I occasionally wish I had some other job than being a programmer.
But I quickly find out that most other jobs involve a lot of tasks that could be automated.
Unless you're telling people what to do (imperative programming) or making high-level schematic drawings (declarative programming), I can't imagine not being a programmer in a classical sense and not get bored with repeating things that computers or robots could be doing, and I could be telling them how.
Learning AppleScript and (La)TeX as a graphic designer changed a lot of tedium into lengthy coffee breaks or, productive work on some more interesting aspect of the project at hand.
We’re mostly pure programmers here, so we think of this wrong, I think. Most people shouldn’t learn to handle spaghetti code 10,000 line monstrosity programs. It isn’t a skill that most people will ever use.
But for people like you, who already have a full skill-set and learn enough to automate it? That’s a super-power.
HyperCard was close, and I've been productive with its clones, and hope that something interesting happens w/ LiveCode Community Edition, but I wonder if the solution isn't just Domain Specific Languages wrapped up in nice applications.
I've been pretty successful w/ OpenSCAD, and its Customizer is _amazing_ and the new ability to run it in the browser is way cool:
This is my problem. Everywhere I go, I look at things and go I could automate this. The amount of useless jobs is staggering. But I am lazy, I solve problems for my employer and don't feel like solving problems for "free".....hoping to cash out some day because frankly I have done sales and never again.
Several of my friends left the IT sector to pursue some work related to farming and food production (farm, bakery, cake shop, bio foods, etc. are for some reason very popular choices). Anecdotally almost without exception the new job turned out to be just as much of a slog after some time, except with much lower financial reward, if any.
I think sometimes it's just easier to think the grass is greener elsewhere. Hobbies are often not as fun when they become a job, a necessity.
You can burn out just as easily with a hobby-turned-job if you're overdoing it. IT was probably a hobby before it became a job for many of today's engineers. The solution is to avoid overdoing it rather than to jump from one hobby-job to the next, maybe ruining them all in the process.
Yes, I grew up in a blue collar home and understood the reality of that type of work enough to know to stay away from it. At the same time, a lot of knowledge work is very unsatisfying because it's often so abstract and even if meaningful (and there's plenty of bullshit software work out there) is such a small part of a larger system that it's hard to see your contribution. (I believe Marx would call it alienation of labor).
Growing plants or building buildings or baking bread is the opposite; you can immediately see the product and get satisfaction from that. But given the economic realities, it's probably better if you can keep those as hobbies and slog through the day job.
I struggle with this too, and to some degree at least with my specific job and lots of the ones I see posted, it feels like its not the illusion of alienation, but that its actually correct and that the work is actually useless.
At least for me personally I find it so very hard to be motivated to do something that doesn't matter for 40 hours a week. Which is easier than something that directly harms the world I guess..
I think it’s usually people that allow themselves to get burnt out though… Far too many programmers treat it like a hobby, and are severely taken advantage of by employers. 9-5, go home and don’t touch a computer, It’s just like any other job then.
While I agree with you, in the sense that your suggestion is a viable solution for burn out, the outcome of that for these people is that they would lose their favorite hobby.
This was always the case. Anybody remember the old Kuro5hin thread about the programmer who quit to become a bike messenger? I think that was back in the early 00s. Jamie Zawinski quit programming to sell beer in 1998.
What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
It’s repetitive, really boring (once you get over the initial infatuation, and the sameness sets in, and you’re not getting to pick what to work on because it’s a paid job, not a hobby), and half or more of the time your work is just thrown out without doing any good. But it’s so hard to leave because money’s so much worse doing almost anything else that doesn’t require going back to school for a bunch of years.
Truly Sisyphean. “Hurry, roll that boulder! It’s important!” And then the boulder rolls back down the hill and everyone shrugs and starts back over. “Go, go! Important!”
And everything you have to use is probably broken and/or terrible. Even, and perhaps especially, software from major vendors staffed with “geniuses”. So very much time wasted to our tools and libraries being shit. It’s frustrating, and it’s day, after day, without end.
