort of conservation of energy. Because they wanna keep they want to keep part of themselves. I would argue actually you lose part of yourself by working like this. It is actually better to at least like part of what you're doing and be engaged in it. A at least for me. Okay. I'm not gonna speak for everyone, obviously. Like I'm I'm not everyone, but I feel like I lose myself. Like part of myself disappears. It it sort of thins out in a way when I don't get to enjoy what I'm doing, right? And this is why LLMs also have been such a an absolute curse on on my personal kind of professional outlook, because I think talking to LLMs is one of the least enjoyable parts of just any situation. Okay, I'm debugging something and eventually I'm like, Yeah, I don't know. I need another signal here, right? I need something else to maybe spot something that I haven't been able to or whatever, right? Let's talk to the search engine here and just have it spit out whatever's going on. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong, etcetera. Sometimes it points to somewhere and I'm like, motherfucker, that is definitely not it. I don't know how you got there, but whatever. Like you're not thinking. This is not I don't know why I'm trying to s search look for, you know, some kind of like how how did it reason ⁓ its way into that? It doesn't. ⁓ it's just a bunch of fucking nonsense, right? But Yeah, I think it is a mi mix of, you know, how most people relate to their work is this conservation of energy principle in some ways, right? Trying to essentially use as little as possible. ⁓ they're thinking, you know, their day is mostly thinking about when they get home they're gonna, you know, I don't know, cook a really good steak or whatever. What the fuck? You know, they're doing something else. That's what's on their mind. They don't really care about this stuff. And You can see why also, right? Most companies, whatever they produce, you know, they'll talk about we're a family here, we all care, the mission, you know, we're doing, you know, these cool ⁓ team retreats and and stuff for team building and this this stuff is just it's theater, right? Yeah. We're here because we all want to just make money. If we could choose, we would not be here. ⁓ that's how most people relate to their work. Even if they do like the process of actually doing that work, it's not that they like your company or whatever. This is something that a lot of owners have problems understanding. Like, of course I don't have I don't have a connection to your company. You have a connection to your company because you own it. I don't know wha how to explain to you why w this is such a fundamental difference between how we relate to this company that why would you think that I'm like ⁓ yeah, I'm I'm gonna die for this company or or no. Yeah. Absolutely not, right? You understand like you own the company. When something goes really well for the company, you get more money. Yeah. What what exactly am I getting out of this process? Right? Yeah, you give me a job. I guess I'm thankful, but you know, like we cannot r all relate to the company the same way you do. And the fact that you think that people should somehow love the company is absolutely bananas, right? hypothetical boss in this scenario, right? But yeah. A lot of a lot of people, of course, like especially especially managers, I will say, obviously have this sort of I don't really you know, I don't I I barely know what I'm doing and I don't really care. And conservation of energy have the LO lamp spit out roughly the message I want to send, I guess. Sometimes I wonder, like, is this really the message you want to send? Like, d did you actually want to send this? I had I had a bug report sent by a manager that was, first of all, incredibly long for something that is f that was fundamentally just not at all a big thing. And I'm like I I might just I'm reading through all of this. Happily I could grasp it w in the first paragraph, promptly threw out the rest, of course, because very quickly realized, wow. The LLM has no idea what's going on. Like it simply has no idea. And and I'll say, for me, that was honestly a surprise. Because I have used LLMs for debugging and they are never as bad as what I received then. But I realized, of course, that's because I have the insight to actually point it in the right direction. This manager, clueless, right? No, no brain power expended on even thinking about what could the issue be, right? And so Yeah. In those situations, this person simply the it is ⁓ one of the deepest ironies that this person could have simply said, Hey, when I do this or when this happens, it seems to ⁓ it seems to crash or whatever. I don't remember what the exact bug was, right? But they could have said that and then I would have investigated it and that would have been probably less energy. than they had spent doing all of this like ⁓ I don't know generation of this large document for no reason. Thinking about it, copy pasting it into Slack. I don't know. I don't know how much energy they spend it, but I feel it's not much less than just just tell me. What issue are you having? I would be happier. You would get to talk to a person. I I assume some of us do want to talk to people sometimes. So why not? Right? go through an L L ⁓ I don't need Claude's opinion on this, you know?

speaker-1: I wonder, it's possible that this manager might have been thinking about like the ratio between how much work they're putting in and the optics of it. Cause to at a cursory glance, it would appear that they put a lot more work in because it's a, it's like 10 paragraphs of not was actually nonsense, but at a, at a cursory glance, that's not obvious. So to their boss, it would look like, wow, look at this incredibly detailed report that this person sent about a bug. must care a lot about the product. And but in reality, right? Even even if it was slightly more work, I think the optics would have looked better. Like you get more of a more of a multiplier by the giga like 10x optics by doing twice the work by using them. LM model, guess.

speaker-0: Yeah, th this could be the case, but the interesting thing about that is this was the owner of the company. So there's no there's no optics yeah. There's no one there's no one the approval, like, ⁓ good job, you really care. You sent a big document. Now I think maybe it's the optics of like, hey, should I send Richard a a bug report and and and should it be like I I can't do X when Y? Maybe that seems like hey I shouldn't send that. That's bereft of information. In interestingly enough, it's exactly the right information. Yeah. Right. It's actually the absolute correct information about the problem. I can find the issue. I'm a programmer. It's just I'm gonna just, you know, get into it and and fix it. Which I did. It was a very simple fix. It was two lines. I mean it was two lines and it wasn't it wasn't whatever the LLM said it was, which it was. Yeah. ⁓ so you know.

speaker-1: actual prompt. Yeah.

speaker-0: That kinda scenario, I think it's maybe the optics of like, should I send Ricard this half baked to just ⁓ these two lines? Maybe maybe they misunderstood like what I want. I want high signal, right? ⁓ low noise. Yeah. Which would seem obvious to most of us, right? But you are perhaps right that they were worrying about should I should I waste Ricard's time with this incredibly small message that really, you know. But instead you wasted my time with this massive fucking markdown document that said almost nothing of any value beyond the information that that I needed, right? And so yeah, that it's a tricky thing, this this stuff, right? ⁓ the whole like and the manager class I think has bought into this of course for other reasons. Like ⁓ they really badly want the LMs to work. Again, it's the the the hoping ⁓ you know, for for all this.

speaker-1: So I want to say I really agree. made a video a couple of days ago called something like how to survive, how to survive a wage job. The premise of it was that

speaker-0: Learn learn to enjoy a wager job, I think it was, right? I I got this in my recommendations. Haven't watched it yet though.

speaker-1: There's a thank you.

speaker-0: Watch the one about the spell checker. I w meant to say this before but you were on our roll talking about it, so I like, Okay, but you know I but I've seen it. Some of these videos are you know, they they're really good. Yeah. I like I like the enthusiasm for actually doing things and so on. It's really good.

speaker-1: Thank you. So the, the way G job, the premise is that caring about it is how you actually enjoy your time there. ⁓ I used to work at, I used to work in retail customer service, retail sort of like customer service desk, et cetera. And most of the people around me really, they were doing what is called an Italian strike, which is when you do the absolute bare minimum to modify it. ⁓ and those people were.

speaker-0: Okay, yeah.

speaker-1: in hell. They lived in hell every day. If you spoke to them, how's it go? And the response would be same shit different day. Like, okay, ⁓ my God, bro, your life must be just absolute nightmare. Like you dread, you dread half of your waking time. It's that's incredible. Because you have to hopefully sleep for eight hours or something around that. And then you have to be at work for like eight hours plus commute. Like you just dread. more than half of your time. And so I noticed very quickly that the solution was to just care, to talk to people, to see, how's it going? How are you actually doing? You, person number 7042 that I've spoken to since I've started working here, how are you doing? And you can have some really wholesome, like ⁓ there was one lady, this was a bit like better sweets. She told me that she came to my till because I reminded her of her late son. And I was like, ⁓ that's, I didn't, I wanted to give her a hug. I just didn't even know. But it was, she looked, she looked at me with such, like she was happy and incredibly sad at the same time. And I just didn't know. Like I was happy that I got to give her this sort of fleeting moment of she's with her son again. But I just didn't really know. Like it's just But you can have a lot of really kind of sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet moments like that. ⁓ This one lady came to me, I'm gonna have to censor this. ⁓ We had a conversation. And she said she touched my hand afterwards. And she said, thank you, I was gonna self delete later, but now I'm not going to. And she walked away. And I thought, just didn't quite know I was like, ⁓ okay, I'm happy that you're not gonna do that. And I thought she was kind of like joking, but then I realized now there's no I don't think she was I think it was so sincere. And I wonder how many other people have done that for without them without them saying anything about it, right? Because in like three years and a half, that must have happened at least a few times. And it got to the point where people people would queue up in my till even though there were other tills available, they would just come to me because I want to talk to me personally. And I think having this, this like actually caring about your work and actually doing well will improve your experience dramatically. And if you go down the route of doing as little as possible, that sounds like hell. It sounds like you're living in hell. It's incredible.

speaker-0: Yeah, I th I think it you're definitely you're definitely on onto something with this, right? It it doesn't really matter what you do, if you can find if if you can find the enjoyment that can exist in this thing, like and the I think this is probably because of the culture I come from a little bit, but people people who enjoy their work also have ⁓ more professional pride, right? In in in the sense that Maybe maybe these two are linked or maybe some is like I have professional pride, so I want to do a good job so that I enjoy my work. I don't know exactly what the how does this actually combine, right? But there's this ⁓ I don't wanna roast Bulgaria too much here, but

speaker-1: As a Romanian, I give you the pass. It's close enough that I give you the pass to do it. It's fine.

