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Animats 17 hours ago [-]
Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died.
I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers.
Now they're struggling to survive.
Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
estearum 53 minutes ago [-]
Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak.
Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years?
You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall?
Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!
altmanaltman 29 minutes ago [-]
Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.
jimbobbam 10 hours ago [-]
My grandfather was a printer not to far from that Burger King, in a building now owned by the academy of art. In 1963 he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda. He died early, but extended family stayed in the business. It was union work, he as the youngest operator of the 4 color press. His wife my grandmother didn’t work. The printing business was cooked by the early 90s. I was laid off from Broadcom a year and a half ago- I think about the printing industry to Ai analogue all the time. I got lucky and got a job a startup making less than half of what I made before. I know much more capable and smart people laid off in the same round- that are still wondering what the hell to do.
lp4v4n 5 hours ago [-]
The worst of all is that people will still argue that, in this day and age, labour has not been completely devalued and that you are wealthier than your grandfather.
That kind of story was not uncommon at all in the past, today you would have to be a literal multi-millionaire to have that lifestyle.
jdm2212 3 hours ago [-]
If you're ok with 1963 living standards, you can in fact have the grandfather's same lifestyle today at a very reasonable cost.
appplication 2 hours ago [-]
Very curious what living standards you’re thinking of
jdm2212 2 hours ago [-]
A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home. Available medical care was very limited, so you don't need modern health insurance. No braces for the kids. One small car, and it can be a really old beater and still be better than 1963 cars (no seatbelts or catalytic converters back then). One landline phone, no internet, no cell phones, etc.
The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.
Anyway, if you can find a woman who wants to be a SAHM to your five children in a Fresno starter home, where she clips coupons and cooks meals from scratch with no appliances, you can achieve a 1963 standard of living pretty easily on a schoolteacher's salary.
rayiner 12 minutes ago [-]
> The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.
This is a key point. I grew up in a nice middle class neighborhood 20 minutes from DC. Back then DC was the murder capital of the country, there were no tech jobs in northern VA, etc. Today it’s much more expensive, but it’s also full of tech engineers. The town has moved upmarket. It’s not a Honda Accord, it’s an Acura.
davemp 1 hours ago [-]
> A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home.
Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.
jdm2212 46 minutes ago [-]
That's more like the top decile than the average. The top decile in any era has it pretty good.
Most of the "life is too expensive today" complaints are some flavor of: Grandpa was a 90th percentile income earner and I am a 50th percentile income earner, so even though my life is objectively much better than Grandpa's in many ways (childhood vaccination, clean air, seatbelts, etc) the loss of status is much more salient than the gains in material well-being.
rayiner 21 minutes ago [-]
Only 12-15% of the country had AC in 1963.
inigyou 53 minutes ago [-]
Where can you find a starter home today on your grandfather's salary?
jdm2212 42 minutes ago [-]
Fresno, like I said above. Go on Zillow and you'll find plenty of very nice 2BR and 3BR houses in Fresno that a teacher or auto mechanic can afford.
If you mean "where within commuting distance of the hottest industry in the world can I find a reasonably priced home" then yeah obviously you can't, but SF wasn't that in 1963.
rayiner 22 minutes ago [-]
Size of house, availability of food and clothes, percentage of population that receives an education, etc.
listenallyall 4 hours ago [-]
Your point about affording the lifestyle isnt entirely incorrect, but it is skewed by what you choose to include vs ignore. Owning a house? Indeed, grandfather probably had it easier. More space per person in the primary residence? Grandson wins, most likely. Restaurant meals vs home cooked, international travel, ubiquitous air conditioning, threat of being drafted into the military (and actually being deployed!), expected lifespan, dental visit experience, number of sexual partners... I'd bet most grandsons have all of those significantly better than their gainfully-employed grandfathers.
Tade0 2 hours ago [-]
Disregard the grandfather for a moment.
How is today better than the situation 20 years ago?
alex43578 2 hours ago [-]
Most of those measures, just less significantly compared to the grandfather.
inigyou 52 minutes ago [-]
What if having a residence at all is more important than having a large residence?
andrepd 3 hours ago [-]
In other words: everything to do with economics is worse and everything to do with the inexorable march of progress is better. Yeah sorry but no shit. Technology has progressed since grandpa's day.
"TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.
jkrom3 2 hours ago [-]
You’re being myopic. Yes, TVs being better and cheaper isn’t that useful. But ACs, dishwashers, washing machines, beds, cars… etc. are all useful counterpoints when discussing the economy and these are impactful. And beyond the normal big ticket items, smaller items (thank China and Walmart) are cheaper. And that adds up. Lamps being cheaper doesn’t seem like much but add that across all the furniture in the house.
inigyou 51 minutes ago [-]
"it's okay to be homeless because at least we have dishwashers and cheap lamps" is a new one to me. Usually people pick a more important excuse.
oharapj 56 minutes ago [-]
You sure can buy severely enshittified versions of all those products designed with a very limited lifespan for cheap.
alt227 3 hours ago [-]
The luxury market has been commoditised.
No matter how many billions you have in the bank, you cant get a better netflix subscription, TV, or iPhone than the normal person. This is the 'march of progress' you speak of. The things people wanted and coveted most have been squashed to a market value most people can just afford, and then subsidised with credit plans to make them affordable by all.
This is the basics of modern economies. It is not separate to technology progressing. The technology progressing has become the foundation of all modern economies.
Netflix is a terrible example, it’s cheap entertainment for the masses. Why would a billionaire watch Netflix when they could get front row and/or box seats to any sporting event or concert in the world and fly there via private jet.
listenallyall 16 minutes ago [-]
You're dense. Likelihood of military service - way down. Widespread diseases like measles, tuberculosis and polio - gone. Number of people lifted out of poverty is in the billions since 1960s (economics). Access to credit - massively up (economics). Commercial air travel affordable to virtually anyone (economics). Abundant, clean, healthy food available to almost the entire world (economics). Government-insured bank accounts (economics). Tax-advantaged retirement investment opportunities (economics). You can also look at civil rights, access to justice (small claims court didnt exist in many places when this dude's grandpa was young), college participation...
> he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda
How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.
danans 5 hours ago [-]
> How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life?
The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
Peaches4Rent 4 hours ago [-]
Aah, so by definition only a select few can do it
detourdog 3 hours ago [-]
I would say only a few do it and they are self-selected. The ones that do it have a sense of agency that is lacking in the ones that dont do it. Some people never notice their own agency they believe it comes from outside them.
Oras 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not only agency, and it sounds like you do your own thing which is great, but the pressure coming with it is not bearable by many. It’s kind of similar to competitive sport, thousands train and put the effort chasing a wild goose, but only handful make it big. That’s why it raises a question many others: is it really worth it?
And for that, I agree with you, it’s self-selected to take the suffering jounrey
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
It is suffering and I'm not sure it is worth it. I didn't notice the suffering until the later stage of life.
pj_mukh 3 hours ago [-]
Good faith counter point
>>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor”
Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?
detourdog 3 hours ago [-]
I found that that stock market is the way to scale income. One can't make big money with just their hands unless they are an artist.
jrapdx3 2 hours ago [-]
Very few artists earn a living in art let alone become wealthy. The art world is highly competitive, though real talent and innovation are rare. But making it big in art is more about self-promotion and marketing than artistic ability. So success is only marginally correlated with what they do with their hands, as opposed to what's done with their mouths.
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
The number of artists that succeed is irrelevant to my comment. No one needs to tell me about the life of an Artist or the Art world. My dad was a fine art painter, my mom was a potter, another uncle is a kinetic sculptor, one uncle made pastel's of Sulky races to get by. I have a cousin that was a pioneer in computer graphics attending the Media Lab while it was still in the architecture department.
I was raised in the art world by a multi-generational art family. None were wildly successful all managed to make enough for a good life. Farmers, bakers, masseuses, carpenters,... all work with their hands generally only artist can take rubbish and turn it into big money. The criticism of the art world you put forward is very one-dimensional.
close04 3 hours ago [-]
That’s the answer to a different question. We were talking about a printer who probably wasn’t acing the stock market in the ‘60s but his salary covered all that. Question stands, if anyone can offer a good equivalence for something similar today.
listenallyall 3 hours ago [-]
How much wealth? Not really that much if you move to the middle of the country. You're thinking of San Francisco (well, Daly City) of the 2020's, which San Francisco absolutely was not in 1963. Nice place, sure, but still heavily working class, blue-collar and union. You could have 5 kids and a few apartments on a reliable, but not spectacular, income today in many cities (and suburbs of such) in the US.
kelnos 2 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really pass the smell test for me.
How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?
listenallyall 35 minutes ago [-]
Go become a plumber or union carpenter in Lansing, Michigan or Birmingham, Alabama or Utica, NY. Median home prices well below $300,000. You must be supremely arrogant to not know cities like these and jobs like these exist.
roenxi 4 hours ago [-]
If you're happy to live life to a 1960s standard, it'd be quite cheap. If I'm interpreting the stats properly [0], he expected to put two children through high school and the other 3 would have been contributing a lot to the family quite early on. It'd also be interesting to check whether it's legal to build the same apartment in Daly City's current regulatory environment because that isn't a given.
Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.
Obviously I’m interested in the modern equivalent of whatever that man had. If those apartments were on the outskirts of the city, then something equivalent today. If society expected the kids to finish no more than high-school then but university today, then university it is.
And I want to understand if there’s any chance to do it the same way with salaried work, not with clever investment over decades, or winning the lottery, or getting an inheritance. Which are all valid ways to have a lot of wealth but don’t tell me the value of salaried work in the US today.
roenxi 3 hours ago [-]
The modern equivalent to what the man had is what the man had. You'd need to be paid maybe a bit less to support a family like he had because everything has gotten slightly more efficient over the years. If you want to define things by means and medians, the median worker had a median lifestyle then and a median lifestyle today.
If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.
setopt 2 hours ago [-]
It really isn’t though. The median person in 1963 didn’t need say internet or computers or smartphones, because no one expected them to have one. Good luck even applying for a job today without at least a computer and internet, and possibly a smartphone capable of running very specific apps.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer, but as the GP indicated the rest of society expect very different things from you today – more equipment, more education, etc. Those things aren’t just increased living standards, they are increased job requirements.
roenxi 2 hours ago [-]
Sure. There is no way that old mate in 1960 could have afforded all that stuff and thread ancestor is pointing out that people around today can't afford a 7 person family and have all that stuff in 2026.
So we've moved from a world where it was impossible to afford all that stuff and a 7 person family to a world where ... still can't be done. People have raised their standards to the point where they can't afford 5 children, savings and a lifestyle that they think is reasonable. Not much of a mystery there to interrogate. There has never been a generation that could afford the lifestyle they want and it appears there still isn't.
alex43578 2 hours ago [-]
Go to the library and use their computer: consider it a parallel to walking into a business with a resume and a firm handshake.
mlrtime 2 hours ago [-]
You can get internet and a phone for < $20/month. It will have all the apps, you don't need a computer.
Rendello 17 hours ago [-]
Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive:
Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype...
There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.
In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.
Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.
But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.
Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
> Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.
Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.
When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.
Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Why should the age play a role at all in unions?
In European unions you pay the membership and that is it.
On top of that many apply to complete industry sectors, they are not tied to specific jobs and don't care one second how you got your skills.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
The union lobbies for regulations that require you to apprentice under an existing master in order to enter the trade. The union's masters then purposely limit the number of apprentices they take to limit the supply of license holders. Since the slots are then valuable as a result of artificial scarcity, they get allocated on the basis of nepotism etc. You're not the nephew of anyone currently in the union so you don't get an apprenticeship.
Moreover, getting your own full license takes around a decade, during which time you're expected to work as an underling regardless of whether you already have the capacity to do the job yourself. So to the extent that anyone can get an apprenticeship without blood relations or graft, they expect someone who is willing to be stuck in an entry level position for that long even if they already have significant relevant experience from a related field, and then you get in the queue behind a million high school seniors and never get a slot.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
Quite different from over here, as mentioned it is a plain membership.
Getting permission for jobs is required in many cases without any union having anything to do with it, you have to get them regardless.
Finalising high-school without going through trade school, or into university, meant jobs that only unqualified people get.
jdub 1 hours ago [-]
you're describing a pre-20th century guild, not a union
mattjhall 3 hours ago [-]
> And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.
This is not how unions work in the UK
vasco 3 hours ago [-]
All unions just exist to fuck up the existence of anyone not on the union. All you need to know this is to have worked near unions.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Nope, that is the US model of anti unions.
Unions have saved my ass multiple times in the European countries I worked on.
noduerme 11 hours ago [-]
I live in Oregon. Up until last year, you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card into.
You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more
... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.
I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
Earw0rm 7 hours ago [-]
They're doing this in the UK right now with security for cultural events.
Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.
A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.
It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).
harvey9 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of the time bag checks are for glass bottles either because they can make brawls more dangerous or because the venue doesn't want you bringing your own booze.
ludicrousdispla 4 hours ago [-]
>> it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy
Then the gas station owner could hire another attendant. Or your parent could pick a different gas station or a different time of day, free markets and all...
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
It would be better if they were paid to do nothing.
noduerme 5 hours ago [-]
Right, but that's the double edged sword isn't it? If you pay them to do nothing, they have nothing to do. If my income is going to subsidize that, then they'd better literally do nothing as if doing nothing is their full-time job. Like: Don't start a podcast, don't get into politics, don't whine about people who choose to work and earn more than the UBI. Don't have children and don't usurp credit. Just take your check for doing nothing, play your video games and watch your movies, thank you.
I don't think it would be fair fo make living on a UBI as comfortable as the lowest minimum wage job people are actually working at. Not fair to the people who work at whatever they can find.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
The premise of an actual UBI is that it's universal, i.e. unconditional. If the UBI is $12,000/year then everybody gets $12,000 a year. If you don't have a job then you get $12,000. If you have a job that pays $10,000/year then you get $12,000 plus that $10,000. If you have a job that pays $100,000/year then you get $12,000 plus that $100,000.
Of course, you also pay taxes out of whatever you make, so the person who makes $100,000 might be paying $30,000 in taxes and then they're effectively paying $18,000 rather than receiving $12,000. But that's fine and is actually want you want, because it produces a progressive rate curve even when everyone is paying the same marginal tax rate. Right now we put irrationally high marginal rates on lower and middle income people in the form of benefits phase outs. With a UBI they get the benefits as cash and experience the phase outs as paying taxes at the same (rather than a higher) marginal rate as higher income people.
You don't want people doing nothing. You want them to have the incentive to take productive employment when it's available. Taking away the money you give them because they take a job is exactly what you don't want, which is crazy.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, but, if everyone gets $12k, then doesn't $12k mean nothing? If I'm buying a car or a house, and the guy I'm bidding against is getting a $12k check, and so did I, then he ups his offer and I match it so doesn't the price just jump by the same $12k? After a year or two, won't the cost of living just go up so that the UBI no longer covers basic necessities? And isn't that just inflation... instead of printing money, injecting it into a different part of the cycle?
I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax. Specifically zero tax on basic necessities and an escalating sales tax on anything optional or luxury. A gluttony consumption tax, if you will. Want to spend your $12k on Nikes? You're only gonna get $3k of shoes for it. Make $300k a year and live on rice and beans? Keep your money. Want to buy a boat? 20% of that goes to pay for the UBI.
[edit] on the other hand, what I just wrote is probably also a prescription for destroying the world's most successful and productive economies, and the companies that fuel them. But taking a UBI out of income tax is a great way to make more people not want to work. And if Nikes get way too expensive, who knows how that could distort the economy. Maybe it would be better if the government just made some basic rules about minimum wages and work hours and let people fight it out for a buck like they do now. idk.
clort 2 hours ago [-]
Dont forget that with a UBI system, it is not simply that everybody is $12k better off. It needs to be arranged against tax reform so that there is an income level which stays the same. Below that level, you would be better off. Above that level worse.
I'm not using actual proposed values, just an example. Lets choose $100k as the pivot point.
So person earning that currently pays $30k tax, meaning they get take-home of $70k. The new system means they get $12k UBI and tax needs to leave them $48k so they stay at the same salary level. They now pay $52k tax.
That means 52% tax rate, across the board.
The guy who previously earned $20k and paid $2k tax had a take home of $18k. He gets $12k UBI. Now he pays 52% tax on the $20k, so $10.4k. His take home is now $21.6k.
The closer you get to the floor, the better security there is. You can live on the $12k but you are not rich, and nobody goes without.
The $1m high earner should have paid $400k in tax but actually paid $100k because he pays $20k to an accountant. He now gets $12k UBI and pays $520k in tax because income tax rate is flat and the accountant needs to find another way to earn a crust, though he gets UBI, so..
clort 25 minutes ago [-]
sorry my figures were slightly out and too late to edit
the new flat tax rate is 42% and the $20k guy takes home $23.6k
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
I wasn't talking about UBI before but now we are.
The $12k is additive, but the factors that would reduce its value are multiplicative. If prices were to all double (an extreme case) it would still be equivalent to today's $6k. There's no scenario where everyone gets $12k but also the first $12k of everyone's money stops counting.
Sales tax on luxury items isn't a terrible idea, but the problem with relying only on sales tax is that very rich people (the ones who are getting most of the population's money) don't buy a lot, so the money just gets stuck in their accounts forever (or until they decide to buy all of the world's RAM). It can be one prong of a mixed strategy, though.
One part of inflation is driven by the difference between money entering circulation and money leaving it. UBI obviously brings a lot more money into circulation; it's generally assumed that taxes would have to be raised to remove the same amount.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
> If I'm buying a car or a house, and the guy I'm bidding against is getting a $12k check, and so did I, then he ups his offer and I match it so doesn't the price just jump by the same $12k?
Only if something is preventing the market from responding to higher demand by building more cars or housing units rather than raising the unit price. And if that's happening then you're screwed independent of this, because anything that causes ordinary people to have more money would do the same thing. If energy costs went down then people would have the money they didn't spend on electricity and that would cause housing costs to increase.
This is why restrictive zoning rules are very bad.
> I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax.
Sales tax is considered regressive for two reasons. One, it's a flat rate, but that's the thing we want in this case because we're using it as the de facto phase out for the UBI. Two, rich people don't spend as much of their income. But that one has always been a giant fraud because it's really income tax that allows the rich to defer taxes (via unrealized capital gains), and when they do that they don't even pay taxes on the money they spend, since they can borrow against the assets and spend on credit.
So using a consumption tax actually works perfectly well in this case and is even more progressive than the status quo where the rich can avoid taxes entirely.
frutiger 3 hours ago [-]
> they don't even pay taxes on the money they spend, since they can borrow against the assets and spend on credit.
They have to pay taxes on the income/realised gains they use to pay the loan back when it matures. It’s not completely tax free.
AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago [-]
> They have to pay taxes on the income/realised gains they use to pay the loan back when it matures.
No they don't, they just take out another loan. If you have a billion dollars in assets that increases in value by an average of 10% a year and can borrow money at 6% interest, guess how long you can spend anything up to your entire wealth on credit before the recapitalized loan principal catches up to your assets.
noduerme 3 hours ago [-]
Right, so... like yes, leaving net wealth aside, what Elon spends in a year on necessary purchases may be 0.1% of his net income, and I spend maybe 20% of my income, and a person making minimum wage spends 90% of their income, so it's not fair to tax that equally. I'd viscerally like to just tax rims and Nikes more than bread and cheese. But that gets shaky because who really decides what's a luxury good... and the decision can be a bureaucratic corrupt thing that makes or breaks a company.
Here's an idea I just kinda came up with: Maybe instead of what you buy, the first UBIx3 you spend in a year should be sales tax free. After that you pay sales tax which goes back into the UBI. But I guess that means tracking everything everyone buys... which would be a privacy disaster. Okay back to the drawing board.
I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking. Whereas a blanket $12k UBI to everyone would make it just as hard to compete to buy a house as before.
AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago [-]
> Right, so... like yes, leaving net wealth aside, what Elon spends in a year on necessary purchases may be 0.1% of his net income, and I spend maybe 20% of my income, and a person making minimum wage spends 90% of their income, so it's not fair to tax that equally.
Elon is really the boring case because a) it requires the premise that unrealized gains are income (which brings in more sticky problems than you really want) and b) billionaires are over-hyped and the majority of total income is the likes of doctors and law partners, because there are so many more of them than there are of Elons.
But those people actually do spend a significant proportion of their income. Not all on necessities, but what kind of sane tax would tax only necessities?
> I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
Suppose that everyone suddenly has an extra $12,000 to buy housing. Now, to begin with, this isn't actually what happens, because we're not printing the money. Whatever someone receives, someone else is paying in tax. For middle income people this is going to largely cancel out. For lower income people this is replacing SNAP and Medicaid and so on. It's a less dramatic change than it's made out to be.
But never mind that and suppose everybody actually had an extra $12,000/year. At existing prices, more people could now afford to buy a home, right? There is now additional demand for housing. And additional housing can be created by construction companies, who want that additional money. If it costs them $150,000 to build a housing unit and the price is $200,000 then they make $50,000 for each one they build. Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them. Meanwhile $12,000 over 30 years is $360,000. So who is going to pay $560,000 for an existing unit when you can have a new one built for $200,000?
The problem only comes if you have zoning rules that inhibit new units from being built, because then everyone has to outbid each other on the existing stock. But even then it doesn't absorb all of the money, because some people would prefer to spend it on things other than housing.
> And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down
Money doesn't care where you got it. A UBI and a tax credit are equivalent things. And if you don't think so then implement the UBI as a refundable tax credit and your concerns will be addressed, right?
> and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking.
Who do you suppose buys more electricity, a janitorial worker or OpenAI?
SecretDreams 11 hours ago [-]
You're half right. UBI is probably the only path where humanity comes out OK in the not so distant future.
But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.
ThrowawayR2 48 minutes ago [-]
I'd be behind Universal Basic Employment: Any able-bodied person is assigned a job that visibly benefits society, even if something simple like sweeping the sidewalk or visiting the elderly, in exchange for basic food and shelter. If you're getting something from society, you need to give something back; both the left and right agree on that.
noduerme 9 hours ago [-]
I agree with you. People need purpose. Ever owned a Border Collie and spent a couple days without giving it something to do? It's bad for the dog and dangerous to your home.
So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.
simonask 5 hours ago [-]
What's unfathomable to me is that so many people seem to believe that a sense of purpose can only be derived from need.
Humans aren't like that. They don't deprive themselves of activity like a bored dog unless you (who?) give them a job. If you give people their time back, they will fill it out with whatever they actually want to do, and that's freedom.
Conversely, the erosion of free time over the past generation has arguably also eroded the social structures that keep people healthy.
socalgal2 4 hours ago [-]
Humans do seem to be like that. They need something other than complete free time
There's an "epidemic" of people who have nothing to do and for whatever reason can't figure something out
Retiree data also shows finanical freedom and free time often doesn't lead to people figuring out something to do
duskdozer 46 minutes ago [-]
As retirees. One explanation could be the lack of free time and resources over the course of their life prevented them from developing themselves enough to have something to do.
A small parallel is that (for me) a weekend is not enough to do much more than recover from the workweek. But two weeks off is enough to recover and then do some more things. Even then, it would take more time to do things of major significance.
CuriousSkeptic 3 hours ago [-]
Note sure this is a strong counter argument. It not that surprising that a system optimised in a certain direction has trouble accommodating operating modes it hasn’t optimised for.
noduerme 3 hours ago [-]
Humans are all different. Like dogs.
Chasing a ball, professionally, for millions of dollars a year, gives some very rich and famous humans a sense of purpose.
Laying on a beach and surfing may fulfill a sense of purpose for other humans.
Some humans need to solve hard problems.
Some humans need to create something original.
And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose. Does work, the need to work, give them some? I'm not a Calvinist, but I have to live in a world where most people are like that. So if they don't have some need to do something, idle hands are the devil's plaything, and no good can come from the idleness. Just drugs and dissolute degeneracy. Take it from a creative alcoholic who struggles with the question of purpose myself, and finds some light between music, painting, hard work I have to do and my better angels.
That's what you're having a hard time fathoming, because you think everyone is like you; imbued with meaning and purpose that they will find. They are not. Even those of us who are, or were, don't always remain so.
But need? Need wakes you up.
The crush. The urgency. The do or die. The death-defying situation. Sinking or swimming. Here is what brings out the initiative and the creativity and the purpose in people.
I used to believe exactly what you said when I was 17. If we didn't have to work we'd all use our free time to make amazing art and poetry and contribute to humanity.
Look around, man. I know a lot of people who don't have to work. Half of them are homeless and the other half are millionaires. You know what none of them are doing with their free time?? Anything resembling something with a purpose.
tomjen3 3 hours ago [-]
Florence Nightingale had a permanent subsidy from her very wealthy father. (Essentially IBI). She chose to do something with her life. But there were thousands of times the number of people with wealthy parents than there are famous people. That is because most people really won't do anything special with themselves, unless they have to.
Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it.
I also don't believe that we have eroded free time over the last generation. As one example, many now have a robot vacuum cleaner, which frees whatever time they previously spent vacuuming. They may be spending a lot of their time on things, but as long as those are things by choice, it's still free time.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
Why would the billionaires do UBI instead of Running Man (latest one)?
Not a joke.
All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.
noduerme 9 hours ago [-]
Because if there's one thing billionaires should be scared of, it's billions of people suddenly becoming estranged from the economy. Having governments pump money into the consumer demand side becomes a no-brainer once you're faced with deflationary depression and mass unemployment. Your investors then get taxed to give UBI to workers to spend money to keep your sales up. It's probably the one form of wealth redistribution that on balance would actually benefit billionaires.
Lio 6 hours ago [-]
Billionaires don’t worry. Not in the main.
