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Animats 23 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 7 hours 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!
wongarsu 1 hours ago [-]
If printing technology took centuries to eliminate the trade of printers, by the same logic computers took about 80 years to eliminate a large chunk of knowledge workers (and that's just counting until today, we might still be a couple years off)
thegrim33 3 hours ago [-]
The difference is that one of those things actually happened, and the other one is your hypothetical extremist/exaggerated/worst possible case of what might happen this time.
mbesto 2 hours ago [-]
The entire premise of the article is that we're being promised that an entire workforce is going to be eliminated overnight. The people who are promising this, do not care about what happens to the working class. This is clearly causing anxiety.
The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.
zero-sharp 2 hours ago [-]
The parent is making a point about the rate/scale at which technology replaced workers. If you think the hypothetical is too extreme, then what would a more realistic version be? Are you uncertain about the rate of disruption?
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero reason to think about events that haven't happened yet. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
alsetmusic 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think they said that at all. I'm pretty sure they were saying that the thing to think about / discuss is the thing that happened, rather than the hypothetical.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
My own initial comment literally addressed the uncertainty.
Here:
> You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is [emphasis in source], the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
"It hasn't happened yet" is a non-sequitur at best, but obviously the goal of such a "contribution" is to chill discussion. The same "contribution" can be made to any conversation about any possible future events. So long as everyone already knows they're talking about the future, it is not helpful in any way.
freejazz 2 hours ago [-]
The entire premise of this article is a hypothetical
altmanaltman 6 hours 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.
Macha 5 hours ago [-]
Also fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. And individuals largely don’t come out fine. We have this notion of “retraining” but that’s not real. It’s like how studies show it’s very hard to make friends as an adult. Most people whose jobs were shipped overseas in deindustrialization never recovers.
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
It’s harder to go from 30 years as an assembly worker to a career as a developer than go from developer to say product manager or whatever roles will survive.
adrianN 1 hours ago [-]
In companies where I worked there were about two dozen developers for every product manager, sometimes more.
lesuorac 4 hours ago [-]
> We have this notion of “retraining” but that’s not real.
While I haven't been "retrained" my understanding was the real issue that it's lip-service.
Like the Department of Labor doesn't actually show up to a closed down factory with staff to train people in some other vocation.
nemo44x 2 hours ago [-]
We create 25% more new jobs that never existed before than jobs that are forever destroyed as obsolete every year. In the USA.
logicchains 3 hours ago [-]
University-educated "Knowledge workers" should be much more capable of learning new things than the average factory production line worker.
chongli 5 hours ago [-]
How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves.
Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
> If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.
I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).
Recurecur 4 hours ago [-]
I think you’re failing to factor in the rapid improvement in robotics.
I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics.
The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs.
I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines…
I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind.
We’ll see how things go from here… ;-)
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
It’s gonna be a long time before we have robots that can replace 100% of a nurse at a cost lower than a nurse. Right now we have nothing close to someone being able to replace those tasks. The industries that have had most robotics and automation such as warehousing still have human workers. Heck I would not be suprised if more people work in warehouses in USA today than 25 years ago.
adrianN 1 hours ago [-]
It is sufficient to make existing workers more effective to be able to fire some of them. If turning a patient to change a diaper is a two person job and somebody buys a robot that assists to make it a one person job, suddenly you need fewer people during a shift.
kaffekaka 4 hours ago [-]
> I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics
I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks.
About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
buddhistdude 3 hours ago [-]
What does it matter how difficult it is? That only means it's gonna take a while longer.
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
That’s not how technology works. We went from first flight in 1903 to a man on the moon in 1969. Then we basically did almost nothing in aerospace for the next 50 years. We never got past the supersonic barrier for feasible commercial air travel. Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency, a 747 from 1969 can achieve basically the same trips in the same amount of time as a 787 or A350.
What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.
somenameforme 3 hours ago [-]
When things are spread out over time people are able to adjust to the point that society, as a whole, might not even notice there was a problem, even if for some segment of that society it might feel like the end of the world - or at least an incomparable inflection point. The only real problem you have is when things come on hard and fast, like a tsunami.
Recurecur 3 hours ago [-]
We shall see about how much of nursing can be automated. I do think that the human presence of a nurse (particularly if of the opposite sex to the patient) is helpful. That could still be provided on a less frequent basis.
As to the rest of their function, I think probably the biggest obstacle will be the ability to safely manipulate the human body, as in turning or moving the patient. That requires delicacy, advanced tactile sensors, and physical power. For fine detail work, such as finding a vein with a needle, the technology already exists. Elon Musk also predicts that robotic surgery will rapidly outpace human surgeons, and I agree there.
On the subject of human teachers, my comment is similar to that about human nurses. A human connection helps with motivation. That said, I think video serves much the same function, and with video one teacher can reach an unlimited number of classrooms. That’s independent of how humanistic the teaching robots will become, and I expect that will also improve rapidly. We are nearing singularity like situations with engineering problems, in other words recursive improvement without much if any human intervention.
5 hours ago [-]
soulofmischief 5 hours ago [-]
Right now, many people do not own property and are one missed paycheck away from homelessness.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
“Many” is doing a tremendous amount of work there. Do you mean in absolute terms? It takes months to a year to evict a tenant for non-payment.
a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago [-]
So, your contention is that it'll take a couple of months of missed paychecks before their lives are irrecoverably ruined, rather than just one?
animal_spirits 3 hours ago [-]
Many states in the United States have a 7 day eviction limit. It really can be life or death
soulofmischief 4 hours ago [-]
I evicted someone from my home just a couple months ago and the process took one month.
I'm not sure what "Do you mean in absolute terms?" is asking, but I think it's generally wise to follow the Hacker News guidelines here:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
My wife did court appointed mediation of landlord tenant disputes. The rule of thumb was that if the person was less than a year arrears in rent, the landlord wasn’t going to see anything and the best course was to write off the unpaid rent.
freejazz 2 hours ago [-]
It sure is convenient when you just completely make up counterfactuals to suit yourself
Why do people always fight with a fabricated strawman of what the situation is like for poor people? Some hypothetical world where unemployment insurance, Medicaid, renter protections, etc., don't exist?
freejazz 1 hours ago [-]
>What experience do you have with the eviction process?
My family has owned brownstones in new york my entire life and their experiences are quite different than yours.
>Why would you accuse me of making it up?
Besides the fact that you're a well known troll here? It's a shockingly convenient argument devoid of any actual fact.
Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction". So yeah, that's why I think you're a liar. Because I've read more than enough of your posts here and I'm also capable of using common sense to determine that shit stinks. Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."
So again, total BS from you.
Will you substantively respond to this post? Let's see! I doubt it.
rayiner 54 minutes ago [-]
> My family has owned brownstones in new york my entire life and their experiences are quite different than yours.
So because you have an anecdote, I must be lying?
> Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction".
My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.
> Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."
What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?
freejazz 41 minutes ago [-]
>So because you have an anecdote, I must be lying?
It's called common sense. You asked what my experience is. I know you're lying because you don't pass the sniff test and you're a well known troll here.
>My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.
Doesn't really matter, your own link provides the average. You citing to what your own link describes as scenarios that will not happen to any land lord just show how dishonest you are in your own framing.
>What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?
Maybe read your link... the "What Speeds the Timeline Up" section up should help
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
It's 1.9 million out of roughly 130 million jobs in the US, putting it at about 1 to 1.5 percent. Not 0.01%
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
What is?
sam_lowry_ 2 hours ago [-]
IT broadly speaking is ~4.5% of the workforce in the US, 5% in the EU, last time I checked.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
Do you think IT is the only field threatened by AI?
Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.
bushbaba 4 hours ago [-]
I doubt unemployment can even raise to 40% before the government and billionaire class is overthrown.
The French Revolution was not an isolated event
purplemoonx 1 hours ago [-]
164 million people employed in 2025 divided by 320 million people means 49% were not employed.
Raw figures.
The actual “unemployment” figure you hear is not raw figures, since you must exclude the 75 million children and elderly.
But still, 33% in that case.
The official figure you see excludes far more people from the counting to make it seem like only a tiny fraction of people are unemployed. They’ll say 4% or something. But in fact, about half of all people are not employed in the US.
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
You have way higher unemployment among young people in many countries without any revolution. What are they gonna do? Randomly kill people who are ”kulaks” and that will solve their problems how? Are they gonna get to eat if they kill a guy running a saas company?
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
And then what?
Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value?
We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?
adrianN 1 hours ago [-]
Well somebody is still making things and presumably selling them. So you could tax them and redistribute the money
wongarsu 1 hours ago [-]
If for that many people there truly is no way left to provide some economic value (that is rewarded enough to pay for shelter, bread and Netflix), that might mean the end of capitalism. Even living in a slum is not free
I'm not sure what would replace it. A welfare state doesn't work if the state doesn't have the money. State-run economies don't have the best track record either
logicchains 3 hours ago [-]
What are the unemployed going to do? South Africa has over 30% unemployment rate, nothing changes, the unemployed sometimes rob/murder farmers, and the employed live in compounds with armed guards.
jimbobbam 16 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.
close04 11 hours ago [-]
> 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 11 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 10 hours ago [-]
Aah, so by definition only a select few can do it
detourdog 9 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 8 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 8 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 9 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 9 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 8 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 8 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.
jrapdx3 2 minutes ago [-]
Your family certainly has an impressive record of success in the art world. My father was a talented painter but didn't attempt to sell his work. He was an even more talented pianist but rarely performed publicly. My sister is an exceptionally talented painter and sculptor. I encouraged her to put her work out there but never did, a real shame.
I'm also an artist, primarily a printmaker. I've made my living otherwise, though my work sells at a modest pace.
I know many artists in galleries but only a few earn enough to pay their bills. Artists who do earn a living are good self-promoters of their work or build reputation through family connections to patrons. The shy ones remain unknown. Hardly a "criticism of the art world" just a summation of decades-long observation.
For every artist turning rubbish into big money there are many who only turn rubbish into garbage. Perhaps my comments are "one-dimensional", but so is implying that turning rubbish into big money is easy to achieve.
close04 9 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.
danans 2 hours ago [-]
> Question stands, if anyone can offer a good equivalence for something similar today.
Then no, it's not possible for the average worker, largely because the advance of technology raised the bar on labor, requiring more (and increasingly expensive) education, all while that 60s worker and their generation, caught in a Reaganite zeal, pulled up the ladder behind them in housing and destroyed public goods.
roenxi 9 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 9 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 7 hours ago [-]
You can get internet and a phone for < $20/month. It will have all the apps, you don't need a computer.
kazinator 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe the secret is in what you print?
listenallyall 9 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 8 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?
gmadsen 3 hours ago [-]
You can buy a 5 bed 4 bath house in Tulsa, OK for under $400K
listenallyall 6 hours 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.
lp4v4n 10 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 8 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.
a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago [-]
Where can I get a house, 3 apartments, a car, and money for raising 5 children at a very reasonable cost?
jdm2212 1 hours ago [-]
Houses are cheap everywhere outside of major metro areas. And raising kids is cheap if you have a stay-at-home spouse, send the kids to public school, and never fly. So basically if you recreate the typical 1963 suburban living experience, this is totally workable on (for example) a teacher's salary.
logicchains 3 hours ago [-]
Any US remote tech job will support that if you live in the countryside of some flyover state.
lp4v4n 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know about the cost-of-living reality in the flyover states, but are you sure you're taking into account the 5x multiplier that kids represent for that specific example?
