Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 290: AI Thoughts & The Best Thing You Can Do for Your Career

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In this episode, Conor and Ben chat and continue their conversation about AI, its impact and what it means for the future.Link to Episode 290 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: LinkTree / BioBen Deane: Twitter | BlueSkyShow NotesDate Recorded: 2026-05-27Date Released: 2026-06-12ADSP Episode 246: Not High on AI?ADSP Episode 289: Ben's Updated AI ThoughtsAmusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanLife update: Zig, AI, unemployment, and moreLean In by Sheryl SandbergIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

And let's be completely brutally honest, right? When I code, maybe you two, when we code, we get the dopamine hit, right? That at the end of the day is a good reason why we love doing what we do, right? And, you know, whether you do, when you build things, when you see those test passing, when you're in that kind of flow, when you're in that loop, you're getting that positive feedback. that dopamine. And several people I've talked to say that, you know, prompting AI does not, does not scratch that itch, does not do that for them. It just doesn't. The number one thing you can do for your career is go to the meetups, go to the conferences, do the networking. Probably the most

meaningful thing you can do is maintain your friendships and relationships with the folks that you enjoy meeting up with. Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 290, recorded on May 27, 2006. My name is Connor and today with my co-host, Ben, we chat about AI, career advice, life advice, and more. Shima and I, I have to get Shima's the book, but she read this book recently. I'm not, it has to do with the medium is the message. It's not like a book by Claude Shannon, but it's a book about...

Wait, Claude Shannon? Is Claude Shannon? Sorry, Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan. Yeah, Claude Shannon is information theory, sorry. Yeah. But I think, well, I don't know. don't think Clyde Chattano comes up in the book. I think it's Marshall McLuhan.

Anyways, in this book, I'm not going to remember the name of it, but I'll put it in the links. I think I'll ask. I think I know this book. Do you? I can't remember the title either, but I think it's a book I have. I mean, I sometimes can message my wife. What is the name of the Marshall McLuhan book you like? And while she may or may not respond to me because she's a busy person and sometimes I won't hear back from her for a couple hours. Let me look back, yeah. Laws of media? Laws of media.

That doesn't ring a bell. Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of media, the new science. No, that's not that one. Okay, anyway, that was my guess. Well, I'm asking, let's see if the AI can get it based off of my question. Because the book goes back. It's like asking the AI, where did I lose my car keys?

Well, the AI is giving me Marshall McLuhan's work. It wasn't written by him. It was recommended on an Ezra Klein podcast by the guest. Anyways, it goes back over the last couple hundred years and looks at what the primary medium that people communicated by. Right. The AI said, oh, no. See, the AI's first recommendation is the people,

paradox of democracy. That is not it. But then right at the bottom, it mentions amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman. And that is definitely the name of the book. And I haven't read the book. My wife has, and she really likes it. But it talks about, you know, back in the day when TV wasn't a thing and radio wasn't a thing, you know, people had newspapers and people used to sit at dinner tables and, like, you know, debate politics and talk about what's good for society. And, you know, it used to be a thing where people would kind of like give little monologues at dinners. And, you know, maybe this sounds terrible to the generation of 2026. But I think it's quite interesting. And people used to go, apparently. And this is all third hand from my wife, who's read this book, once again, I haven't read

the book. But like, people would go to debates where there was no applause allowed. The debates would be, like, very civil. And they would last for like hours, like four, five, six hours. And they were, it was considered like very important that, you know, these potential leaders of these countries, and I think it mostly focuses on America. They would go and have. these, you know, long-winded from our standards, debates. And anyways, then it goes to the evolution of when radio came out and when TV came out and when the internet came out. And every single time, one of these new technologies came out, like, there was a moral panic

and, like, an outcry of, like, the impact that this was going to have on society. And, like, one of the kind of takeaways of the book is, like, a lot of the outcries, specifically with respect to, like, the internet and TV came true. Like, if you look at the political... of the world, one of the things it said is that, like, with TV, it's going to become a form of entertainment and no longer, like, a debate of what is best for society. And without naming any names, you know, you look around and you go, huh, maybe the people that were outcrying back when these things were happening had a point.