speaker-0: I mean, yeah, I I've lived here for ⁓ more than ten years at this point. I th I think I can pretty confidently speak about certain things in Bulgaria. One of those things is if you go to a supermarket and by the way, I'm not saying like worker, you should smile and be happy for my my edification. I am a customer. A customer is always right. That that stuff, ⁓ you know, I've worked in c customer service, the customer's not always right. But you know There's this feeling that you get in Bulgarian supermarkets and stuff oftentimes, I would say more than more than not, ⁓ where you are an inconvenience. Yes.

speaker-1: to the zero customer service zero exactly.

speaker-0: Yeah. And this really like it is it is remarkable the difference between Sweden and Bulgaria in this regard. And I think it has something to do with the work culture of sort in Sweden, it's not that because there's a certain amount of fakery that goes into like smile because the customer's here and blah blah blah. And that's not really I think what's happening in Sweden. ⁓ it's more like these people are actually happier. They are actually happier because they do actually care a little bit about their job. And of course they have more incentive to care because they get paid more. So I'm not saying that there aren't external factors here that matter. Of course there are. But being happy with where you are, being happy with yourself and so on comes from a lot of places. But a lot of it comes from you, right? The the actual person doing the doing, so to speak, right? ⁓ The the actual existence, you know, you have to in some sense spawn this level of like satisfaction in yourself because it doesn't help being grumpy about stuff. ⁓ and of course we all get upset, mad. We we can be frustrated. ⁓ especially, you know, nowadays I I of course feel some level of ⁓ frustration about sort of where we are in the job market and so on, but at some point I'm just gonna have to move on. And, you know, do the best with what we have. Either whether it be, you know, leaving all this entirely or finding something finding a a corner of the world where I can still exist and and be happy, right? In some fashion. There is no alternative where I can just continue being grumpy and, you know, be upset about where we are and where we've been and where we're going. Because the truth is, that kind of thinking really only leads to as you said, you know, i self deleting so to speak. I I genuinely believe that if you go down that road for too long and you don't have some extrinsic barrier to this process of doing that, then you are headed towards that. Because no one lives no one can live like that and and truly be upset all the time without moving in that direction is what I will say.

speaker-1: I think that because I think we've had a similar experience in the sense that like, we've, we've both spent significant amounts of time in both Eastern Europe and Western Northern Europe, I see, spend a lot of time in Sweden and Bulgaria. I grew up in Romania, spent all of my adulthood essentially in the UK when like more Western Europe. Yes, in Eastern Europe, you have zero expectations of customer service, unless you go to a very nice restaurant. Otherwise zero, like even like normal restaurants. I'm surprised to see like you're just an inconvenience is the impression that you get essentially. Yes, that's a great way. Good way of putting it. Whereas in the UK, there's this expectation that I need to have some sort of level of service. I think that the reason why a lot of Eastern Europeans are like that, the history of Eastern Europe is deeply depressing. There's probably a part of it. However, I would argue that it's things are kind of shifting. I am curious. to know, like, I think that the meta now, especially one of the things that I advocate for is minimalism on my channel, especially financial minimalism whenever possible. Because especially now since the job market is the way that it is, ⁓ the way that you regain some of the power that has been stripped away from us by our bosses investing trillions in this technology is to lower your need for money, right? And so I would argue that the smart move like I'm doing a version of this where for the past eight years, I've been freelancing and traveling, like I ran out of I'm in Portugal, right? I, I'm in the middle of the tourist season, and I paid 600 euros for a room for an entire month. Because you get discounts if you if you rent for a month at a time on Airbnb, right? In, in London, there'll be double. what I'm paying right now for the exact same room, exact same size, exact same like shared kitchen, shared bathroom. When I go to Romania, I stay with family for a few months a year. If I go to, to like France, it was like 350 for a month in France. I think that the meta now is if you're actually better off sometimes if you're from these countries from like Eastern Europe, from like, or if you have the option to live there, because you can have this disproportionate system where you can make Western or Northern European money while living in Eastern Europe. And my parents used to dream of that. I remember my dad, I was five years old, he said, it would be so good if we could make English money living in Romania. And that's real right now. I think that's the meta. I'm curious. Is that the reason why you moved to Bulgaria? Did you have if you can speak about it? Obviously, there might be personal

speaker-0: No no. ⁓ now the reason I moved to Bulgaria was okay, so there there are several aspects to this aspects. So in in twenty thirteen I was still I was still living in Sweden. I didn't have all that much going for me, I'll be honest. ⁓ it was kind of ⁓ I haven't had exactly like a a super c you know, great time in Sweden. I come from ⁓ I come from a family of I was the first one to who went to university. in my family. And I dropped out, predictably, 'cause I

speaker-1: Smart move on ironically, but yes.

speaker-0: And ⁓ it's it's just a family of factory workers, which I had a a very, very I had a huge complex about ⁓ at some point because when I turned eighteen I couldn't find a job. And ⁓ I I was looking, couldn't find anything, and I really also in my soul felt like I don't want to work in a factory. But I felt really ashamed of that, you know. And I felt like I don't really fit in into this family, you know. And of course my parents, you know, like y they they they told me when I said this because I I eventually I told them like I feel really bad about this, like I'm not, you know. They're like, We never wanted you to be ⁓ to be that. It that doesn't matter to us, of course, right? And ⁓ and you know, they understood because this was around two thousand and six ish. ⁓ I come from a a town where ⁓ a place called Mutala in Osttiotland in Sweden, that essentially is it's it's been based on industry. That's the town. It's been based on having factories that produce, you know, fridges, TVs, stuff like this. Like it's ⁓ mostly, you know, just factory work. You do you make products for people, right? And and so that's what essentially everyone who came before me did. They turned 18, got a job at the factory. Because that's that's what you have and and also it was pretty plentiful. Like they they all they're always looking for more people. But then just as I was turning 18, this changed essentially. Yeah. ⁓ they were moving ironically, they were actually moving one of the factories to the US. And I say ironically, because you expect like wouldn't those people want more money? No, it actually turned out they found like some bum fuck Idaho place. where they could just sort of get people for nothing, right? so all of this is going away like suc successively, right? And so you grow gr you grow up in this town where there's really nothing to do. And now suddenly there's no jobs either. The only thing you can really do is take drugs and and drink. And you know, like it's not a great place, really. And I ended up sort of making peace with all of this I had to wait a little bit because I couldn't actually because I fucked up high school as well, because I'm you know, I was definitely a loser at the time. I I had some problems and so on, ⁓ home issues and all that stuff. So I end up having to sort of wait around essentially looking for just random jobs, interning ⁓ to places, ⁓ and and so on. Eventually I get to just sort of quote unquote finish high school, like essentially the the equivalent of a GED, sort of. And I also ended up ⁓ getting into this technical foundational year where you learn essentially university versions of what you learned in high school, but so you're just learning them better and and stuff like this. And I go to university with this because you get guaranteed placement if you do that because they're like, we taught you. We know what that you know these things instead of the people who come from high school where we ⁓ we have to teach them these things when they start and so on and so forth. So you get you get ⁓ placement, guaranteed placement, went to computer science And I mean, it wasn't bad. Like the thing I said before about, you know, a great teacher will teach you enthusiasm as well. There was some of that. I some of those those people there, they really sort of taught me like you can be in this game for a long time and still feel this sort of almost childlike joy ⁓ when it comes to some of these things. And that really gave me a lot. But I would say overall, computer science studying it was not necessarily like my jam in the long run. I I think yeah, it it was kind of uncomfortable because a lot of it was sort of theoretical and I feel like they didn't actually spend enough time on certain things. You know, like we had to breeze through certain things and and so on. And they actually ended up creating a different program because they actually shut down the computer science program. at that school ⁓ the year after we started. So like we were the last ones. Because it was like no one really wants to do this. It doesn't seem like a lot of people are applying. And you could tell like a lot of the people in computer science in the in my class were underachievers is what I would say. And and I I related to them a lot. I I'm definitely I at that point I was definitely cut from the same cloth as a lot of these people. You know, we know a lot because we really like looking into things, but we also don't necessarily like put a lot of energy into studying and so on and stuff like that, right? We we studied on our own time all of the stuff that we thought was interesting, right? And by accident you sort of learn a lot of really important stuff, but it's mostly like I'm just exploring. I'm I'm really just here to be amongst these people who really like knowing and learning and Going into detail on things, right? And so they shut this down, this program, the computer science program, and instead started offering a project-based learning course, or not course, but like a program, right? Where you essentially learn the same things, but everything is everything is sort of rooted in you're doing a project. So you're doing prep for the project theory, you're doing the project, and then you're doing essentially postmortems on the project. And this to me sounds amazing. Like it sounds actually like, wow, you're actually doing projects, you're to learn things and you're then gaining all of the knowledge from everyone else who did the project, like all of their insights and all of that stuff. I don't know how that how well that worked, but I can say that this ⁓ highly theoretical way of learning where you're just sitting in classrooms, ⁓ listening to things and so on. I think that part I would say the project based one probably was more my jam, but again, it wasn't For me. It wasn't like it wasn't there when I showed up. It showed up after me and so on. So what I what I end up doing is I drop out of computer science. ⁓ big failure on my part. ⁓ and then ⁓ I started teaching one of the courses there. Right. Started ⁓ being a teacher's assistant rather in one of the courses. Doing doing the labs and stuff. Because of course I knew a bunch of shit. It's just that I just couldn't finish computer science. It was just not for me, right? So I'm getting off the bus at some point, prepping ⁓ mentally for going into one of the labs to, you know, direct the the lab and so on. and I just see this very confused looking girl get off the bus behind me, and she's like she looks like I don't know where to go and so on. So I go up to her and I ask, Behoven Yelpmenogot? Which is Swedish for do you need help with anything? And I see she looks even more confused, so I'm like, Do you need help with anything? And she's like, Yeah, I don't know where to go. I just got here. And so we end up going down to the reception. We end up then going to the international reception. We talk along the way, like, why you know, what are you doing here? And so on, you know, all of that stuff. And ⁓ eventually, like a moron, because you know, ⁓ being a guy and all and not very bright, I suppose. I I end up being like, okay, ⁓ you found your way to the where you need to go. ⁓ have a nice day. Goodbye. You know. And then I'm standing because for some reason I'm like an hour early, by the way, because I don't know, nothing better to do, I suppose. And as I was standing there thinking, like, hang on. Hang on. I