I think that just in terms of food expenses, having to feed five children + one spouse might be pretty challenging. Let alone if we factor in things like healthcare plans, among other things.
Another thing: the GP's grandfather was a blue collar worker, you're talking about a white collar remote worker who by definition is a high earner and not somebody average.
This talking point that things are not harder today and everybody would be able to have the same affluence of 60's people if at least they were not so demanding sounds completely unrealistic.
jdm2212 1 hours ago [-]
Food is very cheap if you eat like Americans did in 1963. No restaurants, no prepared food, relatively little meat. Rice, bread, beans, potatoes, squash, etc.
Healthcare is cheap if you consume healthcare like a person in 1963. No need for MRIs, anti-depressants, chemotherapy, most childhood vaccines, braces for the kids' teeth, etc. The big exception is labor & delivery, where what used to be standard (a long hospital stay for recovery) is now so outrageously expensive that it's not even an option.
appplication 8 hours ago [-]
Very curious what living standards you’re thinking of
jdm2212 7 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 6 hours 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.
That is just a huge mess of tautologies. Like the way they measure the housing you need to thrive is by the 40th percentile of rent. But today's apartments are much nicer than apartments in 1963, so the 40th percentile is buying a much better product today than in 1963.
This makes "thriving" a constantly moving target, because by definition 40 percent of people have housing that sucks too much. This does reflect realities of human psychology (our happiness is mostly about relative well-being, not absolute well-being), but it is not remotely useful for comparing material living standards over time.
davemp 7 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.
markbnj 5 hours ago [-]
I grew up in the 1960's. We lived in a suburb of Detroit where my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on drive trains and suspensions for Cadillac. My mom was a homemaker. We had one car. The house where the six of us lived was 1/3 the size of the one just my wife and I live in today. We had a black and white TV that got the network broadcasts, a single dial phone, a washer, a dryer, a stove, a toaster and a small refrigerator. My mom had a plug-in steam iron. My dad did the lawn with a push rotary mower and trimmed the sidewalks with hand clippers. We kids had bikes and board games. I did not know anybody with air conditioning. The most luxurious things we had were time, leisure and the outdoors that nobody minded us losing ourselves in for hours at a time. This isn't nostalgia by the way. I wouldn't go back. But if you could, somehow, you'd be shocked at how much less of nearly everything material there was.
jhbadger 5 hours ago [-]
Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were still tiny -- the average size of a US house in 1960 was 1,289 sq ft -- basically apartment sized. And typically only had one bathroom
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 6 hours ago [-]
Only 12-15% of the country had AC in 1963.
jhbadger 5 hours ago [-]
And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would go and sleep on their floor.
astura 5 hours ago [-]
Residential units? Or does that include businesses too? Cause 12-15% for residential units sounds high for 1963.
Air conditioning was extremely uncommon in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s. I didn't personally know a single family that had a/c until the 90s. The only places that were air conditioned in my neighborhood in the 80s were businesses. I'm sure it was more common in the South.
znpy 5 hours ago [-]
People vastly underestimate the savings a woman clipping coupons and cooking meals from scratch can bring.
evilduck 2 hours ago [-]
I don't underestimate it, I know pretty clearly what it's not worth because it's all my SIL-SAHM does in life. It's possibly the difference between them being homeless or hungry, but the last few years of inflation have obviously offset whatever it had been worth before. They'll never penny pinch themselves out of poverty. It's the behavior of a household not thriving.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
My wife comes from a lower middle class family so she’s a big deal finder and coupon clipper and cooks at home. We spend $1,100 a month on groceries, for 2 adults and 3 kids. Lunch for me most days is some bread and cheese, or a hot dog, or rice with an egg over it. She goes to three different discount grocery stores and if we eat beef it’s from Grocery Outlet. Sometimes a packaged item from ALDI (like their pulled pork).
pronghorn 5 hours ago [-]
That's heroic. I hope you tell her so (though you sound like you would).
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
I try to! But my family is the opposite, so at first I was offended, like "do I need to make more money?" LOL.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
Where can you find a starter home today on your grandfather's salary?
jdm2212 6 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
It’s interesting to look at places like Westchester that were already upscale decades ago. Here’s the first listing I found in Scarsdale, NY, which has been an affluent Wall Street suburb forever: https://www.redfin.com/NY/Scarsdale/12-Stoneleigh-Rd-10583/h.... Sold for $645k in 2003 and $1.25 million this year. That’s 3% appreciation per year over the last 23 years. It’s exactly the rate of inflation.
ramesh31 4 hours ago [-]
Hudson Valley real estate is the best kept secret in the US. Plenty of places with good schools and a sub-1hr train commute to Manhattan can be had for under $500k still. Westchester is cooked, but add 15-30 mins north to your commute and it's still extremely accessible.
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
Size of house, availability of food and clothes, percentage of population that receives an education, etc.
listenallyall 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
Disregard the grandfather for a moment.
How is today better than the situation 20 years ago?
alex43578 8 hours ago [-]
Most of those measures, just less significantly compared to the grandfather.
BoingBoomTschak 5 hours ago [-]
The fact that you listed "restaurant meals" and "number of sexual partners" as a plus tells me everything I need to know here.
Yes, the people who like living in the Pleasuredome of cheap and fast thrills have it better these days. The rare few who want a stable, thoughtful life with a lifelong partner far away from the racket? Well...
listenallyall 1 hours ago [-]
Options are generally a good thing, even if you dont explore them all. Much respect if you found one person and its just the two of you to the grave. But, you cant ignore the fact that women fought for years for sexual freedom, and that most people of both sexes prefer to be able to date and search for a long-term partner rather than be arranged, or to be pressured by parents, church or community to marry the first person they had sex with.
Secondly, you can't invalidate a list of net positives like longer life expectancy by objecting to one of the things on that list.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
What if having a residence at all is more important than having a large residence?
andrepd 9 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 8 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 7 hours 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 7 hours ago [-]
You sure can buy severely enshittified versions of all those products designed with a very limited lifespan for cheap.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
Stuff was total shit back in the day, lol. Even in the 1990s cars regularly rusted out. Today you can drive a cheap Kia for decades.
AngryData 2 hours ago [-]
1990s cars aren't any more prone to rust than cars now, the rust is just hidden under the plastic panel. That plastic panel isn't doing any of the work of the frame though. Shit and gilded shit are both piles of crap even if one looks better at first glance. Especially when you consider how much thinner modern car frames are which means there is less to lose before failure, assuming the electronics even last that long.
picofarad 4 hours ago [-]
The 90s was decades ago. I don't see many 2010 kia on the road.
You can't know the quality of new kia "for decades".
I still see 90s and earlier cars on the road all the time (nearly daily). I owned one until 2020, when someone totalled it while parked for me.
alt227 9 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.
CosmicShadow 3 hours ago [-]
Who cares? It's probably not better than a TV anyone else can afford and why would a billionaire need a folding tv in one of their 24 room homes?
The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.
I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.
ses1984 2 hours ago [-]
> 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford
It feels like 200% is approaching, from an arbitrary start point of 2013.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
(voiceover) technology is part of economics.
listenallyall 6 hours 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...
2500 cases? Call me when it reaches hundreds of thousands of cases, like it was every year up until the 1960s.
Rendello 23 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 10 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 9 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 8 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 7 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 7 hours ago [-]
you're describing a pre-20th century guild, not a union
jhbadger 5 hours ago [-]
In the US because of the merger of the AFL and CIO into the current AFL-CIO, "unions" in the US mean both the industrial "worker's rights" style unions like the CIO had, as well as the "guild" style unions of the AFL for plumbers, carpenters, etc. that are mostly about limiting the number of people in the field to make sure salaries don't crash due to oversupply.
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
> are mostly about limiting the number of people in the field to make sure salaries don't crash due to oversupply.
Notice that this is equivalent to ensuring that they crash three times as hard for the people being excluded, because they all still need jobs but are now stuck competing for not just fewer but also lower skilled jobs, and on top of that then have to pay more for housing etc. because trade work is being artificially kept in undersupply.
parineum 5 hours ago [-]
I've only known one person who went into a trade union but it almost perfectly describes his experience. Right down to having an uncle in the union already.
mattjhall 9 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 9 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 9 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 17 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 12 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 11 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.
Earw0rm 3 hours ago [-]
I'm too old and boring to go to cultural events that are likely to end in brawls.
And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.
Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
It would be better if they were paid to do nothing.
noduerme 10 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 10 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 10 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.
AnthonyMouse 9 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 9 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 8 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.
fc417fc802 59 minutes ago [-]
Notably under any sane regime this would only defer taxes until death however in the US we adjust basis at that point. But then inheritance cough sorry "estate" tax kicks in so ... I'm not actually seeing the problem? (I mean I see several problems but not the "avoid paying taxes" one. At least not until we cure aging. The IRS will get its cut of your billions assuming you don't find a creative way to offshore the assets.)
noduerme 9 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 8 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?
fc417fc802 50 minutes ago [-]
I fully agree with you that (overly) restrictive zoning is the root cause of at least a few serious problems we currently face. However this bit
> 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.
sounds like you're describing a paperclip maximizer and drives home the importance of zoning (or rather land allocation and geographical coordination) as a general concept.
clort 8 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 6 hours 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 9 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.
pcthrowaway 3 hours ago [-]
> I mean, but, if everyone gets $12k, then doesn't $12k mean nothing?
Yes, this is why many people think Universal Basic Services (food, housing, health care, etc) is a vastly superior model to UBI
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
It's also why those people are not just wrong but have it completely backwards. If you give people money that can only be spent on housing or healthcare then they can only use it to bid up the price of housing or healthcare. It does the exact opposite of the thing you want.
And to the extent that it doesn't, it's because they were going to buy those things anyway (since they're necessities) in which case it's equivalent to cash because they can now spend the money they otherwise would have used to buy those things. At which point all you're doing is wasting tax dollars on administrative overhead and reducing utility when you get the numbers wrong and what a given person actually needs is more money for food and less for housing or vice versa.
ludicrousdispla 10 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...
taneq 15 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 11 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 10 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?!
SecretDreams 16 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.
noduerme 15 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 10 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 10 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 6 hours 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 8 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 8 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.
SamoyedFurFluff 5 hours ago [-]
I disagree with you largely. The vast majority of people I know have interests that drive them beyond a work they dislike. They follow sports. They golf. They cook. They are foodies. They enjoy mixology. They raise their children. They enjoy taking 45 minute walks after every meal. They host parties with friends. They do a book club. They knit or crochet or craft with felt. All of these things do not resemble “purpose” in that they’re not really monetized. But in a world where you don’t have to make money to live I think there’s a hell of a lot of things that can give purpose.
simonask 5 hours ago [-]
> And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose.
Whoever told you this or gave you that impression? It certainly does not reflect anyone in my life. It sounds like symptoms of major depression. But I strongly suspect it is actually just a lie.
What do you think people did before work was invented? Or rather, do you think evolution shaped humans in an environment that demanded 9-5 desk sitting, email sending, backcircling?
It's extremely revealing that people seem to not even be able to come up with things that might give you a sense of purpose in life. No wonder we're all depressed cynics.
tomjen3 9 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.
simonask 5 hours ago [-]
> Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it.
