Tech Anxiety

Here I am: late night, sitting in front of my beautiful MacBook, in an apartment with about 55 square feet, with a bottle of cold tea. This is already the end of the weekend, or technically, the very beginning of the new week. That’s right, it’s late night now, and new characters are typed in after three days.

One advantage with this delay is that the anxiety has been calmed down largely. And these almost 72 hours gave me enough time to savor those feelings, which may be swirled by my mind and become thicker, like cream but tasting bad (a cup is the limit, second one makes me nauseous).

So, story begins. There is a phrase in English that I really love, which is when you suddenly get an idea and you can’t wait to try it out: it hits me. Here is the fascinating part: hit is never a pleasing process, or at least not purely pleasing (even for a masochist). You got hit, and you got hurt, to some degree. And on that haunting Saturday, very early morning, before I got into sleep, thousands miles way from sunrise, I got hit (by an idea for sure).

“News alert! Google releases its newest open-source LLM model Gemma 4!” Wow! Is that so! You know me, I never miss the trend. And this time it’s called LLM on your laptop. Don’t ask me why I was just that hyped. I’m a techno-maniac, and I play with all of them. Well, LLM is not a new thing, but it just got insanely popular with those agent coding, openclaw, MCP (what the heck), and blah blah. One day a new jargon with some contents I never heard of. Better than never! I dug in with endless videos talking about those concepts and everyone is an expert now. Let’s have a glimpse: talking about distill, MoE (am I using the right upper and lower case?), dense model, xx B parameters, Oh, and RAG (it really convinced me that I can figure that out and utilize it as an AI assistant!)… They look, or sound, like some glittering gems, shining, with that kind of crystal structure, embodied in a captivating geometry. My eyes were blinded, my head was like a crying baby for those milk drops from the juicy breasts of technology mother. I was dancing among them, with crippled legs; I dove into the vast ocean of models, installed them, tested them. Almighty codex and Claude code bestowed the vibe-coding power upon me and I can create anything I want! Hooray! I was Alice, I was falling into THE rabbit hole, I was in Wonderland!

Following the fading of adrenaline, all those fancy, charm, frame by frame, along the lengthy film, were strangling me. The more I struggled, the tighter they entwined around my neck. The ChatGPT-like UI are all in the same key, bringing nothing special but the wildly spinning fan inside the computer; the vibe-coding asked me to install a bunch of libraries with those code scripts that I would never understand, and they didn’t work well! One model after another, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie: bullets all out, total mess left all over the place. Trust me, I was not belittling them. I was blaming myself. I was not like others who can grasp those details fast. I couldn’t figure out how to use them to build a thing that is able to really improve my working efficiency. I failed helping my wife ease her job by those new tech. I disappointed myself.

I’m old. I’m not like those young generations. Even though I’m just at the age of 31.

For the first time a sense of powerlessness caught me off guard. I was submerged by the information. The situation evolved from curiosity into a turmoil, This AI era, an era I am trapped in, right in this moment, like a mirage, overwhelms my mindset. I gravitating towards them, and now I need a breath.

I was about to say “I’m still going to embrace this era positively”. Hey, second thought, for me it would be a good idea to step away from it at least for a while. I know they are just tools. But just as the name “intelligence” implies, it has its own will. I’m not a philosopher. I’d love to ponder on it. Am I capable? I don’t have an answer. I decide to keep a safe distance. I can still use it as a tool, but I use my brain to control my day.

It’s my turn to be a fuddy-duddy.