Posts

This post uses Jonathan Haidt’s elephant/rider framework: the elephant is the hedonistic, reward-seeking id, and the rider is the rational ego/superego that guides it.

It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.

Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.

It’s a very good post and well worth reading. I subscribed to the author’s RSS feed!

There appears to be some competition in place to run as many of these agents in parallel with almost no quality control in some circles. And to then use agents to try to create documentation artifacts to regain some confidence of what is actually going on. Except those documents themselves read like slop.

[…]

When I watch someone at 3am, running their tenth parallel agent session, telling me they’ve never been more productive — in that moment I don’t see productivity. I see someone who might need to step away from the machine for a bit. And I wonder how often that someone is me.

This mirrors my impression after learning more about the Ralph loop that everyone’s talking about.

I recommend the normie loop: tell Claude/Codex/whatever what to do, watch what it does and steer as needed, repeat.

A model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems, to me, not to be a promising one.

This system relies on your celebrity target being dazzled by receiving a large sum of free money. If you came to them before the money was there, they might ask questions like “why wouldn’t people just directly donate to me?”, or “are these people who think they’re supporting me going to lose all their money?“. But in the warm glow of a few hundred thousand dollars, it’s easy to think that it’s all working out excellently.

The fact that this seemingly revolves around X accounts should be raising alarm bells right off the bat.

It’s been four months since I left my job at a startup. I say “left”, but it was somewhat involuntary: I had worn myself down so much that I couldn’t continue.