I mean, from a certain point of view, it is true. It is also true to say that, you know, blue st. Jean's, blue state, lam, mchios, right? It's, it's, most of the problems of today are the same problems people had 100 years ago, you know, in terms of society and the way politics works, a lot of things were the same. But it's also true, like we were saying earlier, like, try doing a math test from the 1890s, and you will find out how poor your math education is from the 1990s, right? Yeah. How did we start talking about this? Oh, right, bringing someone on and the different types of, is it even generous to call my vibe coded sites software, you know, but like the different types of code or software out there,

I think come with a different sets of concerns. Yeah, concerns. How comfortable, you know, with specifically how one is using AI, you know, the types of code that I guess you are primarily using AI for, how does that influence, you know, you're feeling? If most of the code that you're writing is for work and going on millions of devices around the world, obviously that's going to inform. how you feel about these tools. I try not to be, I try not,

I'm an old man, but I try not to be, mostly. Let me put it as well that way. Maybe the listeners will understand. In other words, I try not to make arguments of the form, you know, the youth of today, or people don't understand what it was like or whatever. But from what you were saying, like,

I think it made me think, like, there is an observation that maybe people of my generation, perhaps were the last to be comfortable with being bored. Because I'm of the generation where, yeah, on a weekend, your mom would say, go out and play, we back for tea. So we did. You know, we just had to go out and find the kids in the neighborhood and find a way to spend our time between, you know, morning and evening.

Yeah. Were you bored, though? you're going out to play, you know? Well, I mean, yeah, there were times when I was bored. You have to figure out what to do on your own, right? And you have to take the consequences of your choices. You know, you decide to reenact the popular music video of the day and jump down from that tree.

You need to be okay with the fact that you skinned your knee or whatever. That would be, the music video I'm thinking of would be Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants for, anyone who's listening of the same era. I'm sure there's a few people out there. Anyways, where does this leave us? I don't know. I would make one more comment,

which is to say, you know, regarding technology and AI and everything about the modern world, you know, the sentiment I hear often expressed is one of resignation and fatalism of like, well, you know, if we, we don't do this. Someone else just will. The cat's out of the bag. You know, this is the way the world's going. It's not up to me. But I would say, it is up to you to live an authentic life. It is up to you to behave in the way that's consistent with your own morals and ethics.

You have agency. Let me just leave you with that, Connor. All right. I definitely will, we're going to leave it there because I don't have anything as prophetic sounding or prophetic itself to say. But yeah, it's a hot topic and it's going to be, I mean, it's a very, well, is it exciting? I don't know. That's the thing. It depends on who you talk to. I guess, yeah, we didn't talk about NDC Toronto at all, but that was one of the themes.

There was a lot of talks because it wasn't specifically a C++ conference. There was a lot of talks. And depending on who you were talking to, because Shima was visited a couple times because she was working downtown and the conference was downtown. And she sat in for like a lunch and breakfast and chat with some of the people there. And she said she was very surprised because she spends all her time around me. And I am like hyper excited about all this stuff. And then she went to this conference and she was like, wow, like a lot of people do not share your optimistic outlook and are quite like nervous, concerned. Well, it's very difficult to feel negativity towards something when it's paying your paycheck, I think.

I mean, this is the problem with work. It's not a problem. It's a downside. of working at a company that is, what's the word, benefiting from this technology, is that people assume that that is what informs my opinion. And I guess we'll never know, because I'm not working at a different company, but I started using these tools before even InVita was paying for them. And I would like to think that regardless of where I worked,

I still would have built the sites that I built. But anyways, I mean, maybe the last thing I'll say is we were, talking to someone internally at Nvidia, Bryce and I. And he said he didn't want to come on to talk about it. But on the last episode with Bryce and Marco, we're talking about AI. And I brought up that there's a lot of folks, and I'd seen this YouTube video, a guy who said he kind of felt a lot of hopelessness if his job has turned into just like prompting LLMs to generate code.

And I said that like, I'm not saying that makes me not excited, but it does like, that when I hear about people's struggling the word or like trying to try to deal with what does this mean for like you know I went into a job to do one thing and now it's you know arguably totally changed what does that mean for people that is I think is like uh I I don't know you know and then I pose the question you know this is something we should care about and I definitely feel like it's it is a problem and let's be completely brutally honest right when I code, maybe you two, when we code, we get the dopamine hit, right? That at the end of the day is a good reason why we love doing what we do, right?