That's a baffling proposition. I think society benefits overwhelmingly more from the sum of average contributions, not the rare exceptional contribution.
I do think we're missing out on a huge number of exceptional contributions due to the circumstances people face who would otherwise be free and able to make such contributions. Instead they are sending emails.
ThrowawayR2 6 hours 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.
codexjourneys 3 hours ago [-]
The trick here is, what if you would rather do something else, as in a different job or start your own company? People need the option to pursue their dreams, or it's a dystopia.
lazide 16 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 15 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.
samiv 4 hours ago [-]
When you have a surplus of poor people that might insinuate insurgency it's always possible (and cheap) to hire one half to kill the other half. Problem solved.
Lio 12 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 6 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
Sooooo...
Circular financing???
noduerme 9 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 14 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 11 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.
Y-bar 8 hours ago [-]
I’m quite sure Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Jared Kushner, Sam Altman et al are unironically thinking that.
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Remove the /s. This is the main purpose of robot dogs and drones.
generic92034 6 hours 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.
watwut 13 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 10 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 9 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.
jakelazaroff 16 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 16 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 15 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.
selimthegrim 3 hours ago [-]
The law never applied to diesel cars FYI
sbiru93 11 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 14 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 7 hours ago [-]
I think you should check your tires more often.
ricardobayes 13 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 10 hours ago [-]
Must be nice to be in the 10% of the population who are citizens. Apartheid labor so so sweet.
ileonichwiesz 12 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that the plot of an episode of Always Sunny?
ZeroGravitas 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's also a YC startup called Yoshi from 2016, I wonder how often those two overlap?
SoftTalker 16 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 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vkou 14 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 17 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 10 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 23 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 14 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 9 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.
swat535 4 hours ago [-]
> 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!"
If software genuinely becomes a solved problem, everyone is going to working in AI labs (or its verticals).
If AI is also going to maintain itself, then there is no need for AI labs either, at which point we've reached singularity and no one is safe.
tonyhart7 13 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 11 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.
LogicFailsMe 3 hours ago [-]
And yet the most unproductive work at FAANNG arises from huge bureaucratic turfy fiefdoms whose leadership games the productivity metrics to look busy. Broadly, workfare for ass kissers. And heaven forbid you work on anything that remotely resembles their dominions.
Counterpoint: reducing most of these metastatic organizations to 2-pizza level teams with AI would be positive across the board.
Countercounterpoint: But since the overlords of these fiefdoms are not stupid, just malevolent, they'll use AI to tighten their grip and terrorize anyone who dare oppose them. Basically, organizational Ponzi.
J_Shelby_J 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lelanthran 12 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 12 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 12 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.
sph 12 hours ago [-]
WTF is an EM? Please expand your acronyms.
0123456789ABCDE 11 hours ago [-]
prolly Engineering Manager
lelanthran 12 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.
Muromec 22 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 18 hours ago [-]
There are sizeable camps for both those opinions.
Lerc 17 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.
zahlman 51 minutes ago [-]
I have heard people speak of AI agents as our "successor species" or words to that effect, seemingly thinking this to be a good thing.
kakacik 13 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 12 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 17 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 22 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 18 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 21 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 21 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 19 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?
17 hours ago [-]
globalnode 18 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
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, like Tesla, SpaceX, or any of the social media silos, AI isn't politically neutral or generic. Unless you're using a model you created and trained yourself entirely on data you own then you're at least indirectly supporting technofascism, mass surveillance (which particularly targets minorities,) mass psychological manipulation and propaganda, genocide and colonialism, environmental harm, deskilling and every other negative effect this technology has. It isn't possible to fight fascism without addressing the tools of fascism, and AI is a tool of fascism even if it's also useful.
ben_w 21 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 15 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 21 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 10 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 18 hours ago [-]
It's not true indeed.
iwontberude 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bonoboTP 20 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 19 hours ago [-]
They want to get paid enough to pay human models.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
bonoboTP 19 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 10 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 9 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 7 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 6 hours ago [-]
If you want to sell something, you need a buyer. This is my point.
randallsquared 8 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.
6 hours ago [-]
imtringued 12 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 12 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 12 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 8 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 7 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.
varjag 2 hours ago [-]
I meant 3% from median baseline. Humans have enormous variation with some very mediocre surgeons practicing yet people kinda live with that.
thaumasiotes 12 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 12 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 11 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 22 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 21 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 11 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 17 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 14 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 15 hours ago [-]
The class you’re thinking about is not made up of workers.
esafak 22 hours ago [-]
Tell us more.
aaron695 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
quijoteuniv 13 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 13 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 9 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...
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
I think there's a balance between high paying and intrinsically rewarding. You dont always need to work a soul crushing job in order to make a lot of money. And I think you're kinda burying the lede on "earning maximally" and "build up a nest egg." I worked two SWE jobs for several years and had a successful exit and didnt increase my standard of living, saved most of it, and all that really amounted to was being able to afford a decent down payment on a "starter" house in my area some years later. Maybe its a skill issue but it i feel like the concept of "work hard and get ahead" doesn't work anymore. You have to work hard just to keep debt low and maintain a decent quality of life.
Jtarii 11 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.
Matumio 11 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 9 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 7 hours 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.)
kaffekaka 12 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 12 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.
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
I'm really confused by this comment. I know what I am now. In the grand scheme of things nothing matters, but we don't live in the grand scheme of things, we live right now.
The point of the commenter was that if we wait to have fun til later, there may not be a later. Life is about striking a balance of having fun now and sacrificing now so that you (or your family or community etc) can have fun later.
swat535 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, so you should optimize your time to have the best quality of life NOW and never later. You can die at any time.
customguy 10 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.
layer8 7 hours 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.
ericyd 20 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 18 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.
KaiserPro 21 hours ago [-]
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 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 12 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 19 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
m463 5 hours ago [-]
I found reading "The Box" about the change to containerized shipping to be an interesting way to gain perspective a huge change, from the outside.
On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc.
they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more
But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen.
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 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?
abustamam 8 hours ago [-]
Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.
abustamam 8 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.
follow_the_mone 22 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 20 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 15 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 20 hours ago [-]
I'd guess it just means they failed some moral purity test.
hbbbcbbcx 17 hours ago [-]
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wyre 18 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 22 hours ago [-]
Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7
overgard 21 hours ago [-]
Thank you! HN doesn't usually do specialty/novelty accounts but I've very excited about this one.
simonebrunozzi 4 hours ago [-]
Nicholas Berggruen is pretty well known in Venice, Italy, where he bought 2-3 important buildings to host his foundations and art galleries.
21 hours ago [-]
nephihaha 20 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 19 hours ago [-]
Oh excellent, I appreciate you pointing that out. I love Harari’s work.
nephihaha 9 hours ago [-]
Doesn't really matter since he thinks we're both useless eaters.
epistasis 22 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 21 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 20 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 16 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.
19 hours ago [-]
neetle 22 hours ago [-]
Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”
fitzroy 21 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 20 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.
pixelready 23 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 21 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.
Theodores 2 hours ago [-]
I can remember the Thatcher years when redundancies for hundreds of thousands was routine, with the unemployment figures going stratospheric.
The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.
To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.
For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.
Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.
IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.
RivieraKid 22 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 17 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 9 hours ago [-]
I didn't imply that this is how I define UBI. Look at the exact wording I used.
ben_w 21 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 16 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.
fzeroracer 20 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 9 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 17 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
lotsofpulp 21 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 9 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 21 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.
la64710 11 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 9 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.
7 hours ago [-]
retropragma 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
equality_1138 22 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 20 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 19 hours ago [-]
I thought my previous comment made that obvious. And unlike in the private sector, mismanagement in government is a given.
greenchair 22 hours ago [-]
maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?
com 22 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 21 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 20 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 20 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 11 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).
20 hours ago [-]
michaelhoney 20 hours ago [-]
you will need to provide evidence for that assertion
worik 22 hours ago [-]
When? Where?
messe 22 hours ago [-]
It has never been tried.
Remind us what the U stands for?
TacticalCoder 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
azan_ 19 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 14 hours ago [-]
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DaSHacka 20 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 22 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 22 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 22 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 21 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 14 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 13 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?
CaptWorld 39 minutes ago [-]
I think you inverted the causation, the provider doesn't nudge but their culture is more oriented being healthy which in turn makes providers provide the services for that. The people of the USA are generally centre right and they say that they support universal health care but the minute anyone proposes solutions to implement them, the support inverses. The same happened with ACA, it did raise costs for some people but that was enough for democrats to get brutalised for that in midterms. The solution is to implement more free Market oriented Health care like singapore etc and let people choose their options.. it would suit Americans as it isn't that burdensome compared to universal health care without private options.
preg_match 5 hours ago [-]
The kicker is that it's provably not worse in quality. Sure, maybe in the absolute, meaning if you have infinite money. But on average, health outcomes are better.
exogenousdata 22 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 22 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 18 hours ago [-]
Do you have any citations, or just your assertions that this happens?
gustavus 3 hours ago [-]
I mean asking ChatGPT got me this answer that around 49% of 30-34 year olds grew up in social housing in the UK. Sources and reasoning included in response. So I'd say that's a pretty strong signal.
If you don't think the NHS has any problems then I don't know what to tell you on that you either don't follow any information about it or don't interact with it.
TheOtherHobbes 22 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 20 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.
jjav 18 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).
deadlast2 11 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
preg_match 5 hours ago [-]
I just don't see this with our current safety nets, particularly SSI disability. SSI disability will pay you not to work if you have a disability. A lot of people think that surely it's abused. No. Everyone I have seen on SSI disability is doing everything they can to not be on SSI disability. They would MUCH rather work and earn a reasonable wage than be forced to live on SSI disability.
Now, not everyone can, because some people are very disabled. But the internet has brought new capabilities, and some disabled people are able to work remotely. And guess what, they do. They willingly give up the "free", say, 900 dollars a month on SSI to work for a salary.
hackable_sand 3 hours ago [-]
I think I understand now.
You see "work" as a transactional unit.
bothers 13 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 22 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 22 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 21 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 21 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 22 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 23 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 22 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 22 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 22 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 12 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 20 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 11 hours ago [-]
We did, and we have our public spaces (public in the non-physical sense here) to show for it.
worik 22 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
21 hours ago [-]
nephihaha 20 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 14 hours ago [-]
Associated Press
nephihaha 9 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 21 hours ago [-]
You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid
anovikov 12 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 9 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 20 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 14 hours ago [-]
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harimau777 20 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 20 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 19 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.
jleyank 19 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 17 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 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.
fragmede 17 hours ago [-]
Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com
crossroadsguy 7 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.
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 15 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.
port11 9 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.
realharo 7 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.
znpy 5 hours ago [-]
> Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
Btw, from the author page:
> 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.
There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.
IncreasePosts 22 hours ago [-]
The author "is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company".
MichaelZuo 23 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 23 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 21 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 13 hours ago [-]
We've already defunded the police, and you can see the ramifications all over the world.
yoz-y 21 hours ago [-]
A camera with a gun on it can go a long way though.
Rendello 23 hours ago [-]
A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.
notsmarthuh 23 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 22 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 21 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 23 hours ago [-]
what were you doing in 2012?
notsmarthuh2 22 hours ago [-]
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gamblor956 22 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 22 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 23 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 11 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 10 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 11 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 20 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 20 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 19 hours ago [-]
Indeed, all I do is live performance.