It grinds you down. At this point if pay were equal for all careers, programming would be pretty far down my list of preferred occupations.
It’s easy to start dreaming of throwing the fucking laptop in the trash and starting a Christmas tree farm or becoming a carpenter or some shit.
I've found that you only suffer from this mental frustration / burnout when you are writing software under time pressure and you have a boss. It's not true for hobby projects where you can take your time, lovingly sand and polish your project. Leisurely iron out every compiler warning. Run static analysis over and over finding every last imperfection. When I wrote software for a living, I was just fighting frustrating tools and barely churning out crap as fast as I could. Now, I'm making beautiful artwork. And the best part is I don't release any of it, so there's also zero pressure from users.
I'm pretty happy with my path, all things considered - the biggest issues re: programming for me is:
- carpal tunnel; have already had the surgery 1x on left arm and 2x on right with some persistent issues that some PT is tackling
- eye strain; have been messing with blue light glasses alongside some monitor changes and using trying to use more saline (I forget to blink all day), not perfect but it's manageable for the time being
A good friend is a mail carrier and I'm actually super jealous of her job; I went from walking several miles a day as a server in undergrad to 5hrs standing/3hrs sitting while working with an AM/PM walk to bridge the gap but it's just not the same as being active all day. Have been considering making a move into something else...but it's unlikely to actually happen tbh
> A good friend is a mail carrier and I'm actually super jealous of her job
You're envious of the side effects of the job, more physical activity. Bet she's jealous of the side effects of your job, more money. Probably neither of the jobs themselves are intrinsically attractive to the other.
That's a good point. Everyone likes to talk about how trade jobs wear the body down, but most of the people I see going to PT and dying of heart attacks in their 40s are office workers.
There's definitely a kind of wear that comes from an office job, but it's one that can leave you with enough juice to improve your own fitness, if you're proactive.
> What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
They don't just want to do something else but something very different, everything IT/computer work is missing. The common theme is "less tech" or "outdoors". People dream about what they're missing. Farming is not at all easier on the body but all of a sudden it becomes attractive by being different.
IT work usually brings you enough money and safety which let you think about any dreams and that you'd be successful with them too. But it's also just stressful enough that the dreams look like a good alternative. Your mind melds the financial success from your current job with the spiritual happiness of the dream.
I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program on my off time.
Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" circa 1965, because she recognised that she and her fellow Apollo programmers were doing engineering, and had to be doing engineering, because otherwise people would die.
Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people.
E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
> I now suggest that we confine ourselves to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs. If someone fears that this restriction is so severe that we cannot live with it, I can reassure him: the class of intellectually manageable programs is still sufficiently rich to contain many very realistic programs for any problem capable of algorithmic solution. We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.
Nobody does this. We don't even try. As you said, everyone in programming is insane: so much so, that proposing "hey, why don't we try writing computer programs we actually understand" elicits laughter and scorn.
In every other engineering discipline, proposing a solution that you do not understand will get you fired. In software engineering, it's a Tuesday.
I am a software dev in a company that doesn't sell software. We have everything, management, production, logistics. Developing software here is a blast and quite varied. Yes, this does result in very specialized applications where some of them have a huge amount of technical debt (often also caused by yourself), but you have a lot of freedoms.
That freedom has advantages and disadvantages, but almost everything you do will become immediately productive.
My experience by pure software companies was the same. Insane is pretty accurate.
It is called a mid-life crisis. Around 40-45 many people get sick of their job and do a major job shift. Others buy an expensive sports car. It is very common at that age and has been noted for a long time.
That is age cohort doesn't refer to your generation, other than "millennials" are entering those years now. Generation X is mostly done with it.
And even funnier for those of us that work in ag tech and know that the money in farming these days is in big business farming, run at scales far larger than traditional single family operations.
I often joke about building a cabin in the woods where I don't even have an address, I'd have to send you coordinates.
I always hope the story is just far fetched enough nobody thinks it's an actual plan, but I'm not sure.