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: This is stupid though, right? I'm being dumb. I should at least, you know, go see if you know, may I could give her my number, maybe, you know, then I'll I'm I'm I'm going there and I'm telling her like, Hey, if you need someone to show you around or something, here's, you know, my number. I also gave her my email because I'm a fucking nerd or whatever. But

speaker-1: Hack and add six, seven, four, 20 proton.

speaker-0: So so it's like, you know, yeah, so I I I obviously eventually I realized because eventually the the machinery will get there at some point, like, ⁓ hang on, I should probably capitalize on this. Like she she was nice and she's cute and I, you know, like this person. Long story short, we end up hanging out a lot and ⁓ she is from Bulgaria. She's there to write her master's thesis ⁓ at the at the university. I did not have her in any of my labs. It's not one of those situations where I'm some weird predator or whatever. But yeah, so so I end up sort of we hang out and, you know, ⁓ you know, form this bond and like I said before, to tie this back to the to what feels like five years ago now, ⁓ when I started saying all of this, I didn't have a lot going for me. And I was like, you know what? What if I just go somewhere else? Right? What am I actually, you know, what am I really doing here? I I'm doing this teacher's assistant position, which is it's not giving me like monetarily a bunch of money. It's giving me some, but it's not gonna, you know, sustain me. ⁓ I really don't have a lot of prospects. I feel like everyone in in Sweden, and it this is me then. I don't know how, you know, how it actually was, but I felt at the time like Everyone's gonna want me to have some, you know, university diploma, obviously. Right. I I'm not gonna get in the door. So, you know, fuck it, right? Let's just go somewhere else in the end. And I started kinda looking for jobs even before she left. But I obviously I talked to her about this. I'm not just ⁓ sort of planning this weird move to Bulgaria like showing up like here I am, ⁓ we met in Sweden. I don't know if you remember me or whatever. ⁓ but yeah, so I started sort of planning this and and then ended up finding a job in customer service that was just like I mean you should know Swedish. And that's that's it, right? And I'm like, yeah, I do actually know Swedish. I know it's fairly well, actually. I've been using it for a bit. so so I just you know came to Bulgaria, just did that and realized, you know, man, this is this is paying off though. ⁓ got you know essentially a upper middle class salary just from a few salary bumps in customer service and realized they're building a new middle class with these youngsters just doing ⁓ customer service, which is crazy to me, right? Like you know, if you know Romanian, Italian or whatever, like something that people might not know here, they're gonna just pay you for it.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: Right, my colleagues in in my team were like, there's a Czech guy, there's someone from Poland, et cetera, et cetera. Like it's just a bunch of people who have ended up here and are just sort of using their language to their, you know, ⁓ benefit. And and yeah, so that's how I how I got here. That was in twenty fourteen.

speaker-1: I am so I want to say there's a couple of things I want to say. So first of all, even if she was in your class, I wouldn't think I wouldn't see was a predator or whatever. I know that that's how the current zeitgeist is. But I think it's a shame that people can no longer meet people in these places. Like Bill Gates met his wife, she used to work for him, right? Like that used to be normal. Now it'd be like, ⁓ my god, he, he talks to his input. Yeah. So I think that's that's, I get it. go, yeah. But ⁓ I think that ⁓ Europeans have always moved around. It's something that we've always done. ⁓ Like I grew up in Romania. I don't come across as particularly Romanian. No one ever assumes or even believes that I'm Romanian. ⁓ I noticed that when I go to more Northern European countries, people tend to assume that I'm from there. When I went to Norway, for example, people would just speak to me like I'd have to go, I have to go, yeah, snorkeling, snorkeling, because I just, wouldn't, they go, ⁓ okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit, yeah. So I think that a lot of, like a lot of, a lot of Europeans were all from like, were all kind of mixed at this point. ⁓ I might have some Germans, some who knows, who knows, like we've all been moving around for a very long time. So I think that the idea of that you should, that you maybe you shouldn't move. think it's a good one. Like sometimes, especially a lot of the stuff in the West has been built already. Like there's this, the money used to be in the West, but now it's all built and now it's just in decline. Unfortunately. Like a lot of a lot of the West is in decline. A lot of it has problems with crime, like really big problems. Like Eastern Europe is people have a lot of weird notions about it. But Eastern Europe is one of the safest parts of parts of Europe, like hands down. ⁓ I'll show friends from from England, like random videos from random Romanian cities and they go, ⁓ wait, there's just there's no people like this is built on TikTok. by an American guy in a city in Romania. And he's walking around early in the morning showing that restaurants leave their chairs outside. They're not tied to anything people like people just don't steal them. And he was like, wait, so they just they just leave the chairs and the tables outside. It's like, yeah, no one takes them. They they leave the piano outside. And yeah, yeah, just there. You could just push it and take it if you wanted to, but no one does. And this seems very It seems like a very foreign idea, having lived in London for many years and seeing it get worse and worse over the years.

speaker-0: Yeah, there's a lot of I think the the whole cultural kind of we have so many misconceptions about things and of course it's it's definite it's very difficult to sort out the bullshit from the the reality of things and so on, right? ⁓ I was for a little bit I was watching this channel with ⁓ it's a Chinese girl showing her village and and you know like how her life is and so on, right? And some of this stuff is incontrovertibly So much better than than what we're used to as as Europeans in general and certainly Westerners. Things like people don't steal packages that just are lying around in this open lobby, anyone can walk in and stuff like this. Because it's like, man, these things are so cheap that they're getting, and they're getting them so fast, you can replace something immediately. When you actually, you know, they have return policies, they're super lax, people don't abuse them, and so on. And you wonder a little bit like. What kind of moral decline have we been suffering where we expect these things to be so fucking hard? And and like, why is it there a safe for every resident in this building where the packages can be put? Yeah. They don't fucking need it, dude. They just order stuff. It arrives whenever. They leave it around and no one seems to actually steal anything. Because they're all just like, yeah. High trust. In a way that we can't even comprehend, I guess. I don't know. It's I I was A lot of s the stuff in the videos, sure, maybe you can sort of present it in a way and lie about it, but ⁓ like I said, a lot of the stuff is incontrovertible. She's she's showing you reality, and reality says it's just better th than what we're seeing here. Right? And some of it I I will say is dystopian in the sense that they've isolated themselves from each other in a way that I I almost can't really understand ⁓ over there. At least her class of people or or whatever. She's she makes the point that she's lonely, ⁓ and and alone, which are not the same, of course, you can be alone but not lonely. But she makes the point that, you know, she doesn't actually get direct human contact a lot because the way that their society is set up it's not actually something that people necessarily are enabling to a large degree. They enable a ton of other stuff. ⁓ like super fast deliveries. Again, they have this high trust concept of of like, yeah, no one wants to steal your package. It's fine, leave it there. It's not gonna be a problem. ⁓ they they order everything, so they've enabled this sort of instant delivery of anything. You buy everything online. ⁓ even when you go to a store, you scan the item and then you buy it online, have it delivered, it's probably gonna be there when you get home. Crazy. Weird. Right? This this stuff is bananas to me. ⁓ like the way that they've actually created their society, it's it's it's it it's interesting. It's so interesting, right? And the isolation and the stuff, they haven't really I have they figured out something about human beings? I don't know. It seems backwards to me that we would all just sort of live in our own, you know, bubbles or whatever. That seems crazy to me. If anything, the more The older I get and the more I have to deal with, you know, LLMs and technology and stuff, the more I'm like, please give me a person. I I need to talk to a person. Stat ⁓ fuck all of this shit. Like I'm I'm really just tired of how technology is supposed to solve everything when really like people are the solution to most things in in general, right? But yeah, society in in China and so on is interesting in that they they have a completely different set of problems and some of them are just self created. I in in my book. ⁓ but they've also solved a lot of the problems that we I don't know if we think we have them and we just don't, or if it's l legitimately the case that I mean, we know like ⁓ videos from a lot of places where porch pirates, you know, these people who go up to people's porches and steal packages, like they exist, right? We know that. But if I if I was living in just like here in in Bulgaria, if I'm if I'm here and I get a package. Do I actually have to worry about people stealing it? Or is it more of a perceived kind of this is how it is. We need to lock things in in in things so that no one steals them or whatever. Do I actually need to lock my door? Is the question here, is kind of what I'm saying, right? We do, ⁓ but do I need to? Right? And and I think that this is ⁓ like a soc psychological quirk, right? We we obviously we grow up in societies and they shape us. ⁓ and and so on and we keep doing things and that then becomes an expected standard because we all think like this and so on. But of course in in in China some of this seems to be like this is a null thought. They simply do not have it. It does not exist for them. At this very moment at least, it may have before, but it doesn't exist now that someone would just go steal your packages. Even even if they did, it doesn't seem to actually be an issue. Right? Crazy. And and we wouldn't necessarily expect a lot of these things and a lot of the differences that she shows in these videos, we wouldn't expect them or think about them when we just hear of this amorphous Chinese landmass with this government and so on, with their restrictions on what goes in, what goes out goes out and so on. We are of course more primed to think about like this this amorphous evil that exists that We don't really understand it. We don't want to understand it. They're dangerous. They're dangerous. What are the Chinese gonna come up with next? Giving free LLMs to people stuff.