Recording is too much work. ;-)
bloody_bocker 12 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.
Foobar8568 21 hours ago [-]
Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?
analog31 20 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 20 hours ago [-]
It seems like the occupations that are easiest to have faith in are generally occupations that are paid less.
tbrownaw 17 hours ago [-]
Probably clergy?
stock_toaster 11 hours ago [-]
Plumbers? With so much bullshit in the world these days, I assume plumbers will remain important. ;)
sandworm101 21 hours ago [-]
Lawyers
bonoboTP 19 hours ago [-]
HN moment. The median lawyer isn't who you think it is.
sandworm101 18 hours ago [-]
HN moment. A not-small number of commenters here are those lawyers.
23 hours ago [-]
teeray 22 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 22 hours ago [-]
Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.
copperx 21 hours ago [-]
That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.
nephihaha 20 hours ago [-]
The other fairy tale is when the workers rise up and create utopia. Infallible Marx didn't anticipate cybernetics.
goatlover 16 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.
api 19 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 23 hours ago [-]
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la6479 22 hours ago [-]
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lezojeda 21 hours ago [-]
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1bpp 23 hours ago [-]
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DragonStrength 19 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 1 days 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 19 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.
tokioyoyo 23 minutes ago [-]
> If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content.
I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.
JohnMakin 16 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 14 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.
CoastalCoder 7 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.)
necklesspen 9 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.
strangegecko 7 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.
mihaic 2 hours ago [-]
As a person who has actually helped friends with depression, I can totally understand on the other hand where Karrot_Kream is coming from.
I think he wrote enough for an internet comment, and anyone should probably ask for more context instead of jumping to a negative conclusion.
dayglo 7 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 13 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.
pardon_me 5 hours ago [-]
For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. This has shaken my core to re-evaluate who will ever be allowed to benefit from my skills and time, but ruined a lot of my genuine enjoyment and enthusiasm.
5 hours ago [-]
zahlman 29 minutes ago [-]
> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online]
I see.
You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
marginalia_nu 18 minutes ago [-]
Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2].
Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window.
Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...
josh_p 18 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 10 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.
josh_p 6 hours ago [-]
The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here.
All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.
I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.
We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.
MarkusQ 1 days 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 23 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 21 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 9 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.
MarkusQ 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, that's an easy one.
When I'm trying to model a situation I consider a wide variety of possible explanations, and then rank them by how well they fit the facts. I also note when someone is trying to push a narrative on me, and consider what might make them do that. I also watch out for instances of trope-thinking, where the explanation is just a pattern match to some other situation, and am careful to distinguish cases where the exemplar is fictional (thus the B-movie tag above).
And thanks for your expressed concern about my mental health!
vinyl7 20 hours ago [-]
Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies
MarkusQ 18 hours ago [-]
Right, that was in my list. That's a clear case of the misery being incidental / collateral damage.
pzo 14 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
s1artibartfast 20 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"
onraglanroad 23 minutes ago [-]
> by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant
Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?
MarkusQ 18 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 17 hours ago [-]
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consensus1 23 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 21 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 23 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 1 days 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 22 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 1 days ago [-]
A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
pseudalopex 23 hours ago [-]
You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?
Gud 1 days ago [-]
Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.
marginalia_nu 1 days 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 23 hours ago [-]
Aren’t quants and what you would usually refer to as “investment bankers” pretty different groups of people?
asdff 23 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 17 hours ago [-]
They didn’t get lucky except to the extent they were born into a fourth generation Ivy League family.
seb1204 16 hours ago [-]
Because they chose to not doom scroll?
consensus1 23 hours ago [-]
Having done both I would say not by much
hellohello2 19 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.
zahlman 23 minutes ago [-]
> I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet.
We do, and we knew decades ago.
The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.
jvidalv 10 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
Obscurity4340 3 hours ago [-]
Tildes is nice, Hubski's a nice slow and thoughtful
duskdozer 6 hours ago [-]
You put it there yourself. The community can't be there to maximize engagement.
rootusrootus 19 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.
zahlman 22 minutes ago [-]
Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.
parpfish 15 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.
m463 23 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.
23 hours ago [-]
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leptons 19 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.
Gooblebrai 5 hours ago [-]
> how incredibly toxic the web has become
A reflection of human nature at scale?
willis936 19 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.
nz 5 hours ago [-]
I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all Americans owning a computer (the smartphone and tablet, IMHO, is one of the greatest embarrassments of the tech industry: it is a practically sci-fi device that does _less_ than the clunky desktop computers, _by design_, even though they could probably do _more_[0]). The tech companies are feeding people misleading, enraging, and toxic content because this creates a strong emotional reaction, which is the first step to selling advertised products. For example, nobody will buy a thing they can't rationally justify, unless they can justify it emotionally[1].
[0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling.
[1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).
elias1233 6 hours ago [-]
Almost misread as ”outage porn” which would check out here on HN with all the recent outage posts
purplemoonx 13 hours ago [-]
The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out
zahlman 19 minutes ago [-]
As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.
This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.
marginalia_nu 10 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 13 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 13 hours ago [-]
Nah your pub is like saying "overheard online"
whstl 5 hours ago [-]
Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately.
It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.
13 hours ago [-]
arjie 22 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 22 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 21 hours ago [-]
Thank you. Emailed!
sneak 7 hours 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.
deadbabe 20 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 18 hours ago [-]
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pseudalopex 24 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 24 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.
jancsika 22 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 20 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.
qlte 23 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 21 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 20 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 22 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 22 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.
22 hours ago [-]
shimman 22 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.
23 hours ago [-]
pseudalopex 20 hours ago [-]
> As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks.
The assumption I had not was false.
preg_match 5 hours ago [-]
This works really well because most of us are very privileged. I'm white, I have a good job. Yes I live in a republican hellhole state with just about the worst policies on anything you can imagine. But I am isolated because of my status. Things can be shit and I can be fine, and I am. I have gone over 6 months without social media, and it works.
But... you do notice the cracks. Slowly. You see it at Walmart, I see it when I go out to the clubs. Lots of cops around. Nobody dancing. A bouncer for the bathroom? Hm, okay. I travel to south Texas sometimes and you see it there, too. Lots of protesting. Fear everywhere. You drive through maybe 50 abandoned, impoverished towns. I see it in my community. Businesses closing left and right. Replaced. I say "I give them six months". I'm wrong, they close their doors in three. Weird.
And then I got cancer. I knew the healthcare system was bad, but I was young and healthy, so out of sight out of mind. Not anymore. However bad you think it is, it's worse. 10 people in the infusion room, one nurse running with her head cut off. My IV has been beeping for 30 minutes. The oncologist? She's not in the building, because she's the one oncologist for three different clinics 50 miles apart. Luckily, I only have to pay an arm and a leg for this. They had iPads in the infusion room. They removed those after a couple weeks, I guess they were too expensive. And I can't trust my care team. I have to review every single medication, every single scan, everything. My oncologist mentions medications I've never took. She misreads tests. I don't blame her, I know she's overextended, she probably barely knows who I am. So, I review everything, which means I need to call and request they fax it to my line. I guess a portal is too expensive. My primary care? The next appointment is in two months. Well that's okay, I only have cancer. He barely knows who I am, too. "You never did chemo, right, just surgery?". No... I did four cycles of chemo, we talked about this a couple months ago. He sets his phone down on the table and records our conversation. OK, I guess that's a thing now. I go home. Bills just show up every few days. I don't even know what for most of the time. I had surgery a year ago at this point. Random departments in the hospital still send me bills. I did prepay ~3,000 dollars for the surgery, but I guess that money is for something else? Not sure. I would call the hospital and ask to speak to billing, but I don't have the time or energy to be on hold.
Anyway, I guess my thesis is: yes things are good, for us. We need to remain humble and recognize our experiences are tinted by our privilege.
lazyasciiart 23 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 22 hours ago [-]
OP never claimed the online negativity was meaningless, only that you hurt yourself unnecessarily by constantly exposing yourself to it.
marginalia_nu 23 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 23 hours ago [-]
Your point is meaningless and implies that your choice of how to experience life offline is equally meaningless.
marginalia_nu 23 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.
22 hours ago [-]
legastenigga 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
elliottkember 23 hours ago [-]
Look at the replies. You’re telling junkies to stop using. It won’t work. This is addiction.
marginalia_nu 22 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.
shimman 22 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 23 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 22 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 23 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 23 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 23 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 21 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 19 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 8 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 22 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???????”
23 hours ago [-]
mrguyorama 21 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.
goatlover 16 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.
autoexec 23 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 23 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.
duskdozer 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, it has. Not "tuning out" the news has helped me mitigate significant problems for me personally, which a delay of a couple days would have meant it was too late.
I think your word choice ("enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state", "martyrdom") seems to show more outrage than a lot of the people you rail against.
It's also my impression that most people who want everybody to turn off the news agree with or don't care about any bad things happening to people that are being reported on.
pseudalopex 22 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.
autoexec 22 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 22 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 19 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 22 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
duskdozer 5 hours ago [-]
Accepting the 99% figure, 1% is not a particularly small number. That's about 3.5 million people in the US alone. And it becomes much greater when you consider anyone who cares about someone in that 1%.
yulker 21 hours ago [-]
Why does one need to be proactively doing anything to justify awareness and holding a point of view?
lazyasciiart 23 hours ago [-]
And what are you doing with the happy mental space you have carved out?
asdff 23 hours ago [-]
Living a couple years longer in better health from less chronic stress, probably.
tuesdaynight 22 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 22 hours ago [-]
And I’m surprised by your level of investment in being a jerk in this conversation.
lazyasciiart 22 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.
tavavex 23 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 23 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 19 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 22 hours ago [-]
Why do you believe that you will better prepared? How do you differentiate between "preparation" and doomscrolling?
Multicomp 1 days 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.
andai 22 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 6 hours 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).
barrenko 13 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!
dec0dedab0de 1 days 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 23 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.
miyoji 4 hours ago [-]
Commutes are uncompensated labor, so you're advocating for a pay decrease for both yourself and your coworkers.
Pay me for my commute and I'll gladly work from wherever you like, just recognize that I would get more done if you weren't paying me to travel to and from work. If you don't pay me for the time I spend commuting, you aren't interested in paying the total cost of employing me and you can kindly go fuck off.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
Commutes can also be forced meditation, exercise, and exposure to sunlight and fresh air.
If you don't naturally prioritize those things, the impact of missing them will sneak up on you.
miyoji 3 hours ago [-]
Meditation is impossible when navigating the stress of traffic. Driving isn't exercise. Sunlight filtered through car windows doesn't provide vitamin D. Fresh air doesn't exist on a highway filled with brake dust and car exhaust.
Walking to work would be nice and would provide those benefits, but the vast majority of workers don't have that luxury.
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
Meditation is impossible when navigating the stress of traffic. Driving isn't exercise.
I was referring to riding public transportation, then walking through the city to the office. I agree that driving doesn't meet the criteria, but commuting != driving.
miyoji 7 minutes ago [-]
As I said, most people who live in the United States don't have public transportation and walking as commuting options.
hyperadvanced 3 hours ago [-]
Salary jobs let you pick your price. How much more as a % of your yearly would it cost you to commute every day, amortized over your ~2000 hours of expected work at said office? 10%? 20%? For me, it’s probably 10% for the right gig.
Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not paying anyone to do anything, please don't tell me to fuck off for expressing my personal experience.
miyoji 5 minutes ago [-]
You're failing at basic reading comprehension. The "you" there is obviously referential to employers, not a direct response to an anonymous internet commenter.
Dusseldorf 21 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)
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
Oh I get it, I was an early adopter and advocate for working from home. Hell, it was my job to write code to help tens of thousands of people work from home when the pandemic started. I gladly did it, assuming they would all enjoy it as much as I did at the time. But I was only 6 years into it at that point, it was barely a walk in the park.
ang_cire 22 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.
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
I prefer WFO. I just think it has hurt me physically and mentally over the last 12 years.
strken 19 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.
braiamp 3 hours ago [-]
If by teams you mean the manager of the team, then no. If by teams you mean each individual can evaluate their role and say "I do not need to come to the office at all", then yes.
kasey_junk 2 hours ago [-]
I’m an extrovert and strongly prefer working remotely.
BoingBoomTschak 5 hours ago [-]
Here at least, I see it as the complete opposite: extroverts have normal lives, families and lack time that commuting eats up even more, so WFH is a boon to them.
Actual introverts (especially in our computer world) don't have that and often lack a healthy social life, which can be partly fulfilled by the office's interactions. Some of us even are chronically depressed, which means escaping home is important to allow changing our mindset (which becomes attached to a location given enough time).
NB: in Europe and worked mostly for small to very small enterprises.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if I actually believe in the intro/extro-vert dichotomy, so I normally try to stay away from the topic, but you have captured my gut feeling here.
duskdozer 4 hours ago [-]
You probably get/got reactions to that because it apparently mirrors the corporate line that precedes mandated RTO, whether or not there is a frog-boiling hybrid prelude.
Most people prefer remote, but in-office requires bodies to provide interaction for those who like it.
While yes, I do think offices are largely a waste of space and resources, I really do not mind much if you like it and want to do it, as long as you leave me out of it. As soon as the office comes with a demand for me to be there too, even some of the time, then I'll shout.
tuesdaynight 22 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 15 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.
titanomachy 20 hours ago [-]
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.
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
This is the kind of thinking that makes hn the best place on the internet. It is a shame that it is not the most upvoted.
stalfosknight 17 hours ago [-]
It is a C-suite power trip.
prinny_ 4 hours ago [-]
I like working from the office for the same reasons. Makes my home feel home and keeps my workplace out. However, I also used to commute for an hour and a half just to go to the office and another hour and a half to come back. This I don’t miss at all.
Telaneo 20 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.
demo4567 4 hours ago [-]
the part that you conveniently didn't say: nobody wanting to work from home is forcing you to work from home, but because you want to be in office, you force everyone into the office.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
Bullshit. If the company stops renting office space to save money, or hires you to a team that lives far away, you are forced to work from home.
ajkjk 23 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- 22 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 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
THX1137 22 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- 22 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.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I am very jealous of you.
THX1137 2 hours ago [-]
I'm lucky that I can do something that aligns with how I like to live and work. I guess my question to you is why you don't seek to return to the office yourself? I might not understand the attraction of the commute but "different strokes for different folks" is like a bedrock of western society.
hollowturtle 22 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 12 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.
titanomachy 20 hours ago [-]
You live somewhere where you can't go outside "most of the year"? Did we evolve on the same planet?
WorldPeas 19 hours ago [-]
You realize that humans are an invasive species in most places they currently reside, right?
titanomachy 19 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.
THX1137 21 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.)
dom96 21 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 14 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.
THX1137 1 hours ago [-]
The poster didn't say they want everyone to go back to the office, they said they preferred to work in the office. Maybe cool off before bashing
dec0dedab0de 52 minutes ago [-]
Thank you, but I didn't even say I prefer it, I definitely prefer working from home. I tried to say that it has been harmful over the last 12 years.
throw-the-towel 13 hours ago [-]
> Makes you wonder why no one wants to be his friend?
Wow, what a way to be bitter and defensive.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
Dude. This is too mean. I'm a real person.
iamflimflam1 9 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.
DeluluDon 23 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.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
This is more than a fair response, and I apologize for using the term, because I really daydream about going on an extended backpacking trip with money in the bank, or living in a van and traveling around. Which is significantly different than the normal definition of homelessness.
gboss 22 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 19 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
DeluluDon 57 minutes ago [-]
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mancerayder 4 hours ago [-]
I and my cohorts are forced back in the office four days a week.
It's a miserable grind. Routine includes alarm, after a poor night of sleep, getting ready, commuting in, loud, bright offices where while you enjoy the convivial nature of joking and commiserating with colleagues, it's so distracting and noisy and visually distracting that you can't be productive technically.
Next you go home at 6, 630, sleepy, go to the gym or do your shopping, home, sleep, rinse repeat.
Suddenly six months has gone by. Then a year.
I cannot sympathize with the work from home complainers. You folks are like people who came across a lot of money, retired early and are depressed due to boredom.
If WFH is misery, is it possible it's the town you live in that's causing the misery?
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I remember feeling exactly the same way. When I got offered a work from home job in august of 2014 it felt like a magic portal into a dream life I always wanted, and it was for the first 6 years.
Maybe it is my town, maybe it's me. But I just don't think it's healthy to wake up, walk down the stairs and sit in front of a computer for 8-15 hours every day, rinse and repeat. Maybe things would be different if I had the discipline to consistently shower, cook, exercise, go outside, spend time with friends, pursue my hobbies, and maintain my household.
mancerayder 2 hours ago [-]
Hold on a second. You can get up between meetings, go for a jog, use a home gym, lay down and read, sit in your yard in the sun with your eyes closed, pet your dog, call your significant other or sit with them, shop for new shoes, study for a new job, take a video call from a recruiter, do your laundry, clean your bathroom, the list goes on.
Discipline is a personal problem not an office policy issue.
dec0dedab0de 56 minutes ago [-]
Yes.
nlarew 2 hours ago [-]
> I just don't think it's healthy to wake up, walk down the stairs and sit in front of a computer for 8-15 hours every day, rinse and repeat
Yes obviously?!? Nothing about work from home makes you sit on your ass all day.
You're projecting your lack of discipline about the things that make life worthwhile (feeling good physically, bettering yourself mentally, enjoying the world around you, and sharing it with others) onto a working model.
dec0dedab0de 55 minutes ago [-]
Yes.
dalyons 19 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.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
Because I have got very used to using my own toilet whenever I need to.
dalyons 49 minutes ago [-]
Ok so this isn’t really a serious conversation?
pzo 13 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.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
The company I work for has an amazing office with free food and beer that is a 30 minute commute in heavy traffic. The allure of sleeping in keeps me home.
throwaway_7274 23 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
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
I was the same way, and the same work from home job I took in 2014 was the first time I didn't have to worry about bills, or picking up the check for a nice dinner. Everything was immediately better in every measurable way.
The hidden tolls of what I've been missing have caught up with me.
I don't know if you were around hn when the soylent guys were posting on here, but at one point one of them was having problems because they left out some trace substance that only becomes an issue after a long time of not having it. That's how I see it, there are trace elements required for happiness that I discounted at a young age. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but I was getting them previously, while being miserable about the macro issues.
I brought up money, because I was specifically thinking of my best friend, and his friends, and others who all work in construction. They work way harder in a day than I have my entire life. They have a refined skillset that took decades to master. They are outdoors, sometimes in horrific conditions. They get to bullshit and joke and call each other a bitch. They get to come home and enjoy the simple things like cooking a burger on the grill, without feeling bad about missing an unreasonable deadline, or not filing a patent for those last 20 ideas that would change the world. They get to be strong and feel confident about their chances of winning a fist fight and have wives that understand and except their flaws.
Meanwhile I am over here with a pile of old electronics I don't want to give up because they have cool components I dream about using. I have sex with hundreds of women that I have no future with. I look intimidating at a glance, but have no muscle to back it up. My kid is an adult and doesn't need me anymore. It just feels pointless.
At some point I convinced myself that making more than most of my friends and family gave me worth. That I would be a loser if I switched careers to something more fulfilling that made less than 6 figures. I know in my heart that is not true, but I am still struggling to make the leap.
...sorry for spiraling at you, I am aparrently going through something at the moment.
elmer2 22 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 22 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 8 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 ...
dec0dedab0de 43 minutes ago [-]
I am extremely wary about the discourse around "late stage capitalism" but you are absolutely correct about lowering thresholds. I think that is the core of what I was trying to express.
titanomachy 20 hours ago [-]
Money might not buy happiness but poverty can definitely buy sadness
FeteCommuniste 16 hours ago [-]
Money doesn't buy happiness but definitely makes pursuing it easier.
gavmor 4 hours ago [-]
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chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
> money doesn’t buy happiness.
it doesn't but it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes.
lazyasciiart 23 hours ago [-]
> Now I daydream about being homeless.
Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.
xlii 1 days 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 1 days 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 23 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 13 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 7 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.
lowbloodsugar 32 minutes ago [-]
Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
jbs789 3 hours ago [-]
I’m finding I’m able to learn more and pick up hobbyist projects easier w the help of Claude.
For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.
fuomag9 11 hours ago [-]
LLMs have literally sparked my joy to build software which I couldn’t before because of literal time constraints and mental overload
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem?
Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.
pydry 18 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 8 hours ago [-]
2022/2023 is when the AI wrecking crews came in in full force
pydry 7 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 7 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 1 days 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 23 hours ago [-]
> The burnout is a separate topic
I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly
dec0dedab0de 1 days ago [-]
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kayamon 20 hours ago [-]
We still live in the eternal september.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't use the internet until 93, and didn't own a modem until Christmas of 94. I'm part of eternal September, but I always identified with the elders of the internet.
cucumber3732842 23 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 12 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.
dec0dedab0de 15 minutes ago [-]
disagree
zelphirkalt 9 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.
a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago [-]
That seems backwards. I'm here for the money, and AI has turned the work into largely unskilled labor. I don't care if all I do is copy and paste between tickets, logs, and the prompt (and, that is really all I do). I'm expecting the gravy train to end, but right now things only suck if you care about doing good work.
Management is quite happy with the resulting output, and I'm fine with matching their energy. I can do things that I care about on my own time.
pydry 20 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 15 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 14 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 10 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.
3 hours ago [-]
pydry 7 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 7 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 7 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 6 hours 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 demand for this type of software is wildly overestimated. Users mostly don't want a bespoke weather app that is customized to their prompt they want one which they can trust.
burnt-resistor 9 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.
21 hours ago [-]
cholantesh 1 days 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 1 days 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 20 hours ago [-]
That was just a brief trend.
Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.
MarkusQ 18 hours ago [-]
I suppose I should be grateful, if it means the mercenaries are leaving.
noosphr 22 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.
VoodooJuJu 19 hours ago [-]
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tigerlily 23 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 20 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
zulban 5 hours ago [-]
> See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had.
Whenever someone writes something like this "nobody talks about it, nobody cared" I always think that just tells you more about the media sources and community of the author (you) than anything else.
Of course people talked about it. They are still talking about it. Of course they cared. They still care. Don't be ridiculous. Go talk to some human translators in real life.
"Nobody is talking about AI". Sounds even more ridiculous when written like that.
whstl 4 hours ago [-]
I think translators will predict what will happen with developers.