We’re going through a series of ever record breaking heat waves where the only thing you can be sure of is that it will be worse next year.
They’re still pushing fossil fuels and blocking attempts to replace them with cheaper alternatives.
They’re too focused on who got the biggest yacht to care.
inigyou 47 minutes ago [-]
Why would they worry when we're all content to lay back and die? When was the last time someone murdered a billionaire? It almost never happens. They have no need to worry.
LogicFailsMe 4 hours ago [-]
Sooooo...
Circular financing???
noduerme 3 hours ago [-]
What else had capital been doing for the last 200 years?! It works when the financing loop is not zero-sum. It only leads to catastrophe when you get too successful and start to blow bubbles or invade other countries.
lazide 8 hours ago [-]
That assumes a degree of forethought and worry about consequences that the current set of billionaires seems to be studiously avoiding - along with half of everyone else, near as I can tell.
generic92034 6 hours ago [-]
Why worry if you can have an army of AI controlled combat robo dogs and drones? /s
Now, times are becoming "interesting" again, unfortunately.
inigyou 46 minutes ago [-]
Remove the /s. This is the main purpose of robot dogs and drones.
generic92034 41 minutes ago [-]
You know, they could also be used to keep invaders out of Ukraine. But for sure, that is not what billionaires have in mind for them.
Y-bar 3 hours ago [-]
I’m quite sure Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Jared Kushner, Sam Altman et al are unironically thinking that.
watwut 7 hours ago [-]
They dont give a shit about angry masses. Nor is the angry mass a risk to them. They have money for arms.
simonask 5 hours ago [-]
The moat around billionaires isn't money, it's the political apathy of the American working class, which somehow believes itself to not exist.
Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but it feels like you guys could just not.
noduerme 3 hours ago [-]
Idk. If I were a billionaire I'd be terrified, and not about simply finding a way to save my own skin. It would seem glaringly obvious that things can't go on in a way where 99.99% of people hate you.... I mean, not that you have to give away all your money, but a self-preservation instinct would demand you at least look like you're doing something more than raping the universe.
I don't hate billionaires. They basically never cross my mind. All credit to those guys for doing what they did. I'm not personally jealous and I find the anger and jealousy at them to be petty and kind of stupid in a way that reflects badly on the person expressing it. Most of the billionaires in the tech sector didn't inherit that kind of wealth, and I respect the ones who earned what they earned. I wouldn't trade my life for theirs and I don't feel left out because I don't have private jets or islands. Whining you don't have a jet or an island is childish... grow a garden and get a dog, don't be jealous. Comparing what you have to someone else's possessions is a basic fault that makes a lot of people miserable for no reason, unable to appreciate what they have. Appreciate what you have. Billionaires can have everything you ever dreamed of and still be much more miserable than you. Good for them if they're happy, I say.
I'm just also saying that if I were in their shoes I wouldn't think the current situation was tenable.
taneq 9 hours ago [-]
> The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed.
I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?
hirako2000 5 hours ago [-]
Home charging is an opportunity.
Mandate a monthly routing check by a certified specialist. You can sign up for a yearly commitment, 12 visits for just $899. A no brainer when a visit costs minimum $149.
Failure to comply can result in a fine up to $3,000 and up to 6 months in prison.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
The IAEA will be up your ass right now just for running a small nuclear reactor in your basement. WTF.
Can't make your own power, it's illegal to grow your own tobacco, what's next? Sewage bills?!
jakelazaroff 11 hours ago [-]
As a New Jersey native (the single remaining state that still mandates gas station attendants) I have spent my entire life convinced this is sour grapes from other states. Why would you want to leave your warm cozy car in the winter to pump your gas?!
hattmall 10 hours ago [-]
You're not wrong really, it's just a luxury most people aren't familiar with. My mom would always only go to the 1 or 2 stations in our town that advertised "Full Service" now it's not even a thing at all anywhere around here. At one we even had an account so didn't even have to bother with paying. The attendant would put air in the tires, check oil, top up fluids and if you wanted go grab you a snack. Last one went away around early 2000s.
noduerme 9 hours ago [-]
My mom did that too. She got an oil check and wiper fluid filled up, and gave a nice tip to the attendant. And that was in Los Angeles where there was definitely no weather-related reason to stay in your car. But my mom was old and I think it was a status thing, too.
On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.
The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.
sbiru93 6 hours ago [-]
In Italy this is still a thing. Almost all city gas stations are "multi": If there are 4 pumps usually 2 are self-services, and the other 2 are with the operator that, if you require, it does check oil, clean windshield etc.
serial_dev 9 hours ago [-]
> The attendant would put air in the tires, check oil, top up fluids
So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).
radiator 51 minutes ago [-]
I think you should check your tires more often.
ricardobayes 7 hours ago [-]
In Dubai and other gulf states, you can order gas to your home and they fill your car up in your driveway.
noduerme 5 hours ago [-]
Must be nice to be in the 10% of the population who are citizens. Apartheid labor so so sweet.
ileonichwiesz 6 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that the plot of an episode of Always Sunny?
ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's also a YC startup called Yoshi from 2016, I wonder how often those two overlap?
SoftTalker 10 hours ago [-]
Do they check your oil and coolant, and wash your windows? That is what Full Service used to mean at a gas station.
duskdozer 43 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
vkou 9 hours ago [-]
Not doing the strike would have had similar job losses. People who have nothing to lose can at least spread the pain out.
dyauspitr 12 hours ago [-]
Collective union Luddite opposition is one part of why there is so much of a plebeian tier pushback against unions, in the very group that should be fighting for unions with their lives. That and right wing propaganda of course.
montebicyclelo 5 hours ago [-]
Cool doc, thanks for sharing. Amazingly, a quick search brought up one of the articles they were shown setting (from the few words mentioned):
Thank you. That was emotional, which is funny because it was a decade before I was.
pj_mukh 17 hours ago [-]
Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.
lelanthran 8 hours ago [-]
> I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution,
That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"
They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.
pj_mukh 4 hours ago [-]
I’m sorry this wasn’t obvious in my comment but I meant AI engineers not software engineers (and not the AI capital owners either)
Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.
AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.
tonyhart7 7 hours ago [-]
You will get downvoted for saying the truth
replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required
back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max
microtonal 5 hours ago [-]
From what I have heard from universities I have contacts at, enrollments have also plummeted. We might not have enough juniors anymore to train to check the slop machines.
I think the outcomes are very hard to predict, it depends a lot on both economical factors, technological factors (how much will LLMs still improve beyond benchmaxxing), societal factors, etc.
It's like the early internet where there was the whole gamut of opinions between 'its a nothingburger' to 'it's the democratic town square of the world'. In the end, it was neither.
Whoever gets it right will be called a visionary, but realistically nobody had a clue.
J_Shelby_J 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lelanthran 6 hours ago [-]
> Lmao, any one else in favor of adding a coding test to be able to post in the subreddit to keep these non-hackers out
You think I'm a non-hacker?
viccis 7 hours ago [-]
I've actually thought about creating (maybe ironically with AI) a browser extension that just filters every submission about or clearly created with AI out. I spend all day being asked to review AI PR slop by coworkers who I suspect to be working multiple jobs, "creating" PRs that they don't review. They have AI review my comments and Slack me follow up questions on them. It's a constant drain on my productivity, and that of my coworkers who use AI appropriately. So I just hate to log onto here, the place where I go to read people who know what they're talking about describe their pet (or prod) projects, and see it full of AI discussion like this or "Show HN" with something they didn't make.
mac-mc 7 hours ago [-]
It's very similar to being an EM, and if you think EMs are useless, the vast majority EMs have decided it's not worth their time to educate you, and the few who have tried to gently probably went over your head.
lelanthran 6 hours ago [-]
> It's very similar to being an EM, and if you think EMs are useless,
I don't think EMs are useless, I just think that you are naive if you think that LLMs can't do the EM work as well.
sph 6 hours ago [-]
WTF is an EM? Please expand your acronyms.
0123456789ABCDE 6 hours ago [-]
prolly Engineering Manager
Muromec 17 hours ago [-]
(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?
lovich 13 hours ago [-]
There are sizeable camps for both those opinions.
Lerc 11 hours ago [-]
I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part.
I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'
Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.
The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.
kakacik 7 hours ago [-]
There are no white collar workers around us excited with AI. Bureaucrats, doctors, bankers, none.
Yes everybody sees it as useful tool, and everybody damn well understands in medium term their work is at huge risk. That rolls over any emotion around 'oh what a nice new toy to use'.
thaumasiotes 6 hours ago [-]
> I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part.
What do you think people are talking about when they refer to "the singularity"?
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
"Fired up" as in optimistic about the future and using it to build cool new things with it.
...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.
pj_mukh 16 hours ago [-]
>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah"
I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.
No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.
I think it gets lost in a translation somewhere. If it's boring technology, why be excited about it? I respect boring technologies and don't believe in the end of the world christian scams, either, so I'm really confused here.
It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.
I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.
pj_mukh 13 hours ago [-]
>> If it's boring technology, why be excited about it?
Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications
Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.
>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something
Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.
jakebol 16 hours ago [-]
Advancement of normal technologies can bring about profound conflict, I feel that is one of the main takeaways from the history of the Industrial Revolution.
krapp 15 hours ago [-]
The conflict in that case (and, I think AI) came about not from the technology or its advancement, but the use of that technology for class warfare by capitalists.
I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.
I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
>The conflict in that case (and, I think AI) came about not from the technology or its advancement, but the use of that technology for class warfare by capitalists.
Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?
11 hours ago [-]
globalnode 12 hours ago [-]
defeating fascism should be tackled as a project called "defeating fascism" head on, rather than as "defeating their tools". ai is just such a generic tool that can be used in all sorts of ways to solve problems that are traditionally difficult to solve, thats why we're seeing it used everywhere right now. maybe once we have had our self inflicted extinction event we will put more care into teaching survivors of the importance of working together and all the other good things
ben_w 15 hours ago [-]
"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are.
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
Animats 9 hours ago [-]
> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models.
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
tjmtjmtjm 15 hours ago [-]
> LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
ben_w 4 hours ago [-]
LLMs can build their own code or close enough, and are used for AI work directly (both from what METR study shows and from reports I've read from the bigger companies themselves), but this is not what I meant as there isn't much point for anyone outside the bleeding edge companies to do this given open models exist.
I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real.
Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research.
* The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.
Insanity 12 hours ago [-]
It's not true indeed.
iwontberude 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
ben_w 14 hours ago [-]
They want to get paid enough to pay human models.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
bonoboTP 13 hours ago [-]
Get paid enough by who and for what reason? Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
ben_w 4 hours ago [-]
> Get paid enough by who and for what reason?
By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point.
> Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation:
they're forced by economics
bonoboTP 3 hours ago [-]
Is "economics" some god of the pantheon or how can he force things?
No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
Seems to me like you're being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/)[1][2] is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.[3][4]
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as the basic elements of economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Individual agents may include households, firms, buyers, and sellers.
- literally the opening of the Wikipedia page
bonoboTP 35 minutes ago [-]
If you want to sell something, you need a buyer. This is my point.
randallsquared 3 hours ago [-]
"Economics" is like gravity: it doesn't dictate your goals, but you can't ignore it, and trying to pretend it doesn't exist means your aircraft will not work.
35 minutes ago [-]
imtringued 6 hours ago [-]
You think customers are so cheap they will refuse to pay the few cents per article for a proper online listing but somehow will be willing to pay tens of dollars for the mystery article itself?
eru 7 hours ago [-]
> The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.
ricardobayes 6 hours ago [-]
We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet.
I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker.
I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.
varjag 3 hours ago [-]
It's all a function of cost. If AI surgeon has 3% worse outcomes but works at 1/30th of the cost 24/7 there is no force in the Universe that would hinder adoption.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
As a first order approximation perhaps; but consider false positives vs false negatives, and that "3% worse outcomes" has many possible measures, e.g. 3% of cases going catastrophically wrong may bump up insurance (or externalised social) costs by a lot more than 3%.
We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.
thaumasiotes 6 hours ago [-]
> But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities.
The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
> Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required
With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc.
>I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time.
You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.
After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.
And so on. Until every single job is gone.
ben_w 5 hours ago [-]
I consider that implicit in what I wrote, perhaps explicit given I wrote about LLMs writing AI.
My surprise was the ordering.
worik 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is a tool.
"Normal"?
It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.
But:
AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired
pj_mukh 16 hours ago [-]
"AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired"
This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.
Our CEO generously offered generous 1% yearly salary adjustment to the trade unions, an RTO mandate and a plan to reduce the number of employees by 20% in a few years, despite having record earnings. It's a bluff of course and the unions will dress that clowhouse down a bit, but they weren't so brazen in the years before.
generic92034 5 hours ago [-]
Good for the employees, they are organized in a union. This is not so typical for IT workers, at least. Meaning, in most other settings the clown show can continue for quite a while.
tbrownaw 11 hours ago [-]
> In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution.
Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.
pmontra 8 hours ago [-]
About increasing welfare, I am not sure about that. Workers pay taxes, companies not much. Welfare is often paid by taxes, especially for people that can't find a job. If more AI leads to less workers, than less taxes and less welfare.
mlsu 10 hours ago [-]
The class you’re thinking about is not made up of workers.
esafak 17 hours ago [-]
Tell us more.
aaron695 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
quijoteuniv 7 hours ago [-]
Isn’t it better to find out that a lot of corporate work may not have much intrinsic meaning now, rather than just before you die? At least then you get a chance to do something about it.
It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.
chii 7 hours ago [-]
> much intrinsic meaning now
work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.
Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.
don_esteban 3 hours ago [-]
You know, convincing the masses to 'work super hard' is a good trick.
Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.
Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.
Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...
Matumio 6 hours ago [-]
No, work is supposed to be at least useful for somebody. Ideally for the society you live in, at least indirectly. If you are wasting your work time, you are also wasting you life time in the same breath. Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice, if it was the highest paying job? No, because that's a bullshit job.
chii 3 hours ago [-]
> Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice
if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.
Matumio 57 minutes ago [-]
Some people earn a million per day just from passive income. They could make you turn leaves all day long just for a quick laugh, and you would be unable to decide if this was useful. (They probably won't do that, I agree, but they won't think about wasting your time by accident, given how cheap it is.)
layer8 54 minutes ago [-]
The FIRE model you’re arguing for isn’t realistic for most people, and besides that, spending your youth “working super hard” on a job you find meaningless will will make you a different person compared to having spent that time doing something meaningful.
And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.
Jtarii 5 hours ago [-]
It would probably be better to make less money and do something worthwhile.
Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.
kaffekaka 7 hours ago [-]
So, the plan is to work super hard until you are ~40, only to die in a car accident at 35?
Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.
testerius 6 hours ago [-]
I think it doesn't matter when you died.
You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything.
You "die" when you go to sleep.
So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.
customguy 5 hours ago [-]
Labour is having to eat and clip your fingernails, having to sleep and repair the roof every year. All animals have to do it, humans always will have to do at least a bit of that, producing things just for them to be consumed. But work is building a world, and of course it does have to have meaning. An animal that won't breed in captivity doesn't want to survive under all circumstances. Sometimes even "nature" just says you know what, if I can only live as someone else's furniture, why live? Burnout is probably a similar mechanism.
"the remaining time"
Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?
Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.
[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.
ericyd 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think losing faith in the value of your job is the same a losing your job due to automation.
troyvit 13 hours ago [-]
That's a good point. I got to hang out with a printer in Slovenia for a few hours in February and your comment made me realize how deep and strong his faith is despite the changes that automation has brought to printing.
He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.
crossroadsguy 1 hours ago [-]
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
In the UK as weaving was mechanised it lead to huge upheavals and only narrowly avoided civil war. It changed the face of the country completely.
zuzululu 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 6 hours ago [-]
We've banned this account for continually posting inflammatory comments and ignoring our requests to stop. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
luqtas 13 hours ago [-]
> impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes
so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
follow_the_mone 17 hours ago [-]
We remind people that Noema Magazine is owned by Berggruen Institute:
You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
Aurornis 15 hours ago [-]
What does “AI booster” mean? From this comment and username I thought you meant they were funded by AI companies or doing marketing for them, but the most I see is that they filmed some interviews with filmmakers about AI?
The about page says this:
> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.
The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?
Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”
nbush 10 hours ago [-]
From the "About the author" page, regarding the author of this article:
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
I'd guess it just means they failed some moral purity test.
hbbbcbbcx 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wyre 13 hours ago [-]
> networking frontier technologists
Means they are invested in AI companies
> shape the next narrative
With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI
Muromec 17 hours ago [-]
Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7
overgard 15 hours ago [-]
Thank you! HN doesn't usually do specialty/novelty accounts but I've very excited about this one.
15 hours ago [-]
nephihaha 14 hours ago [-]
> You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.
senordevnyc 13 hours ago [-]
Oh excellent, I appreciate you pointing that out. I love Harari’s work.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't really matter since he thinks we're both useless eaters.
epistasis 16 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, any funding source invalidates all the arguments....
Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?
I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
Grombobulous 16 hours ago [-]
The funding source is incredibly important when it is relevant to the content of the article.
This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.
This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.
Aurornis 14 hours ago [-]
> This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on
Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?
The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.
I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.
Grombobulous 10 hours ago [-]
The founder of the institute that owns this publication is a billionaire who is very opinionated on the subjects that this article touches upon.
He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”
In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.
To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.
13 hours ago [-]
neetle 16 hours ago [-]
Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”
fitzroy 15 hours ago [-]
Timeless tactic!
"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999.
(edit: added link)
I remember that. It was export banned, wasn't it? A gigaflop being enough for a cruise missile visual guidance or something like that?
Spoom 15 hours ago [-]
I remember those days. Lots of software was also export restricted, but the Internet being what it is, I doubt those restrictions mattered much to folks who wanted effective encryption, who would likely just say they were in the US.
robotnikman 14 hours ago [-]
This time its the entire white collar industry though. The scale of job displacement will be at a scale never seen before. If there are no societal safety nets in place for this then I can see things going south quickly
sysworld 11 hours ago [-]
We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays.
Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
tcrenshaw 11 hours ago [-]
What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
At least here in America, our politicians lose their shit if they see someone getting money without working for it (as if politicians don't already get paid for doing almost nothing). And they use scary words and rhetoric like communism and Marxism, yknow the stuff we fought wars against.
What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat.
I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.
pixelready 17 hours ago [-]
The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down.
If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
woopah 15 hours ago [-]
Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
RivieraKid 16 hours ago [-]
> UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down
If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.
I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.
hungryhobbit 11 hours ago [-]
You have a distorted definition of UBI. The B stands for "basic", as in "not dying in the street of starvation" and a "a roof over your head".
It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.
RivieraKid 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't imply that this is how I define UBI. Look at the exact wording I used.
ben_w 15 hours ago [-]
> If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.
This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.
goatlover 11 hours ago [-]
You mean some redistribution from those with massive capital to those whose careers have been disrupted. There will always be people who don't want to work or can't. It's better for society if they live comfortably than end up on the street or in prison.
la64710 5 hours ago [-]
No UBI is taxing the surplus productivity achieved by replacing humans with robots or AI AND redistributing it to all the citizens.
RivieraKid 4 hours ago [-]
AI is just a technology, nothing fundamentally different from what has been happening for centuries.
Once AI is able to replace all human work, that's a new situation. But this is not happening in the next 20+ years.
lotsofpulp 15 hours ago [-]
>UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.
That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.
RivieraKid 3 hours ago [-]
Free public services are similar to UBI but have little effect on the incentive to work because they don't provide all of the basic needs.
ben_w 15 hours ago [-]
Your list is the "from" part, UBI could be the "to" depending on how people choose to live when they don't need to work.
fzeroracer 14 hours ago [-]
> UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.
If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.
RivieraKid 3 hours ago [-]
Pension systems don't have a huge effect on the incentive to work. They have some effect but not enough to collapse the system. But we could possibly see a collapse in the future in a country like Italy.
By the way, I support some level of rich-to-poor redistribution, not sure what's the optimal level but to get a reasonable range of where the optimum could be, look at the top 20 countries.
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
There's a difference between a plan someone worked and paid into and one where you never have to work and get to free ride on someone who does
But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers
1 hours ago [-]
retropragma 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
equality_1138 17 hours ago [-]
We never talk about social welfare programs? Odd, I hear chatter all the time. How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
> How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?
Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?
equality_1138 13 hours ago [-]
I thought my previous comment made that obvious. And unlike in the private sector, mismanagement in government is a given.
greenchair 16 hours ago [-]
maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?
com 16 hours ago [-]
Can you provide any links that show that every time it’s tried, it fails?
Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.
Can you list more failures?
pitched 15 hours ago [-]
This link says very explicitly that it did show people were discouraged from working, making the experiment obviously a failure.
> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.
AshamedBadger56 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but neither of those outcomes sound like failures? They sound like a net positive for society. New mothers get to spend more time with their children, which has a ton of societal benefits, and teenaged boys decided to study more, and become more educated, something that also helps society out a lot. I admittedly didn't read the entire link yet, but both of those sound to me like a positive outcome of UBI, or at least neutral.
pitched 15 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you understood. I find the disconnect between the summary above and the quote below really funny. Almost as funny as explaining the joke here!
dag100 5 hours ago [-]
Really, many jokes of this nature have to be signalled out-of-band somehow due to Poe's law (particularly applicable in this case). I wouldn't be surprised if a non-negligible number of users here actually held this view (due to a variety of reasons and justifications perhaps, but nevertheless still possessing such a perspective).
14 hours ago [-]
michaelhoney 14 hours ago [-]
you will need to provide evidence for that assertion
worik 16 hours ago [-]
When? Where?
messe 16 hours ago [-]
It has never been tried.
Remind us what the U stands for?
TacticalCoder 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
azan_ 13 hours ago [-]
Communist countries are opposite of UBI by design! You are actually expected to work and work hard and freeloaders are punished. Of course work is extremely inefficient in communist systems and this system leads to poverty, but thinking that communist countries have anything to do with UBI is just dumb.
cindyllm 9 hours ago [-]
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DaSHacka 15 hours ago [-]
Then it will never happen regardless, let alone the fact that any attempts to do as such will collapse before reaching "universal" status
elmer2 17 hours ago [-]
"If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down."
This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.
A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
pixelready 16 hours ago [-]
So I’ve gotten this retort (i.e. threat of starvation being the only valid motivator) from a few folks in person as well, and I always feel like it’s them telling on themselves more than the truism it’s presented as.
Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.
Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?
Xirdus 16 hours ago [-]
> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.
dwedge 15 hours ago [-]
The American system existing is a travesty both because of the struggles it gives Americans but also because it's used as a comparison to make the European systems look good. The NHS in the UK is an expensive bureaucratic nightmare and doesn't come anywhere near to performing as it should (for instance a recent government boasted cutting the waiting list by a high number, but they accomplished it by removing people that had been waiting for too long). It costs a lot of tax but any criticism of it generally gets met with "would you prefer the US system?" as though it's the only other option.
I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.
ndiddy 8 hours ago [-]
To compare the US and UK: In the US, the life expectancy is 76.5 years for males and 81.4 years for females. Annual healthcare spending is $14,885 per capita. In the UK, the life expectancy is 79.1 years for males and 83.0 years for females. Annual healthcare spending is $6,747 per capita. Even if the UK system is bad, it seems like the US system is much worse if they pay more than twice as much for poorer outcomes.
CaptWorld 7 hours ago [-]
I think you have to account for multiple factors like Americans are generally unhealthy people, the people have better access to the top of the line medical technology, people actually spend and consume more compared to the EU. This blog post explains a lot more.
In most countries with universal healthcare, the universal healthcare provider plays a major role in preventive medicine, nudging people towards healthier lifestyles and influencing government policy on a wide variety of topics, such as food standards, consumption taxation, traffic laws, or pollution regulation. Because it's in their interests to do so, because a healthier population saves them money.
Is there the same motivation to help people live healthy lifestyles in the American healthcare system? Are there any lobby groups with the kind of influence and reach as a universal healthcare provider?
exogenousdata 16 hours ago [-]
“This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.”
Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.
The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?
gustavus 16 hours ago [-]
I mean we've got multiple generational families that have been living on council estates all their lives and raising the next generation to do the same at the same time the NHS is collapsing all around, so there's that example.
patmorgan23 12 hours ago [-]
Do you have any citations, or just your assertions that this happens?
TheOtherHobbes 16 hours ago [-]
Tax payers don't fund governments, governments fund tax payers. Taxes are there to encourage certain economic activities and discourage others.
Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.
Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.
Not for long, anyway.
pitched 15 hours ago [-]
I think taxes predates that by a lot and probably had more to do with feeding management.
Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.
deadlast2 5 hours ago [-]
There are lots of countries that have a form of this and survive. Almost every country in Europe has a social welfare system and free healthcare for instance. I
jjav 12 hours ago [-]
> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).
bothers 7 hours ago [-]
>I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.
pzo 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm too pessimistic but i doubt how this can work out worldwide. It can work out maybe for some few wealthy countries but in this AI revolutions most likely we will have only 2 winners: USA and China.
Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.
bojan 16 hours ago [-]
Which is why I still think that the only way forward is that the EU becomes a country of its own. I'm aware that's deeply unpopular, partially due to The forrogn influence, but thr alternative is catastrophic - stagnation and letting US, China and Russia dictate our way of life.
kilroy123 15 hours ago [-]
I, too, have come to this realization. But boy, oh boy, do Europeans get disgusted by the idea. (My partner is European)
jackvalentine 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve never even thought about this - what does the EU get as a country that it can’t get with its current structure?
shimman 16 hours ago [-]
What does winning even mean for the USA here? I'm not going to benefit if OpenAI or Anthropic become trillion dollar companies, and I sure as fuck won't benefit when more myopic business leaders become billionaires that have some of the most anti-human ideas that decide they want more control of society.
Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?
80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.
RealityVoid 17 hours ago [-]
I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet.
The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
Tarq0n 17 hours ago [-]
That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
>It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists.
We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.
Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.
The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.
Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.
Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
Earw0rm 6 hours ago [-]
Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns.
Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.
National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
It has always been a type of propaganda. Always. Journalism was always low status among actual authors, novelists and poets. It was considered selling out already in the 19th century. The sort of thing that pays bills but requires compromise.
barrenko 5 hours ago [-]
We did, and we have our public spaces (public in the non-physical sense here) to show for it.
worik 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, mostly true
But there is still journalism.
* Propublica
* The Economist
* The Guardian
* 404 Media
Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
15 hours ago [-]
nephihaha 14 hours ago [-]
The Guardian and the Economist both have their issues. For one they represent insulated groups of people, who focus on some talking points but not others.
paulryanrogers 8 hours ago [-]
Associated Press
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
The British papers tend to feed off AP, AFP and Reuters. The Guardian tends to specialise in opinion pieces rather than its own investigative journalism.
But to be fair the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer did score an impressive scoop last year with Chloe Hadjimatheou's investigation of the "Salt Path" scandal
georgeburdell 16 hours ago [-]
You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid
anovikov 6 hours ago [-]
If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.
prmoustache 3 hours ago [-]
It really depends about the income and debt.
If a $20000/y a job is deemed unrelevant, chances is that one might easily find similar or better in a totally different area.
If a $200000/y job is deemed unrelevant and is lost, and one has mortgage payments they can't pay with a $50000 or $100000 job, they have a big problem because selling that house might become difficult when all other $200000/y workers will try to sell their house and move within the same period and the housing market crashes. So you can ruin the economy of a large area quite quickly.
So a bit of anticipation is useful.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
You have to do something that is truly effective and productive, otherwise you live a fake life, you live in a zoo, you live a performance.
If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.
tjr225 8 hours ago [-]
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harimau777 14 hours ago [-]
Sure, as long as the new jobs pay at least as much as the old jobs and society is willing to pay for the retraining. In that case I imagine there would be lots of people willing to reskill.
pydry 15 hours ago [-]
>I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant"
I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.
Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.
Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.
rayiner 13 hours ago [-]
> The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.
realharo 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's because back then it just didn't affect enough people at the same time.
They weren't too big to fail.
jleyank 13 hours ago [-]
Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.
bentcorner 11 hours ago [-]
Deleting career fields in and of itself is not a problem with technology, but when it's like the eye of sauron scouring workplaces and snapping jobs away (pardon the mixed universes), it starts to become a little alarming.
University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?
My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
harvey9 3 hours ago [-]
The industry may be getting close to an NS-5 but the physical complexity of nursing means we would really prefer a Nexus-6.
Rumple22Stilk 2 hours ago [-]
There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com
port11 4 hours ago [-]
The author doesn’t really address the question either. Even if I agree with them that work isn’t all that important, paying your bills and eating food is, so… ahm.
JackFr 11 hours ago [-]
Give the author a break he is hopefully coming to the realization that your job is not where you should find meaning. If your in a role where it might, some doctors, some teachers, etc. great for you -- that is a perk much of the world does not have.
A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
armada651 9 hours ago [-]
> The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.
teeray 17 hours ago [-]
> look at what happened to printers… I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
largbae 16 hours ago [-]
Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.
copperx 15 hours ago [-]
That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.
nephihaha 14 hours ago [-]
The other fairy tale is when the workers rise up and create utopia. Infallible Marx didn't anticipate cybernetics.
goatlover 11 hours ago [-]
Or unions, New Deals and regulations until the upper class figures out how to undo all that with decades of propaganda and buying off politicians.
IncreasePosts 16 hours ago [-]
The author "is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company".
MichaelZuo 17 hours ago [-]
Obviously there is some latent risk in choosing a career anywhere, that the demand disappears. There can’t literally be zero risk of structural demand changes.
nradov 17 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure there's literally zero risk of structural demand changes for law enforcement. Defunding the police isn't going to happen and there's no plausible path toward automating most of the work. Security cameras and robots can only do a fraction of what will be needed.
slashdev 15 hours ago [-]
Police robots and drones.
You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.
It would get officers out of harms way.
Not imminent but not zero risk either.
barrenko 7 hours ago [-]
We've already defunded the police, and you can see the ramifications all over the world.
yoz-y 15 hours ago [-]
A camera with a gun on it can go a long way though.
Rendello 17 hours ago [-]
A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.
notsmarthuh 17 hours ago [-]
The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.
elmer2 17 hours ago [-]
"with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again"
Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
underlipton 16 hours ago [-]
Survivorship bias. You know what's as bad as a criminal record for your career prospects, in America? Being a black man. Having autism. Being over 50. Being a single mother. Being an immigrant without local credentials. Having a long employment gap. Having social anxiety. Having a physical disability. On and on.
The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
soperj 17 hours ago [-]
what were you doing in 2012?
notsmarthuh2 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gamblor956 16 hours ago [-]
The job market doesn't want employees, or business owners, it wants slaves.
I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming.
Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff.
If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was.
Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
shimman 16 hours ago [-]
Community college programs are extremely cheap, and state schools are a thing. It's also not unheard of for any state workers to get lower tuition costs as a benefit.
You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?
Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
tayo42 17 hours ago [-]
I've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.
dinkumthinkum 6 hours ago [-]
If you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.
johnnyanmac 4 hours ago [-]
If I could afford to go back to school for 4 years, I wouldn't be worried about finding a job right now. Besides, I hear entry level people are hit the worst right now. I better be spending half my time in college networking if I want a job. But.. Why not do that for my current field at that point?
dinkumthinkum 6 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.
analog31 15 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I'm a musician. Talking pictures. Then piracy, and a few things in between. Now music is either a spectacle, is carried out in private, or as a labor of love by people like myself who have some other means of support.
Support that AI is now threatening.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.
analog31 13 hours ago [-]
Indeed, all I do is live performance.
Recording is too much work. ;-)
bloody_bocker 6 hours ago [-]
I also am recently coming to realization that live music is best experience, followed by recorded live music (plenty of sessions on YT that sound gorgeous and have better performances than 'normal' recordings do.
17 hours ago [-]
Foobar8568 15 hours ago [-]
Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?
analog31 14 hours ago [-]
I had some level of faith as a scientist. Today, I expect that scientists will be replaced by faith in AI before we're replaced by AI. Either one is a threat to my job.
forshaper 14 hours ago [-]
It seems like the occupations that are easiest to have faith in are generally occupations that are paid less.
tbrownaw 11 hours ago [-]
Probably clergy?
stock_toaster 5 hours ago [-]
Plumbers? With so much bullshit in the world these days, I assume plumbers will remain important. ;)
sandworm101 15 hours ago [-]
Lawyers
bonoboTP 13 hours ago [-]
HN moment. The median lawyer isn't who you think it is.
sandworm101 13 hours ago [-]
HN moment. A not-small number of commenters here are those lawyers.
api 13 hours ago [-]
I used to be a libertarian-capitalist type. The big thing that disabused me of this idea is that I also love technology and progress, and I'm not a sociopath.
I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:
(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.
(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.
The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.
I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.
AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.
Edit: I can think of a third option:
(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.
I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
12998175 17 hours ago [-]
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la6479 17 hours ago [-]
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lezojeda 15 hours ago [-]
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1bpp 17 hours ago [-]
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DragonStrength 14 hours ago [-]
My grandfather’s career was in decline before my father hit adulthood (autoworker, electronics), my father’s career (nuclear control systems engineer) was in decline from the day he established it, and I’ve never expected my new-fangled software career to be there for the next generation, but there’s a rhyme probably.
I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.
marginalia_nu 23 hours ago [-]
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that.
I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.
If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.
It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.
All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.
This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.
Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
Karrot_Kream 13 hours ago [-]
Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair.
I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.
In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.
This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.
"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
JohnMakin 11 hours ago [-]
I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could point you to a ton of studies, but this post makes me a bit nauseous.
I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.
like particularly this:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.
Karrot_Kream 8 hours ago [-]
You are being uncharitable. In fact, you're demonstrating the dynamics I spoke of in my post.
I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.
In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.
strangegecko 2 hours ago [-]
FWIW, I had a similar impression of your comment as JohnMakin.
> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on
If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.
If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.
necklesspen 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not the person you're responding to - but I do too wonder what you meant. I would surely think that among friends it's not going to be the case that a depressed person soapboxing is met with the response you describe.
I think I would agree with you if it's somewhat of a wider circle - acquaintances perhaps - that I'd expect the average response to play out as you described. But also perhaps the term soapboxing could mean something different to me - I assumed because you mention a depressive person it would be more personal, but if it's like political venting then yeah I would probably also agree with you.
CoastalCoder 2 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, I think I understood your original post as you intended it.
(Just mentioning this so you know the wording wasn't universally confusing.)
dayglo 1 hours ago [-]
The devil is always in the detail with these sorts of online disagreements.
Let’s say you have a friend who is always miserable, always needs support, and turns every gathering into a therapy session for them and their problem. Let’s say you’ve been friends with them for say, fifteen years. Nothing has helped.
They never go and get therapy, they never go and do any exercise, they constantly do the same things over and over and still expect support.
Wouldn’t you stop wanting to hear them talk? Maybe even stop being their friend ?
What’s the limit ?
BloondAndDoom 7 hours ago [-]
As someone who has been in the industry over 25+ hands down this is the worst period of being online.
There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one.
Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.
josh_p 13 hours ago [-]
You mention the election cycle and things getting worse.
I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.
And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.
It all feels wrong.
Foobar8568 4 hours ago [-]
I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world.
And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck?
Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russian asset who is using the constitution as toilet paper. At this stage, just turn directly to a fascist state and stop pretending.
MarkusQ 23 hours ago [-]
"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year."
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
geraneum 17 hours ago [-]
Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.
MarkusQ 15 hours ago [-]
Who's making money off our misery exactly?
I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).
But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?
geraneum 4 hours ago [-]
We, developers/tech-employees (safe to assume since we’re on HN) are the “entire class of workers” that the article is talking about. The premise is losing faith in the future of our profession. Which is something that’s openly advertised to the investors by AI companies and more importantly, openly discussed.
> But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot.
That’s a curious one. I think it’d be healthier if you reflect on why you perceive it that way.
pzo 8 hours ago [-]
Short sellers earn the most when company they bet against is crashing.
On the other hand investors benefit when they competitors are crashing.
For many labor is just expensive cost running company - I can see how some people salivate
vinyl7 14 hours ago [-]
Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies
MarkusQ 12 hours ago [-]
Right, that was in my list. That's a clear case of the misery being incidental / collateral damage.
s1artibartfast 14 hours ago [-]
Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on.
Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.
Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.
Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.
It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"
MarkusQ 12 hours ago [-]
That was my point exactly.
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.
bdjdjdjdh 11 hours ago [-]
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consensus1 17 hours ago [-]
I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65...
For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
"If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals.
If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.
watwut 17 hours ago [-]
Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.
rob74 23 hours ago [-]
If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...
Lammy 16 hours ago [-]
> If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place
“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”
marginalia_nu 23 hours ago [-]
A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
pseudalopex 18 hours ago [-]
You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?
Gud 21 hours ago [-]
Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.
marginalia_nu 21 hours ago [-]
There's much more overlap than you'd think. Quants generally have a STEM background, and stay in the field much for the same sort of reasons tech workers stick around building torment nexuses for FAANG.
pastel8739 17 hours ago [-]
Aren’t quants and what you would usually refer to as “investment bankers” pretty different groups of people?
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. The quants have legitimate skills. The ibs mostly just got lucky with the big internship junior year that set themselves up for life.
brewdad 11 hours ago [-]
They didn’t get lucky except to the extent they were born into a fourth generation Ivy League family.
seb1204 10 hours ago [-]
Because they chose to not doom scroll?
consensus1 17 hours ago [-]
Having done both I would say not by much
hellohello2 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
jvidalv 4 hours ago [-]
Small forums is the answer. In spain they are still popular and after some time it feels like an small town in the good sense, you know everyone and everyone knows you. Of course small forums will not IPO
rootusrootus 13 hours ago [-]
I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level.
I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.
Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
parpfish 10 hours ago [-]
Those plans might work to give a nice sane internet experience to the folks that are willing to put in some money and effort.
But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
elias1233 34 minutes ago [-]
Almost misread as ”outage porn” which would check out here on HN with all the recent outage posts
m463 18 hours ago [-]
> '90s going online ... '20s going offline
It feels to me like the change from:
- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.
- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.
there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
17 hours ago [-]
17 hours ago [-]
leptons 13 hours ago [-]
There have been many times throughout the past when going "downtown" elicited a "don't go" response. And yet there were times when going "downtown" was a fun thing to do. Somehow we got from past "don't go" to future "downtown is fun" back to what we have now. Things will change if people stop going. And then they'll change again.
17 hours ago [-]
barrenko 7 hours ago [-]
Our public offline lives are also miserable. If you live in a westernish society, you know exactly what are the problems, and if you are 40 something you can see that for your whole life no one has ever attempted to solve it. We just live with extreme negligence. Like child of permissive parents. And we're all, each and every single one of us both the children and the parents!
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant.
As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.
There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.
By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
marginalia_nu 16 hours ago [-]
> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
arjie 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you. Emailed!
sneak 54 minutes ago [-]
I don’t experience this. I love the internet more these days than ever. There are so many cool people doing cool things.
I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone.
The world is much better than it has ever been.
purplemoonx 7 hours ago [-]
The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out
marginalia_nu 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.
bazodedo 7 hours ago [-]
To be fair, saying "overheard an argument at the pub" wouldn't imply that theres but a single pub in the world.
orangeberrytea 7 hours ago [-]
Nah your pub is like saying "overheard online"
7 hours ago [-]
willis936 13 hours ago [-]
I recommend It Came From Something Awful. It's short and the thesis is that corporate co-option of counter culture pushed the internet over the precipice.
deadbabe 14 hours ago [-]
I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me a large amount of people on the web are basically just LARPing extremist takes or depressions as some kind of fun outlet.
Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
cindyllm 13 hours ago [-]
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Multicomp 23 hours ago [-]
TL;DR: We won't stay here in blackpill-as-entertainment long term, tech/HN will proxy the way forward, but it will take time and will be messy.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
pseudalopex 18 hours ago [-]
> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
marginalia_nu 18 hours ago [-]
As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.
qlte 17 hours ago [-]
People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016.
For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.
But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.
And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.
My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.
The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.
All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.
But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.
For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.
bee_rider 16 hours ago [-]
I think this idea (and I necessarily don’t believe in it, but let’s give it a fair chance) is more like a few-weeks detox. Avoiding any news at all half a year seems a bit disorienting (as you experienced).
Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).
pseudalopex 14 hours ago [-]
> I think this idea (and I necessarily don’t believe in it, but let’s give it a fair chance) is more like a few-weeks detox.
> Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
The idea was this would teach something. And another idea was All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. What could someone do for months or years? Cycle outrage porn and detox. Or avoid all news. But you saw news differed and you could control your news.
mixmastamyk 16 hours ago [-]
Doomscrolling vs. no-news-at-all is a false dichotomy. There are calm sources of news. And nothing wrong with learning events from others a few days later. What would you have done with the Biden news?
here on HN in 2013. I'd read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" so it particularly resonated with me at the time. I've watched the world get even more sucked in each passing year.
bee_rider 16 hours ago [-]
No-news-at-all was the suggestion in the post they responded to. It seems like a detox type idea (it doesn’t seem sustainable).
I think you are right that there’s some middle ground between 0 and doomscrolling that is preferable, though.
16 hours ago [-]
shimman 17 hours ago [-]
eh, it sounds like you don't really have a community you can socialize with. You just had a digital community. Digital communities are easy to come by but they lack the nutrition your soul aches for.
Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:
Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.
The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.
Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.
Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.
jancsika 17 hours ago [-]
I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]:
> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).
That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.
I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.
I feel like your last paragraph could be said about any time in the last 10 years. That was my biggest wake-up call to stop following mainstream news. Whatever shows here or in my social circle are enough to be informed as much as needed (YMMV)
jancsika 15 hours ago [-]
Did you read the paragraph before that about paying ninety-five dollars just for two weeks of proxying through a single U.S. IP? There's nothing in the last 10 years even remotely as economically bizarre as that. You'd have to go back over 20 years to Bittorrent where-- for the first time I know of-- an increase in demand for a resource caused a decrease in the time to get that resource.
If I'm wrong give me another case that isn't a crypto scam and I'll read up on it.
17 hours ago [-]
tavavex 17 hours ago [-]
Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most unavoidable and unambiguous ways - in addition to the indirect effects I've been experiencing already.
marginalia_nu 17 hours ago [-]
The negativity is affecting you negatively though, that's my whole point. Doom scrolling and blackpill cirklejerking hasn't fixed even one singular problem in the history of the phenomena. Depressed chronically online people have fuck-all agency, they just want to lay in bed all day reading about how bad everything is.
If you want to make the world a better place, you have to retain a headspace that actually lets you do that, and right now, the easiest fix for that is to just unplug, and then work with what you can change, which typically involves things and people around you.
pseudalopex 13 hours ago [-]
Your thoughts of this are black and white seemingly. People can doom scroll news and black pill circle jerk on social media. Or they can use them to learn things they can change and work with people to change them.
tuesdaynight 16 hours ago [-]
Why do you believe that you will better prepared? How do you differentiate between "preparation" and doomscrolling?
pseudalopex 14 hours ago [-]
> As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks.
The assumption I had not was false.
lazyasciiart 17 hours ago [-]
My offline time is spent volunteering with asylum seekers. As an experiment, try actually caring about the people experiencing what you think of as meaningless online negativity.
throwlifeaway 17 hours ago [-]
OP never claimed the online negativity was meaningless, only that you hurt yourself unnecessarily by constantly exposing yourself to it.
marginalia_nu 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if this is arguing for or against my point, but it's good you're touching grass I guess?
lazyasciiart 17 hours ago [-]
Your point is meaningless and implies that your choice of how to experience life offline is equally meaningless.
marginalia_nu 17 hours ago [-]
Well where does meaning come from? It doesn't seem to exist in nature. Some say it's something we have to create ourselves.
16 hours ago [-]
legastenigga 17 hours ago [-]
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goatlover 10 hours ago [-]
No thanks. I went too much of life being a low information mostly non-voter. This is how authoritarians win, because too many people don't pay attention, don't protest, don't vote, don't express their disapproval.
shimman 17 hours ago [-]
That's true but it also seems to downplay how much elites + corporations have control over our society and somehow when people want to build a better world, you have to first explain the problems of the current world.
jknoepfler 17 hours ago [-]
No thank you. I had ICE flood the streets where I live with poorly trained thugs with assault rifles recruited from the ranks of neonazis illegally assaulting, detaining and abusing citizens of my country because they had brown skin. They shot dead two citizens (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) doing what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.
I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.
Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
> Tough shit if you don't like it.
narrator: actually, it's you who is the problem.
"I'm only happy when I'm in my misery" - Offspring
ianbutler 17 hours ago [-]
> Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem.
But ARE you doing anything about it? Because unless you're actually taking action it's basically just self flagellation to the benefit of no one. Like if you have some measure of power (community action, organized resistance, political lobbying) and are taking action that's great, reading articles that make you sad and angry and then going to bed isn't doing anything.
lazyasciiart 17 hours ago [-]
Try literally responding to the comment you are dismissing
> what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
The other commenter makes an interesting point though that these behaviors really don't do anything but make people engaging with them feel that they are doing something productive against whatever they are protesting. ICE will still do whatever the hell they want as long as the president continues to give them a 500ft leash. And neither the president nor their voter base care about these protests, so what is the point? The lines in the sand in this case are already drawn and there are no fence sitters left to convince. Record all you want, put up as many cops are pigs signs as you want, they don't care. Call me jaded, but it is true. The way protesting is done in this country doesn't effect change.
panopticon 15 hours ago [-]
At least protesting is doing something. What's far worse is the people getting emotionally invested and then just arguing on Facebook or going to bed sad. That'll just make you depressed and does literally nothing.
dalyons 13 hours ago [-]
certainly not true in this case. The constant protests and clashes and deaths caused a significant national backlash, to the point that operations were dialed way down and even the field chief was replaced. Without the actions of protestors in minnesota we would likely still be seeing similar militant takeovers of cities around the country - it actually did change a lot. (in my opinion of course, alternative histories cant be proven)
Rumple22Stilk 2 hours ago [-]
It's not an interesting point at it. It's obviously idiotic.
You do have a choice, you can change things. Getting angry, especially in large numbers, is a prerequisite to change. Because getting angry is the prerequisite for violence.
His statement is "ignore getting fucked in the ass and take it". How exactly is that interesting?
lazyasciiart 16 hours ago [-]
I disagree. But if you want to have a conversation about whether specific actions achieve their intended goals, that’s very different to saying “but did you even DO anything because of what you learned???????”
17 hours ago [-]
mrguyorama 15 hours ago [-]
ICE killed a completely random person, who had every legal right to be here, in Biddeford Maine. There is again video evidence that ICE's claim of self defense is complete horseshit.
You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.
They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.
Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.
It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.
Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.
elliottkember 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
marginalia_nu 16 hours ago [-]
Think it's often depression rather than addiction that's at the core. Trying to get depressed people to stop ruminating and to start engaging with the world is a notorious challenge, though in terms of potential quality of life improvements, it can be worth putting in the effort even if it feels like you're talking to a brick wall.
autoexec 18 hours ago [-]
I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
ianbutler 17 hours ago [-]
What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do anything.
pseudalopex 17 hours ago [-]
> Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things
Yes.
yulker 15 hours ago [-]
Why does one need to be proactively doing anything to justify awareness and holding a point of view?
autoexec 17 hours ago [-]
> What are you doing to fix the issues though?
You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.
Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.
What does ignorance get you?
ianbutler 16 hours ago [-]
> Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started.
This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.
pseudalopex 13 hours ago [-]
> This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.
marginalia_nu said all news.
tuesdaynight 16 hours ago [-]
You are making valid points, but most people will spend their day reading about other places governments or presidential scandals. For 99% of people, knowing what Trump or whatever politician is doing does not change anything in your life. Also, you have no control or power for changing something about it. If you spent 70% of your day worried about Trump while you live in Estonia (random example), not reading the news is a good choice. You sound like someone who can avoid these traps, but I can say that this is not a common behavior. Most people will bite the ragebait
lazyasciiart 17 hours ago [-]
And what are you doing with the happy mental space you have carved out?
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
Living a couple years longer in better health from less chronic stress, probably.
tuesdaynight 16 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised by how you need to answer that. I'm not sure if they are being obtuse, contrarian or defending their addiction (yes, I said it).
lazyasciiart 16 hours ago [-]
And I’m surprised by your level of investment in being a jerk in this conversation.
lazyasciiart 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, not thinking about serious problems because they don’t personally impact you will make your life more comfortable. Butler appears to be making the less obviously self serving argument that spending time being aware of serious problems is only hurting your ability to do anything about them, which implies that he is better able to do something about them because he does not spend time knowing about them. I think that he isn’t doing anything about them, and therefore his pretense that people would be more effective by staying offline is crap.
andai 16 hours ago [-]
Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted.
The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)
andai 3 minutes ago [-]
I assume it had to do with the Malthusian panic (which was very effective, and remains a sticky meme, although for slightly different reasons now).
dec0dedab0de 21 hours ago [-]
This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me.
I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early.
I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here.
I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright.
But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.
cheschire 17 hours ago [-]
I did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to.
Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this thing that made their lives worth living or whatever.
When it first happened I thought it was a weird interpersonal conflict situation. Maybe I had broached it wrong. But it kept happening! So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.
But I’m an extrovert and working from home was suffocating.
Dusseldorf 16 hours ago [-]
I think the reason people get angry about it is that it feels like an asymmetric ask. It feels a bit like saying "everyone needs to come I to the office because I like there to be people in the office, regardless of whether that's what they want." (not saying that's what you're saying here, just trying to shine some light on how it may be perceived)
ang_cire 17 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't that WFO-preferenced people don't exist, it's that it aligns with the narratives of the extroverted management (who approve their own PTO) that it's better, and people who aren't extroverts dread being forced back. No one who prefers WFH is actually against people who prefer offices being allowed to go there, they're opposed to people publicly claiming they prefer that- unqualified- because they see it as a threat; a statement that will be weaponized to support management's RTO initiatives.
strken 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not an extrovert, I'm more or less on the line between the two extremes, and I prefer WFO or hybrid.
Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.
tuesdaynight 16 hours ago [-]
It is because RTO people would force WFH people to spend time (hours, in some case) commuting, spend money on lunch, and making the same salary. You are not wrong for that, but you can understand the reaction, at least, because you hated being forced to WFH during COVID
sackfield 10 hours ago [-]
Wow I thought I was the only one. I have also had these experiences, including abused by people on this site for the crime of saying I miss the office.
I am back at the office now, and am enjoying the separation between work and home.
ajkjk 17 hours ago [-]
Same. HN comments would (maybe still do) accuse you of astroturfing if you said you preferred an office. Not that much stock should be put in strangers accusing you, but, it was telling how ignorant it was.
mh- 16 hours ago [-]
I believe "LLMs are useful"* is the current zeitgeist's version of "Working from the office has upsides", in terms of attracting astroturfing accusations over expressing an opinion held by many.
* simplifying, of course.
titanomachy 15 hours ago [-]
And the gold medal in the 2026 Motivated Reasoning Olympics goes to... the AI deniers!
EDIT: wow, I had this lodged in my brain without even realizing it was an XKCD reference
I understand both types of people, I think. Some of my friends are parents living outside of tech hubs whose lifestyle would be impossible without remote work, so they understandably felt attacked. But the discourse around this was unhinged. Some remote advocates were convinced that RTO was either a C-suite power trip, or a move to stop commercial real estate from imploding.
stalfosknight 11 hours ago [-]
It is a C-suite power trip.