speaker-1: That was a crazy move.

speaker-0: And then we don't really like I I don't think w we get in touch with reality ⁓ i in a lot of these situations. We don't understand that of there's of course ⁓ an actual material material reality that these people live in that is in many ways so much better than the one that we live in and the one that we kind of construct for ourselves. Right? This prison of someone is gonna steal my package, I have to go get down to get it immediately.

speaker-1: I love ⁓ Golden Age science fiction because there was this optimism, there was techno-optimism back in the 40s, 50s, 60s. It appeared that the general trajectory was generally up. ⁓ And this notion even came from authors who knew better. For example, have you ever read The Foundation by Isaac Asimov?

speaker-0: I started it. Unfortunately I haven't finished the f I haven't finished the finish it.

speaker-1: That's perfect. for those who haven't read it, there's this misconception in history that technology always ever goes up and ever goes down. And that's just not true. ⁓ For example, when the Roman Empire fell, Europe went back centuries in terms of technology. ⁓ know, 100 years after its collapse, there would be sheep herders walking around seeing these massive structures built by, well, probably aliens. from their perspective, right? You see aqueducts still carrying water from the mountains and you're like, who built this, right? ⁓ And it took centuries for European cities to get the same level of sanitation that Rome used to have. So technology does not trend upwards, maybe over the long term theoretically, but in the short term, there's always ups and downs. And in the foundation, there's this premise, this isn't a spoiler, because it's very early in the book. There's this premise that there is a Galactic Empire, which has automated things to such a degree that knowledge work has become very abstracted. You have nuclear power plants, however, they are operated by what are essentially priests. They can operate the power plants if something they can kind of fix them. But if something went dramatically wrong, ⁓ it was game over. The plant would explode. Some planets even returned to coal burning because the knowledge of how to build these things was so far removed from the people existing at the time that they just couldn't do it. ⁓ Even authors like Isaac Asimov generally still had kind of a techno-optimistic view of the future. And I'm wondering where it went wrong. I think the 70s were probably like the end of that era. Once we entered the 80s, there was this like hyper consumerist nihilistic, ⁓ like everyone needs to make as much money as possible and to play tennis wearing white shorts and does not look like a little white hair band like super like 80s peak consumerism kind of kind of thing. I wonder where it went wrong, because clearly as a society, we have the tools. And we have the ability to build great things. And yet we're in a spot where no one really wants to be like everyone. People look at videos from the sixties and seventies with a sense of awe of like, wow, man, Europe used to be like paradise. People used to live in beautiful buildings. Like it was peaceful and clean. And now it's just a mess. And everyone's like, where can I, where can I escape to? Where can I go? So it's not like that. What do you think has been the driving? ⁓ factor behind this. Assuming you agree with my premise to begin with.

speaker-0: No, no, I I do agree with the premise. There's actually a great video or a great presentation rather by Jonathan Blow on this ⁓ Yes. This thing is preventing the collapse of civilization for anyone who might want to check it out. I can only really, really of course speak to the what I view in terms of let's say programming. ⁓ it's the thing I have the most relation to. And I would say we do not have a proper respect for capability as a concept. We don't understand most people don't understand that ⁓ loss of capability is the default, like you said. And it is the loss of capability that is going to ultimately be, you know, the ruin of software. And and as a concept that also applies. The the ⁓ loss of transmission from one generation to to the next, and of course that requires two parts. You need someone actually give the knowledge. You need someone to listen. Yeah. Both those are integral. We suffer from a lack of both, sadly. ⁓ But we find ourselves in this situation where we lack we back we lack both the the interest to actually give this knowledge to the next generation. We lack the interest on the part of the s receiver to receive and understand and examine that information. I say examine because there's also a certain amount of you have to be critical in your in your intake when of ideas and so on. That is how we evolve ideas in in fact right. When someone gives you bad information, you should try to find out if if it's bad information and then you should try to correct it so that you can transmit the correct knowledge to the next person in line. And That is one that is something that we're having great difficulty with in the field of programming. I think a lot of a lot of us are trying, but it it is just ⁓ I'm not gonna s try to give myself the out here that ⁓ it's so hard. ⁓ it's so hard, that's why I haven't ⁓ succeeded. No, it's ⁓ it really is something that you have to work on ⁓ continuously. You have to find new ways to actually frame things. You have to try to understand your audience and so on. You have to also inspire them in a way that I don't think most people are capable of. It's very difficult to show people like the thing about enthusiasm, right? You have to teach enthusiasm about some of these things and so on. And that is incredibly difficult. And you have to also realize like there have been people before you. A lot of people have heard things before you came to them. And ⁓ oftentimes A lot of those things will be hurdles that they will have to overcome in order to understand what you're saying. And ⁓ that part I find i very difficult. In a previous life I have tried to teach people Haskell as an example. Now I'm not saying that Haskell is somehow the the language that everyone should learn and do things in. It's not really about that. But Haskell has a ⁓ an unfortunate reputation amongst people in that It has tons of lore about how difficult it is, how how sort of ⁓ academic it is. And it's all mathematics, dude. And industrial programming in Haskell is like writing C. It much more it has more in common with C than I think most people are prepared for. And in that sense, it's like, well, you have to break down the barrier of This person's understanding of what Haskell even is. In order to even start talking about the productive parts of actually writing Haskell programs, you actually have to break down all of the things they think they know or have heard or whatever, like about Haskell. And all teaching goes through this mechanism. Someone will think that they know. I've seen this, you know, firsthand also with people who show up and and They're doing sort of the basic programming course in university. The worst students were all always the ones who had done C or something before, right? And now they're sitting there with Python and they hundred percent think like I know everything. I'm the fucking the greatest greatest programmer who ever lived. This shit will be so just easy and straightforward. And then it's like your code doesn't pa I it doesn't even run. I I don't know what to tell tell you like Did you at all run this program? Did it pass any of the tests? I you know, was there a moment when this program ran beyond like the first line? You have to actually like s some part of the part of this comes from the people you're trying to teach, and you have to get through that. You have to reach through that and say, you're just gonna have to listen here and try to we're gonna decompose a lot of your bad ideas and and we're gonna build up better ones, right? That's what a lot of teaching really is to a large extent. And of course that can be very difficult because if someone's been hearing, you know, their whole career, they've actually worked with programming for like six years and all they're hearing is like, well, you know, object oriented programming is how you do stuff. And clean code this, clean code that, you know, Uncle Bob ⁓ says this and that. And, you know, the Lisk of Lisk of sub substitution principle is super important. That's how we structure our programs and stuff. ⁓ yeah, you're gonna have to basically be like, yeah, that's all fucking nonsense. We're gonna have to just approach this from a completely different way. And I'm gonna show you how that leads to a better situation. But we're gonna you're gonna have to take this essentially as an axiom to begin with, that there is another way. What you think is the one true way is simply not the one true way. It is not somehow a solitary, you know, pillar of how things are done. We are going to build up a different way. And then you're gonna have to decide for yourself what actually makes sense and what doesn't. And I'm gonna explain to you why I think this one makes more sense and so on. And, you know, all of that to say that it's very, it can be very difficult to show up in someone's life and then somehow teach them stuff because there was a life before that. That is inextricably going to inform their understanding of what you're saying and so on. Right? We don't always get people at their earliest, you know? Especially because we have such disparate sort of when you make YouTube videos, someone who's been programming for 20 years will see that video, and someone who literally just started will see that video and everyone in between. You don't really know. You're gonna just catch them at some point. during this journey and can you teach them something? I mean, it's a stretch for the 20 years guy. Maybe I don't know. It depends on how many bad ideas they have, right? But at that point, they're probably, you know, they're probably pretty stuck, right? So it's a tricky prospect. ⁓ and and all of this maybe also comes to the obvious deficiency here is that the very earliest teaching that is done with regards to programming is often incredibly bad. Right. The programming courses in un in university are sort of meh. ⁓ the high school ones are usually terrible. Like terrible, terrible, terrible. Often that they're taught by it's like a math teacher that they were just like, ⁓ you're gonna teach this. And they're like, I don't know programming. You know, why am I teaching this? But I guess I have to, right? I am the math teacher, so I guess it seems more logical. We had I had already programmed at that point for quite a bit, right? But we had in high school we had this ⁓ math teacher, literally just a math math teacher, who were he was she was given a folder. Like, here's what you're teaching. And she was sitting there flipping through the folder and just sort of typing out code like like this. And then she was like ⁓ here's a a thing. It was completely useless. Completely useless. And ⁓ I ended up sort of helping people in the class, right? Because I'm like, man, this is we programming is fantastic. Like I need you guys to know it's not like we don't need to do this. We can here's what's going on. Like it's now trying to kind of coordinate a little bit ⁓ some of that stuff so so that people didn't get the wrong idea. Because I'm seeing something being completely butchered in front of me and I'm like, man, we don't need this. First of all, we can do this super fast. Like I can teach you exactly what's going on in this code. And it's not what she what she's saying. And the thing is I don't blame her. Right? The system does not work in many of these circumstances. Like of course we can teach programming ⁓ correctly. We know mostly how for some version of that, right? My version is gonna differ a little bit from some other people. I'm not saying I'm right, but I I'm I am saying I think it's gonna be a lot more productive long term. ⁓ mostly with regards to the capabilities thing, right? there's this temptation to teach people pro programming via Python and so on. I think that's a mistake, like you talked about before, C is a much better vehicle for actually teaching people foundation, you know, foundational stuff so that we don't lose capabilities over time and so on because we have we have been failing at that part for a very long time now. The optimism, I don't know exactly how much to do about I think maybe if we could yeah, if we could bring technology back on track just from a hey, we can actually deal with this. ⁓ it it's not it's not eating the world and it's just completely rotted away because that's sort of the that's what I personally am seeing right now. That we We're we're seeing it's it's more like we're seeing vines that take things over and don't enable anything. ⁓ we're not really seeing like something that's enabling more. We're seeing just it's taking things over and it's shit. Like it's not good at all. It's essentially making owning a car a terrible prospect in terms of, hey, I want this repaired. Yeah, well, guess what? They've put software in this shit now, and you can't fix it. You actually don't know anyone who can fix it. In fact. Whereas before, it was like, here's my Lada or my Volvo in Sweden. That's our Lada, basically. Here's my Volvo. It's mechanical. Guess what? You know you know some you have some relative that could fix this shit. Like they could simply get in there and be like, Yep, that part's that part's broken. I can fix it. Or whatever, right? So this whole like, ⁓ software is eating up everything But it we we don't really trust it, especially if we know software. That part is especially bad. Like we we have the curse of knowledge that makes us at least I I I view it like this. I certainly the people I know would think like this, or the people I care to know, I suppose. That, you know, keep software away from things that matter, please. ⁓ place it in, you know, certain places and so on. It can't be that the assumption is that software is just everywhere and then we we sort of work with that, right? I think that this would go a long way to sort of give people a sense of like, yes, it's software is not it's not taking everything over and then it's incomprehensible. ⁓ and it it's the it's the thing that makes it so my mechanic has to stand there with a fucking weird tablet. And talk to me about my my car. Right? Because that whole experience in itself is like, why is this alien technology all of a sudden? They've been driving cars cars for how long? Why is this suddenly feeling so alien and weird? And why can they shut your car off remotely? What? When like the first thing I think should be dealing with some of those things, right? Where it doesn't feel like software is sort of this hostile. organism that's taking everything over. Like this vine that's just shutting down stores in places. Like, ⁓ yeah, we can't open the door anymore because this weird vine has now essentially blocked our door or gotten into some lock mechanism or something. Because that is how software feels to me a lot of the time. And I'm one of the s ones who's who's supposed to understand a lot of this, right? I can't imagine how quote unquote normal people feel about software when they're like Again, the car example is such a great example, or tractors, whatever it might be. Why on earth are are we running so much software in things that ran fine before? I understand that there's certain, you know, like, ⁓ the fuel ratio can be automatically figured out here and stuff like this. I understand that there are aspects of this that I'm not really, you know, bringing up here. But we we simply don't need software to take everything over. But I think the the most obvious reason why they're doing that is it allows them to put barriers in place. It allows them to extract data. It allows them to control who does what and so on. It is never actually about the practicalities of having software be like, well, we can update it remotely so that ⁓ things are fixable. This was simply not an issue before. Why are we making it an issue now? What are we gaining? What are we gaining as normal people? of Earth from this development happening. The truth is, of course, we're not gaining really much of anything. They just want your data. They just want to control who you go to to get your car repaired. They want to have deals with people, etc. etc. They oftentimes will claim, ⁓ this is for security. We don't want just anyone repairing your car. That was the point. We had mechanics so that we could go to anyone. Yeah. It's just mechanics. ⁓ I mean, yes, some of them will scam you, but you're scamming me right now. Like I don't understand what even what are we doing here? Right? And of course, the thing that we're we're doing is we're just being taken advantage of. Whereas, you know, the people putting software everywhere is just sort of scamming us.

