Because you become what you do. Actions and habits are shaping one’s mind in the long run. This has little to do with work ethics, it’s about spending one’s life doing things that are meaningful to oneself.
I've worked at various tech jobs and have not really gotten meaning out of them. Coding, committing, pushing, and deploying gave some dopamine hits, but not long term meaningfulness. And now AI agents are doing those things anyway.
If people have found meaning while pushing bits around, I'd love to hear about it. I think working to improve other's lives directly (healthcare, charity work, community involvement, etc.) can provide the most meaning to people.
People certainly differ in what they find meaningful. I chose my profession based on what is meaningful to me, and was lucky in that it also pays reasonably well.
Perhaps shocking to most of Silicon Valley, but you can do things outside of work, which have nothing to do with work, with no social connections to people at work.
It takes years to build the habit of being able to be present at work and give it your best, no matter how much you “care” about the actual work. People are relying on you either way, and those habits and mindsets carry into other areas of your life. You may as well give it an honest effort, and be proud knowing you’re someone who shows up and can be relied on.
It closes future doors for you. Who gets assigned to the interesting new project? Not the guy who's phoning it in. Who gets first crack at the limited pool of raises? Not the guy who's phoning it in. So, even if all you want out of work is money, phoning it in is bad for you. If you want more, if you want interesting, fulfilling work, it's bad for you there, too.
More than that, phoning it in is bad for your character. That assumes you share a certain moral framework or outlook, though. If you're a moral nihilist, then it's really hard to make such an argument make sense to you. But let me at least try to make it make sense.
I want to be part of something, part of a team, not just a cog in a machine. I want relationships, not just for all of life to be transactional. But, see, wherever I go, I take me. The "me" that I take to my marriage or to hanging out with my buddies is the same "me" that goes to work. When I make one part of my life purely transactional, it's hard to keep that from leaking out into other areas that definitely should not be transactional.
Now, you're going to say that companies take advantage of that, and you'll be right. They do. They try to sell you on "we're all a big team!" and such. But the fact is that some places do actually try to live that out, and some places purely use it to try to extract the maximum effort from suckers. And the second group tends to be corrosive to your character, too, even if you don't phone it in, partly because such places tend to have lots of people who are phoning it in, but more because the company is phoning it in in how they relate to you. But the answer is not to phone it in in return. The answer is to start looking for somewhere better.
It kills any and all potential career progression, will annoy your coworkers if it’s bad enough they have to carry you (which will make the 40 hours a week you show up at the office less pleasant for you) and will put you at the top of the list to go if and when your company eventually hits a rough spot.
"Bad" is subjective, but as I stated, it's my opinion. It's not about work ethic at all; it's about your own values.
To simplify:
1. Reinforced behaviors become stronger, while others get weaker. Ultimately, I'm a behaviorist (ACT).
2. Work is a big part of your waking life.
3. If you spend that much of your life going through the motions, you're strengthening behaviors that may not be constructive.
4. When your situation changes, and you need those more constructive skills and behaviors, you may find them much more difficult to access.
That's a very functional lens. However, there's a deeper lens you can apply. I believe people feel most fulfilled when they're routinely acting in alignment with their core values (what they truly care about).
Phoning it in at work may actually be "workable" from an ACT standpoint if your personal life lights up all your values, and you are feeling completely fulfilled by friends, family, hobbies, etc.
However, I would venture that most people also want to feel that their work is giving them some feeling of intrinsic satisfaction, not just a paycheck. You can call it Purpose, Mission, Self-Efficacy, whatever you want. In my framing, people don't want to live in conflict with their values 8 hours/day.
But there's an even more basic argument that I would make: Life is incredibly short. You are hurtling toward death. If you're phoning it in, you're giving away your most precious resource for a small amount of financial security (and you still might get fired). You may find that when you hit 45 (or 65) you look back and weep for the decades you poured into something that you didn't care about, or even held in contempt.
You have to do what's right for you, but it's never too late. As someone who has admittedly phoned it in previously, I'm violently on the other side now. Regardless of how you feel about your job, I strongly recommend finding a way to give a shit, or getting out by any means necessary.
>Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text.
Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.
IIRC the courts ruled that because it would be implausibe for a person to use google books previews to read an entire work (you'd have to make a whole bunch of separate accounts to do so), it could not plausibly impact the market for that work.
Lmao. No. Content that is wholesale generated by AI is also not subject to copyright in the US. It relies on the honor system and you can always modify the material juuuust enough that you can claim the copyright. In practical terms, this changes nothing.
It’s been established in the DC circuit, where basically any challenges to copyright office decisions would need to be brought. For all intents and purposes, until the Supreme Court or Congress decide to weigh in, it’s pretty well established that AI generated content cannot receive copyright. There will probably be some decisions around the edges regarding when human editorial input might result in a copyright being awarded to the editor, but it would be very surprising to see the precedent overturned completely, particularly given its grounding in previous caselaw.
Authorship is also required in the Constitution's section on copyright, and is likely entangled in international treaties. Any change that foundational would probably require a constitutional amendment.
Did anyone expect it to go the other way? Europe is more hardcore about copyright than the US, and that's saying something. Germany is practically...well I was going to say they're nazis about it but perhaps that's in poor taste.
It's not surprising, though, since the ECJ held in the Infopaq case that copyright (under the EU Directives) can only exist for something which is the intellectual creation of an author.
IANAL, but my understanding is that whatever patents and industrial design rights Nintendo had on the N64 expired long ago, so replicating N64 hardware is perfectly legal as long as you don't use the original logos and trademarks.
Iirc a talk about the Gameboy hardware @ Chaos Communication Congress correctly, the system _requires_ the Nintendo logo shown at game startup to be present, otherwise it won't boot. And showing the Nintendo logo without authorization/licensing from Nintendo is copyright infringement.
This is likely not the case on the N64, but it's an interesting bit of detail of how Nintendo goes about things.
I consider all homebrew stuff very cool but the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
But in general, the thing that really impresses me is what people come up with working within these various constraints. Less is more.
Megadrive / genesis homebrew is where it's at for me. But tbh I am honestly kind of clueless when it comes to this stuff. Still trying to get parallax scrolling and foreground occlusion figured out for my "game."
> the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
The point isn't just to be a novelty throwback aesthetic. It's the most accessible way for indie devs to make a 3D game without needing to worry about particularly high quality 3D models and animation.
Well, youre trading quality for accessibility. For some, that's acceptable. To me, the number of steam games that emulate that aesthetic is so massive that its become oversaturated in my view. And in fairness, there was a major quality dip when 3d graphics started becoming viable. A lot of n64 games just look like shit to me. conversely a lot of those genesis games still look amazing, esp when playing them as intended.
How is it "bad" for you? Make an argument that doesn’t simply devolve into vacuous platitudes and protestant work ethic nonsense.