So far, what I see:
I have a few friends making a proper living translating AAA games from when I worked in the area. So far there's been a lot of talking but AI hasn't been able to replace them. Whether it's "yet" or not, I won't speculate.
I also know a few people doing freelance translation online, mainly through marketplaces. Those were mainly done in bulk, for websites/apps they never heard about, probably the websites/apps I worked for.
The second group is getting very very few jobs after AI.
sluggishpudding 2 hours ago [-]
Nah. OP's real point is that people didn't talk about translators _enough_. Of course people in the circle are devastated and are screaming at the top of their lungs right now, but at a societal level no one cared enough to for example seriously consider policy changes (like UBI for example).
rindalir 23 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.
hyperadvanced 3 hours ago [-]
I have a friend who owns an organic farm (with a couple partners). They mostly scrape by and work long hours and there’s a lot of stress. People really really under-appreciate how nice the remote tech daily routine is: “I wake up, drink coffee, and solve a few abstract problems each day with an army of AGI bots at my fingertips, and for a high salary”. Compare to roasting in 95 degree heat and wildfire smoke to make sure your veggies don’t die, living in a trailer on the farm, and working retail in offseason/relying on GoFundMe to recover from the inevitable natural disasters.
bell-cot 23 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 22 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 22 hours ago [-]
Or, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!
rindalir 22 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 20 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.
mythrwy 5 hours ago [-]
YouTube always makes those things look more feasible than they are in reality.
First of all I doubt the 250K a year number just looking at the amount of produce in the field. Second of all, by the time all the expenses and distribution costs are figured in whatever the real number is shrinks by a lot. Third of all you need to be an area where a large number of people will pay double what it costs at Walmart for your produce. Lastly it takes years and a lot of trial and error to successfully produce efficiently and a couple of mistakes or bad luck and you are wiped out.
I actually have a lot of experience with this. I have a BS in Agronomy and managed a youpick/market garden back in the 90s. I still garden extensively you can see my YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@pecospablo
I wish reality was as rosy as this video I really do. But I don't bother to try to sell my produce or expand, I know better. I just do it because I like it and eating top quality fresh picked food with high nutrient density is important to me.
maerF0x0 21 hours ago [-]
and the nutrition per lb has fallen. Farm slop
testerius 12 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 12 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 11 hours ago [-]
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Retr0id 11 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.
lollapalooza88 7 hours ago [-]
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Godsend69 11 hours ago [-]
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Jtarii 11 hours ago [-]
Astroturfing AI spam.
punkbit 11 hours ago [-]
Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…
dan_q 8 hours ago [-]
This site aggressively suppresses any criticism of LLMs, especially LLM generated/"assisted" code.
flaburgan 5 hours ago [-]
I don't understand those articles, especially, I don't see why AI changed anything. At least for me, the important quest isn't how you build, but what you build. If your product is meaningless, useful only to the company because what it does is futile, then the emptiness you feel is not coming from the fact that AI is "stealing your job".
Don't quit to a farm with goats, find a way to distribute food which would have been wasted to the homeless. Find projects which make sense. Then it does not matter if you use AI or not. You actually build something useful. And if you were making bullshit PowerPoints then AI or not AI is irrelevant. Just stop that.
a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder how long it'll be before you can ask an LLM to investigate, run surveys, and figure out what to build. It feels like it's not that far away. Hm, this may actually be an interesting business for someone to found.
It's definitely farther away for this than it is for coding, but 2 years ago it was also totally useless for coding.
brushfoot 21 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 18 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 20 hours ago [-]
Do you disagree that your work is pointless?
entropy47 20 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 17 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 11 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 19 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 19 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.
uncivilized 3 hours ago [-]
Sure. Feel free to share what positive real world impact your work is having.
mangoman 19 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
hyperadvanced 3 hours ago [-]
I think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.
dogomatic 18 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!
InfinityByTen 1 hours ago [-]
I went through the whole article, agreeing to most of it and I was baffled by how skeptical people were in the comments here, with remarks of "follow the money". I didn't read all of it in one shot, but in breaks over the course of 2 days and when I finally got to the last paragraph I understood what people in the comments were on about.
I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it...
Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.
thraway3837 16 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 10 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".
awaythrow9191 5 hours ago [-]
It's funny because part of the wave of change you're describing is self-inflicted: we all wanted to get more people into farmsteading the Electronic Frontier, we wanted to make it more accessible and easy to use, hence projects like OLPC, Wikipedia, etc. I felt like the 90s and 00's were about "building a better world for everyone, online". But when "everyone" joined that world, well, they brought their own culture with them, and all the problems etc.
I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.
Thanemate 7 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_ 9 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 13 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.
lostaccount 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 22 hours ago [-]
That's not a common refrain, that's you interpreting reasonable statements in the most extreme possible way.
hiAndrewQuinn 23 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 13 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 8 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 1 days 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 23 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 1 days ago [-]
Physical labor is bad for the knees, but good for the soul.
RobinL 23 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 23 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 22 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 22 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 12 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 12 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 11 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 11 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 8 hours ago [-]
Claude Fable is very eager to design for 3D printing but I have not tested it real life yet.
drivebyhooting 10 hours ago [-]
That is super cool.
What kind of interceptor? Solid rocket motor with control surfaces?
anovikov 10 hours ago [-]
No, a kind of electric FPV drone.
21 hours ago [-]
FLeXMurphy 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
> This article is too inward
Too inward for what?
purplemoonx 2 hours ago [-]
Can't say the inward here (it's racist)
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
FLeXMurphy 1 days ago [-]
No, I pained myself reading the article too much for that.
Schlagbohrer 43 minutes ago [-]
Entire article fails to mention "alienation from one's labor"
crnkofe 11 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 8 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
cocoto 4 hours ago [-]
N = 1. The company I’m working for, (a hundred employees, EU), we basically build projects on data science, ML, optimization, operational research and such for many industries (transportation, manufacturing, finance, engineering, etc). We are basically the first to know about the latest advances in AI and we have internal optional workshops on LLM assisted development. And yet nobody is pressured to use these tools. At most we are incentivized to at least try these tools.
agys 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
titanomachy 19 hours ago [-]
I sincerely hope you're able to someday deal with your issues and become free from your suffering
dec0dedab0de 1 days ago [-]
You're farting with a walkman on.
7230883707 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mattcantstop 1 days 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 23 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 13 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 1 days 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.
22 hours ago [-]
bethekidyouwant 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
titanomachy 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe he's just Japanese, or German.
tacker2000 19 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 8 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 11 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 19 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.
arendtio 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
From my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?
left-struck 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Leave the wagon to where? Like get off the train? The trains are all wagon, no?
NicuCalcea 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Gotcha. On the trains I'm used to (Amtrak, NYC subway) spaces between cars are either nonexistent, or extremely dangerous.
NicuCalcea 23 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 8 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 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
qbit42 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, these days, most of us won't do that because there is a high likelihood it could incite violence.
chasd00 21 hours ago [-]
and inciting violence is against the law.
chrisjj 1 days ago [-]
UK included.
olooney 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
22 hours ago [-]
arjie 22 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 22 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 7 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 21 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 21 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 8 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 23 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 12 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”.
hdndjsbbs 19 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 8 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?
andix 20 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.
FloorEgg 20 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 20 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 17 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.
rr808 6 hours 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.
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
This is inevitable in any system where the old want to maintain purchasing power over the young and the proportions of old are increasing relative to the young.
rr808 4 hours ago [-]
I'd say its more like about time we had a correction to make people realize markets dont always go up, money doesn't come easily and we all have to get back to working.
rarisma 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
What makes you feel like that? Is it AI specifically?
ang_cire 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 24 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 23 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 22 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 9 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 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it is a sliding scale.
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
xnx 23 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 23 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor
dataflow 23 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 1 days ago [-]
the term your looking for is "worker alienation"
pc86 1 days ago [-]
"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
scottLobster 1 days ago [-]
He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
pc86 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 1 days 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 23 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 23 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 22 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?
scottLobster 1 hours ago [-]
They don't have to believe the insured, they can believe the doctors, plural. Also, their "errors", even when innocent, are on you to solve.
I'm currently working to get my 2nd autistic child covered for ABA services, been fighting insurance for 2 months now with 4 qualified professionals, 2 MDs, a PhD Nurse and an ABA Supervisor, from multiple providers saying she qualifies. Insurance's own in-house doctor agreed that they followed state recommendations, up until another internal doctor just some days ago contradicted them and said there's one part that they don't, which just so happens to invalidate her entire diagnosis (which took 3 separate appointments over the course of a month and was more thorough than most). The doctors who diagnosed here are livid, as they have a major insurer essentially telling them that their entire program and every diagnosis from it is invalid, while other programs are not held to the same scrutiny. I know first hand, because her older sister is also autistic and she got approved by this same insurer on a much less stringent examination from a different provider.
We'll get it solved, in the worst case we're fortunate enough to be able to hire lawyers. Not everyone has that kind of savings. Oh, and in the meantime this is 2 months my kid is going without therapy, and a bunch of wasted time for all involved.
You want more?
Earlier this year my father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan denied him coverage for in-patient rehab after brain surgery, which the surgeon, doctor and every medical professional who looked at him said he needed. We appealed, they denied the appeal. Later that week he tried to get up at night to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and fell, suffering a skull fracture that necessitated a second brain surgery. That second surgery was fully covered, but they still refused to cover in-patient rehab. He died some weeks later, have never received more than rehab 2 days a week and whatever improvised rehab the family could cobble together between our work schedules.
And that's just my personal experience in the last year. I have stories from previous years and more still from relatives. Anyone who's had to make extensive use of the medical system will have many such stories of various severity, it's just a given that when you file a claim you must be ready to fight and hope you don't have to. These are not innocent mistakes, and if they are than the insurers making them should be shut down for negligence and those in charge held responsible for resulting damages.
pc86 22 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.
scottLobster 1 hours ago [-]
Raising taxes to pay for the public welfare isn't stealing.
Rationing and wait-lists are a problem in some countries, and they're preferable problems to the ones existing in our current system.
You don't want to help, and you need a fairy tale to reframe your selfishness so you can lie to yourself in the mirror. Many such people, you aren't insightful.
pc86 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 1 days 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.
0123456789ABCDE 11 hours ago [-]
you will note gp did not refer to the deceased as a criminal, nor did they condone their murder, on the contrary.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
Wrongful denial of medical treatment. Delay, Deny, Depose.
pfdietz 23 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".
scottLobster 55 minutes ago [-]
That's a nice theory. The stock prices of many of these companies seems to disagree.
They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.
pc86 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, what a waste that is.
timcobb 1 days ago [-]
not all crime is illegal, unfortunately.
akagusu 1 days ago [-]
Can I pick all?
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
1 days ago [-]
stego-tech 1 days 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_ 22 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.
stego-tech 3 hours ago [-]
100% agree with your twist, there. I was speaking from the broadest possible sense, from local OS all the way to corporate internet infrastructure, but you're correct that one of the earliest promises was independence and intent separate from corporate dicta.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
> industry of tinkerers and designers
At no point in history was it ever thus.
ang_cire 24 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 23 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 23 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 22 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 21 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 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
Der_Einzige 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ang_cire 1 days ago [-]
I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.