Telaneo 14 hours ago [-]
> So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.
Is it really surprising that people have this preference?
Their reaction to you in the moment might not be reasonable, but it's coming from an injustice done to them, and one they perceive you to be in favour of.
DeluluDon 17 hours ago [-]
I used to daydream about homelessness until I did it for 6 years. You're surrounded by threats and your limbic system is in overdrive, deindividuation kicks in and takes a year of being rehoused before you're back to being the same person. Those daydreams generally stop after taking a hike or twenty over the weekends.
gboss 17 hours ago [-]
I'm really impressed you got out of that! Thanks for sharing, the best thing to help homeless people must be prevent them from being homeless in the first place.
Loughla 13 hours ago [-]
I was homeless for a year. My experience is that the best way to help homeless people is in giving them housing while mandating extensive drug/alcohol counseling and/or extremely invasive mental health treatments. There are some people who have just fallen on bad times (I was that), but a WIDE majority of the people I was around that year needed extreme help. When I say extreme, I mean borderline removing their agency to make decisions for themselves.
It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.
It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this
THX1137 17 hours ago [-]
> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day
This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...
mh- 16 hours ago [-]
There are different kinds of people, and a considerable % of folks rely on some foundational structure in their day-to-day to drive many of their other habits.
For a lot of people, that was commuting to a job outside of their home.
hollowturtle 16 hours ago [-]
I mean in which lucky place of the planet you live in? I dunno u but where I live it's 40 degree celsius out there and all over europe. I'm a remote worker and most time of the year going outside is just not possibile, over heat or too cold or raining like it never did before(climate change you know)
Toutouxc 6 hours ago [-]
I’m don’t know how to say this, but if you’re claiming that there’s a place anywhere in Europe where going outside is “not possible” for more than a handful of days of the year (like extreme heatwaves), you definitely have some kind of problem that other people don’t have. And I mean it, it isn’t normal to be this scared of going outside.
THX1137 16 hours ago [-]
In Canada - and it does get cold here, and hot here. You can't work outside every single day, but you also do not have to stay at home or indoors every single day. I lean toward being outdoors for as much as possible of the year. There's no perfection about it.
There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.
Find some shade and don't stress it Europal! (I hate climate change too.)
titanomachy 15 hours ago [-]
You live somewhere where you can't go outside "most of the year"? Did we evolve on the same planet?
WorldPeas 14 hours ago [-]
You realize that humans are an invasive species in most places they currently reside, right?
titanomachy 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure about that, I've been to the African savannah and I didn't find it particularly hospitable. My ancestors adapted to a different climate.
dom96 15 hours ago [-]
Not the person you're replying to, but this is genuinely the killer feature of the UK. Yes, we get heat waves and more of them now, but it's much better than mainland Europe. Especially if you stay away from London (which I would recommend).
csomar 9 hours ago [-]
The previous poster doesn’t realize he is part of the problem. He wants everyone to go back to the office so that he can see people face to face again and have the social pressure to wash himself. Makes you wonder why no one wants to be his friend?
If you are ever in a situation where you are alone and no person works for you, realize you are most likely the problem. It took me a while to figure it out and it’s hard to make friends that you resonate and align with. But there are billions of people around the world and unless you live in a small village, there are always people looking to strike a conversation; and some of those will make good/reliable friends.
throw-the-towel 7 hours ago [-]
> Makes you wonder why no one wants to be his friend?
Wow, what a way to be bitter and defensive.
iamflimflam1 3 hours ago [-]
I've now been in tech for 30+ years in various roles up to quite senior levels.
It is hard to keep caring about something where you see repeated patterns of behaviour and failure.
Getting closer to retirement has been a very interesting experience. Turning 50 was very stressful for me. A deep feeling of - I've only got so many rolls of the dice left. Am I in a secure position financially? I've mostly been involved in startups and small companies and wondered if I'd made terrible mistakes in my career. Why wasn't I set for life when so many others had "made it"?
Not everyone is going to get lucky and retire early - it's not a given that this will happen.
I have friends who have run successful startups and are now free to do whatever they want. And I had opportunities to join them at the beginning - I would also now be very wealthy. Equally, I have other friends just like me who have also run and joined startups and completely failed.
I absolutely love the flexibility working from home gives me - but I have a strong group of people around me to meet for coffee and live in a central location in a good city so I'm not isolated at all. But I can really relate to people who don't have that and don't have support around them.
AI is unlocking all sorts of exciting things - there are projects that I've long had on the back burner that are now unlocked. It is going to radically reshape our industry.
This reshaping is tough. What made me good at my job may not necessarily be useful. Deep focussed work delivering highly technical work - maybe that's not needed now.
I'm not sure I want to work until I'm very old. I've got my financial plan that puts me on a trajectory of being able to retire in a couple of years compfortably.
It's worth modelling this. Knowing your position is a real help. Just being able to look at something and say "I'm going to be ok - I can stop in X years if needed". Or even - "I can stop now and it wouldn't be a disaster".
And if the modelling says - you need X more years - at least you know.
pzo 8 hours ago [-]
I worked around similar problem just working from coworking space and/or traveling.
For cowork you don’t often have to commute as much (more options around), can arrive late, don’t have to dress to nice. For some you can still change your homebase at least for few months temporarily.
But you can still have physical coworkers (even if you don’t work with them), have chitchat not relate to work, go to lunch together. You can also have routine and separate your professional life from personal one.
throwaway_7274 17 hours ago [-]
It’s funny, people are so different! I’d always taken it as an axiomatic Truth of the world that money doesn’t buy happiness. When I finally caved and took a high-paying job, I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find that it made my life a lot easier. So much breathing room :)
This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts
elmer2 17 hours ago [-]
"that money doesn’t buy happines"
I think people get this meaning wrong all the time. The love of money doesn't buy happiness. Having money can definitely make your life easier, and you can spend it on things that make you happy.
throwaway_7274 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah absolutely. And obviously I’m overplaying my naïveté and idealism for effect here, a little bit, but I was still surprised how much it really did improve my quality of life.
I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.
I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”
Just thinkin out loud into the internet
don_esteban 2 hours ago [-]
There are two thresholds.
Below the lower threshold, you have to worry too much about money to just get by. Unfortunately, too many people live below this threshold. Even in rich countries.
Below this level, it is difficult to be truly happy, as your life is filled too much with money worry.
Above the upper threshold, all you basic and not so basic needs are covered and more money does not buy you much in terms of happiness.
Of course, these thresholds are very individual. The lower your thresholds are, the freer you are.
Both marketing and general enshittification from late stage capitalism are trying to push both of these thresholds up.
On the other hand, the society should strive to get most/almost all people above the lower threshold. Both by pushing the expenses of basic needs down (education/health care/public transport), and by creating environment for easier earning (good economic environment for entrepreneurship, antitrust regulation, minimal wages, unions, social assistance). Well, at least most countries see it that way. US has a slightly different take ...
titanomachy 15 hours ago [-]
Money might not buy happiness but poverty can definitely buy sadness
FeteCommuniste 11 hours ago [-]
Money doesn't buy happiness but definitely makes pursuing it easier.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
> money doesn’t buy happiness.
it doesn't but it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes.
dalyons 13 hours ago [-]
i dont really understand, if you hate working from home now (and it sounds like you have for a long time) why dont you switch to an in person role? there are certainly plenty of those.
lazyasciiart 17 hours ago [-]
> Now I daydream about being homeless.
Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.
xlii 23 hours ago [-]
Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.
Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.
They wanted gold.
For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.
For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
dec0dedab0de 21 hours ago [-]
I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
cheschire 17 hours ago [-]
Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem? Have you replaced problem solving with LLM chats?
Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.
But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
geertj 8 hours ago [-]
> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.
Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?
Thanemate 1 hours ago [-]
>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.
The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
fuomag9 5 hours ago [-]
LLMs have literally sparked my joy to build software which I couldn’t before because of literal time constraints and mental overload
pydry 13 hours ago [-]
The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.
There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.
Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".
dan_q 2 hours ago [-]
2022/2023 is when the AI wrecking crews came in in full force
pydry 1 hours ago [-]
Yea there were layoffs blamed on AI even when GPT 3.5 couldnt write a line of code to save its life. That's public relations for you.
No exec wants to chalk up a layoff to a faltering company that can't grow sales even if it's not their fault.
dan_q 1 hours ago [-]
At my job in 2023, after the staff engineers quit, new-hire engineers backed by new-hire managers pushed through a series of 5,000-10,000 line GPT 3.5 PRs affecting ludicrously convoluted, critical Makefiles designed and maintained by engineers who had left the company because of AI initiatives.
Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.
xlii 20 hours ago [-]
The burnout is a separate topic, and it was always difficult to balance in this specific industry.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
bluefirebrand 17 hours ago [-]
> The burnout is a separate topic
I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly
dec0dedab0de 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kayamon 14 hours ago [-]
We still live in the eternal september.
cucumber3732842 17 hours ago [-]
> I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.
Everything has this arc.
A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.
By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.
anovikov 6 hours ago [-]
Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.
zelphirkalt 3 hours ago [-]
It doesn't derail them, except for them not finding a new job and many being unfortunate enough to lose their old one. Instead many jobs are taken by "AI engineers", glorified prompters, who are not in tech because of the tech, but because they will do anything for that paycheck.
noosphr 16 hours ago [-]
Tech means a lot of things there.
I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.
Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.
burnt-resistor 4 hours ago [-]
This is what annoyed me to no end; being surrounded by incurious corporate political players who wanted to appear "smart" but couldn't care less about learning, excellence, or much of anything except leaving in time to pickup their kids.
Meanwhile, I had taught myself coding the hard way without the internet or proper reference materials or community, by trial-and-error in front of a debugger/profiler/disassembler in the mid 80's - late 90's. Apparently, that holds no economic value now because all that matters is # of PRs, tokenmaxxing, and "impact" like savings and features. But really, the deal breaker for me is the brazen and/or clueless evil aims of the ownership class such that working for them enables rather than reduces societal harm. Thus, tech isn't for me. Also, the number and distribution of cool, decent, clever people has been driven out of both the startup scene and the megacorp scene; maybe there's better hope in obscure SMBs or nonprofits.
pydry 14 hours ago [-]
>For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed.
Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.
I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.
laichzeit0 9 hours ago [-]
It’s great to care about the craft as long as someone else is paying for it. I think most software developers are waking up to the reality that they were always just holding business at ransom with their craft. Software is a grudge purchase for businesses. No one has ever cared about the craft except the craftsmen.
skhameneh 8 hours ago [-]
The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both.
I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.
Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).
laichzeit0 4 hours ago [-]
Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.
I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.
To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.
This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.
pydry 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think you do get it. Caring about craft and wanting to write things like compilers are two very distinct things.
One is liking a mental challenge - like a crossword puzzle. The other is having pride in the quality of your work.
An LLM is not a compiler. It is the leakiest abstraction of all time. I never experienced a compiler making a mistake, I think, ever. Every LLM I use makes a critical mistake somewhere between 50% and 95% of the time.
If vibe coding truly is the future of coding then it really doesn't matter what you do. Keep up or don't keep up it doesn't matter. Your career is dead either way because your boss will replace you with a prompt. Might as well give up now.
pydry 2 hours ago [-]
The patient with heart disease doesnt give a shit about exercising and eating healthy they just want the doctor to make them better.
No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.
The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.
When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.
laichzeit0 1 hours ago [-]
You are correct on all counts. This is the IKEA phase of software development. Disposable shit. Need something new and ask an LLM to summon it into existence. I guess you could compare it to this hand-crafted desk I’m sitting at that my great grandfather built himself. He was a carpenter. It’s still here, decades later. To be honest, my next desk would be some IKEA shit, because it’s cheap and I can replace it every few years as fashion changes. But I get the emotional attachment.
pydry 23 minutes ago [-]
The economics of code and carpentry are different though. A really good piece of code to, say, calculate taxes can be written once and used by a million people.
Or, a million people might generate a one off piece of slop to calculate their taxes.
Which one was more efficient?
I do think that disposable easy to validate software will probably never be human written again but I also think that the economics of slop demand very forgiving users.
15 hours ago [-]
cholantesh 21 hours ago [-]
Quite a lot of folks who got into tech for the tech are also miserable, because, as the byline rather aptly puts it, a lot of it is pointless. It does not serve a public good, or even a public desire, and 'work for its own sake' is only engaging up to a point.
MarkusQ 23 hours ago [-]
100%.
I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".
uncivilized 14 hours ago [-]
That was just a brief trend.
Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.
MarkusQ 12 hours ago [-]
I suppose I should be grateful, if it means the mercenaries are leaving.
VoodooJuJu 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tigerlily 17 hours ago [-]
This is such a neat comment! If you concentrate, it's very near the metre and prose of a Dr Seuss story, like the Lorax or the Sneetches.
Havoc 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
rindalir 17 hours ago [-]
I want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.
bell-cot 17 hours ago [-]
Okay - but for most types of agriculture, the minimum viable farm size is rather larger than it was a century or so ago.
Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
rindalir 17 hours ago [-]
Well, I should say it was sheep —> artisan cheese, which is in my view one of the few paths to viability for a small sized farm. It’s definitely not big enough for producing a commodity profitably. And farming takes either generational wealth and experience OR being able to go big by forming a farming cooperative like Chris Newman. It’s probably not something most people can “escape” to.
ang_cire 17 hours ago [-]
Or, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!
rindalir 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, honest person that I am even I think “is the reason this isn’t working because I am not capable of gaming the system”. But all that money goes to farms orders of magnitude bigger anyway.
I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.
titanomachy 14 hours ago [-]
"We produced $250k worth of food last year. We sell most of it wholesale, so we don't get a terribly high price for it."
The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.
I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.
It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.
maerF0x0 15 hours ago [-]
and the nutrition per lb has fallen. Farm slop
testerius 6 hours ago [-]
Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is that you know you can't solve problem then you will know what I am writing about.
But...
There are exceptions which make me bad feeling about AI, LLMs and so on:
1. Paid, subscribtion based payment model - you have to pay for tokens.
2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.
3. Feeling "I did not do it myself". This is the most what could make bad feel. You "cheated". You did not write this great app or solve problem alone. You just did modern "copy and paste". You did not write or design this class, function alone by hand. And you know you probably could not do it without help of AI, LLM.
CodeCompost 6 hours ago [-]
2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.
This is why tech companies are working hard to make sure you can never build your own computer again.
Godsend69 6 hours ago [-]
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Retr0id 5 hours ago [-]
The third point, on its own, doesn't bother me so much. What does bother me is the "clean it up for publication/PR/etc." phase. It was never especially fun in the first place, but cleaning up my own mess is something I can contend with, and you get a sense of satisfaction once you're done.
Cleaning up the slop from a faceless machine is just... not something I want to do. And even if you do get it done, the sense of satisfaction at the end is reduced.
I think the only way I can be truly "productive" with AI is to drop my bar for quality. For some cases that's easy (e.g. run-once-and-throw-away scripts), but for everything else I just can't do it.
punkbit 6 hours ago [-]
Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…
dan_q 2 hours ago [-]
This site aggressively suppresses any criticism of LLMs, especially LLM generated/"assisted" code.
lollapalooza88 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Godsend69 6 hours ago [-]
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Jtarii 5 hours ago [-]
Astroturfing AI spam.
hn_submit 21 minutes ago [-]
LLMs are not going to put large numbers of software developers out of work. It may have some influence on copywriters, artists and musicians, but to which extent is unknown at the moment.
Most workers lament having to give up their cozy desk jobs and having to do work which currently can't be automated, like health care and service jobs like plumbers and roof repair men, construction etc.
brushfoot 15 hours ago [-]
"Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it.
Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).
stevenwoo 13 hours ago [-]
I’m only surprised how deliberately he avoided using the term alienation - I guess he was just afraid of invoking Marx but not Debord or Graeber.
uncivilized 14 hours ago [-]
Do you disagree that your work is pointless?
entropy47 14 hours ago [-]
I certainly do. As usual the revolution is weeks away, but I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.
You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.
Nextgrid 11 hours ago [-]
> I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.
It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.
(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)
entropy47 6 hours ago [-]
My employer pushes everybody heavily towards AI, but unsurprisingly that stops the moment the work is late or bad in a way that catches their management chain's attention.
I'm not doing work in the way they tell me to but the results are good enough that my performance reviews / job security is fine. For now!
uncivilized 14 hours ago [-]
That has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.
entropy47 13 hours ago [-]
Oh, I hadn't even considered the interpretation here where you're saying knowledge work is pointless and always has been. I'm not even going to engage with that one because I see the value and real world impact of my work every single week.
I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.
mangoman 13 hours ago [-]
> The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do.
It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.
But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point.
In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer?
I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for
dogomatic 12 hours ago [-]
for what it’s worth I still get that excited feeling every time there’s a smaller, distilled LLM that I can run locally. I think it unlocks so many use cases that are pro consumer. Probably an edge case though!
thraway3837 10 hours ago [-]
I think what happened is that a lot of the wrong personalities entered technology for all the wrong reasons.
Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out.
I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff.
Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".
The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it.
For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there.
Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck.
Sorry to be harsh.
rufasterisco 4 hours ago [-]
I belong to the "hacker-type from the 90s" group and what you wrote really resonates with me.
Yet.
I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it.
In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time".
We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it.
I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read.
The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun.
I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary.
But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder.
As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".
Thanemate 1 hours ago [-]
>Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".
Something in that sentence reminded me of the following Jobs' quote:
"Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out."
Capitalism suddenly gets gamed to the point where the quality isn't rewarded. I'm not just talking about software, but also hardware. There's a reason why planned obsolescence is a thing. In a way, software bloat is unplanned obsolescence.
amoe_ 4 hours ago [-]
As you say, many entered the field beacause of a natural interest in tech, rather than pay. But that doesn't imply that they uncritically accept every new technology just because it's new. It seems like you're arguing for "tech for the sake of tech", which you're entitled to do. But now tech has a transformative impact on the world, and most did not consent democratically to said transformation. It makes sense for an adult to consider the effect that their role has on the world at large.
throwaway1183 7 hours ago [-]
Oh my god!! You nailed it. I see two categories in tech. One the builder, innovators, tinkerers, those who just wanted to use tech to draw their ideas to life.
Then other is artisan, those who took pride in organizing and craft.
Second one is having miserable time. The former like me are having a blast. I love tech for that reason.
I stopped talking to people who think LLMs are waste. It's because they don't even touch it. They think it's a taboo to touch it.
So anything in tech is exciting because it enables us to do so many random things. Wish more people learnt about it.
anotheryou 23 minutes ago [-]
My only problem is making money. Need that shit, never build my life around work...
(I'm well paid, just wished I could work less. But well paid part time is harder to come by)
lostaccount 23 hours ago [-]
This is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?
pc86 23 hours ago [-]
> A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather,
And a lot of them don't?
A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.
jonahrd 23 hours ago [-]
There are definitely downsides to office work, but this post really implies to me that you don't actually personally know anyone who works in the trades. The amount of body pain/damage, extreme conditions, and ridiculous scheduling (as in, last minute decisions that you must be on site at 5:30am the next day, not as in overall hours) are pretty much incomparable to tech work.
pc86 22 hours ago [-]
I didn't say they were comparable. But there is a common refrain that every single person who works in the trades has their body basically destroyed by the time they're 40, which isn't remotely true, and that nobody who works in an office (or a number that is essentially a rounding error) has any physical effects directly caused by that, which also isn't remotely true.
phainopepla2 17 hours ago [-]
That's not a common refrain, that's you interpreting reasonable statements in the most extreme possible way.
hiAndrewQuinn 18 hours ago [-]
It's not for nothing that de facto founder of the Singaporean state Lee Kuan Yew wooed top men and women into working government jobs by ensuring the government buildings had A/C. I would far prefer an inflexible air conditioned 9 to 5 than a flexible perpetual sauna.
mawadev 7 hours ago [-]
I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?
dan_q 2 hours ago [-]
The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic.
Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its corresponding cultural manifestations.
Office workers get chronic conditions from sitting around all day too. Yet vary few jobs provide any such balance.
dec0dedab0de 20 hours ago [-]
The only tech job that had that balance was a network engineer at the headquaters of a global company in a skyscraper with 3 offices and a datacenter in walking distance. Most of the time I was sitting around writing code or configs, but at least once a week I would have to walk to a different floor or building to wire up a switch or rack a new DNS server or whatever. That bit of required physical activity and interaction with others was always a highlight.
KellyCriterion 17 hours ago [-]
Actually the only job without all those problems (err,any problems?) is to b a fitness instructor or personal trainer; not on an extreme level,8h a day, but let say you have 2 clients or maybe 3 clients a day, this would be enough movement / workout to never ever run into these problems, I guess?
dec0dedab0de 21 hours ago [-]
Physical labor is bad for the knees, but good for the soul.
RobinL 17 hours ago [-]
I've often felt my job as a programmer has often been to automate myself (and others) out of my job. But I've always felt in control of that. I suppose there's some cosmic justice to the fact that it's now being done to me.
bjt12345 17 hours ago [-]
Serious question though - how are they going with that?
In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.
Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM can either do the classification itself (when given agentic access to the canonical list of addresses), or write a classifier itself if given enough labelled data. Of course these two are complementary
luke5441 16 hours ago [-]
Given it is being trained on your project, the latter isn't that surprising. For the former, you could use LLMs yourself for the probabilistic matching as alternative method? Probably you don't because the trade-offs (like performance) are not worth it...
RobinL 16 hours ago [-]
Yes - it's certainly the case at the moment that you can run a few thousand through the LLM at a reasonable price, but not, say, ten million. But the rate of progress suggests to me that this argument won't hold up forever. Eventually I think an off the shelf LLM will outperform most and probably all more traditional ML models at this task. Largely because LLMs can identify tricky ones and pick them out for more intensive effort (e.g. looking online, further searches again the canonical list of addresses)
tossandthrow 7 hours ago [-]
We are too early to deem it failed ai strategies.
I am advising small startups. One of them went entirely to agentic developed software by a team of non technical founders.
They had their sec audit done with considerably fewer errors than had a software developer build the same (which would have taken upwards of 4 times as long).
I am sorry, the technical capabilities of the agentic systems for software development is already much further ahead than what people comprehend.
Severe disruption is imminent.
anovikov 6 hours ago [-]
I agree. There is no point in hiring anyone into a technical-only role anymore. It's very valuable (and probably always will be) to be something-and-technical: a specialist in the target field who also understands how computers and software work. But not "just" technical, these are already completely obsolete and all of them who still have jobs, do so simply because of institutional inertia, connections, and companies being awash with money. Which is not to say that this is not a sustainable state of affairs - it may very well be so forever.
dinkumthinkum 5 hours ago [-]
Do you realize that there is software out there that are not simple React apps? The models are clearly advanced but I think the world is a lot more complex than you seem to think.
anovikov 5 hours ago [-]
I have basically vibe-coded a guidance system for air defence interceptors in 6 weeks. It works. Took getting my hands dirty with soldering and some mechanical work to test, but Cursor was guiding me on even that. And i started with understanding concepts like "what is a quaternion" and "why doesn't an infrared camera have a concept of exposure time even as it does have a framerate".
I had a "wow it can vibe code a React app" moment 1.5 years ago. AI evolved a lot since.
I admit i had to hire contractors to do designs for 3D printing. I don't know how to outsource it to AI yet, maybe i can't.
rxyz 3 hours ago [-]
Claude Fable is very eager to design for 3D printing but I have not tested it real life yet.
drivebyhooting 4 hours ago [-]
That is super cool.
What kind of interceptor? Solid rocket motor with control surfaces?
anovikov 4 hours ago [-]
No, a kind of electric FPV drone.
15 hours ago [-]
FLeXMurphy 24 hours ago [-]
This article is too inward, clique referential looking. It uses too many "known" things to frame and validate its points, but has very little contributions of its own.
The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.
chrisjj 23 hours ago [-]
> This article is too inward
Too inward for what?
VCFundedGenYer 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
FLeXMurphy 20 hours ago [-]
No, I pained myself reading the article too much for that.
crnkofe 6 hours ago [-]
I have this nagging feeling that the depression, anxiety and pessimism is as-of-late coming from people from all the companies that risked it by adopting token maxing and AI usage enforcement. Its not representative of the whole industry though. There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.
dan_q 2 hours ago [-]
> There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.
Please start naming names
agys 24 hours ago [-]
Side note: a half an hour call on a commute train (or in public spaces) is considered extremely rude in many parts of the world.
elric 23 hours ago [-]
It is rude and annoying in general. But even in quiet cars it seems like many people just don't give a fuck and will simply jabber on obnoxiously without any care for anyone else.
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
Der_Einzige 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
titanomachy 14 hours ago [-]
I sincerely hope you're able to someday deal with your issues and become free from your suffering
dec0dedab0de 21 hours ago [-]
You're farting with a walkman on.
7230883707 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tacker2000 14 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately people all over are starting to not do anything.
On a recent plane ride some old guys were watching movies on their phones on full volume. I complained and they stopped, but another guy in another row started doing it again. It gets tiring.
Last week I was on a NYC subway train to JFK Airport and there was a guy blasting some loud hip-hop/trap and a small kid playing some loud game, totally oblivious to the people on the train. After they left some older guy stepped in talking on full speaker to someone for 10 minutes.