speaker-1: If you were to ask a normie how they view programmers, I think that they imagine us as being tech enthusiasts. I think they imagine us buying every new gadget. ⁓ my God, the new iPod is out. I got to my hands on that. And then I show them that I use a text editor from the 80s. It's called Vim. It's free. It blows their mind that I don't use the newest version of Microsoft Word or something. And it's like, people who know what's happening and what's coming, they're like the most suspicious of technology ever. Like I would never buy a smart toaster or a smart fridge. When my parents bought a new fridge, I was like, please tell me it doesn't have a screen. And they're like, it doesn't. Okay. You dodged a bullet with that one. Honestly, you should have asked me before you bought the fridge. I'm getting angry. It was like, you should have asked me before you bought that fridge. Cause thankfully it's not some. nonsense smart fridge. ⁓ I think that the solution to these problems is to just, think nihilism is one of the problems people have just given up. They're like, yeah, everything just sucks. guess I guess my car is going to suck forever. And like, if I, guess if I, if I don't pay my thing on time on the car, they're going to have the car drive itself back. It's going to lock itself and drive itself back to the dealership or whatever, like people have just completely kind of spiritually given up, I'm trying to fix some of that. think that YouTube is a great medium to try and fix that. So for example, when I made when I made that, ⁓ that video on the spell checker that which I now know you've you've seen that I knew that a bunch of people with different levels of experience were going to watch it and my my gift or the intended gift for everyone watching was slightly different. For the younger people who want to do something, the gift was, here's someone being really enthusiastic about a really badly coded thing that they did themselves, but it was it was really fun and it was a challenge. And you can do it, you can do it too. Like, this isn't magic. You can put things together, you can put logic, you can logically assemble things until it produces an outcome. Like everything that you've ever heard of was built by someone. They built it beast by beast until it worked, right? And nothing, none of this is magic. And for the people who've been doing it for 20 years, it was like, hey, there's still people out there who like this stuff, who get excited by it. I am curious, I want your honest take on it. Like for more you remember from it. What were your thoughts on it, generally?

speaker-0: I would say the general appro approach. ⁓ you actually talked about this before. You you essentially approached this from the perspective of how would I just how would I go back to basics and solve this problem? Right? How would I solve this problem if I just knew literally nothing? I'm not looking anything up and so on. This is something I've ad advocated for when it comes to I was working on this ⁓ project for about two years. ⁓ had an ⁓ contract writing Odin. Our policy for everything, including, you know, 3D engine, even even our core kind of stuff, or something that we we knew that was it was not gonna be running often and so on, was to implement exactly the thing we need. The simplest version of the exact thing we need, that's the default. Uh-huh. This means you're not you're not over sort of ⁓ architecting anything really in to fit into some kind of idea you heard at university at some point. Right it is simply about saying, here's the data I have, here's the data I want. How do I get from this to this? Is there an intermediate step in here? Sure, maybe. Right? And this is informed it this is not ⁓ you know, a revolutionary thought necessarily. ⁓ if someone wants to get some insight into that kind of thinking, I would or probably recommend there's a talk by Mike Mike Acton from CPPon 2014. I think it's 2014 or 2013. He's wearing a Hawaii shirt. You'll know the thumbnail. So this is a talk on C at CPPCon about essentially what programming is and what it is not. It it focuses on three lies in programming that were invented by object oriented programmers essentially. The three lies of programming, if I had to paraphrase them, I don't really 100% remember exactly the content, are software is the platform, but it's not hardware is the platform. Software runs on hardware, hardware is the thing that you actually have to think about. That real world modeling has anything to do with how you should do things in in software. This is also not really the case. You should simply do the thing. You should have data go from A to B to Z. Essentially right. I don't remember what the third one is, but i the talk focuses essentially on this kind of thinking. How do we approach this from an information transformation perspective? Transforming data is the only thing a program actually does. It actually has no other purpose. The only things you actually have to figure out in a program when you make it are I have this data, I want this data. What are the steps in between? Maybe you go straight from this to this, fine. If you can't do that, What do you do in between? Sometimes the actual end result is a set of system calls. What are system calls? You put a thing in a register, you call essentially a system call. Data. Putting things in registers is just data. You start with something, user input, data. Right? Everything is data. In between, we might render something to the screen. What is that? Well we put things, we put vertices. and texture indices and so on, we put them in arrays so that the graphics card can read them. Data. Everything is about transformation of data. There's simply no other thing you actually have to understand in a program. Everything else is accidental complexity. Everything else is stuff that people invent in order to either be able to talk about the data better, or because they have the wrong idea about what programming is. That these are essentially your alternatives, right? So the fundamentals of actually building a program of any kind has nothing to do with programming languages. It has nothing to do with features of programming languages, which people sometimes believe. ⁓ well, we obviously have to have inheritance. No, you simply do not. You don't need that. You only need to talk about essentially at the core of everything. We need some way to group information such that it can be in the same place. These are two mechanisms. You need struct. Well, you should have structs, I will say. You don't need them, technically, actually. I will be breaking my own rule here if I say you need them. You should have structs. It's a good idea. Trust me, it's a bag of values. You probably want those. We need to put things next to each other in memory. So we can move from one thing to another in a good way. If we have those two things, we can suddenly start talking about taking all of these things, converting them to those things. So that we can then get those things at the end. That's it. Programming. And, you know, there's precious little actual programming in there, right? We are, you know, of course you write code to accomplish these things, but software is not the platform, right? The actual data is the thing that matters. How we get the hardware to modify that data is the only thing that actually matters in the long run. And how how do we Talk about data transformations in a reasonable way. There are some very unintuitive to a lot of people ways to organize this type of work as well. Most people would say, hey, I want one representation of my data that just sort of represents the data. Now I can have methods on this and I can treat that as a little object and so on. This is not actually what people do in complex systems when data needs to be transformed. It is actually better to simply have Here's one shape of the data. Here's another version of the same data with a slight difference. That transformation to that transformation is now very clear. We go from this to this. Now we can go from this version to this third version, right? Clear steps. Following the data. This now also becomes trivial to see in a debugger, for example. ⁓ I don't have to look at this God object with five million fields inside of it. This transformation cares about three fields. Those are the three fields I'm looking at. So that talk, by the way, very inspirational. Very I I watch it probably a few times per year to center myself to understand. We have all of these ideas about what programming is and so on, but the fundamentals of this have been known for so long. ⁓ there's someone who in in the QA section of that ⁓ talk, they bring up that Fred Brooks talked about this in The Mythical Man Month. or one of his books, that, you know, show me your code and I will not understand what's going on. But show me your tables, which are essentially the types in the programs that they wrote back then. And I will the the implementation of this will be clear. And it is that clarity, right, that you can construct when you say, here we have this piece of data specifically that turns into this piece of data specifically, that turns into this piece of data specifically. And it will be obvious To any anyone who looks at that process, if there are redundancies as well. Why do we have this step in between? What are we doing here? Diagnosing a program like this is simply not that hard on its, you know, in at its very essence. It can become hard because we have bad ways of visualizing things. We don't always understand, you know, how do we make this visible so I can actually understand what's going on here, right? And we're also often unfamiliar with this way of working because this is simply not we are instead taught that we should write short methods. We should we should have methods in general. ⁓ We should, you know, ⁓ we have to write ⁓ comments ⁓ in a certain cases and so on. We should focus on naming things and so on. And it's not that naming things in a good way to transmit knowledge and understanding is a bad thing, but you should absolutely focus on data transformation. It is the essence of programs. I I usually say there's almost no program that you can tell me that I cannot reduce to some, you know, abstract sort of ⁓ series of data transformations. Even if I don't understand that domain, I can probably reduce it to that. And if I understood the domain, I would know exactly which types this will be. Effectively also after working on it, I will understand, ⁓ we missed a step. We need a step here. And so on. And I say almost when I say that, because I can't guarantee that you cannot give me a program that I could not reduce to this. It's an almost, but I actually believe it's it's definitely the case, right? But I have to couch that statement by saying, well, almost. Almost any program can be explained as a series of data transformations.