Der_Einzige 1 days ago [-]
"The Librarian"
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
ang_cire 1 days ago [-]
The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.
wonderwonder 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
>an innocent
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
wonderwonder 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 1 days 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 1 days 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 24 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 1 days ago [-]
the way healthcare companies act now, they deserve bankruptcy
NicuCalcea 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Be attractive
Don't be unattractive
swed420 1 days ago [-]
Alternatively, if you're attractive (or any other useful trait), use it for public good.
red-iron-pine 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nikole9696 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nikole9696 1 days 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 23 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dec0dedab0de 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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
1 days ago [-]
SketchySeaBeast 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Eichmann never directly murdered anybody either.
whattheheckheck 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wonderwonder 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
he didn't murder an innocent man.
brandonagr2 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Multicomp 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
1 days ago [-]
pc86 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ThrowawayR2 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ang_cire 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Even by your definition, HN is still full of off-topic politics these days.
kstenerud 23 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 23 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 22 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 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, I was up at 4 am every day. It's hard work.
IshKebab 21 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...
internet2000 1 hours ago [-]
I don't need faith, I need a paycheck. How I earn it has changed over the years, and will continue to change.
mancerayder 4 hours ago [-]
Any finance tech workers? I spoke to someone from a Mag 7 recently, and he said, isn't it true that you guys are treated like second class citizens?
Yes, it's true. It's been true for a long time.
It's a bifurcated world where the people that made it big in finance /tech ended up climbing the corporate hierarchy. Even a "distinguished engineer" in an investment bank is a politically savvy project manager who goes home after work to code.
How people have lives outside of work, when work is meetings, is a mystery to me.
Are the rest of you joining the misery since 2023? We've been in this boat for a decade already.
cadamsdotcom 16 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!
darepublic 21 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 21 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 20 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.
nunez 49 minutes ago [-]
As the kids say, "it ain't that deep bro."
Before, we got paid well to do what we loved, and we were sought out for our ability to code.
Now, the "fun" has been automated...by our own hands. Seeing the thing that was so highly-prized be minimized and ground into dust is fucking depressing.
Well, that and the massive layoffs from "efficiencies" brought about by AI. And the compensation "rationalizations" that come from an employers' market with no end in sight. And the ABSOLUTELY LEGENDARY amounts of cope, especially on this forum.
"It was never about the code," they say, as they write the equivalent of a TRD [^0] into a slot machine and pull the lever, hoping to get their hit of efficiency for the hour.
So, yeah, I get the BA dude in the article who lights up when they pull out the piece they're knitting. The end is coming for us; might as well take up knitting while waiting for the fall.
[^0] https://www.timelytext.com/technical-requirements-document/. I did a stint as a BA in college for a pharma company and converted FRDs into these all of the time. You had to be technical enough to translate business-speak into nerd-speak, but not necessarily technical enough to actually implement these solutions. As a result, we never saw a line of code, since these were handed off to some PM who, I'm assuming, turned these into tickets in whatever their ticketing system was. This was during the waterfall days, so it was probably something god-awful. Writing these was soul-sucking to the maximum degree. How people get satisfaction from this process befuddles me. Maybe it's the real-time back-and-forth arguing that's fun? I'll never know.
JohnFen 1 days 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.
dsign 21 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.
smath 19 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)
ghm2199 1 days 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.
cleandreams 18 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.
pm90 1 days 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.
modeless 22 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 21 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 19 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 18 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.
robofanatic 1 days 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 21 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.
paulorlando 15 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"?
janpeuker 1 days 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 24 hours ago [-]
I'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.
gverrilla 5 hours ago [-]
They're not. This is sanitized Debord, taught in many colleges nowadays. The author even admits it's "impenetrable" even though he's citing it. This is récupération.
hn_submit 6 hours 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.
jgerrish 21 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 20 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 20 hours ago [-]
Matt burned any leftover good will a long time ago
Oras 8 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.
deanc 1 days 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.
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.
socketcluster 4 hours ago [-]
I lost faith in my career long before AI.
thisisauserid 1 days 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.
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
eahm 1 days 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.
anotheryou 6 hours 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)
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> knowledge work is mostly pointless
Really, noemamag?
aogaili 1 days ago [-]
That sums up the depth of the author understanding.
my-next-account 1 days ago [-]
Doing pointless things is wonderful, anyway.
dreadnip 1 days ago [-]
Do you like increasing shareholder value?
andsoitis 1 days 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 1 days 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
altern8 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mikert89 1 days ago [-]
You used your most prized mental faculties to build software: logical intelligence, creativity, etc to make someone else rich
trgn 1 days 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
1 days ago [-]
lbrito 3 hours ago [-]
Agree with the dread, but the point is often just making money so one can survive. While the jobs might be meaningless in an ontological sense, the surplus value is very real. All the billionaire yachts are there to prove it
dizlexic 22 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...
Kuyawa 5 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one that loves my career more than ever? The one that has seen his productivity explode? Ideas to products in minutes instead of months? Building my own coding agents that help me being even more productive? This is the year I have been the happiest in my 40 year long career as programmer and I feel much more excited for the years ahead of us.
awaythrow9191 5 hours ago [-]
Nope. But crisis-themed doom-bait is an easy way to get clicks these days.
I am actually more excited about tech too in my 15 year career. Coding agents have allowed me to streamline things that were really frustrating to do, the senseless work of updating config files or terraform files etc. and allow me to focus on things that always had more meaning, like solving fun problems with code. At the same time, I can super-rubber-duck with AI around pieces of code or tools that Im unfamiliar with, so it's supercharged my learning (I still read 2-3 tech-focused books per year, try new languages, etc.).
So yeah, I only remember being this engaged when I was a junior developer and spending 90% of my time coding. Now I get to spend a lot more of my time coding because claude can handle most of the "meh" stuff for me--even stuff like cutting jira tickets, filling in reports, etc. (I still write post-mortem because those documents are all about education and communication, but in my org, jira tickets are just loose markers of effort and dont have anything to do with design and very little with planning.)
tediousgraffit1 12 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.
monkeydust 4 hours ago [-]
> In their vision for the future, work goes from a messy experience of learning and exploring to something more akin to assembly-line production.
I would argue this, the 'messy place' is where a huge amount of real innovation happens in knowledge working. I see this with my team, only a handful of them can operate effectively in this space ( I refer it to as they grey area) but they are the ones that end up taking bigger bolder bets which payoff more often than not.
It's also the space where you let your mind wander and discover associations between topics that you didn't first realize, it's the place where you ask questions a lot rather than relentlessly focus on solutions, KPIs, OKRs and all that other process driven BS.
This is the space AI can't operate as effectively as those chosen few in my team...but it's getting damn close.
hackeraccount 1 days 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.
gls2ro 24 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.
OroPla 10 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.
arendtio 1 days 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 23 hours ago [-]
Original HN title: "Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?"
mrjay42 1 days 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.
MrJobbo 10 hours ago [-]
Not having kids was the best decision of my life...the world is headed to really really bad place.
Grombobulous 1 days 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.
christkv 2 hours ago [-]
This has been happening for a while before the LLMs coming around. A lot of people are over educated doing jobs you only need a high school diploma for if even that. There was a whole book published about this called bs job. Everyone knows people who are basically doing nothing of real value and in some cases actually negative value as they try to justify their paycheck. The amount of busywork with no value in big organizations is very high (private and public).
mariopt 1 days 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 1 days 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.
laughing_man 19 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 20 hours ago [-]
I quit tech a couple of years ago to become a high school teacher. No regrets.
namuol 20 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.
uwagar 1 hours ago [-]
people want to work by themselves with themselves. they are disillusioned working for and with other people.
bonoboTP 20 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.
purplemoonx 56 minutes ago [-]
Nah this whole thing felt artificial and forced.
With Trump and everything else.
There is a ton of work to do. We don’t even know how to stop aging and haven’t sent people to Mars, have still not really invented AI, and tons of business is still clunky and offline.
The whole anti-smart people (and anyone who tries anything) movement feels very backlashy and full of revenge from a group who felt left out by us - all while we had no idea. We were just going to work.
There’s still a lot of work to do IMO and yes money to be made. If we can turn it around.
They got us with bullshit and lies but we can get them with hard work and organization.
eddyzh 22 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.
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
win311fwg 1 days 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 1 days 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 23 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 12 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?
tehnub 22 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 21 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.
jongjong 4 hours ago [-]
I think the part that's hard to absorb is that software engineering was a brutal path. You had to restructure your entire identity, ego, personality, social relationships around that career choice. People didn't expect their career to last forever, but they thought it was a ticket out to gain autonomy.
Back in 2010-ish, many developers thought that, in the future, they'd all be running their own systems and servicing their own customers and making a good living like that (there would be enough customers for every dev). They didn't expect that the entire industry would be monopolized by a tiny number of companies, everyone using the exact same product, no alternatives or competition, and that the value of our labor would be artificially suppressed down to $0... This happened long before AI. AI is just the latest assault.
It's impossible for a solo developer to find their own customers nowadays. You could literally offer the same product or a better product for cheaper, but you won't be able to find a single customer because it's too centralized. The trust barriers are massive. Nobody has money to try anything except large corporations and they never try any product based on what it offers; it's all business networking.
It's like; the same conditioning which caused business people to pretend that Linux didn't exist for the first few decades has now spread to all non-VC-funded software.
asjh15 1 days 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.
xlayn 18 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 15 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.
zitterbewegung 1 days ago [-]
When have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).
Balinares 1 days ago [-]
There was a time when Google SREs were inventing the profession from the ground up, and it was the stuff of legend.
david927 1 days ago [-]
The 1990's
foobiekr 12 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 8 hours ago [-]
Read Douglas Adams. We were not really happy even back then.
Multicomp 1 days 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.
SirFatty 1 days 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).
austin-cheney 21 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 19 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.
gaigalas 6 hours ago [-]
You think IT professionals lost faith? You should look at teachers.
Hate to break it to you, but we're on a dark age, and this whole thing is just another unremarkable development that follows a trend that has been going on for about two centuries now.
ieie3366 1 days ago [-]
Because they don’t exercise, have a terrible diet, lack of socialization, and no family to speak of
seydor 1 days ago [-]
Having just installed the world's most popular software (MS windows), i think they should be.
dec0dedab0de 1 days ago [-]
Surely android and ios surpass windows in usage. Though I would argue that none of them are popular.
alansaber 1 days ago [-]
Fair enough.
sri9s 1 days ago [-]
good one
dgabriel 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
hn1rig3rak 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah I came around to this too
lrvick 23 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 23 hours ago [-]
So glad I am retired.
jgbuddy 1 days ago [-]
I'm pretty happy I think
knicholes 1 days ago [-]
How long have you been working in tech?
jgbuddy 1 days ago [-]
2 years, maybe that's the problem
raiyanr 14 hours ago [-]
I dont think it will happen
paulcole 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 20 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.
erikerikson 20 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.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Because society sucks so people enable Daniel Plainview mode.
20 hours ago [-]
WesolyKubeczek 9 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.
godwinson__4-8 15 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 15 hours ago [-]
The author is pretty unsympathetic towards those who give their lives to “Workism” in exchange for money, no?
godwinson__4-8 14 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.
cousin_it 20 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 22 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 22 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 22 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.
18 hours ago [-]
ChuckMcM 59 minutes ago [-]
From the article -- 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.”
