thewoodsman

theres nothing wrong with doing what feels good.

except that, according to your own experience, it eventually leads to you becoming unable to engage with anything that isn't an instant dopamine hit whose entire arc occurs in a few minutes. you just used writing a 3 paragraph comment as an example of an activity that required long term focus.

and to be clear, i have a lot of the same problems, so i'm not trying to come off overly judgmental here. but i view it as a personal problem that I struggle to finish a book these days, or to invest sustained attention in a challenging side project or even, at times, a fucking video game. (i've caught myself scrolling youtube shorts in my chair at my pc, procrastinating playing a video game of all things).

what you describe (and again, what I also experience, maybe to a slightly lesser extent) doesn't seem conducive to a happy and fulfilling life - or at least it seems fair to guess that a life without the dopamine addiction you're diagnosis could be happier and more fulfilling.

I like Leibniz's comparison of the brain to a mill, which he invokes in an argument[1] that seems to be the predecessor of the modern "hard problem:"

supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap

agreed - s/marijuana/dangerous drug of your choosing/ - the point is more about the differential between the purported benefit of legalization / decriminalization of "sinful" activities and the actual outcome in the specific case of gambling

The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc.

The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.

It's heavily tolerance dependent, and tolerance grows quite quickly with any kind of regular use, so it's really hard to come up with one number.

Thanks! Glad you found something you liked. Got a couple good posts in the pipeline so stay tuned.

I've got this new account and a Substack page where I'm writing about, idk... metaphysical stuff? Spirituality, religion, psychedelics, tarot, and so forth. I was inspired largely by the Weird Studies podcast, but there's a bunch of actually interesting writing and media in this space right now.

I deliberately separated it from my public internet persona (which is connected to my real name) in the hopes that I could write about weird, woo-y, or controversial topics without worry. I've got a few articles half baked and have been having fun engaging with a different subset of the Substack crowd than my normal tech focus would show me.

Of course the stats show that the one article I did that touches on AI has done an order of magnitude better than anything else.

Anyway this is just kind of a weird sideline project, a sort of release valve for stuff that wouldn't fit in on my "professional" site, but it's been a fun thing to spend some time on.

Another thing that's cool is that I largely stopped _writing_ a few years back. I always enjoyed writing but of course as a dev most of my stuff had a technical/tutorial bent to it. Writing weird little "what do I think" essays has forced me to exercise a writing muscle I really hadn't stretched for a long time and I've enjoyed it.

There's only a handful of things up now, it's nothing special really. Link in my bio, if you see something you like I would love to hear from you!

I definitely struggle with both sides, or maybe multiple sides. On the one hand most of my daily output at my job is coming from AI these days. On the other hand I find the explosion of AI-generated "writing" (and other forms of art) to be aesthetically abhorrent. And I've just recently started a ... weird sort of metaphysics / spirituality / but also AI related writing project, so the difference between creation with and without AI is in really sharp focus for me right now.

I wrote an article about this, but honestly I don't think I really captured the totality of my feelings. I really haven't decided where I land. I'm definitely using the tools for economic purposes, and I even have some "pure-fun" side project stuff where I'm getting value from it.

Here's the article if that sounds interesting, would love to discuss the whole topic with anyone who's finding themselves of two (or more) minds on these sorts of issues: https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-m...

Honestly, all the ones I've known have been super sweet dogs. I can never quite bring myself to fully trust them, but frankly I never fully trust any dog.

There is something so wildly cool about having an idea, modeling it, and a few hours later holding a physical instantiation of the thing that previously just existed in your head. Something we software people don't get to experience often enough.