Now What?

I understand a lot of complex things, maybe because I spent my whole life trying to understand and explain things around me, since 4 year old, when I used no name every single car on the road in a small Ukrainian Steel and mining town where I was born.

Understanding cannot be “outsourced” or even safely “delegated”. One will always end up with a sort of “tragedy of commons”, when sterilization and modern technologies produced packaged foods which slowly but surely kill you. This is what happens when you “delegate” your own understanding.

Lets begin from some general biological principles, which underlay everything humans do, no mater what abstract theorists in humanties would babble about “free will” and what not.

Any autistic person faces just one “burning” fundamental problem – how to avoid that highly unpleasant and unwanted state of being overwhelmed, agitated and overloaded with inappropriately exaggerated “responses” which amygdala triggers.

The answer is almost universal – they “escape” into restricted, repetitive behaviors and activities, which quickly became very strong habits, which give them better hormonal responses – less cortisol, more serotonin and dopamine.

Yes, autism is a full spectrum of just this – learned coping mechanisms, and the underlying genetic factors.

This crudely outlined (but true) biological mechanism is behind what I call “small tasks”, and is the underlying basis of any regular, ritualized religious activities (and all the “feelings” they evoke), the basis of all repetitive drills, compulsive cleaning, everything.

Accomplishing a “small tasks” gives quick, immediate feedback in terms of hormonal spikes, and one becomes addicted it. It can be performing a ritual, preparing a meal, or cleaning the room for 10th time (We Got A Winner!).

This is exactly the basis of bad “programming” we call “coding” (without understanding). Most of crappy code has been written due to dopamine spikes of unqualified individuals, where the quick reward for that something “works” is substituted for the proper understanding and doing “the right thing” (which, by definition, is one of many), which is hard, slow and unrewarding, like first miserable years of irregular running. We call it “low-effort crap” (hello, “systemd”).

Just as lots of people love to talk (mostly bullshit), lots of coders love to write code (mostly low-effort crap). We have been drowned in this kind of code, especially in webshit and now in Python “AI” slop.

Now pay attention. LLMs gave them endless torrents of a slop to copy-paste into a repo. The rewards are even more stronger and quicker, the sense of “accomplishment” and self-praise is going through the roof. The understanding, however, is going down (and even being eroded) at a much faster rate, as a square of a cube of “productivity” of copy-pasting.

Also, running this code would be other people’s problem, so it is a “fuck off” code by definition – a toxic “junk food” of programming.

So, this is where we are today. The questions are – shall I continue to participate in all this mess, and where the money will come from? The “knowledge work” is fucked beyond repair right in front of our eyes. Yes, it is good that the crap-producing publishing industry is fucked too, as well as all these soy “experts” in thick glasses with big mouths.

The problem is, however, that we are fucked too. The “race to the bottom” (against clever Indians) and the resulting “tragedy of commons” (ending up in a bare, empty “pasture”) is not somewhere in the future or “tomorrow”, it is today.

The very notion of “knowledge” (as “power”) became enshittificated by an AI slop.

Now what?

Bio-hacks and longevity as the new (honest and costly) status symbol, of course.

Classic understanding-based programming, just like abstract pure mathematics, would become a niche hobby or an upper-class occupation, which, just like math, one might study without having any chance to earn money with it. There will be factories of H1Bs who test and debug some AI slop. Sorry, there already are.