A Confession, Part 2
I still remembered very clearly, the summer I've finished the Gaokao and de facto graduated from high school, we were asked to choose which school and which fields of profession we want to study in that school. Back then I still wanted to learn music because I was an avid Vocaloid fan, but I know very well that you need to work yourself to the bone and have a massive amount of luck to be able to earn a living with music in China, so I thought to myself, that I'm somewhat good at dealing with computers, maybe I can learn computer science and get a job as a software developer, and with the money I would earn I could support my dream of making music. That summer, I got to know Rocq (still called Coq back then) from one particular guy and I somehow actually became interested in computer science itself.
That, was the beginning of this long run. If we were being strict about it, being this led astray was never my actual plan. But I also have to understand, that if I haven't made the choice I made, I wouldn't be here today, which really could be a good or a bad thing at this point.
I still remembered the first day I started my old job as an intern. Me with a few other interns were asked to attend this one meeting, during which the head of the HR department, a 30-something man, told us (something to the effect of) that what's important is not how good you are at things but how much value you can bring for the company. He quit a few months later, allegedly due to health reasons, and I ended up staying for as long as they wanted me to stay. I still remembered (some of) his words. What do companies want from me? The only thing I know is that they asked for someone who could do the job and they've decided that I was the right choice, and everything about this decision-making process is opaque to me. What is value? What brings them forth? How does companies decide that one thing is of value but the other thing isn't? And if they do be not-knowing after all, why do people keep acting like they do?
The recent development of AI changed everything. As I've implied in an earlier blog post, the problem isn't necessarily about AI's capabilities per se but the expectations that surrounds it. I hate, from the very bottom of my gut, that LLMs and diffusion models have become some kind of panacea of this era. Not even the recreational value of problem solving survives when you're constantly reminded of the existence of this thing that can deal with any problem you throw at it and the fact that people somehow enjoys watching this brainless action more; half of Hacker News are just info about how you can say words without thinking so LLMs can do the thinking for you now. Throughout my life I've been able to continue living only because I was able to continue thinking; I can't live in a world where thinking is not needed and even replaced.
Aegis, a self-hosted code hosting software, is probably my most important project right now; whatever life energy that still remains in me within the last four months, I've injected into it; I wrote every single line of that code base with zero AI usage; but how many people would actually give it more than two looks? I was working on its PostgreSQL support, and I was hit with this immense dread: does anyone truly want it? Is it one of the cases where no one would ever give a damn unless I've long been dead, like how people treat Terry Davis as some kind of programmer genius only after he's hit and killed by a passing train and documentaries and video essays were made about him?
There's… no fun continue living like this; that's why I wrote the first part of this confession a few weeks ago. If this continues, there really isn't any point continuing computer science or software engineering. The world's refusal of thinking is going to kill every single one of people like me, who naïvely thought they can always have a little bit of basic dignity and that they'll always be one step above. I have zero idea what to do next, other than praying to God asking for guidance and protection.
Last update: 2025.7.29