Nick Bostrom takes himself waaaaaaaayyy too seriously.

I’m only aware of a lot of what I find distressing because of my superpowers. I can know what’s happening everywhere in the world within minutes of it happening. Somebody I will never, ever meet in person can say something mean about me and put a shadow on my mood, if I choose to pay attention to it.

My day-to-day is idyllic. Modest, urban, a bit ecclectic… but comfy, by American standards. Food, shelter, medicine, recreation, community, art, adventure, mobility, and friendship are all in adequate supply. I’m employed and paid fairly. Accepted by friends and family, valued by my colleagues. If my sphere of awareness and sphere of routine travel were the same, I would think myself a prince.

But my sphere of awareness is vast. So, I know my comfort is a byproduct of privilege, which is withheld from millions of other deserving people because… reasons. I know there are other parts of the world where logic and justice and tolerance are in widespread, societally upheld ascendance, and that those places are far, far away from where I live.

Immediately outside the personal bubble I labor to maintain, there’s pain, violence, fear, hunger, and hatred. One misstep on my part and I could find myself there as well. I know that fear is wielded as a tool by people who live in fortresses made of money, by people who claim to represent the ideals of my nation, but only care that they are the winner and everybody else is the loser.

So yes, there are many nagging feelings. I wish my comfort was more than the byproduct of somebody powerful wanting something from me. Much angst, as I sit in my comfortable chair with my expensive technology, in my lovely house on a gorgeous spring day. I wish I was stupider, less aware, less experienced in the motivations of horrible people.

Scroll through your typical node_modules directory without learning a little something about software bloat. Yikes.

It’s quite a lot, what we expect from our technology now. But we made it this way because the marketplace has deemed there must always be a winner and a loser, so it’s a never ending game of accelerationist oneupmanship.

The market pressures the competitors, the competitors pressure the engineers, the engineers pressure each other to deliver faster and faster. Sometimes they’re backed into a corner and have to focus on more speed and efficiency, which is shortly thereafter consumed by frameworks, languages, and operating systems that are also competing for adopters, and thus supply stuff like JIT compilers and UI frameworks.

Even before we were plunged into the hellscape of vibe coding, you could knock an app together with a kit of parts using a pinch of glue code, having no clue what’s happening underneath the gui. Who cares? My Mac at idle is running hundreds of processes, it can take it. Until of course it can’t.

Back in olden times, a piece of software was painstakingly hand-built in assembler and C over a course of many months. But ain’t nobody got time for that when your manager can shit out an app with Claude in an afternoon.

Narrow down your inputs. Isolate until you feel calm. Yes, this by itself is very difficult and could take a while.

but, if you manage it, begin reintroducing stimuli one at a time and monitor your inner state. Sit with it for a while and see if that experience contributes to a level of unease. Record your impressions. Repeat.

Maybe its too on the nose to say so on Lemmy, but fuck Reddit right in the earhole. Their pearl-clutching, risk-averse, pro-corporate moderation-bot and tattle-tale system was the last straw.