I have no intention of spending the rest of my life chopping firewood and hunting whatever I can find in these woods. It's an amazing fantasy (because it's short term) after dealing with a bunch of BS all week though.
That fantasy is really fun for about 2 weeks a year. After that you realize how bad it is. I used volunteer to run the food stand at a local annual event for a charity to get my going into the restaurant fix out of my system (I quit only because I moved for other reasons)
I envy those with a solid plan to get out. I feel age is going to start to count against me and my passion for programming is dead. But I can’t deny the compensation in this career is great, which makes me not want to move on, for now
I'm just glad I started contributing to my retirement plan before that happened. I can't afford to retire yet - but it looks like I'm well on my way to retiring early. Which is the ultimate out: If I don't like what I'm doing I can find a new hobby, then when that one gets boring either another or go back to a previous. (note that sitting around and doing nothing isn't in my plan)
I truly hope you succeed. However I program because I can't stand to do the same thing over and over again. I want to automate away the monotony. Running a bakery seems like it's everything I don't want to do. You have to make the same products the same way every day. It's good work and I know a lot of people for who that's their dream. It's interesting that you went into programming first and then go into something that I perceive to be the opposite. Best of luck.
I agree. But this is just out of curiosity, what about jobs that don't have repetitive tasks and don't feel like coding, after you've spent enough time on coding. For example, business manager.
I have the impression, and I might be totally wrong here, but that most programmers didn't learn how to program because they like programming itself, but rather because they wanted to do something that requires programming and then learning that skill is more like a consequence of them needing it to do something they enjoyed. I'm not a programmer, but, for instance I learned a little simple bash scripts to scrape some stuff, and I didn't learn that because I like writing bash scripts, but rather because I wanted to scrape stuff.
We are not there yet, but if we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code. I think many people, who would want to learn how to code today, wouldn't want to learn how to write code in this reality.
I've always saw programming as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Sure there are people who enjoy coding and see it as therapeutic for them, but I don't think this is most of programmers...
This sounds pretty accurate to me. I personally got into programming because I wanted to create a website to share my knowledge online, and then felt like adding more and more interesting features to differentiate it from the crowd. I also learnt a lot about it due to wanting to code games as well.
Wouldn't be surprised if something like 60-80% of programmers got started because they either wanted to make a website about something or they wanted to make a video game/video game mod. After all, nothing drives you to learn more than having a clear goal in mind and needing to find solutions for how to achieve it.
I got into programming through making small games. It was very much a means to an end, a solution oriented path. I personally can't imagine trying to learn programming now in a similar manner to high school math courses, where problems are presented so abstractly. If I can't see a reachable and tangible end product in sight, it tanks my motivation to learn.
Yeah, same here. I like to know what I'm actually working towards.
Also that said thing is actually interesting to me. That's a problem with a lot of teaching, the example problems they give are so utterly boring that it saps your motivation to work on them. Like the reminder/notes/shopping list apps that seem to be the default course/tutorial subject for every language and framework now.
> we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code
it will not happen unless we reach AGI. You need to know programming (please don't call it coding, I hate it) to verify the generated program works as you expect and won't fail at 12am on a Saturday in production because the AI added a buggy code block that only get triggered in specific conditions. It's like making a plane without QA. Not gonna happen. And the very low risk programs already have alternatives today that don't require technical skill
There will still be those of us who did get into programming because they like programming. The day I played around with a Tandy Level I in 7th grade, I knew what my career was going to be, though I didn't think of it in those terms until later. So even if AI can create me something, I wouldn't use it unless it's for some really boring thing I've done a trillion times already.
People who don't want to X can always find a reason not to, for any given X. Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X, and go through many of the motions and preparations, but always find some reason at the end to back out.
Is Paul's statement much different from the statement "talk is cheap"?
No, if I had to nitpick, I'd say 'talk is expensive'. The original text doesn't say "Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X" like your comment, and it doesn't need to. But maybe someone who finds 'some reason not to do' will say it, and they won't actually do it.