speaker-1: So one of the reasons why I tell people to read about how CPUs and assembly work is because once you have even the vaguest inkling of how that stuff works, everything that you've said just now completely makes sense. Because if you do assembly, you realize that you just have a bunch of registers. All you're doing is you're moving data around, you're checking if something is true or false, and you're jumping around the code. and you do a go to, to do a loop to do or to have a function, essentially, it's all just jumping around the code, storing stuff, moving stuff in memory, and just comparing statements, is this true? this false? Are these numbers even equal? Whatever. It's all done through mathematical operation, which is, you know, it's deeply, deeply fascinating. And once you see this, you understand just how basic programming can be. It's just manipulating data, just moving stuff around. It's all that it is. And once you see that, any project becomes doable once you understand that. And none of it is magic. When you play GTA 6 at some point, presumably, and you see all these graphics on screen, it can all be broken down into its most basic elements. All of it is logical. All of it is just data being moved around and manipulated. It's literally all that is. If I might make a devil's advocate, I might be a bit of a devil's advocate for a second. And I said, look, bro, I get it. This stuff is interesting. But Claude exists, right? And hear me out. Let me make a devil's advocate. So I've used that mostly as a search engine. They're quite useful for that. I theoretically, they're faster than Google. Assuming they're correct, assuming that they're looking it up and verifying the information is quicker than actually Googling it, which is not usually the case, but sometimes it can be. For example, I found it useful for things that I don't care to learn. Like, for example, I don't care to learn deeply about how FFmpeg works. I need to convert a file. Hey, Chad Gippity, what's the command to convert? Or if I wanna do a quick bash script and I don't really care that much about bash, I can just use the LLM to give me like one time use code. ⁓ I think that most people are okay with using these LLMs like this. Even if they're like us and they're more like they wanna preserve knowledge and skill, think most people would accept these uses as legitimate. And so if this use is legitimate, Why is it that this is okay, but using it in other instances causes problems? And where is that line where it's okay to use FFmpeg, it's okay to use it for something else, becoming a problem at this point? Where is that line?

speaker-0: Right. And I I think that this goes back to something you you mentioned ⁓ it's a a while ago now, but you were talking about making a programming language in assembly. Yes. And people in your chat, some of them, and I will stop at a point here and actually say that that is the point because they were asking, what's the point? That is the main question that you should ask yourself. when you use this tool. What is the point? Am I just trying to go about my day and not learn about FFmpeg? Then use this tool, right? Then use the the magic box to tell you which parameters to pass to FFmpeg. I've been there. I mean I've I find even the man page for FFmpeg to be a little bit of a it's a forest of different flags and shit and you're like, how did I end up in this section? It's using this word, but it's not telling me even what it what that is necessarily. I have to go look up that word and so on. It could be ⁓ very annoying. So the only question that matters in the sense of like why am I using an LLM is what is the point? What is the point of my current activity? What am I hoping to get out of this? If I'm hoping to get out of this somehow, some kind of insight about programming, or I'm hoping to get enjoyment out of it, then You have to then ask yourself, okay, am I getting enjoyment out of sitting here prompting the LLM? am I getting enjoyment out of having this thing faster, but I don't really understand it? If someone legitimately can say yes to to the latter, then maybe they should use LLMs. Right now, I'm not their mother. But if they're hoping to learn something and so on, they have to struggle, they have to bump up against things, they have to do the wrong thing. They have to learn how to debug things. They have to actually they have to be on a a ⁓ rocky road a little bit. Right. There is a certain one of the main things that I think puts certain people apart from others when it comes to learning programming and so on is a certain amount of grit. They have to be able to take some hits, especially when it comes to their ego. You have to feel dumb sometimes. ⁓ Especially when you realize that the answer to your question, the answer to the thing that you've just debugged for an hour, is that something was obviously wrong when you see it, but you couldn't see it. For example, you were using the wrong variable. It all type checked, but it's the wrong variable and you're just like, Why on earth is this happening? I don't understand the universe anymore. I I don't, you know, am I alive? You're questioning everything. You're like You're starting to look at things that don't even really make sense because you're at your limit here. You have to have that amount of sort of be humble in that way where you can say, Holy shit, I'm dumb. Right? I it was obvious. It was actually obvious. When you see it, it's obvious. But of course it's not actually obvious. Like someone could have shown up and sh told you because they have fresh eyes. And I I've had the situation with coworkers. They they sort of call me in, so to speak. To because they've they've been debugging something and they're like, I can't make sense of this. Like I've I've reached my limits here a little bit. And then we look at it for five minutes and I'm like, ⁓ that thing should actually be, it's a pointer to that thing. And it's like yeah. And it's not that I'm smarter or whatever than these people. It's I have fresh eyes and we come at it from a different perspective. Right? We come at this thing from a different perspective. They're they're living in the thing right now. They're They're they have assumptions that things are right when they're not right. Right. They have assumptions about what could be wrong, so they're not looking in the right places, and so on. And this kind of you'll often hear that person be like, ⁓ shit, I'm so stupid though. Like, Jesus Christ, I've been wasting my time on this thing. And it's not that they're stupid. This is what builds a certain amount of understanding and and character and actually makes you resilient in the in the face of even harder problems. Because you have gone through this. Right? And that's also one of the casualties of giving up and sort of giving an LLM this thing, which I have sort of unfortunately become accustomed to. If I'm debugging something for like, you know, thirty minutes, an hour or something, eventually I might give it to an LLM. And it might end up being something stupid, right? Something that is like, how did I miss that? That's that's so silly. Right. And I can't really evolve if I keep doing that. I can't really evolve as a programmer if I keep doing doing that and giving the problem away to an LLM at some point, right? The question is, every instance of that, am I then comfortable with not becoming better at this process? Right? So the key question everyone should ask themselves at all times is The thing that I'm doing, is it accomplishing what I hope to for it to accomplish? That this this includes everything. Why would you make a language in assembly? Well, is that doing what I hope it would accomplish? The only way to s to know is to do it. Those people are questioning this as if it's some kind of ultimate truth that you can't gain anything from that, but it's not. You can gain tons of insight from doing that. Familiarity with things. You'll get better at reading assembly. You'll get better at at actually understanding when you're looking at the disassembler for some code. What what is happening here? Right? So if that's your goal, that's the point. What is the point? That is the question. Yes, what is the point? Are we just trying to produce stuff? Are we just trying to make stuff? Are we trying to learn? Are we trying to become better programmers? Are we trying to just send this email to someone and we just don't care or whatever? By the way, please don't send LLM generated emails to people. Just send whatever prompt you were planning on writing to them, they will understand. But yeah, so what is the point? That is the key question to all of this, right? And and this really goes back to once again, we actually end up in what is the essence of programming? What is the end result? The construction of a programming is a is ⁓ A program is a lot like the the construction of your process in a way. What am I trying to accomplish here? What are we actually trying to get as an end result? A lot of people seem to not understand that getting something to happen on your computer might not be the goal. I've I've said this to people who watch my stream. Actually, this is an interesting one because someone in the chat was saying, Yeah, well, if you gave this to an LLM, they would have figured it out, you know, long ago. Because I was debugging something on stream. And I had to explain to this person that so the reason I do these streams is not because I want to get this thing done. Right? If I wanted to get this thing done, I would do it off stream in half the time. That's not why I'm doing this. I am doing this it ostensibly for you guys, for you know, sharing this process with you people. Otherwise, why would I be streaming? If if the point was to just get stuff done, then I would just do it. ⁓ you know, offline it would be so much faster. I don't know how how I'm I'm so slow and so dumb on stream, but it's it it's a a phenomenon. Oftentimes I will shut off the stream and pretty pretty quickly realize what the problem was in in some of these cases if if I ended the stream with some kind of problem, right? And Again, this comes down to what is the purpose of the activity that I am currently doing? That is the key question. Always. So using tools, not using tools, broadcasting, not broadcasting, and so on, right? What is the point?

