Paul Cantrell
RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376219055579156
I know a lot of people, in software and otherwise, who are feeling things along these lines.
Hold on, whatever tools you’re using, just hold on to your sense of purpose and meaning. There are a lot of forces at work in this world that want to rob you of that, and that force is not a fact of our reality; it is a weapon.
Paul Cantrell
One advantage of being an artistic weirdo who makes completely commercially non-viable music is that I have a •lot• of practice forging that sense of purpose and meaning for myself when the world is aggressively not handing it to me.
Software development has been coasting on a wave of profitability / employability for several decades, and as a discipline perhaps has an underdeveloped sense of intrinsic purpose. Now is a good time to for us to redevelop that as a community, regardless of future job market prospects.
Paul Cantrell
Tips I can give you from my experience as a musicial weirdo if you’re looking to redevelop a sense of intrinsic purpose and meaning:
Beware of leaning on extrinsic validation (winning a contest, getting a grant, getting a job) for your psychological well-being. Those things may be important for practical purposes, but psychologically they are all empty calories.
Three •good• sources of purpose and meaning in your work that can sustain you:
- your own sense of satisfaction in your work
- sharing work via meaningful, sustained human connections
- the sheer joy of making and doing
Paul Cantrell
A particularly dissonance in my musical life is the aggressive non-interest of the world in my music in competitive circles (commerce, grants, whatever) and the warm, passionate enthusiasm it receives when I share it with people in person.
What’s worked for me: creating contexts of joy and mutual support where I can share with people — not just share generically in general, but sharing with specific actual people where there is a human relationship underlying the sharing — and then sharing.
Paul Cantrell
These contexts by and large don’t just exist on their own; we have to •make• them. It’s not a thing you can just decide to do and then it’s there. It’s damned hard.
Software folks should pay more attention to the musicians and artists who are creating artistic spaces: neighborhood festivals, house concerts (whether “salon” or punk band in the basement), converted warehouses, street art, that kind of thing. Watch how artists on the margins don’t just •look for• space, but •create• it — and how it’s rooted in community. That’s a model to follow.
ben
@inthehands One positive for me, I think, in the recent wave of nonsense, is that it’s sharpened my sense of what matters — that I actually enjoy doing it and being good at it.
Paul Cantrell
My piano teacher — a lifelong professional who’d played Carnegie Hall and had one of his trio’s recordings featured in…Time magazine or something, I forget — said to me in his 80s, “I think I’m finally learning to be a true amateur.”
Paul Cantrell
Here’s an attitude that can nourish and preserve.
Paul Cantrell
@datarama
Certainly in professional circles it is, unless you really really luck out with your employer.
Stefan Bohacek
@peter Echoing what @inthehands is saying.
LLMs are at best "divisive", but if you look at all the studies coming out, it's closer to "universally hated".
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-generative-ai/#consumer-sentiment
There will be time when we'll need to rebuild everything. Let's get ready!
V
@inthehands And participate in those spaces that already exist - the odd corners of the Free/Open Source software space, some corners of the indy/amature gamedev space (The roguelike community comes to mine, as one I've had ties to directly) & game jams, retro-comp hacking, all have non-commercial - and largely uncommodificatable - clusters in them of people doing weird creative/expressive/fun things that are often great, but, usually unrecognized by the more corporate-employable side of things.
Nicole Parsons
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.... their phantom "antifa" but also to oppose non-criminal conduct, unrelated to national security.
Trends like people taking free public transit & ditching their gas guzzlers. WFH.
Things like identifying every person posting against the fossil fuel industry's shills, Trump, Orban, Putin, and #PrinceBonesaw using age verification scams.
Hackers stole 10 petabytes of data from a Chinese supercomputer lab recently.
The only reason to collect that much data is economic cyberwarfare.
Nicole Parsons
Part of the malaise striking the tech industry is the awareness that AI is a ubiquitous state surveillance platform.
It's like working for the East German Stasi in its waning days. The narcs & informers freaked out because their grift is ending.
The fossil fuel industry funds AI, not just for any of its stated reasons, but also for ending any nation ditching their toxic products.
Trump's oligarchs want to identify dissenters & opponents like ...
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