alt Hacker NewsWow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a negative to me.
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Playing with legos is fine if you can afford them.
It’s not binary, it’s a plus until it’s not. I agree with the author that the problem is “what happens if code is free” can change the incentives so much you forget why you were there in the first place.
You’re very reasonable response may be “well, why don’t you just do more of what you want to do and less of what you don’t want to do” but that’s not how incentives work.
You could talk about revealed preferences, and how obviously if this person did these things maybe that’s obviously what he wanted to do. And great, feel good about that.
There’s an uncomfortable reality for most of us normies (maybe not popular with the libertarian HN crowd) that an increase in freedom can make it much more difficult to find meaning and purpose. Friction can be good actually.
I do theorize that this is one of the mechanisms by which productivity could be tanked by AI.
OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.