It was quite crazy tbh, and I guess people here have already given up and start accepting it since it is tiring to police somebody new every 5 minutes and could also end in violence.
yard2010 3 hours ago [-]
I found it easier to use anc headphones with white noise. I'm waiting for the next 5 years to pass, then I could also have my glasses that block all kinds of abominations from my vision, as it became normal to put cancer video ads everywhere in the public space. The future looks really good imho!
littlecranky67 5 hours ago [-]
I am in the give up department. Don't own a car, so public transport heavy. TikTok adicts everywhere, elderly taking video calls on super high volume, people playing or recording Whatsapp audios etc. has become the norm. Every bus, every restaurant, everywhere I go, people do it all the time. Pointing it out and confronting people has become pointless, it takes 3 minutes for the next person to offend. It is easier to accept it and hope for noise-cancellation technology to become better.
WorldPeas 14 hours ago [-]
The number of people blasting video on a regional flight with no internet really made me reconsider just how necessary airplane mode is. Probably an applicable case study for many other societal boundary-breaches silently spreading.
mattcantstop 22 hours ago [-]
It's rude to me as well. But I think we are wrong about this.
I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?"
I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't around on the phone? If two people can speak in that place, it's not weird for someone to have a phone discussion.
Now playing music speakers or watching TikTok videos on your phone in a public place...psychotic!
1123581321 18 hours ago [-]
That’s a good observation. I think it’s where their heads are facing. Two conversationalists face each other or face the room, but talk quietly with body language that suggests they’re conversing (heads tilted, leaning.)
Someone talking on the phone but facing away from the room isn’t usually considered rude, either.
In a waiting room or train car, if you’re sitting and talking on the phone or Zoom, you’re broadcasting into the room with your posture. Your voice tends to broadcast as well with no wall or other conversant as an immediate barrier.
ed_mercer 8 hours ago [-]
> I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird.
It's also why calls/online meetings are banned in many coffeeshops in Japan.
dec0dedab0de 21 hours ago [-]
I would consider two people talking to each other in a waiting room or on a train very rude too. If they are loud enough that the people next to them or behind them can hear the words they are saying, then it is rude of them. Of course, this is relative to how noisy the place is overall.
16 hours ago [-]
bethekidyouwant 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
titanomachy 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe he's just Japanese, or German.
arendtio 23 hours ago [-]
I think it depends not just on culture but also on the volume of the conversation. Some people manage to have a conversation when you can barely hear them; others seem to have a conversation with everyone on the train.
swat535 21 hours ago [-]
I don't mind people having conversations, just don't blast the volume up or put it on speaker for the whole train to hear..
neom 23 hours ago [-]
From my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?
left-struck 23 hours ago [-]
Having lived in both Australia and Japan and visited SK, for me it seems like it’s rude in all those places but only in some places do almost all the people care what strangers think enough to modify their behaviour. Which is not as judgmental a statement as it sounds like, because that care, or some might call it pressure to conform, has upsides and downsides.
neom 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, to clarify my comment, I think it's rude everywhere and I suspect many others generally also, but I've only experienced feeling I couldn't do it/people will absolutely stop you in SK/JP. I've been on trains all through Europe, the UK, almost all of North America and usually hear someone on the phone, but nobody ever says anything.
dspillett 23 hours ago [-]
UK, unless you are quiet about it. Though you might not notice as our reaction only tends to be in body language, or for particularly loud speakers (particularly those who are GOING INTO A TUNNEL or otherwise think shouting will help with bad reception) we might tut.
boelboel 23 hours ago [-]
It's considered rude in Belgium, at least when I commuted there by train. People would leave the wagon to take a call. Maybe it's changed in the past few years. There were also signs that it's prohibited to call in the trains.
margalabargala 23 hours ago [-]
Leave the wagon to where? Like get off the train? The trains are all wagon, no?
NicuCalcea 23 hours ago [-]
There's usually some space between train coaches (I think it's called a gangway?) or at the end of a coach (a vestibule) that is separated from the seats area by doors on both sides. You can take your call there.
margalabargala 22 hours ago [-]
Gotcha. On the trains I'm used to (Amtrak, NYC subway) spaces between cars are either nonexistent, or extremely dangerous.
NicuCalcea 17 hours ago [-]
In London, subway cars are either completely separated and you can't travel between them, or it's just one long continuous tube, there are no vestibules. You don't get much signal underground either way, so it's rare to see people on a call.
Most trains however have a space [0] at the end of each car where you enter and exit. That space can also have a toilet, bike storage, various (locked) train controls, sometimes even a few seats [1] where you can sit if your call will be a while.
Leave the department*, the parts where people get on/off trains are closed off from the seats. There's also some gangway connections which have doors between the wagons.
ausbah 23 hours ago [-]
i’m in the US, if you took a call for more than a few mins a busy metro car I’d tell you to knock it off
serf 23 hours ago [-]
My dad speaks loudly on speakerphone phones in restaurants and public spaces daily because he's a rude old asshole.
No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.
I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.
yard2010 3 hours ago [-]
What would he do if I would tell him to knock it off? Wouldn't he just yell at me making the situation worse than it was to begin with?
honkostani 22 hours ago [-]
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qbit42 23 hours ago [-]
People talk on the phone all the time on every US metro I’ve tried. Seems fine if they’re not on speaker or raising their voice
nikole9696 22 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, these days, most of us won't do that because there is a high likelihood it could incite violence.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
and inciting violence is against the law.
chrisjj 23 hours ago [-]
UK included.
hdndjsbbs 13 hours ago [-]
The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code.
The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.
The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
dan_q 2 hours ago [-]
> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
olooney 23 hours ago [-]
Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites:
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book.
This book and the "bullshit jobs" label is discussed extensively in the article.
Der_Einzige 23 hours ago [-]
We are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
ComputerPerson 22 hours ago [-]
Woah, bad day?
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
17 hours ago [-]
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
This hasn’t been true for me. Not only are the majority of software engineers I know married but also looking at the marriage rates in high-income in the Bay Area, it’s quite high, so I don’t think it’s specific to my group.
There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.
Der_Einzige 16 hours ago [-]
Can't believe people here try to gaslight me on this topic:
"If you're not taken, gay, or furry, the consensus is that dating in SF sucks..."
danparsonson 1 hours ago [-]
Is it just possible that your dating problems come from somewhere else? I personally haven't experienced the negative social consequences you're describing, but I'm also not dating in SF.
monknomo 16 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you are describing a problem with the San Francisco dating scene, which does relate to a small subset of the SWE experience, but hardly covers anything close to the totality of being an SWE.
arjie 15 hours ago [-]
Well, I certainly was not trying to 'gaslight' you considering I repeatedly anchored my view in "for me" and "engineers I know" and then used a statistic to say that my experience seems pretty standard.
To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.
Balinares 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't found that to be true at all. So I suppose there's a personal component to it and your observation doesn't apply universally? If so, though, that's possibly good news: it means there may be factors that are yours to evolve for better prospects.
coldpie 17 hours ago [-]
That has not been my experience at all. Usually people aren't interested in the career as a conversation topic ("Oh I don't understand anything about computers! Anyway,") but I've never seen anything like what you're describing.
Maybe AI people specifically get that kind of reaction, but that's a pretty hot topic at the moment.
Toutouxc 6 hours ago [-]
There isn’t a word in the comment that I can relate to. Might be a US thing, I’m in Europe.
My [very normal although otherworldly beautiful] wife thinks my job is interesting and talks about me with pride.
When I tell people that I work in IT, they almost never think of FAANG, because these companies aren’t really considered that interesting or important over here. I think it’s uniquely a US thing to conflate “IT” with “SV sociopaths”.
rarisma 23 hours ago [-]
"It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over."
I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.
jebarker 23 hours ago [-]
What makes you feel like that? Is it AI specifically?
kstenerud 17 hours ago [-]
The author talks as if this were a new phenomenon; it is not.
I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer.
Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for something physical.
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
If I could make white collar pay landscaping, that's what I'd do for the rest of my life. One of the best jobs I had but they pay only a couple dollars above minimum wage.
pavel_lishin 17 hours ago [-]
How much time did the farming take, compared to the software engineering aspect?
My very limited understanding of farming is that it takes a huge amount of time, and you're usually up and working before sunrise, even with automation.
kstenerud 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, I was up at 4 am every day. It's hard work.
IshKebab 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah I had to stop reading after the author thought he could draw some deep insight from the fact that someone with a boring finance job had a hobby...
ang_cire 23 hours ago [-]
Because we see what's coming?
Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?
Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?
Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?
Take your pick.
dspillett 23 hours ago [-]
In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.
JohnFen 22 hours ago [-]
So much this. I've spent my whole career avoiding being promoted into management because I don't want to be or enjoy being a manager.
So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
9rx 21 hours ago [-]
The last time a programmer wasn't a manager was when they were handed a piece of paper with toggle combinations and their job was to flip the toggle switches as detailed. AI doesn't seem to have much applicability in any other profession, other than maybe graphic arts, but the same holds true there. Artists are also always managers.
So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
rhsjie294nd 21 hours ago [-]
That's a weird way to put it. Yeah, everyone does a level of management for their own time and work projects. Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. Programmers talked a lot more about data structures and algorithms instead of keeping the LLM on track or sandboxed. How is it not different? We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
9rx 21 hours ago [-]
> That's a weird way to put it.
How so?
> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.
The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?
> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.
And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.
If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
rhsjie294nd 19 hours ago [-]
I was talking about the programming profession. Their work is (was?) in establishing those details. The programming jobs as they were are going away, and are becoming more like management. I think we both agree there. What I don't agree with is saying that programming was always management. That, to me, is over-generalising what management is to the point where the word is becoming almost meaningless.
9rx 18 hours ago [-]
> What I don't agree with is saying that programming was always management.
I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.
> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is
The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...
Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already always management (where you include computers as something able to be managed), even if there was a brief moment in time where it was more than that.
rhsjie294nd 17 hours ago [-]
People management was always only a branch of management. However, never would I say that when coding, I'm "managing the computer". It's a weird thing to me. A compiler is a tool, not an unpredictable process I need to manage. I never used that lens in my professional work until LLMs. I'm talking 3 years ago, not 30.
I get that it's cute and philosophical to think everything is management and I'm one to generalize stuff as well ad-nausea. But when people don't find satisfaction in their work anymore and the excuse is "well, think of it as a promotion", that to me is taking the analogy too far because it suits the current trends.
But we're discussing now what it means to do management. We'll just have to agree to disagree and call it a day
9rx 17 hours ago [-]
> People management was always only a branch of management.
What other branch is there? You are either delegating or doing all the work yourself. Those who delegate become seen as managers, as that delegation requires managing the people (or, possibly things, depending on how you see that) that the work was delegated to. Those who receive the delegation and carry out their task individually are those considered to not be managers, but rather individual contributors.
> However, never would I say that when coding, I'm "managing the computer".
Why would you say anything while coding? I guess if you had some kind of voice-to-text system you might say something, but it wouldn't be "whee, I'm a manager now!!!!" — it'd be specific instructions directed at the computer so that it knows what task you are delegating to it.
> A compiler is a tool, not an unpredictable process I need to manage.
A compiler can be predictable if you perfectly describe the task you want it to carry out. However, that rarely happens in practice. Communicating your intent is always the hard part.
Which isn't much different than people. There are exceptions, but generally if you clearly define what you want them to do, they will execute it perfectly. Management of humans is all about coming back to make sure that what you described was correct and made sense to the receiving party. Which is the same thing you have to do with compilers.
shubb 3 hours ago [-]
On the face of it, product management and service management are the big duty donors.
Project managers and real executives manage a budget in dollars, not man days or tokens. Historically businesses are pretty reluctant to devolve that. I don’t think a big corp vibe coder is going to be able to pull out a company credit card and buy a marketing campaign any time soon.
So you have those other 2, managing product market fit and availability.
One person startup you do everything I guess
dspillett 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is a sliding scale.
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
xnx 17 hours ago [-]
Nah, the part of management that sucks is the people. Management/operation of a thinking machine is a dream by comparison. With AI you can still get into the details all you want. AI won't get offended for being "micro-managed".
sodapopcan 18 hours ago [-]
Ya, I've been doing this almost 20 years and never even thought about a manager position. I always tell everyone in interviews that I'm "IC for life."
spicymaki 23 hours ago [-]
> Because our daily complicity ...
Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
scottLobster 22 hours ago [-]
As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean.
I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.
At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
fl4regun 19 hours ago [-]
never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor
dataflow 18 hours ago [-]
I actually can enjoy being the digital janitor, when I'm allowed to. What's frustrating is when things are dirty and they don't even let you clean.
red-iron-pine 20 hours ago [-]
the term your looking for is "worker alienation"
pc86 23 hours ago [-]
"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
scottLobster 22 hours ago [-]
He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
pc86 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0123456789ABCDE 5 hours ago [-]
you will note gp did not refer to the deceased as a criminal, nor did they condone their murder, on the contrary.
scottLobster 21 hours ago [-]
The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
lotsofpulp 18 hours ago [-]
>The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
scottLobster 17 hours ago [-]
Excessive is knowingly denying someone necessary medical coverage solely for financial gain. If private insurers want to play that game then they can register as a non-profit organization or be an optional layer on top of a public backstop, such as medicare-for-all, an arrangement they've lobbied against for deacdes.
Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion
lotsofpulp 16 hours ago [-]
If you were in charge of denying or approving claims (millions of them), would you expect to make errors?
Would you expect every insured without sufficient medical knowledge to understand which denial was appropriate versus which was an error?
pc86 16 hours ago [-]
You know the answer, they would just steal money from people they don't like the pay for everything, and when that runs out almost immediately they'll implement rationing and waitlists. Tale as old as time.
pc86 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 19 hours ago [-]
Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities.
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
BigTTYGothGF 20 hours ago [-]
Wrongful denial of medical treatment. Delay, Deny, Depose.
pfdietz 18 hours ago [-]
Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system the insurance companies do it. They have the negotiating power that individual patients do not.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
pc86 20 hours ago [-]
There is literally an entire cottage industry full of people whose entire livelihood depends on getting people medical treatment after it's been denied.
BigTTYGothGF 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what a waste that is.
timcobb 20 hours ago [-]
not all crime is illegal, unfortunately.
akagusu 23 hours ago [-]
Can I pick all?
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
22 hours ago [-]
stego-tech 23 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah.
I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.
Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.
I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.
The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.
We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.
And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
Terr_ 16 hours ago [-]
> The technology of today does not enable, or empower
To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing:
The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage.
The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours.
In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.
BigTTYGothGF 20 hours ago [-]
> industry of tinkerers and designers
At no point in history was it ever thus.
ang_cire 18 hours ago [-]
Yes and no.
There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).
But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
BigTTYGothGF 17 hours ago [-]
> early gaming
Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades.
I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.
cucumber3732842 17 hours ago [-]
>Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?
And this is different than other industries how?
Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.
ang_cire 16 hours ago [-]
I agree about what happened, but I think the timescale is different.
Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s.
I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech.
If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.
mrguyorama 15 hours ago [-]
>If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids
All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.
"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.
Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.
salemh 23 hours ago [-]
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Der_Einzige 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ang_cire 22 hours ago [-]
I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.
Der_Einzige 22 hours ago [-]
"The Librarian"
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
ang_cire 22 hours ago [-]
The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.
wonderwonder 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pixl97 23 hours ago [-]
>an innocent
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
wonderwonder 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 23 hours ago [-]
If Mangione was the CEO's health insurer and knowingly denied him cancer treatment the CEO's doctor said he needed, all to boost his quarterly earnings, resulting in his death, would you have this same level of outrage?
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
ang_cire 20 hours ago [-]
Exactly. It's insane how we've come to just accept corporate profit as a valid reason for allowing people to die, or for shifting responsibility for the outcome away from the corporation.
The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
tavavex 18 hours ago [-]
Don't forget:
Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened
Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this
Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
nancyminusone 22 hours ago [-]
the way healthcare companies act now, they deserve bankruptcy
NicuCalcea 23 hours ago [-]
A quarter of Americans (and 40% of young Americans) see Mangione favourably, so it definitely is a society thing.
The only reason in my mind to view Mangione unfavorably is that vigilante justice, however justified, does not result in a civilization anyone would want to live in. It's the same reason we can't just go around killing everyone in the Epstein files. It's not that they don't deserve it, it's that the resulting corrosion destroys the entire system, including the good parts.
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
wonderwonder 23 hours ago [-]
Be attractive
Don't be unattractive
swed420 20 hours ago [-]
Alternatively, if you're attractive (or any other useful trait), use it for public good.
red-iron-pine 19 hours ago [-]
it's not because the US healthcare system is a gigantic trainwreck that prioritizes F100 companies over suffering people. nah.
it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it.
not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills.
it's cuz he's hot.
akagusu 23 hours ago [-]
Mangione is a murderer but that "innocent man" he killed was not innocent at all, he indeed was a murderer too. The only difference between then is they used different tools. No... Mangione murdered one, the other guy killed much more.
baggy_trough 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nikole9696 22 hours ago [-]
"And therefore, someone must decide what claims are reasonable."
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
baggy_trough 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nikole9696 20 hours ago [-]
"tradeoffs have to be made" is a great way to say that yes, you agree that instead of focusing on lowering health care costs, you think it's fine that people die because of them. I would posit that no treatment should be allowed to cost multiple millions of dollars - I am aware that's easier said than done, but I'm pretty sure society should try. Maybe if the CEOs didn't make billions of dollars and instead we put those profits back into play, we'd have a chance.
tavavex 18 hours ago [-]
> So you think that your doctor should be able to order you any imaginable treatment that they think is medically necessary, and someone else will have to pay for it?
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
scottLobster 23 hours ago [-]
If you think all denied claims are denied in good faith, I don't know what to do for you.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
baggy_trough 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dec0dedab0de 19 hours ago [-]
Why would an insurer who denied all claims have any customers? I think you're missing the market competition aspect of the insurance business.
Most people do not get to choose their own insurance company, they just get whatever their job picks. Most big companies have directors and officers that personally benefit when a particular insurance company does well. The market is completely broken.
Insurance is an arbitrage leach at best, and extortion at worst. It provides no value to society.
Without insurance Market prices would drive down the cost of healthcare.
scottLobster 21 hours ago [-]
I was presenting an extreme hypothetical to a make a point that the insurers are motivated by selfishness.
In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.
Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.
I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
SketchySeaBeast 21 hours ago [-]
Isn't it also not the direct customer purchasing the insurance, but their employer, who also has to pay into the pot and so is incentivized to find cheap options? (I'm not 100% on this - I'm not American.)
scottLobster 20 hours ago [-]
Depends on your employer/occupation. You can purchase insurance directly as an individual but it's usually the most expensive way to go as you have no group bargaining power. Small businesses are also hit by this, as they're only trying to cover a small group of people.
For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.
Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.
Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.
The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.
Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare
21 hours ago [-]
SketchySeaBeast 23 hours ago [-]
> Do you think that there is some health care system in which all requests for care can be approved without limit?
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
BigTTYGothGF 20 hours ago [-]
Eichmann never directly murdered anybody either.
whattheheckheck 20 hours ago [-]
Shame? Where's the shame for these orphan crushing machine administrators? Just doing my job. Just following orders. Just designing and optimizing it
All of it is doing it both. The system is cracking and the ONLY REASON why its brought up is because 1 guy did a murder to an important guy. Otherwise business as usual.
Shame on society
ang_cire 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wonderwonder 23 hours ago [-]
Cool so do I get to decide who's decisions I don't like and resulted in death or do only people like you and Mangione get to decide?
And to be clear, you are advocting for vigilante justice so you are going to be celebrating when the following happen:
Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down
Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down
Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down
Regular killers and gang members are gunned down
Police are gunned down
Politicians on both sides are gunned down
Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down
Feel free to add to the list.
ang_cire 22 hours ago [-]
Everyone makes decisions in life and lives with the consequences. Your question, as it's stated now, is simply "should we have free will?"
I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
whattheheckheck 20 hours ago [-]
Systematic over denial of claims is not murdering innocent children, women and men?
"Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
kome 23 hours ago [-]
he didn't murder an innocent man.
brandonagr2 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Multicomp 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not happy they do it, but I'm not surprised. There's a lot of media echochambers where Luigi M is lionized and his heinous actions dismissed or celebrated because it advances a grievance/covetousness/envy political narrative, and for the same kind of people who have to be atheist to be fashionable tend to be the ones who can fall into workism as described in TFA and also have a non-trivial chance of falling into media spheres that want to drive that anti-healthcare-exec animus crowd.
scottLobster 23 hours ago [-]
Anyone who's lost a loved one over a denied claim can sympathize with Luigi even if they disapprove of his methods. Sounds like you haven't gone through that experience, but a lot of Americans have.
ang_cire 23 hours ago [-]
That's only okay if they're a politician or business exec, right? It's fine to hold those murderers up as role models, apparently.
20 hours ago [-]
pc86 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ThrowawayR2 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ang_cire 22 hours ago [-]
Is discussing offshoring that takes away American jobs and has driven much poverty in the heartland equally political and unacceptable, or is it just the political discussions you don't like having that shouldn't be allowed?
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
throw-the-towel 21 hours ago [-]
Even by your definition, HN is still full of off-topic politics these days.
cadamsdotcom 11 hours ago [-]
> What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica.
Because the world sure needs more goat farmers and surf instructors.
It's all pointless, you can't outrun the pointlessness - so just enjoy it!
Oras 2 hours ago [-]
My personal take is it’s not the tech or AI, it’s the lack of leadership to make things correct. I’ve seen it a lot in tech.
Working on your own project doesn’t seem tiring or as exhausting as a job, because it has the sense of achievement, you work, learn, make something that you believe is making a change. On the other side, you see how pointless the work is when it’s just contributing to a number in a slide for a manager that has no idea what they are doing.
The solution is not technical though, it’s human, and that is more challenging to fix.
andix 15 hours ago [-]
I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously.
I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't matter much anymore, and everyone tries to make the best out of it in their private life.
rr808 23 minutes ago [-]
I think 15 years of asset boom has made enormous fortunes not just for billionaires but for regular middle class folks and especially anything tech or finance related. When your investments make much more than your wages, its hard to care about your career but this is the norm now for lots of people around me.
FloorEgg 14 hours ago [-]
Sometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine.
Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).
When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.
Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.
andix 14 hours ago [-]
Interesting idea. Modern media and social media is probably really the most relevant change we had in the last 15 years. Everything else didn't change that much.
an0malous 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah something broke during COVID. One factor was the stimulus created enormous wealth inequality, people who owned assets before that live like gods now and people who didn’t can’t even buy a home. The economic policies since then have exacerbated the issue.
darepublic 15 hours ago [-]
I'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable
tines 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, some people only assign value to things in terms of money and economics. I will never understand these people.
You are the art.
nik282000 14 hours ago [-]
The fact that you can think is what is valuable. I work for a slew of drones who will ask the same question 4 or 5 times, to multiple people, hoping that one of them will 'slip up' and reveal that there is actually a hidden easy solution.
JohnFen 22 hours ago [-]
None of that is the reason I'm sad. I'm sad because I realized that this industry had grown from something that is a benefit to everyone to something that is the opposite of that.
smath 13 hours ago [-]
This is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct service of someone. Modern organizations are complex and can put several layers between the knowledge worker and the customer it ultimately serves. This produces the feeling of 'cog in a machine'. It is possible to work such jobs and serve others directly on the side (e.g. friday evening soup kitchen)
dsign 15 hours ago [-]
I personally have been trying to get a financial security cushion for the last ten years or so (and failing) so I don't take my own feelings into account; AI hasn't made me more frustrated. On the contrary, it's a tool I now use in my escape-the-rat-wheel adventures, and there's nothing sweeter than seeing Opus dismantle in ten minutes a problem that would have consumed two full days of my time in this world. But when I speak with colleagues and friends, all of them, now and not before, in all age groups, and with only in common to be knowledge workers, are searching for a way out.
cleandreams 12 hours ago [-]
I am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun.
I loved my career.
Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.
There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.
One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.
...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.
ghm2199 23 hours ago [-]
On a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices:
1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".
2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.
I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.
paulorlando 9 hours ago [-]
This came up in a few responses below as various roles have been replaced by machines (gas station attendants, printers, travel agents...) so I'm responding in a new thread.
When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking.
There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine.
Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.
But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods.
Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers.
The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.”
> That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.
Did someone just say "WFH"?
modeless 16 hours ago [-]
Many occupations have been made obsolete throughout history, and this article examines none of them. I'm not sympathetic to "this time it's different", I think people are just too lazy to try to find out what actually happened in the past.
IshKebab 16 hours ago [-]
This time it has the potential to be different because it might basically obsolete all white collar jobs, which is waaaay more jobs than even the industrial revolution, and in a much shorter time.
Maybe anyway. I think that probably depends on at least a couple of more breakthroughs - at least a solution to the hallucination problem, and probably some kind of true on-line learning, not just writing stuff down and reading it again later.
carlosjobim 13 hours ago [-]
Information Technology has always had the purpose of obsoleting white collar jobs. Creating some new jobs along the way, but obsoleting more than it creates. "Computer" used to be a job title for a human being.
mahogany 12 hours ago [-]
The difference now is about the scale. What percentage of the labor force do you think were “computers”? It is not comparable to a potential disruption of huge swathes of the workforce in a short time span. That’s what people are worried about.
pm90 24 hours ago [-]
Tech has always had an unhealthy streak; it was ok while workers were being compensated well and treated amazingly. The end of zirp has cut comp and benefits massively so there’s a lot less upside to this lifestyle.
robofanatic 22 hours ago [-]
Because most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
This is me, if i can keep the train on the tracks for 10 more years I'll be able to stop dancing, collect my tips, and finally get off the stage. I'll be 60 then and may open a coffee shop idk yet.
gste 5 hours ago [-]
The author wants to draw a contrast between the powerful businessman discussing EBITDA and the creative expression of knitting. In my opinion they are equally dull and well matched.
janpeuker 19 hours ago [-]
Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)
SauciestGNU 18 hours ago [-]
I'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.
jgerrish 16 hours ago [-]
I'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light.
Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts.
Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from.
Is that fair enough?
I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad.
Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
treszkai 14 hours ago [-]
To roll with this idea: soon the credits will include more names like Sol and Opus 5 and various pointy-haired bosses than names like Mike Little. That's not very encouraging either.
jLaForest 14 hours ago [-]
Matt burned any leftover good will a long time ago
deanc 23 hours ago [-]
I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.
I've been trying to figure out how to make money with trading for years (and I _might_ be getting closer, now).
Trading is the only way to make money I can think of where you don't have customers/clients and are truly in control of your own destiny.
But of course it's not that easy.
thisisauserid 23 hours ago [-]
Most of the people in tech I know that have interpersonal relationships and go out and look at a tree every once in a while are not often sad.
23 hours ago [-]
23 hours ago [-]
OroPla 5 hours ago [-]
Can't say that I agree with the premise. It's not AI that has people feeling that their jobs are pointless. If your job isn't directly contributing to make the world a better place, which is most jobs, then you know it. And if your job isn't even producing anything tangible, then you know it, too. Same for when your job isn't at the very least benefiting other people in some way.
But that's where hobby's come into place. You can just pick up something you do for fun that makes the world a better place, or leaves something tangible or otherwise benefits someone you know.
eahm 23 hours ago [-]
Because everything is ads, lots of propaganda and too much politics.
Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.
Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.
tediousgraffit1 6 hours ago [-]
maybe I'm missing something, I'll admit I haven't made it through the whole smug article, but critiquing knowledge work, especially IT work, just a few years after that field yielded it's...what, fourth?... major contribution to society in the last say 40 years is pretty funny imho.
I'm counting:
1. the pc (80's)
2. the web (90's-early 2000's)
3. the cloud (early 2010s)
4. the computers that speak natural langage (early 2020s)
a big chunk of gdp in the most prosperus nation on earth is dedicated to knowledge work but sure, it's abstract so I guess it doesn't feel as useful.
andsoitis 24 hours ago [-]
> knowledge work is mostly pointless
Really, noemamag?
aogaili 23 hours ago [-]
That sums up the depth of the author understanding.
my-next-account 23 hours ago [-]
Doing pointless things is wonderful, anyway.
dreadnip 23 hours ago [-]
Do you like increasing shareholder value?
andsoitis 20 hours ago [-]
Absolutely! As a part-owner in a company that’s exactly what I expect. I’m not putting my money in a company because I’m feeling generous.
I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.
luciana1u 23 hours ago [-]
we spent a decade being told we were building the future, and now the future is a subscription fee and a quarterly layoff email
dizlexic 16 hours ago [-]
>A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
The pleasure...
mikert89 23 hours ago [-]
You used your most prized mental faculties to build software: logical intelligence, creativity, etc to make someone else rich
trgn 23 hours ago [-]
> logical intelligence
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
23 hours ago [-]
gls2ro 18 hours ago [-]
I like an article focused on us, the special tech people.
But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...
You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.
hackeraccount 23 hours ago [-]
I read about an experiment with pigeons. The birds were given a target. For one iteration if a bird pecked a target it would get a piece of corn. For another it got nothing and for a third... sometimes it would get piece of corn and sometimes it would get nothing.
Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together.
I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.
1vuio0pswjnm7 17 hours ago [-]
Original HN title: "Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?"
arendtio 23 hours ago [-]
I think we shouldn't be depressed, but work on ideas and concepts of how this could be changed into something good.
I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
hn1rig3rak 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah I came around to this too
mrjay42 22 hours ago [-]
Because of the *gap* between the enjoyment of "discovering, learning and practicing tech" and the capitalistic use of tech and the consequence it has on people AND how tech is used.
wigster 44 minutes ago [-]
if?
Grombobulous 23 hours ago [-]
Everyone in tech isn’t sad, the people who are vocal about being sad are sad.
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
laughing_man 13 hours ago [-]
There is certainly ample precedent for this. How many stable hands lost their jobs as people switched from horses to automobiles?
In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.
inquist 15 hours ago [-]
I quit tech a couple of years ago to become a high school teacher. No regrets.
namuol 14 hours ago [-]
With or without AI, if I had to talk about EBITDAs for my job, I too would have to take up knitting to feel like I’m doing something real. I’m sure Charlie Munger would agree.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
Things are going to change once again. It's been a long time ago since things really changed. In the 70s, probably. And before that maybe in the 1920s. It will be a generational change. Life went from quaint 19th century stuff to airplanes and medicine and plate tectonics and knowledge of galaxies and washing machines and the contraceptive pill and antibiotics in one or two generations. Then there was a bit of breathing room and things are picking up once again. Life is never constant. It is something you prepare for and deal with. For reference, people in Europe over the last hundred years lived through extreme ups and downs. Cities flattened to the ground. Entire families exterminated. Properties expropriated. All streets renamed multiple times. Entire ideologies swapped out multiple times. The US has enjoyed relative constancy. But now the entire world will change once more. It's not the first time. But history is back. Whether you prepare or put your head in the sand.
MrJobbo 4 hours ago [-]
Not having kids was the best decision of my life...the world is headed to really really bad place.
mariopt 23 hours ago [-]
Let's see.... Unemployment, AI Lunatics, forced to use AI, AI Slopping...
Much of joy we got from coding was taken way, I can not even imagine anyone wanting to get back to a coding role to vibe slop all day long.
I even heard from colleagues that presented algorithms better than the AI slop and heard verbatim from their boss: I prefer the AI solution instead of your.
So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
pixl97 23 hours ago [-]
>So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech.
With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
eddyzh 16 hours ago [-]
This resonates a lot with me, well worth the long read.
And the last part about how to try keep the human part relevant, is exactly what I try for now.
tehnub 17 hours ago [-]
If you're excited about AI, doesn't that mean you're actually less AI-pilled? You don't believe it will replace you fully.
Eridrus 15 hours ago [-]
I am a fundamental believer that technological efficiency is the reason life is better now than it was hundreds of years ago, and will be the reason that life in hundreds of years is better than it is now.
There may be disruption to me as a producer, but I think the results for people as consumers will be great.
There will be change, there is already change in our careers here, but I do not fear the need to change and do something different.
On net for humanity, I am certain the change will be positive even if some people including myself will experience disruption.
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
win311fwg 23 hours ago [-]
The glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.
okwhateverdude 20 hours ago [-]
A company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.
pseudalopex 17 hours ago [-]
Graeber's test of a bullshit job was it could be eliminated without harm to society. Jobs to make people above feel important was 1 type he identified.
win311fwg 6 hours ago [-]
We're talking about the link. It refers to pointless work.
- "over half of societal work is pointless"
- "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be"
Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?
xlayn 12 hours ago [-]
People who argue against AI are the same people arguing against the car because of horses...
This is going to open a whole field of jobs for... ... ...... someone... but let's not go into those details...
Remember that this is going to supercharge economy, sure, in the beginning it'll not be obvious, but then you are going to see how it'll enable people to stop working, just like trickle down economy has redistribut....ed...
Ok maybe that's a bad example, sure it's going to take a lot of people out of business, and yes there will be a lot of pain for a "small" part of society, but in general it will be pure gain as a whole... it's not like all that people being laid off means something like stop paying house mortgages, and then a lot of evictions and suddenly a lot of houses going of market... ... I mean even then that's not like it's going to cause all the house market to go down right?
Ok maybe a bit... but don't worry if you are near underwater with your loan someone will buy all those houses to keep your loans on check... it's not like it's going to be some private investors with all the money that will go to the top 1% and take them out of the market and make impossible for the rest of us to buy something...
I mean, my point is don't be negative, stop fighting progress, if more people can buy super yatches there will be more openings for building them!
awesomeMilou 9 hours ago [-]
This comment is funny, because Berkshire Hathaway's exposure in the housing market uses basically what you said as it's strategy memo.
WesolyKubeczek 3 hours ago [-]
Oh, I know what happens: most will fail to reinvent themselves and will spiral themselves into drugs or alcoholism.
Seen that happen once before.
zitterbewegung 23 hours ago [-]
When have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).
Balinares 23 hours ago [-]
There was a time when Google SREs were inventing the profession from the ground up, and it was the stuff of legend.
david927 23 hours ago [-]
The 1990's
foobiekr 6 hours ago [-]
Othr than bubble $, not really. The true "golden time" was the 1980s. Creation of Cisco, Sun and SGI, and so many other things (like the personal computer), all new, incredible energy, mostly positive.
toyg 2 hours ago [-]
Read Douglas Adams. We were not really happy even back then.
SirFatty 21 hours ago [-]
cybersecurity has taken over my life as a IT Manager. Security was always important, and always something I worked on, but now it's all I work on and it's exhausting.
Managing patch management)software and firmware. Users who cannot help but enter credentials via phishing regardless of training.
Chasing the next best practice (SSL VPN out, IPsec is back, etc).
Multicomp 23 hours ago [-]
> In my experience, there are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome.
> The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there.
The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy.
Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia.
Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
austin-cheney 15 hours ago [-]
Just as a reminder this subject of AI replacing developers come up all the time but it has not happened yet.
People want to focus on AI but the same problem has always been there for 2-4 decades. Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria. You just show up and everyone is super insecure. AI just provides a name to identify that insecurity. Nothing else has changed.
aetherspawn 14 hours ago [-]
I want to open with: I have 20 years exp as a hacker and deep tech software engineer. LLVM and such.
I shared your opinion until just last week, when I started using Fable on Autocode and passing it huge requirement specs I had written for desktop apps.
$500 in -> 5 days -> an app that would take me a year to write, and the code quality was fine. I just left it running in /loop… I did nothing.
Now I, unfortunately, believe the propaganda, and I too am worried.
Can the economy support the burn rate of AI companies though? My mission now is to create all the apps and products that are stuck in my head while I still can, before Fable is inaccessible due to bankruptcy or they hike the price or some other thing.
paganel 4 hours ago [-]
> “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.
Uncle Ted is being proved correct in his assessment day after day after day. Too bad that the normies in the article wont' ever look at the world through Uncle Ted's nor through Ellul's eyes, they're too intellectually limited (to not use the word "stupid") for that. Too bad, had they known they could have turned their lives for the better earlier on.
raiyanr 9 hours ago [-]
I dont think it will happen
ieie3366 23 hours ago [-]
Because they don’t exercise, have a terrible diet, lack of socialization, and no family to speak of
seydor 24 hours ago [-]
Having just installed the world's most popular software (MS windows), i think they should be.
dec0dedab0de 23 hours ago [-]
Surely android and ios surpass windows in usage. Though I would argue that none of them are popular.
alansaber 23 hours ago [-]
Fair enough.
sri9s 23 hours ago [-]
good one
dgabriel 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not sad. As an engineer with decades of experience under my belt, I'm really excited about how AI can democratize software and help me finally complete long-simmering side projects, create value for the greater good, and be a generally fun thing. So far, I have not found myself even remotely replaced by AI at work.
echelon 23 hours ago [-]
I have never been happier.
I flipping love AI.
This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.
To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
celsoazevedo 20 hours ago [-]
You seem to ignore all negative aspects of AI, so it's not a surprise that you're happy and excited. It's the other side of the coin of "AI is bad and brings no benefits", usually the result of ignoring any positives.
I've used AI/LLMs to create tools for myself, which otherwise would have not been created. That's good. But I also know people that are terrible at detecting AI content... it's only a matter of time until a couple of fake videos trigger a mob and something bad happens.
I think that's where some of the negativity comes from. Yes, AI can do nice things, but it's not all good.
lrvick 18 hours ago [-]
I am finally able to deliver on years of backlog ideas thanks to the GPUs I racked up in my garage. Having a blast.
Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
mjcohen 18 hours ago [-]
So glad I am retired.
erikerikson 14 hours ago [-]
What the article describes was already a problem. Business people frequently pushed for broken incomplete work via shortcuts, fell for flattery, and otherwise twisted the work for those of us who cared about doing it well and accomplishing valuable and important things.
Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies.
The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity.
To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.
jgbuddy 23 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty happy I think
knicholes 23 hours ago [-]
How long have you been working in tech?
jgbuddy 21 hours ago [-]
2 years, maybe that's the problem
paulcole 23 hours ago [-]
> people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams…
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
rvz 23 hours ago [-]
Because the free ride and the day-care rest and vest ZIRP tech life style is over.
In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join.
In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off.
It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are looking for a safe and stable job, it does not exist.
8by3 23 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to be _that_ extreme,
Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc.
Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.
Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
pixl97 23 hours ago [-]
>what the promise of a good job was supposed to offe
So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either.
Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
ungovernableCat 15 hours ago [-]
Working culture at OpenAI and Anthropic is quite brutal.
But hey, a lot of their employees are on 7+ figure compensations (when counting their paper worth) so it's certainly a motivating factor to work long hours.
15 hours ago [-]
godwinson__4-8 9 hours ago [-]
Yikes. Won't someone think of the software engineers?
Many of us have done far better than we deserve. There are so many workers who will never approach the gains even an aborted or partial career in software will accomplish.
How many of you are willing to sacrifice to achieve UBI for all?
My sympathy for you will depend on the answer.
aobdev 9 hours ago [-]
The author is pretty unsympathetic towards those who give their lives to “Workism” in exchange for money, no?
godwinson__4-8 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe so. Yet a "career" is not charity. I think it's important for engineers to remember a career in software is still (as it long has been) a luxury.
matheusmoreira 23 hours ago [-]
Because society sucks so people enable Daniel Plainview mode.
12 hours ago [-]
cousin_it 15 hours ago [-]
The article makes an interesting point. Like, sure, AI slop is nasty; but also maybe the job itself was bullshit all along (making powerpoints, or coding yet another todo app and so on), and you were only making peace with it by adding a human element which wasn't strictly necessary. Now with AI that illusion is stripped away, and you see the job for what it really is: just how little it means.
npilk 17 hours ago [-]
So the author tells us there is a crisis of meaning in the workplace, and their proposed solution is… to remember none of the work matters?
The start of the piece:
“These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?”
The end: “For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory.”
hingler36 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this take is wildly out of touch. Sure, it's great when you're able to derive philosophical meaning from your work, but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are here for the paycheck.
chasing 16 hours ago [-]
“Tech” is one of the most rapidly-changing disciplines historically. It was very different in 2016. In 2006. In 1996. In 1986. It will be very different in 2036. If this is your career, part of your job is being aware of those changes and being the person who can help others create value from whatever new technologies come around. I’ve always found these changes exciting and fun, but I’ve also been aware my entire career that whatever I’m doing be year could be out-of-date and not of value the next. Tech is exciting. Trepidation is a part of excitement.
jimt1234 8 hours ago [-]
For me it's not just AI. The industry just doesn't feel the same anymore. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon - I've been in this industry since the 80s, but things really seemed to change, or I finally noticed it, around 2010 or so. It seemed like everything we were building wasn't to help people, it was to extract data from people and generally just harass people into buying shit.
We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.
matrix87 9 hours ago [-]
Personally I'm pretty excited for the future.
I feel like LLMs make reading papers way easier than what it is before. If I ever run into a roadblock, I can just keep digging and probing until it makes sense to me. If anything, the amount of work that needs to be done has been amplified because it makes learning new things that much easier.
The business culture at F50 companies is several decades behind tech. The business culture in middle america is even further behind. If these people can remain employed, I'm not sure why anyone in SV is worried. The nature of white collar work is that it changes over time and frankly I think getting attached to one job title is nonsensical.
Also, half of the battle with white collar work is information asymmetry. The effectiveness of the models with real systems in the field is limited by the amount of context that people are willing to provide. This problem existed before AI, if teams document literally everything, management could see this as an outsourcing opportunity. If management forces them to document stuff, why would they do a good job? Also, why the hell would management even try to do this in the first place if it by implication eliminates their job as well?
There's a social problem here: how do you get people to give high quality information if there is no incentive? How do you know that they're not telling you things or intentionally explaining something badly (as opposed to the AI just being "bad" at something)? Especially now that the billionaire class has done enough saber rattling over it and gotten everyone thoroughly freaked out for the next decade at least? (This is also a problem in high churn corporate cultures as well, the fear fucks up the signal to noise ratio)
frollogaston 15 hours ago [-]
Speak for yourself.
rayoleary 11 hours ago [-]
Bravo
wonderwonder 23 hours ago [-]
'professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”'
This has been a meme in tech for decades. I seriously considered farming 20 years ago due to my dissatisfaction with tech, its nothing new.
I fall into the group of tech workers that never enjoyed their work, I still loathe it but it pays really well. Standups are the worst, every day its "what did you do yesterday". The number of hours worked are far above a normal 9 - 5.
Sections of sociery spent years telling people to learn to code and they did and they do. The issue is that for many people that just work to live and don't live to work, code is souless and there is nothing to show for it after decades of grind.
This negative outlook is not universal of couse, I am sure this site is full of people that love software and more power to them. For a good deal of us though, its just how we pay the bills and there is nothing else that will come close to paying them as well.
Now to add to the general malaise we see companies laying off tens of thousands of engineers to justify their token spend. The feeling of living on borrowed time is prevelant especially for those that never got RSU's or SF salaries
surgical_fire 23 hours ago [-]
I enjoy coding, but I always sort of hated working in tech. It's something I do because I get paid well to do it, I happen to be good at it.
It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again.
Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
purplemoonx 9 hours ago [-]
Already happened, next
annoyingnoob 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that Hobbies are an existential threat. We had hobbies before the Internet too. It is the non-stop rat race that is the problem. Before cellphones and email we went home from work and left work at work, for the most part. Find a rich life outside of work.
andix 15 hours ago [-]
Here in Europe employees turn off their company devices after work. Getting called-in in your time off usually happens not more than once every few months. You're not supposed to check your messages in your time off. But it still feels a lot like described in this article.
annoyingnoob 10 hours ago [-]
Well, I said "Find a rich life outside of work".
In the article's conclusion, "once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real".
I suppose we agree and are saying something similar.
If you've worked for startups then you've delt with existential threats, perhaps hard times and failures. I read the article as a lot of corporate jobs. When you fail you find out quickly what is important in life. You need some not-work to be important in your life too. AI can only mimic your creativity and your emotions. You are not as replaceable as it may seem. Maybe I'm not convinced that Anthropic and OpenAI are going to replace us all just yet.
We are living in strange times, not only with threats of automation everywhere but with great political upheaval all over the world. One thing is certain, change, things won't always be this way. I'm going to rely on my grit and remember what is important to me and what makes me happy.
zabzonk 23 hours ago [-]
Too much web stuff.
elzbardico 16 hours ago [-]
[Verse 1]
Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all
[Chorus]
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades, come rally
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal
Unites the human race
[Verse 2]
Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give!
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live
asjh15 22 hours ago [-]
Everyone is so sad because comments that follow the AI money are flagged, everyone knows that there is marketing and censorship and 50% of commenters are useful idiots that swallow the propaganda.
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
surgical_fire 23 hours ago [-]
Everyone is sad?
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
catigula 23 hours ago [-]
The idea that "knowledge work is mostly pointless" is absurd and only literally true specifically if AI can do it... which it seems to be able to.
VCFundedGenYer 21 hours ago [-]
When every other website (or its content) is AI-generated and not made by humans, we can't buy computers anymore, we're being forced to use AI at work (for no tangible benefit either other than "It's the future! You'll be left behind [citation needed]!!"), endless security vulnerabilities caused by AI burning IT/Infosec out, do you HAVE to ask?
cupcakecommons 14 hours ago [-]
I read up until the term "late capitalism" then stopped and rolled my eyes and closed the page. Coin clippers control the money supply and mainstream economics is the sham - it really is that simple. Mass enshittification will continue until monetary debasement and ensuing Cantillon effect is halted and pricing mechanisms can function.
_doctor_love 18 hours ago [-]
Since it's Friday, I'm going to suggest an activity: this evening, invest 30 minutes in watching "The Brain Center at Whipple" from the old Twilight Zone TV series. This conversation is much older than any of us, starting really with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaninglessness and inanity of much of corporate work is part and parcel of that. AI makes the contrast more stark, but not new.
Or to come at it another way: the system we live in - capitalism - is defined by the process of 'creative destruction' (coined by the economist Schumpeter). We are always iterating on technology, making it better, finding new optimizations. When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.
Whether this process is desirable, moral, ethical, etc. is not answered by the observation, simply that this is how the system works.
jselysianeagle 16 hours ago [-]
> When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.
I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.
docmars 10 hours ago [-]
I'm finding that AI is only fun for people with limitless savings or retirement funds.
When you have nothing to worry about, and you can create anything you want, at any expense, of course it's great.
For everyone else, we're dealing with teams who ship slop, company cultures that devalue workers right in front of their faces, and force them to worry about layoffs at any turn.
tossitawayplz 23 hours ago [-]
A lot of people truly enjoyed the craft and creativity of building something. That is being stripped away. The building is being outsourced now. In some cases, the design too. Everything they once enjoyed and took pride in is being done by machines now. That is not a good feeling.
Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft.
Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved.
Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis.
A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better.
The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you.
Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me:
1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal.
2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome.
3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior.
4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form.
Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself.
Good luck out there.
NateEag 7 hours ago [-]
You have channeled a great deal of my anxiety, stress, anger, and sorrow with this comment.
Every day at my job I search for a chance to write some fragment of code by hand, a place where just for a moment I remember the joyous struggle to be a craftsman.
I have the sense that you're right - musicians, writers, illustrators, actors, animators - they largely seem to hate the way the genAI companies vacuumed up everything that was meant for other people to feed the soulless dreck-vomiters.
I wish I knew the way to unite the programmers who were and are craftsmen with the artists who desire well-crafted tools that respect their artistic autonomy and creative freedom.
There could be some good cooperation there, if someone could solve the coordination problem.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts - I empathize strongly and appreciate what you had to say.
I hope your quest goes well.
vrganj 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if an indie games studio might be the place for both kinds of craftsmen to create unique rewarding quality work.
MDTHLN 15 hours ago [-]
This is a wonderful comment, and I’m glad I scrolled far enough to see it.
> Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists?
This is the tradeoff that hurts me the most. I spent a significant chunk of my 20’s learning new paradigms, languages, and frameworks. I thought I knew the tradeoff I was making. I thought any sacrifice now would pay off in the future. Instead, it seems like any learning outside of the first few years of my career was completely useless.
I would love to go out on my own terms like you suggest, but unfortunately I have at least 25 more years in this profession before I can retire. If the profession survives that long.
diogenescynic 23 hours ago [-]
Because the entire career or job experience is like a never ending marathon where the only reward is keeping your job and not becoming destitute. You never have true job security and if you work at a company long enough to go from start up to mature company then they eventually start trying to outsource or automate your job etc. It's nothing but stress and fake positivity for years and years and hopefully your lottery ticket/RSUs actually increase in value and you're eventually able to afford your freedom. It's brutal. I keep fantasizing about cashing out my retirement and running some kind of small business. I am sick of the corporate world and being a hostage to some corporate executives whims.
maerF0x0 15 hours ago [-]
also: David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was first published on May 14, 2018
anovikov 8 hours ago [-]
They always have been. As an outsourcer, i observed, for decades, organisations with lots of American tech workers who did almost nothing except nodding on meetings, most being utterly incapable. All actual work was done by outsourcers - bulk by Indians, complex parts by Russians and Poles.
Now AI does it instead, with outsourcers out of work.
With the productivity growth since late 19th century, vast majority of employees only exist by tradition, for political and social purposes. It's not "work", it's "service" (not as in "held in service or labor" but as in "public service"). They exist to make organisations they work for, look big and respectable. They exist to make their boss feel like a real boss. They are cheap - famously real compensations have been stagnant since early 1970s while productivity skyrocketed - so keeping them as essentially, pets, wasn't too expensive for business and keeps getting cheaper. They do bullshit work (Cory Doctorow).
This is why i am not at all worried for those workplaces. There is no AI can replace what was useless from the beginning.
Oh well, one thing will change. RTO will be mandatory nearly everywhere.
gverrilla 23 hours ago [-]
Debord without Marx...
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
There is one major difference from previous technological advancements: AI is going to hit many if not most sectors at the same time.
And it's not like hitting just one sector has ever been gentle: machines entering manufacturing caused an 80 years slump in British occupation rates and salaries.
Machines entering agricultural fields by the end of 1800s caused a similar slump in work conditions in Europe that really ended by the 1960s/1970s (depending on the country).
Automation + AI will keep taking more blue collar jobs at speed while also taking more and more knowledge workers out of jobs.
Seriously, at no point in history we've seen a single technology threatening so many sectors at the same time.
And people telling you "but the workers always recovered" keep ignoring that those recoveries sound good when they were not the ones impacted, and that these recoveries can take a lifetime.
monkaiju 17 hours ago [-]
Very happy to work somewhere where sanity has triumphed over AI madness...
taswellian 2 hours ago [-]
Where is that?
kittikitti 23 hours ago [-]
Objectively speaking, I'm less miserable than before, even though I am still miserable. I think it's because I always found Workism to be very cringe. Now that the workplace has a good amount of fascism mixed in, adherents to Workism realize their free trial is over. The price to pay is their soul.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
23 hours ago [-]
slowhadoken 10 hours ago [-]
Tech corporations co-opted open source technologies and liberalism by employing a bunch of wokies to act as social interfaces. Feminism has been doing the same thing to tech and media that Mitt Romney and private equity firms have been doing to brick and mortar businesses for the last 25 years.
throw-the-towel 7 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate please?
applyboost 2 hours ago [-]
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Forgeties79 23 hours ago [-]
It’s not 1998 man you don’t need to use that word.
aogaili 23 hours ago [-]
Which word? I use what I want..I hope you understood what I said. Also, who said I'm man? I might be they?