And, you know, whether you do, when you build things, when you see those tests passing, when you're in that kind of flow, when you're in that loop, you're getting that positive feedback, that dopamine. and several people I've talked to say that, you know, prompting AI does not scratch that itch, does not do that for them. It just doesn't. And so, yeah, what does that mean? And is it like, you know, I talked to one person and they said like, ah, well, it's hard for me to feel sympathetic because we're like in one of the most privileged industries. And there's a lot of people in the world that have way worse jobs and they don't get any dopamine hits. They're just doing something and I was like, well, that's, that is true.

But that's also like telling someone that their problems don't matter because someone else has like, whatever, a worse problem or a worse situation, which I don't think is, it's not going to make that person feel better. That, like, if your response is like, well, how would you just be grateful, even though you don't like your job anymore, you know? Both things can be true. We can be grateful that we have jobs that we enjoy, but we can also want to preserve those experiences. Yeah. Anyway, so it's, I don't know, I find myself still excited about these tools, but as I see peers in my industry be more like and more concerned or not share the same excitement, I do, I don't know, gives me more pause for concern of like, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, we're trying to, I mean, I don't know if that's actually what society's goal is, but, you know, I would hope that, you know, we're trying to build a world where people can live happily and coexist. and live meaningful lives. And if we're like, if a tool gets invented that is stripping a certain percentage of one's

meaning from their life due to the fact that they had a job that they loved and now they, like, I was like, that doesn't sound great. Anyway, so will any of this make it in or will I just cut it right at your prophetic statement as a better ending? Well, it's up to you. It's up to you. But we've certainly had an interesting discussion. This has been, you know, like I said, this,

you should measure the amount of dead air we have in this podcast and it might be among the you haven't made measurements over time but well it's funny yeah we have to stop talking at some point but I find Shima and I all of our conversations these days are you know what is the best way to live life and you know what should what should we really be optimizing for and and with respect to careers and whatnot right and going into like parenting and balancing work life balance and all this stuff and and then you talk to some people and they're like, I would never want to have kids right now. It's the worst time to bring

children in the world. And I'm just like, what? I mean, everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I would just say, we haven't had the kid yet. So maybe this is the best time to ask me. But it has been like the most magical experience seeing my wife like grow our future kid. And I remember listening. I won't name the name because a lot of people, uh, have to take issue with him. But he has like a whole subsection of a podcast interview one time where he just gushes about having kids and how he thinks it's a shame that like, because there's a, I think globally, I'm not sure if there's any, I think there's some countries in Africa that are having upticks. In the West, we might say, the trend is down, I think.

Yeah, less and less people are having kids. And everybody can have, you know, live your own life. But I just, I just think it's like the, going to be the biggest adventure. And anyways, a lot of conversations, yeah, these days. It definitely seems like, I'm not sure. When the internet was coming out, was there this much, like, buzz around? because I was being born at that time and I guess maybe you were too young

I don't know if like... When are you talking about? Like, early 90s? Yeah, okay, so I was first on the internet in 1992. Okay, yeah, was there the same amount of like how is this going to affect society and whatnot or, like, concern? I don't think so.

Not that I remember. It's funny, I remember, I remember when spam was invented. Does that seem crazy? Does that, I remember. I remember Cantor and Siegel, a law firm, posted the first, what is recognized generally as the first spam message to a Usenet news group. And the reaction from the community was, as you would predict, they were kind of outraged.

But Cantor and Siegel were completely unapologetic. They basically said, we can do this. And that was the birth of spam. A sad day. Yeah. Is that the ending? Is that the ending? Oh my gosh.

A sad day. Yeah, I don't know. I guess, I guess, yeah. Like I always say, though, these are, the conversations that we end up having on these podcasts are exactly what we, if we, if I was at C++ now and we were chatting, I'm sure we'd be talking about a bunch of the talks that we saw. But, yeah, over dinner and stuff, these are the kinds of conversations that we probably would be having.

Yeah. So, people should. should go to their local beatup and go to conferences if they can. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, everybody should go. If there's one positive thing to come out of all this, is it positive? Who knows? Is that I think that like the in person, especially in a world now for remote work, like that stuff is, it's become like more and more important.