(B has never said he wants to learn to code)
A: Do you have any plans to learn to code? It seems to be useful.
B: No.... (thinking) Well, AIs.
(And B doesn't learn to code in the real world)
Actually, this comments doesn't matter at all, but I leave it in for fun
There is more to learn in life than you will have time before you die. That is just learn to the level of you can do something but are not very good, master takes a lot longer. You need to choose what to master, what you want to learn for other reasons, and what to let someone else do for you in life. If you decide that programming is not for you then I have no problem with that decision.
If you are asking for advice: nobody knows what the future will bring. AI sometimes looks really useful and sometimes horrible. There may be things coming I'm not aware of. You have to make your best guess, and if it turns out wrong adjust. That said, programming has been a useful thing for the past few decades and looks to continue to be. However medical jobs have also been good for even longer and that too looks to continue. Music and art can be good for a few, but most people who go into them have to do something else to survive.
Nothing stops you from mastering more than one thing. There is nothing wrong with being a master programmer for 8 boring hours at an insurance company, and then going home to create music with your friends. (I picked this example because I work with programmers who took a substantial pay cut to work where I do instead of the insurance company they worked with before)
For what reasons do you believe programming and medicine will remain options but not music or art? They are most probably all doomed in the next few years. Diagnosis models are already showing superior accuracy over human-only and human-in-the-loop results (i.e. as with chess AIs, the best results come from following the machine blindly, humans get it wrong when they second guess it).
I think OP is more referring to art/music/theater careers are low paying, so people need some other form of income to sustain themselves. In very well may be the same for programming and medical - we really don't know.
However, I am optimistic that with AI automation happening "everywhere" (wherever it can generate profit), we'll see culture shift to appreciating more human-only things. Singing can be AI generated, but we're still impressed by someone being able to harmonize and hit notes; Physical sports are still too chaotic for AI to effectively compete at human levels, so audiences will flock to watch humans.
This line of reasoning actually warmed me up to people that are live-streaming as a career. They opened their lives to be experienced by others, another element that AI (I believe) will struggle to genuinely replicate because the audience will want living people. Similar to the popularity (and profitability) of reality shows (even dramatized ones) - you see highlights of someone "living".
> This line of reasoning actually warmed me up to people that are live-streaming as a career. They opened their lives to be experienced by others, another element that AI (I believe) will struggle to genuinely replicate because the audience will want living people.
There already exist very popular AI-generated live streamers.
Everything will remain an option - the only question is how valuable it will be. Most artists/musicians do not make money doing art/music. A lot of them are making money teaching art/music to kids which gives them some free time for their art/music. A lot of them are making money in something else and doing a hobby.
Right now you can make a lot of money as a programmer. AI currently isn't good enough to replace us and nothing else is even showing promise, meanwhile there is more and more ideas people come up with that need a computer programmer. Of course who knows - I've seen a lot of technology take over, meanwhile flying cars have been just around the corner for 70+ years. My best guess is AI won't take over - but that is a pure guess and could be wrong.
Similar for doctors. There is a lot of efforts in using AI, but so far nothing takes over from a well trained humans. Will that change - I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India.
[I purposely didn't mark that as a quote. Seeing the entirety as if it was written by a different Paul shows its emptiness.]
His obsession with clarity/minimalism in communication + the (befuddling) expectation that VCs are constantly opining on things seems to mean that more and more of his tweets read tonally as though they're addressed to a seven-year-old.
Well, they absolutely _are_ addressed to impressionable, not always especially worldly, young [mostly] men. They are the workers he needs to send into his particular mine.
Programming is fun if you enjoy tinkering with computers.
It's not if you don't.
I see no reason at all for anyone to learn to do something that they don't care about. There are many ways to make a living, and people like Paul know this well.
Computers are everywhere nowadays. Everybody should learn enough to throw a couple lines of python together. It’s more like the ability to interface with the computer more pedantically.
