Thoughts on thinking

> nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by default.

Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of your thought is a sad way to live.

More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same.

It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the planet, the odds are not in your favor. And if you get there, it's almost certainly going to be unfulfilling. Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world? The #1 topologist? Do they get a lot of recognition and love?

a fun thing about having a high-dimensional fitness function is that it's pretty easy to not be strictly worse than anyone

pareto adequate

> Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world?

James Gosling, of course[1]. Next question...

> The #1 topologist?

I'm not a mathematician, but... maybe Akshay Venkatesh, who won the Fields Medal in 2018?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005008

But inevitably you lose in the flood of enshitified creations made with LLMs.

I think we will come back to roots, the simple in person creation: pen and paper, declamation, theatre, live performance, hand painting, improvisation, handmade work.

Maybe not everybody but it will be for (mentally) free people.