It's always been the most important thing and it's now even more important. Yeah. And that's the thing. Yeah, it's even more important now. The number one thing you can do for your career is go to the meeting. meetups, go to the conferences, do the networking. It may be hard. It's certainly hard for, you know, your stereotypical standard nerds to do that, which I count myself among.

But yeah, it really is more important now than ever with the, especially with the, with the job market the way it is, you know, where it's basically devolved into AI sending resumes to other. their AIs, as far as I can tell. The thing you have to do is actually get in touch with a human and network and get an in. Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing is people hear the word, that's the thing. Yeah. Here's a little advice too from someone, you know, I wish someone had told me this when I was younger in my career.

People hear the word networking and they hear the word mentoring and they think of this like, oh, I got to go, I got to go to this event and I got to network. No, showing up at the event is like the net. You're naturally going to start chatting with someone, and you don't have to be thinking, oh, I've got to ask for someone's business card. Like, just showing up at the conference or at the event is the networking itself. And mentoring, like, I actually got this from, say what you will about the book in general, but Cheryl Samberg wrote a book called Lean In. In that book, she talks about how one time someone asked if she could be her mentor. And she had been having these little five or 15 minute conversations with that person over the last couple years.

And she was thinking herself like, she's like, you already are. what do you think we've been doing this whole time exactly it is the five minute conversations or whatever you bumping into someone people don't realize like your peers can be mentors you know you're you're the folks on your team yeah yeah you can have different mentors for different areas of your life right exactly yeah and i and i realize too at one point in my life i you know people don't know this but i actually emailed sean parent i was like hey can you be my mentor and then he probably i don't think he ever replied to the email but like in hindsight having then read the book later,

I realized, wait, like, Sean Parent, like, I'm very lucky to call him a friend now, but he was like a mentor, like, even, even just watching his videos before having ever met him. That is like, you know, you can be mentored by someone that you've never actually spoken to just by consuming their content and reading their blogs and stuff. And friends can be mentors, sure, as well.

Yeah. I've, you know, the people who you enjoy, the people whose company you enjoy, the people you enjoy at work, the people whose friendship you enjoy, keep those relationships going. Yeah. Like, it's worth it.

Yeah. I mean, that's what, I mean, this conversation has gone all over the place. But like, sometimes she and I, we joke about like, oh, you know, what if AI really becomes super, and, you know, this place is everybody. And it's like, well, we're all going to have to find purpose.

And, you know, I'm just going to start running a whole, I'm going to be in the best shape of my life ever, because my, my, you know, hour, hour and a half runs. And they're going to turn into two or three hours. runs a day and, you know, board games. And there are other things that people do, you know, gardening. And, you know, we have a little whatever backyard now. And, you know, I don't garden, but, you know, I've gotten really into mowing the lawns.

There are things you can, you know, get meaning and, like, enjoyment from other than work. And, like, I don't actually think that's the way society is going. But sometimes we joke is like, oh, well, you know, what actually are we going to do? And, like, if that is the case, people, there will have to be some shift in, like, and probably the most meaningful thing you can do. is maintain your friendships and relationships with the folks that you enjoy meeting up with. Because... Oh, and I have one piece of advice for being a dad, at least in the early days.

Figure out which shirts you like and set them aside. Because your job as dad is mostly to get spit up on the shoulder, right? That's going to happen to many of your shirts. Luckily, almost all my favorite shirts, except for two, are shirts that I got, quote unquote, for free. from including the one I'm wearing right now. Okay, okay. From races. And I have like three times as many as I would need.

Oh, you're in good stead then. Like, yeah, conference shirts, race shirts, whatever. All those free t-shirts, put them to good use. Yes. And, you know, even though I've donated a ton of them over the years, I still have probably, because I kind of... You probably still have a few dozen. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And there's the ones that you don't actually fit great, but you're just like, ah, you know, I might need this at some point. They're about to come. Yeah, you can throw it on at 2 a.m. for the feeding. Yeah. Or they're just going to become my daily drivers, you know, if I'm getting sick on every day, it's going to be like, you know what? You're right.

I'm going to set my favorite race t-shirts aside, and we're going to put these ones that I don't particularly love in rotation for the next few months. Yeah, that is good advice. And luckily, I have a whole rotation of free t-shirts ready to go. All right, we should probably call it here. Be sure to check these show notes, either in your podcast app or at ADSP, thepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a

get-up discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. I am the anti-brace.