speaker-1: that. obviously, if I just want a line of FFmpeg so I can get something done, then it will be acceptable to use. But if your goal is to learn something, simply being exposed to information is not the same thing as actually processing that information. There is an amount of suffering, wading through suffering required in order to actually absorb the data. ⁓ Before I move on to the next point, I want to point out I've noticed this phenomenon on stream. where I joke because I have there's this meme on my channel that I have an IQ of 150 has become a meme. I made a video, whatever. It's like a bit of a meme video. But people are like, ⁓ 150 IQ move because I'm playing Half Life one on stream right now. And sometimes, like some puzzles, I'll just I'll just blast through and people are like, Whoa, that took me like 20 minutes to figure out when I first played it. But most of the time, I get I'm significantly dumber on stream than I am off stream. I think it's because we have to split our attention so brutally. It's like you're playing the game, you're looking at chat, you're thinking about what they're saying, you're processing information, you're responding, trying to be funny. That is going to diminish your ability to actually solve problems on stream. It's something that I've noticed before I started streaming. I'll be like, is this guy dumb? Clearly you just jump on the thing and then just, but when you're in the moment, when you're thinking, you're talking to chat, this is a phenomenon that I've noticed as well. But here's thing, I was talking about the degradation of skill that we're seeing.

speaker-0: By the way, I just wanna add one note to this that fundamentally a lot of the thought a lot of the process that people go through normally, I don't think they think about this, but a lot of the process that people go through normally are super boring to look at and would be yeah for terrible streams. Yes. So when when I try to solve a problem normally and I'm not streaming, I'll get up and walk. Yeah. I won't be there for a while, right? If I did this on stream, it would be the absolute fucking worst thing ever, right? It would be like, why did he just fucking walk off? Like that doesn't make any sense. Now he's you know, and and instead I have to sit there and talk to essentially the stream about the problem, which is it's good, it's good. Don't get me wrong. But we simply cannot do the same things on stream as we do off stream because we are in part there to share with other people and and and to some extent entertain. Right. I don't co consider myself an entertainer, but holy shit, if you were watching a stream of me normally programming, it would be one of the worst experiences ever. Because it's like this is not exciting. It's not interesting in that way. I'm not I'm not vocalizing everything. I'm not actually because I'm sitting there thinking. It's you know and I most people understand this when you tell them this, but they don't really get like yes, there's a a ⁓ wide sort of difference here. Anyway, continue, sorry.

speaker-1: sometimes things that like things that are fun to do may not look fun to experience right so like if I'm thinking for a problem like if I'm if I'm working on a set on a second sci-fi novel right now and to me it's the most exciting thing in the world because I get these flashes of inspiration out of the ether and I quickly open up my text editor and I write them down in a a fever but this would be really boring to watch. Like if I were to do this on stream, it would have to look completely different to what it actually looks like. But the degradation of skill. So I was talking to my dentist, and he told me that his son who's currently in high school, he's completely given up, like all of his courses in Romania, all his clothes are completely given have been given up, because they think, what's the point AI is going to do everything? What What is the point in even learning how to do anything? Right? I'm seeing I'm being bombarded with videos on YouTube of teachers on TikTok crying their eyes out because their students were about to finish high school can't read or write it back it back in my day when I was in high school. ⁓ They were they were always a few kids who are like that. But they were never they were never the majority. They were always a tiny minorities like one or two kids who played a bit too much football. in the back of the class and they couldn't read out loud. They had difficulty doing it, whatever. But now it seems to be ⁓ a majority of, I don't know if a majority, but like an alarmingly high number of kids can't read or write. And it's worrying because they're not kids anymore. They're finishing high school. Are smartphones primarily the reason for this? ⁓ Is it just a general demoralization? ⁓ Is it just the case that these people just aren't going to be needed in the sense that or like, even if LLMs don't work out, automation is the general trend towards which we've been moving for a long time. And even though, you know, 20 years ago, there was a need for a lot of people, maybe there's less of a need for as many people going forward. What are your thoughts on this?

speaker-0: I'm so far removed from the the youngsters. What I what I suspect in in the case where I can actually say that I have been exposed to some of some thinking like this. Specifically, there was a chorus of people when I learned programming that claimed you would you don't need to learn how to read assembly anymore. And they were wrong. I'll say that they were just outright wrong because I did need to end up actually reading assembly. ⁓ as part of just you know general programming and understanding some part of what's going on, I'm still not good at it. You know, if you if you do a a real project in assembly, you'll be better at reading assembly than I am. So there's something to what they're saying. You can certainly be a productive programmer if without this knowledge. But it is very seldom the case that when someone s tells you don't need to know this stuff, that they're actually right. They cer they cannot be right in a general way. ⁓ this is actually impossible. It is impossible to express that opinion and somehow be completely right in for everyone for all cases, right? Because we are all very different. We're gonna be doing different things. If I suddenly started working in cybersecurity, you better you best believe I'm gonna read some fucking disassembly at some point, right? We haven't always had great tools that just produced C code for you, you know, like ⁓ there's a tool that the NSA actually made, which is so deeply funny. That the NSA made one of the best ⁓ disassembly tools that everyone is using for cybersecurity and stuff, because these guys are the ones who are hacking you, by the way. you best believe if I was doing cybersecurity, of course I'm going to be reading a bunch of assembly. And then at that point, I I obviously would have had a ton of usage from the skill, right? Because that is the the the core of it is this is a skill. There is a place you can apply it. Of course, have I had teachers tell me you need to understand this thing, and then they turn out to not really be right for me? Absolutely. I had a teacher that thought German was the most important language that you could possibly know as a as a Swedish person outside of Swedish. It turns out English is a lot more useful. English is a lot more useful. a lot of the other languages, I'll be honest, I kind of ⁓ You know, it's a it's a tight competition there in the bottom for, you know, every other language that's spoken in in Europe, to be honest, right? ⁓ German, yeah, it didn't turn out to be hyper essential, let's say, to my existence. But of course, does it does it hurt to have learned some amount of of German and then be able to relate to other languages? I probably had an easier time learning Bulgarian, ⁓ because I I learned German at some point, right? Because you form A certain, you know, there are neurons that fire when you're learning languages. And those neurons, you know, they might fire when you're learning another language. You can make connections that you wouldn't have otherwise and so on. And so I guess what I'm saying with all of this is that a certain attitude of like you don't need to know this ⁓ can poison sort of a whole sphere of things, right? Because if you have that attitude about one thing, it is very likely that you're having it about other stuff. And those people are actually making connections that don't make sense. They somehow think like, hey, we can just opt out of a bunch of things in life. But the truth is that's a tenuous relationship to knowledge, right? Because we can't just opt out of as much as possible and then live in our little bubble and do exactly the same thing always. So it sometimes you have to extend. You have to extend beyond. And it is very useful then to already have some of that experience. Certainly it's useful to have extended beyond. your current knowledge before. The general process of doing something that you have not done before is in itself useful. You're not going to get there by opting out of everything. Opting out of everything is a great way to stay in one place doing exactly the same thing and not really being any good at it, right? Or certainly not becoming any better at it. So with regards to this really fucked me up when you said like there are people who just graduate high school and can't read. I don't want to glaze Or whatever the expression is, ⁓ the Swedish school system too much here. But this to me is bananas. That someone in my class would not be able to read is like crazy. Because at least in in you know the nineties, early two thousands in the Swedish school system, if you had told me that, I would be like No. And I I mean I come from a ⁓ a pretty it's a place like I told you before, like it's just a A place of factories and stuff, essentially. Like it's not some big hub of, you know, intellectuals or whatever. It's just a normal bog standard Swedish school with, you know, a bunch of Bosnians, a bunch of, you know, i in in general, just a very mixed bag of everything, right? And a normal Swedish school system kind of school, right? The idea that I would actually go to class with someone who just was straight up like, I can't fucking read. It's just crazy to me, right? And for this to somehow become, you know, really common, I find this even more crazy, obviously, because it's like, no, this hang on, there there exists a set of core skills. Like we we might not agree on exactly what all of the core skills are. Like I'll I'll give some room here, right, for people to have differing opinions on this. But reading and writing is not optional, guys. It's just not optional. You're not gonna end up in a situation where where this is somehow not relevant. I'm I'm sorry. Like what are you doing w with this? It's not as if you can what what are you gonna walk through life not doing No, I don't know. I that that's crazy. That's crazy. That I I really sincerely hope that peop these people need support. They need really, really, really, really good support with this, you know. Obviously they've been failed by life. And technology certainly is not doing any anyone any favors here in the in the sense that technology is ⁓ for a lot of people I suspect at least deeply sort of im it it's an impersonal kind of like we talked about before, it's an organism that's just sort of taking over and making everyone's life worse. But but yeah, we have to we have to the the best way to actually have humanity matter in the in the end, I think, is actually learning things and being good at things. Maybe take that to heart. A lot if if someone here is making a decision between giving up and and sort of not giving up, at least here's my vote for learning things, knowing more, understanding things, I vote that's probably still more valuable. Right? No matter what happens with these machines, let's say we all become, you know, L L ⁓ operators in the future or whatever. Knowing more can only help. Regardless, I guess it's not gonna be a bad thing. It's not gonna hurt you. Will you be what are you doing with your time right now? What are you doing that's so valuable with your time right now anyway? Learn things. Learn learn how to learn things. Learn how to enjoy learning things. It's gonna be one of the best things that you've ever done, probably right. So yeah. But i the whole learning, you know, just ⁓ reading and writing thing, no. J just no to that. You're crazy.