Not everybody needs to learn about SIMD and cache line widths. But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer:
Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet. Cars are everywhere, everyone should know how to change their oil. Etc.
I personally feel that way too. But everyone has their poison. What you like is not what I like.
> Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet
I don’t think everyone should learn how to build a computer. Most people should be able to, like, replace a cabinet hinge though. Maybe not everyone but it is a common enough skill that we don’t talk about whether or not people should learn it.
Health is literally vital for you as a human. Everyone should be doing daily workouts and maintain a certain level of fitness (which I am guessing most programmers here sharing your point don't) and cooking fresh food regularly (which I am guessing most programmers here sharing your point don't). Do YOU do that?
The reality is that there are things that are beneficial to us that we should all be doing but we don't. Sometimes we get lucky and some of the things we like are things that we should be doing so we get on our high horse and begin preaching without realising that we are literally in the same position as everybody else.
> But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer:
> Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
One day soon the office worker will be able to tell the computer that, literally and verbatim, and it will do it.
Was it Karpathy who said plain English is the programming language of the future?
I guess it's an answer to Jensen Huang? He certainly has reasons to oversell AI, but he was talking about teaching kids at school programming - which never made sense IMO. Even if you want everyone of them to become professional programmers, better give more hours to math and sciences.
As of AGI, if it comes, everyone apart from the owner class is equally doomed, so you are not missing anything if you learn profession you like, including if it is programming.
I love programming but I'm terrible at coming up with my own ideas for useful things to make that haven't already been done many times over.
I don't particularly like making things for myself as I don't really have a need for much, I prefer to make things for other people, but finding those people (with good ideas), is very difficult.
My advice would be to make things even though it’s been done before. You might have a different perspective, or you can use it as an exercise to hone your skills. Many projects are just throwaways, like an illustrator might doodle.
The goal would be to get better with your tools and keep the creativity flowing, even if it’s not going to turn into your next unicorn startup.
What I think paulg might be getting at is that programming is a way of thinking as much as a practical skill. The job market fluctuates with economic cycles but the mindset that one develops when mastering programming is transferrable and useful in other contexts. Most people are not genuinely interested in mastery and are content with mediocrity (which is fine). I spend a huge amount of time programming, even though I don't even particularly like computers, because of what I learn about myself and the world through the work.
patio11's thread on that topic was quite interesting. His move to Japan was apparently 90% motivated by the wrong prediction of all the jobs moving abroad:
The shaming of people who are unhappy being slaves still exists in the western world
The statement "People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to" is clearly designed to shame those who are looking for a better future.
Dont be a slave!
Take an adventure. You only live once!!!
Spread yourself about. expand your mind and knowledge. LIVE!!!
I have had 4 main jobs in my life:
I left school in 1972 aged 16:
At 16 years old I trained as a baker for 2 years.
At 18 years old I began an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic for Jaguar and Daimler.
At 28 years old I set up my own company designing and installing high end bathrooms.
At 36 Years old I went into higher education, college and university to train as a psychotherapist.
At 40 years old I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor.
This kind of pseudo intellectual wisdom is very funny on some level. Something really broke in the 20th century after the postmodern movement. We had actual thinkers now we have people spouting bullshit on Twitter.
The actual hard job as an ordinary person is trying to not elevate these people beyond their field. If you are successful at X that doesn't make you authoritative about Y and Z or actually anything else. But you can see this in the tech world a lot, all the time.
Well, you can learn to program and much of that would still remain true. Many low level tech jobs are indeed outsourced, AI is causing a huge shift in investment away from traditional tech, and we're in the middle of another burst bubble right now. If you're just entering school now, maybe things will be different in a few years. But good luck trying to get an entry level tech job anywhere right now.
And more to the point, we probably don't need this many programmers. The industry just shed several hundred thousand of us over the last 2 or 3 years. It seemed like an inevitable correction to the overhiring of the covid boom.
If paulg is Paul Graham, well, presumably he's a VC and investor, and cheap programmer labor is good for people in his class. Commoditized coders + AI supplementation = rich investors at the top.
