AI Post

Finite and infinite races…Great post by @pnickdurham Nick Durham @pnickdurham Company building in the AI era will be a hidden battle between Apollonian and Dionysian ideals. This is simultaneously the most leveraged humans have been and the most physically exhausting knowledge work has felt. For the class of people really pushing the models daily, the cognitive load is creeping higher and higher. Every model interaction reflects back the clarity of your understanding, your technical competence, your domain knowledge, your ability to learn quickly, your physical endurance. If your language isn't clear, you're wasting time and burning load. But getting super clear is demanding.@karpathy now functions as a de facto spokesman for tech's view of AI’s frontier. I try not to have any original thoughts on AI unless Karpathy has validated it. Lisan al-Gaib. He posted in December that he has never felt this behind as a programmer. "Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession." This is of course Apollonian instinct laid bare. Optimize. Adapt. Master the new abstraction layer. Do it now or stand in the breadlines with the permanent underclass.In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that Greek culture achieved greatness not through Apollo alone (the god of form, order, reason, individuation) but through its tension with Dionysus (the god of dissolution, ecstasy, and collective surrender). Nietzsche described the Dionysian as the moment when "all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or 'shameless fashion' has set up between man and man, are broken down." AI has supercharged the Apollonian and starved the Dionysian. Every knowledge worker is on the treadmill. Out of rational tool choice, pursuit of euphoria, or existential anxiety. The feeling Karpathy describes, that a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue, is spreading to every profession from engineering to law, to finance, to design. Nolan Lawson wrote an essay this year called "We Mourn Our Craft" about programmers grieving the displacement of hand-written code. This grief obviously will not be unique to programmers. It will be the universal experience of watching your professional identity dissolve faster than you can rebuild it. Karpathy later posted in a reply about what programmers should do: "Experienced devs have a real advantage but only if they rapidly progress through their grief cycle and adapt, now and onwards. Categorically rejecting or ignoring the new layer would be a mistake." Grief that is not metabolized turns into burnout, cynicism, depression, or attrition.@barelyknown's The Dionysus Program offers the only framework I have seen for solving this problem. A core principle from the book is the distinction between Run Time and Ritual Time. Run Time is Apollonian. Its focus is on pure work execution, decisions, accountability to plans, and elimination of variance. Ritual Time is Dionysian. Protected containers where a team can metabolize loss, correct near-fatal mistakes, dissolve outdated identities, resolve personal grievances, and rebuild meaning. Ritual Time sounds like a euphemism for an HR-approved DEI vulnerability exercise. Soft, emotional, indulgent, the opposite of industrialist American culture. In reality, Ritual Time is the harder discipline. Every durable institution in human history grew through disruptive societal change with ritual. Every world religion runs on rituals and ritualized calendars. The liturgical year. Ramadan. Shabbat. These calendars are designed as mandatory interruptions of productive time. Before every major campaign, Napoleon and his officers dined together. Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA through ritualized whiteboard sessions. Even Elon, who would puke a little at this post so I'm not going to tag him, is running Ritual Time in his companies unknowingly. Does his famous “we dine in hell" Tesla production battle cry sound Apollonian to you? The split of Run/Ritual is up for debate. Elon might be 99/1. Maybe the norm is 95/5. But zero will rip your company apart. You cannot engineer ritual out of human organizations any more than you can engineer sleep out of human bodies. It is a basic need, and the organizations that deny it get brittle.@zebriez posted recently: "Every startup I know is in an all out sprint right now. With full awareness that they're going marathon distance. I'm predicting the teams that take their water breaks together are the ones that are building the healthiest, happiest cultures." That's a sound prediction. Drink more water. Marc Andreessen does not want to introspect. I don’t want to either, Marc. Who wants to slow down and performatively celebrate small wins when you are trying to solve the world's problems? If there’s any experience more painful than shaking yourself out of the euphoric and manic phases of Run Time, I’d love to hear about it. That’s why so few leaders do it well. Yet, the strength of trust within your human teams might be your biggest asset in an era of infinite leverage. I have two boys, 4 and 2. I spend most of my dad hours with them describing the function of large steel machinery in as dream-like of a state as I can. Every night we go to bed browsing photos of @ahmedshubber25 dozers and excavators. The Apollonian impulse is decidedly not a Silicon Valley phenomenon. It’s in our bones. Nietzsche's whole point was that Apollo without Dionysus produces rigidity. And rigidity, under enough pressure, shatters. The race is long enough that the ones who never stop will not finish. The winners will take a breath from time to time, order more jugs of water for the office, and occasionally, Greek wine. twitter.com/i... Posted Mar 27, 2026 at 9:27PM Posted Mar 27, 2026 at 9:29PM