speaker-1: It's thankfully, at least for now, this phenomenon seems to be concentrated in the US. ⁓ So most of the videos that I see from teachers, they seem to be ⁓ US or North Americans specifically. ⁓ don't think like in Romania, don't think not being able to read or write is a problem yet. Although the general demoralization is 100 % a thing with the younger generation from what I'm being told. because I as well don't I don't hang out with teenagers. I don't really I don't although I did hang out with a few of them when I worked it because whatever interns and stuff. But those are generally pretty cracked because they were they were there because they liked computers. Right. So they weren't necessarily a very good although they also had some brain rot from TikTok. So that was even with with the ones that were cracked, there were still some some brain rot. What I what I am wondering for the because I made a one of the, one of the very first years I met on my channel was an argument that having skills is as important, maybe even more important going forward. But if we assume that an LLM is a multiplier, even if it's a negative multiplier, which it might well be, whoever knows more and has more skills always has the advantage because it's a multiplier. if whatever the LLM can do becomes the, becomes the floor. And so if you can't do anything else, you are beneath the floor, which is surprising that people treat these things like who cares? I don't have to learn anything. These things will do everything. It's like, no, you're gonna, if there's going to be a permanent underclass or whatever the meme is, you're going to be firmly within it because there will be no use for you essentially, right? If you, it sounds scary, but If multiplying yourself with LLM still yields a zero, you're in trouble. Obviously, right now, you made a video recently, we said that it's generally becoming more difficult to find work in this field. Companies are having cash flow issues. Of course, people getting laid off will only increase the cash flow issues because people won't have the money to actually buy services and things. What advice would you give to people who are looking to become junior engineers right now.

speaker-0: This one is a little bit complicated, right? Because if I had all of the answers, I would probably think more positively about all of this, right?

speaker-1: You can be a bit negative, sometimes things just suck, it's fine.

speaker-0: Yeah, so I would say I would say this. If you want to become someone who could professionally be a ⁓ you know, regular or a senior in terms of skill, go out there and do stuff. It's it's all pretty readily available to be honest. And you can you can use LLMs sparingly to sort out information about these things if you want. I think that's a pretty good sensible way to go about it. ⁓ we don't all have to learn like the boomers did, for example, but That's also actually a super valid thing to do. You you will definitely learn a ⁓ you will become sharper, I would say, if you have to do things yourself. Because you only get better at the things you do. You don't get better at the things you prompt for. Just to keep that in mind. If you want to become skill-wise someone who actually could fill that role, ⁓ it's all there. It's already it's all there and it's been there for quite a while. Help yourself to the rest of the world in that sense. ⁓ if you want to do it professionally. Wait and see is what I would say. ⁓ we don't really know what's gonna happen with all of this stuff. I I would consider it maybe a little bit unwise to stake your future because a lot of y so a lot of you guys have a future, pretty long one. If you consider statistics and so on, you have a a lot of years in you. It might be unwise at this point to stake that part of that future on on a professional, you know, ⁓ chasing that professionally. Becoming that person that can become someone who does that professionally, absolutely. I I I'm all for it. Mostly because it's really fun, it's interesting. A lot of this stuff is like, you know, appreciate the magic also, you know, appreciate the the wizardry of it all, right? Form that bond a little bit with what you're doing, with with all of the stuff that you're able to do. And ⁓ spend some time doing that magic as well. Right? Don't only learn about stuff. Spend some time playing around and actually, you know, all of that stuff. But professionally, I I might ⁓ for someone who who is very young and has lots of years in them, I would maybe consider consider viewing it as not necessarily that right now. Wait and see a little bit, see what happens, because there is a future that we don't know if it will happen yet, where people are really just sitting there talking to LLMs. And I I'm sorry, that's not the point. Like that's not the point of what we're doing. You won't have any fun if you're if you're listening to this conversation and you're sort of inspired by all of this ⁓ wonder at how things work and so on, LLMs will not get you there. The the prof if if that becomes the professional landscape, I'm sorry to say that's not for you in that case. If you actually appreciate the the magic and the the wonderfully intricate ways where we we actually get these boxes to do things for us and so on. And we we zoom in so that, ⁓ this part is trivial. Right? All of that, the the magic of that. You're not gonna find that in in ⁓ the LLM future, so to speak. It's gonna be essentially erased, right? And it it already to some extent is. That's why you see so many arguments from people who are sort of working in v web development. Like, you know, they they look at what things that I say and and sort of rightly they point out, well, I'm just stitching together libraries, dude. What are you even expecting me to do about any of all of this? Of course I'm not gonna sit there and and you know, look through this garbage library that I found on NPM. They might not think it's garbage, but that's really what it is. But so for them, of course, this has become already soulless, mindless. Like it is it almost has no actual purpose to care. Like the the actual point of caring in many of these people's Minds at least, is it's gone. So e there are even sections before LLM before LLM show showed up. There were sections of programming that were essentially they were dead. Like there was no soul left in them because they have been commoditized. They've been, you know, like you have to sit there and go fast. You have to install a library to do a thing. You can't actually think about the problem you're trying to solve, which in many ways actually, in many cases, would actually be it would take less time to do that. But you know. People don't know that. They they feel forced to install libraries. They feel forced to just go, go, go. Right? We have another MVC controller to write get going. Right? We need business logic and stuff, right? So in this case, in this particular case, I would say wait and see. See what everything shapes, you know, up to to actually be in the in in the future.

speaker-1: argue that if you're the kind of person who's listening to this and enjoying the agreeing with the sentiment of what we're talking about, ⁓ you would probably thrive it like having this kind of mindset without a thrive in any in pretty much any field anyway, if you have the ability to do or the the inkling to do cool projects, because it's interesting, you you can thrive at like anything that you can, you know, if you want to be an electrician, for example, It's a of a mean example, but still like you're going to be a much like if you're if you're using GDB to like debug the software that you wrote, you're going to be top shelf, absolute top shelf, ⁓ electrician, because most of the people who get in a lot of these fields, they don't really care. They just want to make some money is whatever was available, right? So if someone with this sort of approach, someone who can program even though you're not going to be using programming skills in that position. Having the mental capacity to do these things means that you will literally immediately shoot up to the top of your field in anything that is even remotely close to this kind of stuff.

speaker-0: Well yeah, it is if you can apply that thinking to whatever you're trying to do, you're probably gonna have a you're probably gonna have a good time because things you will find interest in things, you will find details in things, you will find, ⁓ this actually works like this and that means this and so on. You can infer things, you can connect dots between things and so on. And bringing that kind of enthusiasm also, like that kind of problem solving mindset. To almost anything is going to be a boon to ⁓ a lot of stuff. Right. And and ⁓ I will add to that also the I think becoming that that person that could become a senior in programming will also in many cases breed a fixer's, tinkerers, improvers mindset. I when I worked in customer support, I we had a process for I worked at a sports betting company. So you get all these fun, fun interactions with people who the company is essentially scamming ⁓ via bonuses and stuff, right? And one of these bonuses had these really interesting kind of requirements that ⁓ they had to bet on this and that, they had to bet a certain amount, they had to actually you know, they couldn't be, you know, just plus or whatever. Because it's all there to protect the company. And of course it's just a a a vehicle for s essentially taking money from people, right? And one of these processes that we had to go through was sort of counting the bets that people had made and so on. And this was all done manually. ⁓ people weren't even pasting anything into Excel or anything. It was just like straight up raw dogging a website, right? And just sort of sitting there, ⁓ this and that and you know. And I just was like, man, this sucks. Like, what are we doing here, right? And so I actually wrote a program where you could so you could paste your cookie and then you could paste the username and blah blah blah. And it would just do it for you. You can straight up just say, like, give me the total. And it would give you like this total and this circumstance, blah blah blah. And I ended up, by the way, like the company was like they acknowledged that, ⁓ yeah, this this actually this literally cut We're talking many, many hours off of total support time, by the way, because ⁓ each of these cases now became it became trivial to do, right? They they rewarded me with a trip to a neighboring city. The ultimate fuck you It's like, yeah, I get to go to this other city that's next to this one. ⁓ that's so fun and interesting. ⁓ It's like, yeah, okay, whatever. I actually I actually applied to be like a programmer for the company. And the only actual interaction I had with one of the quote unquote lead programmers, who apparently couldn't solve this problem by the way, in many years, was why does this guy have a compiler? That was it. That was the only thing that he could come up with as a response to any of any of this. Right. Not the fact that I say I just saved the company a ton of money. ⁓ b based on all of this. Like the the the approval sort of rating on all of these cases went up remarkably, right? But of course, the only question this ⁓ supposed programmer has is why does this guy have access to something that compile can compile code? And you know, it's like, yeah, okay, yeah, the corporate machine is alive and well, I see that. Right. So yeah. I ended up leaving, of course, the to go be a professional programmer after that because I was like, ⁓ you know, I might want to do this stuff, you know, a little bit more. Because in in in some ways this was actually the purest program that I have ever written. The purpose was to help people, like actually help people with some terrible situation. And we managed to get there. And then they were like, take a trip to this other city and stay in a hotel from the eighties. You're welcome. Yeah, okay. Fair enough.

speaker-1: So you're left to go somewhere where you were allowed to have a compiler in fact.

speaker-0: Yes, I was I was in fact even expected to have a compiler. It was great. Right. Yeah. That that was an experience in itself, to be honest. That that really it really soured me on like a company. I wasn't I knew immediately when I when I had that conversation with him, I'm leaving this company. This is not actually something I wanna deal with. It it's not really I perhaps knew before that, but it crystallized everything ⁓ to me at that point. Like I can help people, but there are people who would rather see I I you know, see me not help people at the end of the of the day.

speaker-1: Is there ⁓ anything that you'd to talk about that we haven't covered today?

speaker-0: Oof, no. We've covered so much, right? It's no, no. There's nothing that really comes to mind. Like we've covered so much ⁓ in the end. And and people will get overload of you know, there there's just ⁓ an abundance of things here to to think about and take in, right?

speaker-1: Is there anything that you would like to promote to like your channel, everything like that?