It's not so good for existing programmers who already have trouble finding work, and not so good for the new programmers who are just signing up to become part of an ever larger bureaucracy.
Shrug. If I were young, I'd definitely choose another career.
Tech was certainly not over after the dotcom bubble burst, which is what he's talking about.
People have lost jobs to offshoring, but the growth in software engineering demand in the US vastly outpaced the losses to offshoring. If anything, offshoring helped deal with the fact that demand vastly outpaced supply over the last few decades.
As for "we probably don't need this many programmers"... maybe? Or more accurately, we probably don't need this many programmers making as much money as they were making for the past few years. Corrections happen in every sector now and then.
I don't have a Twitter account and can't see the context around his post, but all of these things can be true at the same time. It's not a binary yes/no you should/should not learn to program situation... all of those are variables to consider.
If someone's not interested in programming, they shouldn't feel obligated to learn it just because someone with outside economic interests wants them to. These folks don't necessarily have their best interests at heart (like VCs, CEOs, presidents, or other people who would benefit from the fruits of programmer labor more than the programmers themselves would).
As a class, programmers are some of the least happy people I know, and burnout seems to be increasingly common. Sure, we make more money on average (even then, not always, compared to mid-managers and such) but you make a lot of health and social sacrifices in choosing this career path. It's a lonely, often dreary path full of debugging often-pointless code that will largely be discarded in a few years anyway.
I'd still stand by the overall gist of my comment, that the overall economic conditions have changed since the 90s and 2000s, when tech easily made a whole class of zillionnaires. These days, for most of us in the industry, it's just another middle-class job.
To be fair, though, there aren't many middle class jobs left :( IMO that's the bigger problem, not a lack of run-of-the-mill programmers.
Probably some sort of actual engineering in the physical world (like renewables). But I'm terrible at math, so probably would've washed out early lol. I'm actually trying to get into an engineering program now, but I don't think I can afford to spend another 6-7 years of my life chasing that =/ Might have to choose something else instead.
I am a mechanical engineer turned software engineer. Had a great job as a test engineer, hands on and wrote test software. I also made half of what I make now as a software engineer, with abysmal benefits. I am thankful for all the hands on skills I learned in those 3 years, but the software life is so much better for me personally.
Thank you for the perspective! I don't think any other regular job would be as cushy as software engineering, but that's ok with me. Software seems ridiculously overpaid to me, and it actually kinda rubs my work ethic the wrong way. I frequently hear of (and see) people working only a few days a week but making bank... that doesn't inspire me, it just saddens me that society is wasting that kind of money. (Not saying you're like that, just some of the stories/people I know.)
Anyway, personally, I am particularly interested in civil infrastructure engineering. I never made all that much as a software person anyway (capped out at $100k after 10+ years of full-time work, 20 years of experience), and I don't have kids or a mortgage. I just want the opportunity to do something more meaningful and contribute to society more.
If you're afraid of AI, I have bad news: it's just as capable of taking those jobs as it is of taking software engineering jobs, or any other white-collar job.
I'm not "afraid" of AI per se... the Borg have been my dream since childhood, lol. I look forward to it, just worried about the huge displacements it will have under our current hypercapitalistic system with a weak government and poor safety nets. It's gonna hurt, regardless of what I personally do for work :(
It's amazing how certain programmers can't be arsed to do anyone else's job, but they sure are keen to extol the virtues of everyone trying to do their job (badly).
Q: Can you help me troubleshoot this issue?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Product Support department.
Q: Can you explain how this obscure feature works?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Documentation team.
Q: Can you make this interface less janky to navigate?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the UX Team.
But remember, guys, the real key to a successful product is making sure that everyone in the company knows how to program...
But I quickly find out that most other jobs involve a lot of tasks that could be automated.
Unless you're telling people what to do (imperative programming) or making high-level schematic drawings (declarative programming), I can't imagine not being a programmer in a classical sense and not get bored with repeating things that computers or robots could be doing, and I could be telling them how.