Forgeties79 23 hours ago [-]
You know what I’m talking about and this comment is not as clever as you think it is. I’m moving on, have a good weekend.
aogaili 22 hours ago [-]
But I'm guessing it's "retarded"? You seem to be sensitive to intelligence ranking, judging by your comment "not as clever as you think".
I find a lot tech people sensitive to that in general, given that what they are exchanging in the market is their presumed intelligence.
But again, you can keep me honest, instead of leaving me guessing about a banned word since 1998.
aogaili 23 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't, forgive my ignorance but English is not my first language and I'm from different culture I suppose.
I was trying to explain a point that "sadness" as a by product arraignment not the domain. And I personally found the article heavy on generalization. When I read statements like "All knowledge work is pointless" and "Everyone in tech is sad".. I just think it's lousy thinking.
But I don't know what word you referring too that was not common since 1998 specifically and why..I find you comment to be really strange, sorry.
But anyway, I'm getting used to being flagged and downvoted on this site.
Der_Einzige 23 hours ago [-]
Pretty much every slur is ableist. You better not use “lame” as just another of the myriad examples of how slippery of a slope that is.
aogaili 22 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing it's also the culture and I'm reading about the history of the word "retarded". In my mind, it means slow/delayed, or slow comprehension. Which, I can comfortably use on myself sometimes.
But it seems since 1998 it has been used for diagnosis and people are shunning the word, but that is mostly in western culture.
But I think it was clear from my post what I mean when I said this, I don't know why I'm defending words, I don't know the author, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with the author's position and broad generalizations.
What would someone coming to tech think when they read articles like this?
Forgeties79 22 hours ago [-]
You looked at an article, didn’t like what it said, and called somebody “retarded.” I’m not going to sit here and let you attempt to dress this up as some casual description after the fact. It is a personal attack that depends on commenting on someone’s cognitive ability using a word that is clearly controversial and offensive to many.
If this is new information to you, then you should go look more into the subject and try to understand where I am coming from rather than simultaneously saying “English is not my first language so how could I know” and digging in your heels
aogaili 22 hours ago [-]
I understand.
But then you sat their reading a published article labeling an entire domain/knowledge workers as useless/sad and you took it, so that sits alright with you?
I don't know the person, I can see the work that produced and the cognition behind it, and in my mind it was lousy thinking dressed in uniform published and shared that could lead to damage, just imagine young people at university reading this..
And are you their lawyer? you took offence at the word because it is sensitive to you. Just like I took sadness personal to me. Again, I don't know the person, but I think their work was weak. Perhaps I didn't use the right adjectives but that was my point, it was a weak article and poorly reasoned, that stigmatized an entire domain.
aogaili 22 hours ago [-]
And yes English is not my first language and the definition and perception of this word changes in the west with the last 20 years as you noted.
I'm sorry to break your bubble but if you step out of this forum and the culture you are in, you will be offended every day.
miningape 16 hours ago [-]
> if you step out of this forum and the culture you are in, you will be offended every day
You're not alone, there's just a weird culture in the West at the moment of signalling empathy without demonstrating it. Calling out the usage of a specific word is just an example of it that you've just experienced - don't put too much stock into these people's opinions, even if you get them to "approve" of you all it will take is a slight change in the direction of the wind and they'll burn you at the stake for something else.
Not to mention over time the meanings of these words shift and change because - and repeat after me - language is just an expression of internal thought processes. Eliminating and banning language does nothing to limit the thought processes: people will still want to express the feeling of something being "retarded" even if they cannot use the word "retarded" - eventually the new word being used will be considered "offensive" and the word will shift again but the meaning will stay the same.
Say what you want and stand behind it. Don't let these cry-bullies police your language.
aogaili 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I appreciate the advice and perspective. I agree with you.
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underlipton 16 hours ago [-]
Someone is going to chime in about the tone of this post, with the ramifications of a decade-and-a-half of rejection on one's outlook flying right over their head. If the underemployed and NEETs got half the consideration that extroverts jonesing for just one water cooler chat (just one, man) got during the pandemic, we'd be one our way to solving not only their problems, but also the ones that they're uniquely equipped to tackle.
gamblor956 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you for proving my point. Enjoy being unemployable.
You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.
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defen 9 hours ago [-]
Very disturbing comment and not something you should joke about, especially number 3.
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sri9s 24 hours ago [-]
tech people need to become business owners
dgellow 23 hours ago [-]
how about just letting us behind? You go on your AI futuristic trip, don't force it on others, and you can then come back and tell us how fantastic your life is while we all missed the boat. That's fine with me. But that's not what will happen, right? AI is being forced on everybody, everywhere. Which means it really doesn't matter if we jump in right now, agentic stuff will still be the norm in 5 years, and at that point you can show us all the magical things you're doing. I'm sure that will convince way more people than the current approach of "join right now or be left behind!!!"
hostyle 23 hours ago [-]
how will that help? being a business owner magically makes you immune from ai stealing your job?
gverrilla 23 hours ago [-]
there's no space for everybody. not even near. free market is inherently oligopolic for most cases..
win311fwg 23 hours ago [-]
Oligopolies are unlikely in a free market because as soon as you do anything interesting a million other people will copy what you are doing wholesale and you will have no advantage to see you rise up to form an oligopoly. We find oligopolies in our regulated markets because regulation, such as copyright, patents, tariffs, etc., legally hinder that competition from emerging.
However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
Draiken 1 hours ago [-]
Taking aside the fact that free markets are a myth, all we have to do is look at our current society and you'll see how utopic this view is.
In the real world, oligopolies are the rule not the exception.
twodave 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it probably is sad to be so unimaginative or pessimistic about your skill set that you see AI as an impediment and not a boon.
logicchains 23 hours ago [-]
It's the same as the old "As hire As, Bs hire Cs".
I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive.
Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years?
You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall?
Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!
That kind of story was not uncommon at all in the past, today you would have to be a literal multi-millionaire to have that lifestyle.
The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.
Anyway, if you can find a woman who wants to be a SAHM to your five children in a Fresno starter home, where she clips coupons and cooks meals from scratch with no appliances, you can achieve a 1963 standard of living pretty easily on a schoolteacher's salary.
This is a key point. I grew up in a nice middle class neighborhood 20 minutes from DC. Back then DC was the murder capital of the country, there were no tech jobs in northern VA, etc. Today it’s much more expensive, but it’s also full of tech engineers. The town has moved upmarket. It’s not a Honda Accord, it’s an Acura.
Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.
Most of the "life is too expensive today" complaints are some flavor of: Grandpa was a 90th percentile income earner and I am a 50th percentile income earner, so even though my life is objectively much better than Grandpa's in many ways (childhood vaccination, clean air, seatbelts, etc) the loss of status is much more salient than the gains in material well-being.
If you mean "where within commuting distance of the hottest industry in the world can I find a reasonably priced home" then yeah obviously you can't, but SF wasn't that in 1963.
How is today better than the situation 20 years ago?
"TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.
No matter how many billions you have in the bank, you cant get a better netflix subscription, TV, or iPhone than the normal person. This is the 'march of progress' you speak of. The things people wanted and coveted most have been squashed to a market value most people can just afford, and then subsidised with credit plans to make them affordable by all.
This is the basics of modern economies. It is not separate to technology progressing. The technology progressing has become the foundation of all modern economies.
https://www.cseed.com/en/indoor-tv/unfolding-tv.html
Netflix is a terrible example, it’s cheap entertainment for the masses. Why would a billionaire watch Netflix when they could get front row and/or box seats to any sporting event or concert in the world and fly there via private jet.
- Basic utilities, food, heating, energy, gas.. 50-100% increase in cost
- piano, railway carrage, something nobody uses - 0.34% increase
Thus inflation is only 5% - capiche?
How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.
The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
And for that, I agree with you, it’s self-selected to take the suffering jounrey
>>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor”
Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?
I was raised in the art world by a multi-generational art family. None were wildly successful all managed to make enough for a good life. Farmers, bakers, masseuses, carpenters,... all work with their hands generally only artist can take rubbish and turn it into big money. The criticism of the art world you put forward is very one-dimensional.
How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?
Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
And I want to understand if there’s any chance to do it the same way with salaried work, not with clever investment over decades, or winning the lottery, or getting an inheritance. Which are all valid ways to have a lot of wealth but don’t tell me the value of salaried work in the US today.
If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer, but as the GP indicated the rest of society expect very different things from you today – more equipment, more education, etc. Those things aren’t just increased living standards, they are increased job requirements.
So we've moved from a world where it was impossible to afford all that stuff and a 7 person family to a world where ... still can't be done. People have raised their standards to the point where they can't afford 5 children, savings and a lifestyle that they think is reasonable. Not much of a mystery there to interrogate. There has never been a generation that could afford the lifestyle they want and it appears there still isn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.
In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.
Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.
But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.
Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.
Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.
When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.
Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.
In European unions you pay the membership and that is it.
On top of that many apply to complete industry sectors, they are not tied to specific jobs and don't care one second how you got your skills.
Moreover, getting your own full license takes around a decade, during which time you're expected to work as an underling regardless of whether you already have the capacity to do the job yourself. So to the extent that anyone can get an apprenticeship without blood relations or graft, they expect someone who is willing to be stuck in an entry level position for that long even if they already have significant relevant experience from a related field, and then you get in the queue behind a million high school seniors and never get a slot.
Getting permission for jobs is required in many cases without any union having anything to do with it, you have to get them regardless.
Finalising high-school without going through trade school, or into university, meant jobs that only unqualified people get.
This is not how unions work in the UK
Unions have saved my ass multiple times in the European countries I worked on.
You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.
I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.
A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.
It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).
Then the gas station owner could hire another attendant. Or your parent could pick a different gas station or a different time of day, free markets and all...
I don't think it would be fair fo make living on a UBI as comfortable as the lowest minimum wage job people are actually working at. Not fair to the people who work at whatever they can find.
Of course, you also pay taxes out of whatever you make, so the person who makes $100,000 might be paying $30,000 in taxes and then they're effectively paying $18,000 rather than receiving $12,000. But that's fine and is actually want you want, because it produces a progressive rate curve even when everyone is paying the same marginal tax rate. Right now we put irrationally high marginal rates on lower and middle income people in the form of benefits phase outs. With a UBI they get the benefits as cash and experience the phase outs as paying taxes at the same (rather than a higher) marginal rate as higher income people.
You don't want people doing nothing. You want them to have the incentive to take productive employment when it's available. Taking away the money you give them because they take a job is exactly what you don't want, which is crazy.
I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax. Specifically zero tax on basic necessities and an escalating sales tax on anything optional or luxury. A gluttony consumption tax, if you will. Want to spend your $12k on Nikes? You're only gonna get $3k of shoes for it. Make $300k a year and live on rice and beans? Keep your money. Want to buy a boat? 20% of that goes to pay for the UBI.
[edit] on the other hand, what I just wrote is probably also a prescription for destroying the world's most successful and productive economies, and the companies that fuel them. But taking a UBI out of income tax is a great way to make more people not want to work. And if Nikes get way too expensive, who knows how that could distort the economy. Maybe it would be better if the government just made some basic rules about minimum wages and work hours and let people fight it out for a buck like they do now. idk.
I'm not using actual proposed values, just an example. Lets choose $100k as the pivot point.
So person earning that currently pays $30k tax, meaning they get take-home of $70k. The new system means they get $12k UBI and tax needs to leave them $48k so they stay at the same salary level. They now pay $52k tax.
That means 52% tax rate, across the board.
The guy who previously earned $20k and paid $2k tax had a take home of $18k. He gets $12k UBI. Now he pays 52% tax on the $20k, so $10.4k. His take home is now $21.6k.
The closer you get to the floor, the better security there is. You can live on the $12k but you are not rich, and nobody goes without.
The $1m high earner should have paid $400k in tax but actually paid $100k because he pays $20k to an accountant. He now gets $12k UBI and pays $520k in tax because income tax rate is flat and the accountant needs to find another way to earn a crust, though he gets UBI, so..
the new flat tax rate is 42% and the $20k guy takes home $23.6k
The $12k is additive, but the factors that would reduce its value are multiplicative. If prices were to all double (an extreme case) it would still be equivalent to today's $6k. There's no scenario where everyone gets $12k but also the first $12k of everyone's money stops counting.
Sales tax on luxury items isn't a terrible idea, but the problem with relying only on sales tax is that very rich people (the ones who are getting most of the population's money) don't buy a lot, so the money just gets stuck in their accounts forever (or until they decide to buy all of the world's RAM). It can be one prong of a mixed strategy, though.
One part of inflation is driven by the difference between money entering circulation and money leaving it. UBI obviously brings a lot more money into circulation; it's generally assumed that taxes would have to be raised to remove the same amount.
Only if something is preventing the market from responding to higher demand by building more cars or housing units rather than raising the unit price. And if that's happening then you're screwed independent of this, because anything that causes ordinary people to have more money would do the same thing. If energy costs went down then people would have the money they didn't spend on electricity and that would cause housing costs to increase.
This is why restrictive zoning rules are very bad.
> I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax.
Sales tax is considered regressive for two reasons. One, it's a flat rate, but that's the thing we want in this case because we're using it as the de facto phase out for the UBI. Two, rich people don't spend as much of their income. But that one has always been a giant fraud because it's really income tax that allows the rich to defer taxes (via unrealized capital gains), and when they do that they don't even pay taxes on the money they spend, since they can borrow against the assets and spend on credit.
So using a consumption tax actually works perfectly well in this case and is even more progressive than the status quo where the rich can avoid taxes entirely.
They have to pay taxes on the income/realised gains they use to pay the loan back when it matures. It’s not completely tax free.
No they don't, they just take out another loan. If you have a billion dollars in assets that increases in value by an average of 10% a year and can borrow money at 6% interest, guess how long you can spend anything up to your entire wealth on credit before the recapitalized loan principal catches up to your assets.
Here's an idea I just kinda came up with: Maybe instead of what you buy, the first UBIx3 you spend in a year should be sales tax free. After that you pay sales tax which goes back into the UBI. But I guess that means tracking everything everyone buys... which would be a privacy disaster. Okay back to the drawing board.
I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking. Whereas a blanket $12k UBI to everyone would make it just as hard to compete to buy a house as before.
Elon is really the boring case because a) it requires the premise that unrealized gains are income (which brings in more sticky problems than you really want) and b) billionaires are over-hyped and the majority of total income is the likes of doctors and law partners, because there are so many more of them than there are of Elons.
But those people actually do spend a significant proportion of their income. Not all on necessities, but what kind of sane tax would tax only necessities?
> I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
Suppose that everyone suddenly has an extra $12,000 to buy housing. Now, to begin with, this isn't actually what happens, because we're not printing the money. Whatever someone receives, someone else is paying in tax. For middle income people this is going to largely cancel out. For lower income people this is replacing SNAP and Medicaid and so on. It's a less dramatic change than it's made out to be.
But never mind that and suppose everybody actually had an extra $12,000/year. At existing prices, more people could now afford to buy a home, right? There is now additional demand for housing. And additional housing can be created by construction companies, who want that additional money. If it costs them $150,000 to build a housing unit and the price is $200,000 then they make $50,000 for each one they build. Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them. Meanwhile $12,000 over 30 years is $360,000. So who is going to pay $560,000 for an existing unit when you can have a new one built for $200,000?
The problem only comes if you have zoning rules that inhibit new units from being built, because then everyone has to outbid each other on the existing stock. But even then it doesn't absorb all of the money, because some people would prefer to spend it on things other than housing.
> And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down
Money doesn't care where you got it. A UBI and a tax credit are equivalent things. And if you don't think so then implement the UBI as a refundable tax credit and your concerns will be addressed, right?
> and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking.
Who do you suppose buys more electricity, a janitorial worker or OpenAI?
But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.
So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.
Humans aren't like that. They don't deprive themselves of activity like a bored dog unless you (who?) give them a job. If you give people their time back, they will fill it out with whatever they actually want to do, and that's freedom.
Conversely, the erosion of free time over the past generation has arguably also eroded the social structures that keep people healthy.
There's an "epidemic" of people who have nothing to do and for whatever reason can't figure something out
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
Retiree data also shows finanical freedom and free time often doesn't lead to people figuring out something to do
A small parallel is that (for me) a weekend is not enough to do much more than recover from the workweek. But two weeks off is enough to recover and then do some more things. Even then, it would take more time to do things of major significance.
Chasing a ball, professionally, for millions of dollars a year, gives some very rich and famous humans a sense of purpose.
Laying on a beach and surfing may fulfill a sense of purpose for other humans.
Some humans need to solve hard problems.
Some humans need to create something original.
And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose. Does work, the need to work, give them some? I'm not a Calvinist, but I have to live in a world where most people are like that. So if they don't have some need to do something, idle hands are the devil's plaything, and no good can come from the idleness. Just drugs and dissolute degeneracy. Take it from a creative alcoholic who struggles with the question of purpose myself, and finds some light between music, painting, hard work I have to do and my better angels.
That's what you're having a hard time fathoming, because you think everyone is like you; imbued with meaning and purpose that they will find. They are not. Even those of us who are, or were, don't always remain so.
But need? Need wakes you up.
The crush. The urgency. The do or die. The death-defying situation. Sinking or swimming. Here is what brings out the initiative and the creativity and the purpose in people.
I used to believe exactly what you said when I was 17. If we didn't have to work we'd all use our free time to make amazing art and poetry and contribute to humanity.
Look around, man. I know a lot of people who don't have to work. Half of them are homeless and the other half are millionaires. You know what none of them are doing with their free time?? Anything resembling something with a purpose.
Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it.
I also don't believe that we have eroded free time over the last generation. As one example, many now have a robot vacuum cleaner, which frees whatever time they previously spent vacuuming. They may be spending a lot of their time on things, but as long as those are things by choice, it's still free time.
Not a joke.
All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.
We’re going through a series of ever record breaking heat waves where the only thing you can be sure of is that it will be worse next year.
They’re still pushing fossil fuels and blocking attempts to replace them with cheaper alternatives.
They’re too focused on who got the biggest yacht to care.
Circular financing???
Now, times are becoming "interesting" again, unfortunately.
Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but it feels like you guys could just not.
I don't hate billionaires. They basically never cross my mind. All credit to those guys for doing what they did. I'm not personally jealous and I find the anger and jealousy at them to be petty and kind of stupid in a way that reflects badly on the person expressing it. Most of the billionaires in the tech sector didn't inherit that kind of wealth, and I respect the ones who earned what they earned. I wouldn't trade my life for theirs and I don't feel left out because I don't have private jets or islands. Whining you don't have a jet or an island is childish... grow a garden and get a dog, don't be jealous. Comparing what you have to someone else's possessions is a basic fault that makes a lot of people miserable for no reason, unable to appreciate what they have. Appreciate what you have. Billionaires can have everything you ever dreamed of and still be much more miserable than you. Good for them if they're happy, I say.
I'm just also saying that if I were in their shoes I wouldn't think the current situation was tenable.
I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?
Mandate a monthly routing check by a certified specialist. You can sign up for a yearly commitment, 12 visits for just $899. A no brainer when a visit costs minimum $149.
Failure to comply can result in a fine up to $3,000 and up to 6 months in prison.
Can't make your own power, it's illegal to grow your own tobacco, what's next? Sewage bills?!
On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.
The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.
So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/01/archives/150-hurt-as-truc...
https://vimeo.com/127605643
That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"
They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.
Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.
AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.
replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required
back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max
I think the outcomes are very hard to predict, it depends a lot on both economical factors, technological factors (how much will LLMs still improve beyond benchmaxxing), societal factors, etc.
It's like the early internet where there was the whole gamut of opinions between 'its a nothingburger' to 'it's the democratic town square of the world'. In the end, it was neither.
Whoever gets it right will be called a visionary, but realistically nobody had a clue.
You think I'm a non-hacker?
I don't think EMs are useless, I just think that you are naive if you think that LLMs can't do the EM work as well.
I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'
Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.
The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.
Yes everybody sees it as useful tool, and everybody damn well understands in medium term their work is at huge risk. That rolls over any emotion around 'oh what a nice new toy to use'.
What do you think people are talking about when they refer to "the singularity"?
...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.
I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.
No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.
I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.
Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications
Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.
>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something
Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.
I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.
I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.
Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real.
Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research.
* The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point.
> Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation:
No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.
Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.
We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.
The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities.
The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.
With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc.
eg: (unvetted source) Worker Power: How the black death revolutionised workers rights - https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-re...
You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.
After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.
And so on. Until every single job is gone.
My surprise was the ordering.
"Normal"?
It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.
But:
AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired
This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.
[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...
Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.
It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.
work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.
Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.
Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.
Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.
Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...
if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.
And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.
Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.
Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.
You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything.
You "die" when you go to sleep.
So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.
"the remaining time"
Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?
Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.
[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.
He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.
https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/
so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
https://berggruen.org/
Which is an AI booster:
https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries
You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
The about page says this:
> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.
The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?
Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
Means they are invested in AI companies
> shape the next narrative
With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI
Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.
Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?
I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.
This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.
Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?
The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.
I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.
He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen
In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.
To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.
"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat.
I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.
If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.
I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.
It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.
This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.
Once AI is able to replace all human work, that's a new situation. But this is not happening in the next 20+ years.
That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.
If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.
By the way, I support some level of rich-to-poor redistribution, not sure what's the optimal level but to get a reasonable range of where the optimum could be, look at the top 20 countries.
But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers
Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.
Can you list more failures?
> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.
Remind us what the U stands for?
This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.
A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.
Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?
That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.
I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
Is there the same motivation to help people live healthy lifestyles in the American healthcare system? Are there any lobby groups with the kind of influence and reach as a universal healthcare provider?
Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.
The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?
Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.
Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.
Not for long, anyway.
Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.
Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).
If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.
Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.
Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?
80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.
The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.
Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.
The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.
Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.
Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.
National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.
But there is still journalism.
* Propublica
* The Economist
* The Guardian
* 404 Media
Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
But to be fair the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer did score an impressive scoop last year with Chloe Hadjimatheou's investigation of the "Salt Path" scandal
If a $20000/y a job is deemed unrelevant, chances is that one might easily find similar or better in a totally different area.
If a $200000/y job is deemed unrelevant and is lost, and one has mortgage payments they can't pay with a $50000 or $100000 job, they have a big problem because selling that house might become difficult when all other $200000/y workers will try to sell their house and move within the same period and the housing market crashes. So you can ruin the economy of a large area quite quickly.
So a bit of anticipation is useful.
If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.
I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.
Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.
Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.
Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.
They weren't too big to fail.
University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?
My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.
It would get officers out of harms way.
Not imminent but not zero risk either.
Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming.
Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff.
If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was.
Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?
Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
Support that AI is now threatening.
Recording is too much work. ;-)
I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:
(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.
(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.
The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.
I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.
AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.
Edit: I can think of a third option:
(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.
I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.
I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.
It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.
All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.
This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.
Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.
In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.
This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.
"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.
like particularly this:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.
I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.
In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.
> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on
If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.
If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.
(Just mentioning this so you know the wording wasn't universally confusing.)
Let’s say you have a friend who is always miserable, always needs support, and turns every gathering into a therapy session for them and their problem. Let’s say you’ve been friends with them for say, fifteen years. Nothing has helped.
They never go and get therapy, they never go and do any exercise, they constantly do the same things over and over and still expect support.
Wouldn’t you stop wanting to hear them talk? Maybe even stop being their friend ?
What’s the limit ?
There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one.
Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.
I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.
And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.
It all feels wrong.
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).
But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?
> But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot.
That’s a curious one. I think it’d be healthier if you reflect on why you perceive it that way.
On the other hand investors benefit when they competitors are crashing.
For many labor is just expensive cost running company - I can see how some people salivate
Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.
Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.
Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.
It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.
For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.
“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”
I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.
Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
It feels to me like the change from:
- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.
- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.
there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.
There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.
By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone.
The world is much better than it has ever been.
Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.
But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.
And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.
My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.
The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.
All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.
But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.
For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.
Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).
> Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
The idea was this would teach something. And another idea was All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. What could someone do for months or years? Cycle outrage porn and detox. Or avoid all news. But you saw news differed and you could control your news.
here on HN in 2013. I'd read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" so it particularly resonated with me at the time. I've watched the world get even more sucked in each passing year.
I think you are right that there’s some middle ground between 0 and doomscrolling that is preferable, though.
Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.
The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.
Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.
Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.
> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).
That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.
I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.
1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...
If I'm wrong give me another case that isn't a crypto scam and I'll read up on it.
If you want to make the world a better place, you have to retain a headspace that actually lets you do that, and right now, the easiest fix for that is to just unplug, and then work with what you can change, which typically involves things and people around you.
The assumption I had not was false.
I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.
Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.
narrator: actually, it's you who is the problem.
"I'm only happy when I'm in my misery" - Offspring
But ARE you doing anything about it? Because unless you're actually taking action it's basically just self flagellation to the benefit of no one. Like if you have some measure of power (community action, organized resistance, political lobbying) and are taking action that's great, reading articles that make you sad and angry and then going to bed isn't doing anything.
> what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.
You do have a choice, you can change things. Getting angry, especially in large numbers, is a prerequisite to change. Because getting angry is the prerequisite for violence.
His statement is "ignore getting fucked in the ass and take it". How exactly is that interesting?
You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.
They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.
Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.
It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.
Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
Yes.
You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.
Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.
What does ignorance get you?
This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.
marginalia_nu said all news.
The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)
I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early.
I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here.
I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright.
But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.
Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this thing that made their lives worth living or whatever.
When it first happened I thought it was a weird interpersonal conflict situation. Maybe I had broached it wrong. But it kept happening! So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.
But I’m an extrovert and working from home was suffocating.
Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.
I am back at the office now, and am enjoying the separation between work and home.
* simplifying, of course.
EDIT: wow, I had this lodged in my brain without even realizing it was an XKCD reference
https://xkcd.com/2167/
Is it really surprising that people have this preference?
Their reaction to you in the moment might not be reasonable, but it's coming from an injustice done to them, and one they perceive you to be in favour of.
It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.
It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this
This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...
For a lot of people, that was commuting to a job outside of their home.
There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.
Find some shade and don't stress it Europal! (I hate climate change too.)
If you are ever in a situation where you are alone and no person works for you, realize you are most likely the problem. It took me a while to figure it out and it’s hard to make friends that you resonate and align with. But there are billions of people around the world and unless you live in a small village, there are always people looking to strike a conversation; and some of those will make good/reliable friends.
Wow, what a way to be bitter and defensive.
It is hard to keep caring about something where you see repeated patterns of behaviour and failure.
Getting closer to retirement has been a very interesting experience. Turning 50 was very stressful for me. A deep feeling of - I've only got so many rolls of the dice left. Am I in a secure position financially? I've mostly been involved in startups and small companies and wondered if I'd made terrible mistakes in my career. Why wasn't I set for life when so many others had "made it"?
Not everyone is going to get lucky and retire early - it's not a given that this will happen.
I have friends who have run successful startups and are now free to do whatever they want. And I had opportunities to join them at the beginning - I would also now be very wealthy. Equally, I have other friends just like me who have also run and joined startups and completely failed.
I absolutely love the flexibility working from home gives me - but I have a strong group of people around me to meet for coffee and live in a central location in a good city so I'm not isolated at all. But I can really relate to people who don't have that and don't have support around them.
AI is unlocking all sorts of exciting things - there are projects that I've long had on the back burner that are now unlocked. It is going to radically reshape our industry.
This reshaping is tough. What made me good at my job may not necessarily be useful. Deep focussed work delivering highly technical work - maybe that's not needed now.
I'm not sure I want to work until I'm very old. I've got my financial plan that puts me on a trajectory of being able to retire in a couple of years compfortably.
It's worth modelling this. Knowing your position is a real help. Just being able to look at something and say "I'm going to be ok - I can stop in X years if needed". Or even - "I can stop now and it wouldn't be a disaster".
And if the modelling says - you need X more years - at least you know.
For cowork you don’t often have to commute as much (more options around), can arrive late, don’t have to dress to nice. For some you can still change your homebase at least for few months temporarily.
But you can still have physical coworkers (even if you don’t work with them), have chitchat not relate to work, go to lunch together. You can also have routine and separate your professional life from personal one.
This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts
I think people get this meaning wrong all the time. The love of money doesn't buy happiness. Having money can definitely make your life easier, and you can spend it on things that make you happy.
I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.
I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”
Just thinkin out loud into the internet
Below the lower threshold, you have to worry too much about money to just get by. Unfortunately, too many people live below this threshold. Even in rich countries. Below this level, it is difficult to be truly happy, as your life is filled too much with money worry.
Above the upper threshold, all you basic and not so basic needs are covered and more money does not buy you much in terms of happiness.
Of course, these thresholds are very individual. The lower your thresholds are, the freer you are.
Both marketing and general enshittification from late stage capitalism are trying to push both of these thresholds up.
On the other hand, the society should strive to get most/almost all people above the lower threshold. Both by pushing the expenses of basic needs down (education/health care/public transport), and by creating environment for easier earning (good economic environment for entrepreneurship, antitrust regulation, minimal wages, unions, social assistance). Well, at least most countries see it that way. US has a slightly different take ...
it doesn't but it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes.
Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.
Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.
They wanted gold.
For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.
For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.
But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.
Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?
The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.
Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".
No exec wants to chalk up a layoff to a faltering company that can't grow sales even if it's not their fault.
Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly
Everything has this arc.
A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.
By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.
I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.
From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.
Meanwhile, I had taught myself coding the hard way without the internet or proper reference materials or community, by trial-and-error in front of a debugger/profiler/disassembler in the mid 80's - late 90's. Apparently, that holds no economic value now because all that matters is # of PRs, tokenmaxxing, and "impact" like savings and features. But really, the deal breaker for me is the brazen and/or clueless evil aims of the ownership class such that working for them enables rather than reduces societal harm. Thus, tech isn't for me. Also, the number and distribution of cool, decent, clever people has been driven out of both the startup scene and the megacorp scene; maybe there's better hope in obscure SMBs or nonprofits.
Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.
I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.
I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.
Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).
I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.
To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.
This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.
One is liking a mental challenge - like a crossword puzzle. The other is having pride in the quality of your work.
An LLM is not a compiler. It is the leakiest abstraction of all time. I never experienced a compiler making a mistake, I think, ever. Every LLM I use makes a critical mistake somewhere between 50% and 95% of the time.
If vibe coding truly is the future of coding then it really doesn't matter what you do. Keep up or don't keep up it doesn't matter. Your career is dead either way because your boss will replace you with a prompt. Might as well give up now.
No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.
The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.
When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.
Or, a million people might generate a one off piece of slop to calculate their taxes.
Which one was more efficient?
I do think that disposable easy to validate software will probably never be human written again but I also think that the economics of slop demand very forgiving users.
I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".
Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E
I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.
The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.
I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.
It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.
But...
There are exceptions which make me bad feeling about AI, LLMs and so on:
1. Paid, subscribtion based payment model - you have to pay for tokens.
2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.
3. Feeling "I did not do it myself". This is the most what could make bad feel. You "cheated". You did not write this great app or solve problem alone. You just did modern "copy and paste". You did not write or design this class, function alone by hand. And you know you probably could not do it without help of AI, LLM.
Cleaning up the slop from a faceless machine is just... not something I want to do. And even if you do get it done, the sense of satisfaction at the end is reduced.
I think the only way I can be truly "productive" with AI is to drop my bar for quality. For some cases that's easy (e.g. run-once-and-throw-away scripts), but for everything else I just can't do it.
Most workers lament having to give up their cozy desk jobs and having to do work which currently can't be automated, like health care and service jobs like plumbers and roof repair men, construction etc.
Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).
You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.
It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.
(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)
I'm not doing work in the way they tell me to but the results are good enough that my performance reviews / job security is fine. For now!
I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.
It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.
But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point.
In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer?
I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for
Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out.
I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff.
Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".
The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it.
For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there.
Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck.
Sorry to be harsh.
Yet.
I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it.
In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time".
We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it.
I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read.
The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun.
I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary.
But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder.
As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".
Something in that sentence reminded me of the following Jobs' quote:
"Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out."
Capitalism suddenly gets gamed to the point where the quality isn't rewarded. I'm not just talking about software, but also hardware. There's a reason why planned obsolescence is a thing. In a way, software bloat is unplanned obsolescence.
Then other is artisan, those who took pride in organizing and craft.
Second one is having miserable time. The former like me are having a blast. I love tech for that reason.
I stopped talking to people who think LLMs are waste. It's because they don't even touch it. They think it's a taboo to touch it.
So anything in tech is exciting because it enables us to do so many random things. Wish more people learnt about it.
(I'm well paid, just wished I could work less. But well paid part time is harder to come by)
And a lot of them don't?
A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.
Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its corresponding cultural manifestations.
https://archive.org/details/yuruguafricancen0000anim/page/n3...
In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.
Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM can either do the classification itself (when given agentic access to the canonical list of addresses), or write a classifier itself if given enough labelled data. Of course these two are complementary
I am advising small startups. One of them went entirely to agentic developed software by a team of non technical founders.
They had their sec audit done with considerably fewer errors than had a software developer build the same (which would have taken upwards of 4 times as long).
I am sorry, the technical capabilities of the agentic systems for software development is already much further ahead than what people comprehend.
Severe disruption is imminent.
I had a "wow it can vibe code a React app" moment 1.5 years ago. AI evolved a lot since.
I admit i had to hire contractors to do designs for 3D printing. I don't know how to outsource it to AI yet, maybe i can't.
The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.
Too inward for what?
Please start naming names
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
On a recent plane ride some old guys were watching movies on their phones on full volume. I complained and they stopped, but another guy in another row started doing it again. It gets tiring.
Last week I was on a NYC subway train to JFK Airport and there was a guy blasting some loud hip-hop/trap and a small kid playing some loud game, totally oblivious to the people on the train. After they left some older guy stepped in talking on full speaker to someone for 10 minutes.
It was quite crazy tbh, and I guess people here have already given up and start accepting it since it is tiring to police somebody new every 5 minutes and could also end in violence.
I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?"
I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't around on the phone? If two people can speak in that place, it's not weird for someone to have a phone discussion.
Now playing music speakers or watching TikTok videos on your phone in a public place...psychotic!
Someone talking on the phone but facing away from the room isn’t usually considered rude, either.
In a waiting room or train car, if you’re sitting and talking on the phone or Zoom, you’re broadcasting into the room with your posture. Your voice tends to broadcast as well with no wall or other conversant as an immediate barrier.
We do, it's known as the halfalogue and has been found to be more distracting/annoying. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20817912/
It's also why calls/online meetings are banned in many coffeeshops in Japan.
Most trains however have a space [0] at the end of each car where you enter and exit. That space can also have a toilet, bike storage, various (locked) train controls, sometimes even a few seats [1] where you can sit if your call will be a while.
0: https://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/uploads/7/6/8/3/76...
1: https://www.modernrailways.com/sites/modernrailways/files/im...
No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.
I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.
The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.
The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar
https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
"Bullshit Jobs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtACIFEddhM
"If you're not taken, gay, or furry, the consensus is that dating in SF sucks..."
To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.
Maybe AI people specifically get that kind of reaction, but that's a pretty hot topic at the moment.
My [very normal although otherworldly beautiful] wife thinks my job is interesting and talks about me with pride.
When I tell people that I work in IT, they almost never think of FAANG, because these companies aren’t really considered that interesting or important over here. I think it’s uniquely a US thing to conflate “IT” with “SV sociopaths”.
I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.
I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer.
Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for something physical.
My very limited understanding of farming is that it takes a huge amount of time, and you're usually up and working before sunrise, even with automation.
Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?
Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?
Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?
Take your pick.
So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
How so?
> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.
The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?
> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.
And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.
If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.
> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is
The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...
Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already always management (where you include computers as something able to be managed), even if there was a brief moment in time where it was more than that.
I get that it's cute and philosophical to think everything is management and I'm one to generalize stuff as well ad-nausea. But when people don't find satisfaction in their work anymore and the excuse is "well, think of it as a promotion", that to me is taking the analogy too far because it suits the current trends.
But we're discussing now what it means to do management. We'll just have to agree to disagree and call it a day
What other branch is there? You are either delegating or doing all the work yourself. Those who delegate become seen as managers, as that delegation requires managing the people (or, possibly things, depending on how you see that) that the work was delegated to. Those who receive the delegation and carry out their task individually are those considered to not be managers, but rather individual contributors.
> However, never would I say that when coding, I'm "managing the computer".
Why would you say anything while coding? I guess if you had some kind of voice-to-text system you might say something, but it wouldn't be "whee, I'm a manager now!!!!" — it'd be specific instructions directed at the computer so that it knows what task you are delegating to it.
> A compiler is a tool, not an unpredictable process I need to manage.
A compiler can be predictable if you perfectly describe the task you want it to carry out. However, that rarely happens in practice. Communicating your intent is always the hard part.
Which isn't much different than people. There are exceptions, but generally if you clearly define what you want them to do, they will execute it perfectly. Management of humans is all about coming back to make sure that what you described was correct and made sense to the receiving party. Which is the same thing you have to do with compilers.
Project managers and real executives manage a budget in dollars, not man days or tokens. Historically businesses are pretty reluctant to devolve that. I don’t think a big corp vibe coder is going to be able to pull out a company credit card and buy a marketing campaign any time soon.
So you have those other 2, managing product market fit and availability.
One person startup you do everything I guess
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.
At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion
Would you expect every insured without sufficient medical knowledge to understand which denial was appropriate versus which was an error?
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.
Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.
I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.
The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.
We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.
And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing:
The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage.
The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours.
In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.
At no point in history was it ever thus.
There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).
But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades.
I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.
And this is different than other industries how?
Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.
Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s.
I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech.
If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.
All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.
"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.
Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened
Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this
Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it.
not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills.
it's cuz he's hot.
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
Most people do not get to choose their own insurance company, they just get whatever their job picks. Most big companies have directors and officers that personally benefit when a particular insurance company does well. The market is completely broken.
Insurance is an arbitrage leach at best, and extortion at worst. It provides no value to society.
Without insurance Market prices would drive down the cost of healthcare.
In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.
Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.
I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.
Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.
Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.
The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.
Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
All of it is doing it both. The system is cracking and the ONLY REASON why its brought up is because 1 guy did a murder to an important guy. Otherwise business as usual.
Shame on society
Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down
Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down
Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down
Regular killers and gang members are gunned down
Police are gunned down
Politicians on both sides are gunned down
Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down
Feel free to add to the list.
I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
"Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
Because the world sure needs more goat farmers and surf instructors.
It's all pointless, you can't outrun the pointlessness - so just enjoy it!
Working on your own project doesn’t seem tiring or as exhausting as a job, because it has the sense of achievement, you work, learn, make something that you believe is making a change. On the other side, you see how pointless the work is when it’s just contributing to a number in a slide for a manager that has no idea what they are doing.
The solution is not technical though, it’s human, and that is more challenging to fix.
I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't matter much anymore, and everyone tries to make the best out of it in their private life.
Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).
When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.
Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.
You are the art.
I loved my career.
Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.
There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.
One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.
...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.
1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".
2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.
I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.
When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking.
There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine.
Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.
But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods.
Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers.
The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.”
I'm due to update this, but I've been keeping a running list of examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
Did someone just say "WFH"?
Maybe anyway. I think that probably depends on at least a couple of more breakthroughs - at least a solution to the hallucination problem, and probably some kind of true on-line learning, not just writing stuff down and reading it again later.
Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts.
Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from.
Is that fair enough?
I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad.
Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
Trading is the only way to make money I can think of where you don't have customers/clients and are truly in control of your own destiny.
But of course it's not that easy.
But that's where hobby's come into place. You can just pick up something you do for fun that makes the world a better place, or leaves something tangible or otherwise benefits someone you know.
Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.
Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.
I'm counting:
1. the pc (80's) 2. the web (90's-early 2000's) 3. the cloud (early 2010s) 4. the computers that speak natural langage (early 2020s)
a big chunk of gdp in the most prosperus nation on earth is dedicated to knowledge work but sure, it's abstract so I guess it doesn't feel as useful.
Really, noemamag?
I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.
The pleasure...
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...
You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.
Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together.
I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.
I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.
Much of joy we got from coding was taken way, I can not even imagine anyone wanting to get back to a coding role to vibe slop all day long.
I even heard from colleagues that presented algorithms better than the AI slop and heard verbatim from their boss: I prefer the AI solution instead of your.
So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech.
With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
There may be disruption to me as a producer, but I think the results for people as consumers will be great.
There will be change, there is already change in our careers here, but I do not fear the need to change and do something different.
On net for humanity, I am certain the change will be positive even if some people including myself will experience disruption.
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
- "over half of societal work is pointless"
- "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be"
Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?
Remember that this is going to supercharge economy, sure, in the beginning it'll not be obvious, but then you are going to see how it'll enable people to stop working, just like trickle down economy has redistribut....ed...
Ok maybe that's a bad example, sure it's going to take a lot of people out of business, and yes there will be a lot of pain for a "small" part of society, but in general it will be pure gain as a whole... it's not like all that people being laid off means something like stop paying house mortgages, and then a lot of evictions and suddenly a lot of houses going of market... ... I mean even then that's not like it's going to cause all the house market to go down right?
Ok maybe a bit... but don't worry if you are near underwater with your loan someone will buy all those houses to keep your loans on check... it's not like it's going to be some private investors with all the money that will go to the top 1% and take them out of the market and make impossible for the rest of us to buy something...
I mean, my point is don't be negative, stop fighting progress, if more people can buy super yatches there will be more openings for building them!
Seen that happen once before.
Managing patch management)software and firmware. Users who cannot help but enter credentials via phishing regardless of training.
Chasing the next best practice (SSL VPN out, IPsec is back, etc).
> The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there.
The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy.
Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia.
Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
People want to focus on AI but the same problem has always been there for 2-4 decades. Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria. You just show up and everyone is super insecure. AI just provides a name to identify that insecurity. Nothing else has changed.
I shared your opinion until just last week, when I started using Fable on Autocode and passing it huge requirement specs I had written for desktop apps.
$500 in -> 5 days -> an app that would take me a year to write, and the code quality was fine. I just left it running in /loop… I did nothing.
Now I, unfortunately, believe the propaganda, and I too am worried.
Can the economy support the burn rate of AI companies though? My mission now is to create all the apps and products that are stuck in my head while I still can, before Fable is inaccessible due to bankruptcy or they hike the price or some other thing.
Uncle Ted is being proved correct in his assessment day after day after day. Too bad that the normies in the article wont' ever look at the world through Uncle Ted's nor through Ellul's eyes, they're too intellectually limited (to not use the word "stupid") for that. Too bad, had they known they could have turned their lives for the better earlier on.
I flipping love AI.
This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.
To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
I've used AI/LLMs to create tools for myself, which otherwise would have not been created. That's good. But I also know people that are terrible at detecting AI content... it's only a matter of time until a couple of fake videos trigger a mob and something bad happens.
I think that's where some of the negativity comes from. Yes, AI can do nice things, but it's not all good.
Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies.
The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity.
To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join.
In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off.
It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are looking for a safe and stable job, it does not exist.
Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc.
Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.
Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either.
Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
Many of us have done far better than we deserve. There are so many workers who will never approach the gains even an aborted or partial career in software will accomplish.
How many of you are willing to sacrifice to achieve UBI for all?
My sympathy for you will depend on the answer.
The start of the piece: “These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?”
The end: “For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory.”
We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.
I feel like LLMs make reading papers way easier than what it is before. If I ever run into a roadblock, I can just keep digging and probing until it makes sense to me. If anything, the amount of work that needs to be done has been amplified because it makes learning new things that much easier.
The business culture at F50 companies is several decades behind tech. The business culture in middle america is even further behind. If these people can remain employed, I'm not sure why anyone in SV is worried. The nature of white collar work is that it changes over time and frankly I think getting attached to one job title is nonsensical.
Also, half of the battle with white collar work is information asymmetry. The effectiveness of the models with real systems in the field is limited by the amount of context that people are willing to provide. This problem existed before AI, if teams document literally everything, management could see this as an outsourcing opportunity. If management forces them to document stuff, why would they do a good job? Also, why the hell would management even try to do this in the first place if it by implication eliminates their job as well?
There's a social problem here: how do you get people to give high quality information if there is no incentive? How do you know that they're not telling you things or intentionally explaining something badly (as opposed to the AI just being "bad" at something)? Especially now that the billionaire class has done enough saber rattling over it and gotten everyone thoroughly freaked out for the next decade at least? (This is also a problem in high churn corporate cultures as well, the fear fucks up the signal to noise ratio)
This has been a meme in tech for decades. I seriously considered farming 20 years ago due to my dissatisfaction with tech, its nothing new.
I fall into the group of tech workers that never enjoyed their work, I still loathe it but it pays really well. Standups are the worst, every day its "what did you do yesterday". The number of hours worked are far above a normal 9 - 5.
Sections of sociery spent years telling people to learn to code and they did and they do. The issue is that for many people that just work to live and don't live to work, code is souless and there is nothing to show for it after decades of grind.
This negative outlook is not universal of couse, I am sure this site is full of people that love software and more power to them. For a good deal of us though, its just how we pay the bills and there is nothing else that will come close to paying them as well.
Now to add to the general malaise we see companies laying off tens of thousands of engineers to justify their token spend. The feeling of living on borrowed time is prevelant especially for those that never got RSU's or SF salaries
It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again.
Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
In the article's conclusion, "once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real".
I suppose we agree and are saying something similar.
If you've worked for startups then you've delt with existential threats, perhaps hard times and failures. I read the article as a lot of corporate jobs. When you fail you find out quickly what is important in life. You need some not-work to be important in your life too. AI can only mimic your creativity and your emotions. You are not as replaceable as it may seem. Maybe I'm not convinced that Anthropic and OpenAI are going to replace us all just yet.
We are living in strange times, not only with threats of automation everywhere but with great political upheaval all over the world. One thing is certain, change, things won't always be this way. I'm going to rely on my grit and remember what is important to me and what makes me happy.
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all
[Chorus]
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades, come rally
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal
Unites the human race
[Verse 2] Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give!
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaninglessness and inanity of much of corporate work is part and parcel of that. AI makes the contrast more stark, but not new.
Or to come at it another way: the system we live in - capitalism - is defined by the process of 'creative destruction' (coined by the economist Schumpeter). We are always iterating on technology, making it better, finding new optimizations. When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.
Whether this process is desirable, moral, ethical, etc. is not answered by the observation, simply that this is how the system works.
I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.
When you have nothing to worry about, and you can create anything you want, at any expense, of course it's great.
For everyone else, we're dealing with teams who ship slop, company cultures that devalue workers right in front of their faces, and force them to worry about layoffs at any turn.
Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft.
Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved.
Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis.
A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better.
The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you.
Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me:
1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal.
2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome.
3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior.
4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form.
Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself.
Good luck out there.
Every day at my job I search for a chance to write some fragment of code by hand, a place where just for a moment I remember the joyous struggle to be a craftsman.
I have the sense that you're right - musicians, writers, illustrators, actors, animators - they largely seem to hate the way the genAI companies vacuumed up everything that was meant for other people to feed the soulless dreck-vomiters.
I wish I knew the way to unite the programmers who were and are craftsmen with the artists who desire well-crafted tools that respect their artistic autonomy and creative freedom.
There could be some good cooperation there, if someone could solve the coordination problem.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts - I empathize strongly and appreciate what you had to say.
I hope your quest goes well.
> Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists?
This is the tradeoff that hurts me the most. I spent a significant chunk of my 20’s learning new paradigms, languages, and frameworks. I thought I knew the tradeoff I was making. I thought any sacrifice now would pay off in the future. Instead, it seems like any learning outside of the first few years of my career was completely useless.
I would love to go out on my own terms like you suggest, but unfortunately I have at least 25 more years in this profession before I can retire. If the profession survives that long.
Now AI does it instead, with outsourcers out of work.
With the productivity growth since late 19th century, vast majority of employees only exist by tradition, for political and social purposes. It's not "work", it's "service" (not as in "held in service or labor" but as in "public service"). They exist to make organisations they work for, look big and respectable. They exist to make their boss feel like a real boss. They are cheap - famously real compensations have been stagnant since early 1970s while productivity skyrocketed - so keeping them as essentially, pets, wasn't too expensive for business and keeps getting cheaper. They do bullshit work (Cory Doctorow).
This is why i am not at all worried for those workplaces. There is no AI can replace what was useless from the beginning.
Oh well, one thing will change. RTO will be mandatory nearly everywhere.
And it's not like hitting just one sector has ever been gentle: machines entering manufacturing caused an 80 years slump in British occupation rates and salaries.
Machines entering agricultural fields by the end of 1800s caused a similar slump in work conditions in Europe that really ended by the 1960s/1970s (depending on the country).
Automation + AI will keep taking more blue collar jobs at speed while also taking more and more knowledge workers out of jobs.
Seriously, at no point in history we've seen a single technology threatening so many sectors at the same time.
And people telling you "but the workers always recovered" keep ignoring that those recoveries sound good when they were not the ones impacted, and that these recoveries can take a lifetime.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
I find a lot tech people sensitive to that in general, given that what they are exchanging in the market is their presumed intelligence.
But again, you can keep me honest, instead of leaving me guessing about a banned word since 1998.
I was trying to explain a point that "sadness" as a by product arraignment not the domain. And I personally found the article heavy on generalization. When I read statements like "All knowledge work is pointless" and "Everyone in tech is sad".. I just think it's lousy thinking.
But I don't know what word you referring too that was not common since 1998 specifically and why..I find you comment to be really strange, sorry.
But anyway, I'm getting used to being flagged and downvoted on this site.
But it seems since 1998 it has been used for diagnosis and people are shunning the word, but that is mostly in western culture.
But I think it was clear from my post what I mean when I said this, I don't know why I'm defending words, I don't know the author, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with the author's position and broad generalizations.
What would someone coming to tech think when they read articles like this?
If this is new information to you, then you should go look more into the subject and try to understand where I am coming from rather than simultaneously saying “English is not my first language so how could I know” and digging in your heels
But then you sat their reading a published article labeling an entire domain/knowledge workers as useless/sad and you took it, so that sits alright with you?
I don't know the person, I can see the work that produced and the cognition behind it, and in my mind it was lousy thinking dressed in uniform published and shared that could lead to damage, just imagine young people at university reading this..
And are you their lawyer? you took offence at the word because it is sensitive to you. Just like I took sadness personal to me. Again, I don't know the person, but I think their work was weak. Perhaps I didn't use the right adjectives but that was my point, it was a weak article and poorly reasoned, that stigmatized an entire domain.
I'm sorry to break your bubble but if you step out of this forum and the culture you are in, you will be offended every day.
You're not alone, there's just a weird culture in the West at the moment of signalling empathy without demonstrating it. Calling out the usage of a specific word is just an example of it that you've just experienced - don't put too much stock into these people's opinions, even if you get them to "approve" of you all it will take is a slight change in the direction of the wind and they'll burn you at the stake for something else.
Not to mention over time the meanings of these words shift and change because - and repeat after me - language is just an expression of internal thought processes. Eliminating and banning language does nothing to limit the thought processes: people will still want to express the feeling of something being "retarded" even if they cannot use the word "retarded" - eventually the new word being used will be considered "offensive" and the word will shift again but the meaning will stay the same.
Say what you want and stand behind it. Don't let these cry-bullies police your language.
You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.
However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
In the real world, oligopolies are the rule not the exception.