Because I spent my career working in tech in the Bay Area there are some things that I just think of as 'normal' that other people, without that exposure, are surprised by. During the last 40 years start ups and tech companies have minted tens of thousands of millionaires across a wide distribution of 'net worth just over a million dollars' to 'net worth of tens of millions'. The largest chunk of that cohort leave tech directly and go do 'fun' work. The smallest chunk of that cohort are still working for someone else trying to get a bigger score. What I realized was the most people aren't sociopathic wannabe billionaires. They don't get headlines, they don't show up "out of place", they are just the people who are living their lives doing things that matter to them.
So when the author is on about 'sharing the dream of doing what you want' I was like, "Yup, same as it ever was." The author also does not appear to have the benefit of having been in the area when semiconductor manufacturing became 'foundries' and all the process engineers and other workers in all of the small fabs in the SF Bay Area were now displaced. That was a class of workers who lost faith in their careers. But what was true then, and is true today, in the US we take kids out of High School and spend four years teaching them how to think and generally how to think about some topic in college and then they go out and get jobs. For someone who has been through college, getting a new Bachelor's degree in an entirely new subject takes two and a half years tops. You don't need the general ed, if its another STEM topic you don't need to redo the math, its just "lets take the classes that are specific to the <foo> major."
And before everyone jumps on this and says "But Chuck, now I've got a mortgage and responsibilities and I can't be taking a couple of years off just to go to school." Yeah I get it. That's especially true if you don't have a support network. So it sucks and is depressing and you don't want to even get out of bed because you feel like years of your life were just wasted and now you need to start over. The alternative though just gets you deeper and deeper into a hole.
frollogaston 21 hours ago [-]
Speak for yourself.
jimt1234 14 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.
purplemoonx 2 hours ago [-]
I agree on ~2010 at least in San Francisco, that's when it all started to turn toward social media and VC hype.
a16z, Sequoia, Accel - people like that started showing up. (a16z invested in the first startup I worked at, they were only founded 1 year prior in 2009).
The Facebook movie, Justin Timberlake, I mean Sean Parker, I mean Justin Timberlake. Ashton Kutcher? Wtf
It got out of control, but at least the cash was flowing.
2016 is the year I use for "when it all fell apart".
The young guns always point to 2020s as the "overhiring boom" etc. but they have no idea what a frenzy it was in ~2010. If you knew basic HTML and jQuery you could literally get a $1M Series A in the right circles of people. It was like they could not find enough web designers and would do anything to get one.
Fun times. But of course, that could not have lasted.
wonderwonder 1 days 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 1 days 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.
matrix87 15 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)
rayoleary 17 hours ago [-]
Bravo
zabzonk 1 days ago [-]
Too much web stuff.
annoyingnoob 20 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 20 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 16 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.
purplemoonx 15 hours ago [-]
Already happened, next
elzbardico 22 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
_doctor_love 23 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 22 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.
paganel 10 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.
Obscurity4340 19 minutes ago [-]
Who's Uncle Ted and how does ine see thru his eyes?
surgical_fire 1 days ago [-]
Everyone is sad?
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
catigula 1 days 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.
wigster 6 hours ago [-]
if?
VCFundedGenYer 1 days 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 20 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.
tossitawayplz 1 days 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 13 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 10 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 20 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 1 days 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.
docmars 16 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.
maerF0x0 21 hours ago [-]
also: David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was first published on May 14, 2018
gverrilla 1 days ago [-]
Debord without Marx...
anovikov 13 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.
epolanski 21 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.
purplemoonx 2 hours ago [-]
Not at the rate it is currently gatekept - it will be prohibitively expensive for most people to use AI and AI-based robotics.
It's already out of reach for most small businesses to justify spending on it, and some LLM consumer plans are going for $200/mo.
If a chatbot is $200/mo, what's a full human AI robot going to cost to do general labor? $100k/year? And let me guess, you have to replace it with newer models each year?
Companies will ask: "What's the point?" in losing the people resource, accountability, and everything else in exchange for the same cost of labor (or more).
AI tech needs to be freed up so we can innovate with it, like the Internet was. It's currently too locked down and the K-shape thing only works with goods and assets. I don't think you can lock the majority of people out of technology (and it be as good) the way you can lock people out of home ownership (and it improves home value).
If the plan is that only a minority of ultra-wealthy have the best technology and everyone else is some underclass who can't afford it, then the technology just won't be very good or useful. It will be like the $200 chatbot or an Apple Watch or a Tesla. Some specific kind of wealthy geek will get it, but it won't be that world changing.
If individuals and companies can't meaningfully save time and money without significant additional engineering, then it'll be like flying cars or robotic bartenders and the dream of displacing all people (lol) just won't materialize.
monkaiju 23 hours ago [-]
Very happy to work somewhere where sanity has triumphed over AI madness...
taswellian 7 hours ago [-]
Where is that?
kittikitti 1 days 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.
1 days ago [-]
slowhadoken 16 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 13 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate please?
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Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
It’s not 1998 man you don’t need to use that word.
aogaili 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 21 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.
Forgeties79 60 minutes ago [-]
You’re right. I’ll start calling your family slurs regularly since it’s all meaningless.
aogaili 20 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I appreciate the advice and perspective. I agree with you.
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underlipton 21 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 21 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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peakdunningkrue 1 days ago [-]
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slimtrees 15 hours ago [-]
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defen 15 hours ago [-]
Very disturbing comment and not something you should joke about, especially number 3.
yestheydo 15 hours ago [-]
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sri9s 1 days ago [-]
tech people need to become business owners
dgellow 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
how will that help? being a business owner magically makes you immune from ai stealing your job?
gverrilla 1 days ago [-]
there's no space for everybody. not even near. free market is inherently oligopolic for most cases..
win311fwg 1 days 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 7 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.
win311fwg 4 hours ago [-]
Our current society is shaped by its regulation and the regulation is shaped by our current society. Regulated markets and our society are one and the same. To separate some kind of imagined free market out of that while still clinging to the same society doesn't make sense. They are fundamentally inseparable.
In the real world, the markets are regulated. We are talking about where there is a free market. Was your comment posted just to let us know that you don't give things much thought?
twodave 1 days 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 1 days 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!
The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.
Here:
> You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is [emphasis in source], the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
"It hasn't happened yet" is a non-sequitur at best, but obviously the goal of such a "contribution" is to chill discussion. The same "contribution" can be made to any conversation about any possible future events. So long as everyone already knows they're talking about the future, it is not helpful in any way.
While I haven't been "retrained" my understanding was the real issue that it's lip-service.
Like the Department of Labor doesn't actually show up to a closed down factory with staff to train people in some other vocation.
Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.
I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).
I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics.
The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs.
I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines…
I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind.
We’ll see how things go from here… ;-)
I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks.
About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.
As to the rest of their function, I think probably the biggest obstacle will be the ability to safely manipulate the human body, as in turning or moving the patient. That requires delicacy, advanced tactile sensors, and physical power. For fine detail work, such as finding a vein with a needle, the technology already exists. Elon Musk also predicts that robotic surgery will rapidly outpace human surgeons, and I agree there.
On the subject of human teachers, my comment is similar to that about human nurses. A human connection helps with motivation. That said, I think video serves much the same function, and with video one teacher can reach an unlimited number of classrooms. That’s independent of how humanistic the teaching robots will become, and I expect that will also improve rapidly. We are nearing singularity like situations with engineering problems, in other words recursive improvement without much if any human intervention.
I'm not sure what "Do you mean in absolute terms?" is asking, but I think it's generally wise to follow the Hacker News guidelines here:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
Why do people always fight with a fabricated strawman of what the situation is like for poor people? Some hypothetical world where unemployment insurance, Medicaid, renter protections, etc., don't exist?
My family has owned brownstones in new york my entire life and their experiences are quite different than yours.
>Why would you accuse me of making it up?
Besides the fact that you're a well known troll here? It's a shockingly convenient argument devoid of any actual fact.
>This information is publicly available. E.g., https://www.evictpro.us/blog/how-long-does-eviction-take-in-.... This says that in Maryland, a typical timeline for a contested eviction is 90-150 days.
Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction". So yeah, that's why I think you're a liar. Because I've read more than enough of your posts here and I'm also capable of using common sense to determine that shit stinks. Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."
So again, total BS from you.
Will you substantively respond to this post? Let's see! I doubt it.
So because you have an anecdote, I must be lying?
> Your own link says half of that... 45-75 days "typical timeline - notice to physical eviction".
My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.
> Your article also makes it pretty clear that the difference between it moving quickly or not is mostly dependent upon the landlord. "Worst case is unusual. Most landlords will never see this case; firm portfolio managers will see it 1-2 times a year."
What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?
It's called common sense. You asked what my experience is. I know you're lying because you don't pass the sniff test and you're a well known troll here.
>My story was about landlord-tenant mediation. Do you think those involve straightforward, "best case" proceedings? The assertion above was that "many" people are "one missed paycheck away from homelessness." If someone's alternative is homelessness, then the eviction proceeding won't be a straightforward, uncontested proceeding. And the law gives tenants many opportunities to drag out proceedings.
Doesn't really matter, your own link provides the average. You citing to what your own link describes as scenarios that will not happen to any land lord just show how dishonest you are in your own framing.
>What about that sentence shows that case length is "mostly dependent upon the landlord?" Walk me through it?
Maybe read your link... the "What Speeds the Timeline Up" section up should help
Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.
The French Revolution was not an isolated event
Raw figures.
The actual “unemployment” figure you hear is not raw figures, since you must exclude the 75 million children and elderly.
But still, 33% in that case.
The official figure you see excludes far more people from the counting to make it seem like only a tiny fraction of people are unemployed. They’ll say 4% or something. But in fact, about half of all people are not employed in the US.
Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value?
We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?
I'm not sure what would replace it. A welfare state doesn't work if the state doesn't have the money. State-run economies don't have the best track record either
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.
I'm also an artist, primarily a printmaker. I've made my living otherwise, though my work sells at a modest pace.
I know many artists in galleries but only a few earn enough to pay their bills. Artists who do earn a living are good self-promoters of their work or build reputation through family connections to patrons. The shy ones remain unknown. Hardly a "criticism of the art world" just a summation of decades-long observation.
For every artist turning rubbish into big money there are many who only turn rubbish into garbage. Perhaps my comments are "one-dimensional", but so is implying that turning rubbish into big money is easy to achieve.
Then no, it's not possible for the average worker, largely because the advance of technology raised the bar on labor, requiring more (and increasingly expensive) education, all while that 60s worker and their generation, caught in a Reaganite zeal, pulled up the ladder behind them in housing and destroyed public goods.
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.
How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?
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.
I think that just in terms of food expenses, having to feed five children + one spouse might be pretty challenging. Let alone if we factor in things like healthcare plans, among other things.
Another thing: the GP's grandfather was a blue collar worker, you're talking about a white collar remote worker who by definition is a high earner and not somebody average.
This talking point that things are not harder today and everybody would be able to have the same affluence of 60's people if at least they were not so demanding sounds completely unrealistic.
Healthcare is cheap if you consume healthcare like a person in 1963. No need for MRIs, anti-depressants, chemotherapy, most childhood vaccines, braces for the kids' teeth, etc. The big exception is labor & delivery, where what used to be standard (a long hospital stay for recovery) is now so outrageously expensive that it's not even an option.
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.
https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/
This makes "thriving" a constantly moving target, because by definition 40 percent of people have housing that sucks too much. This does reflect realities of human psychology (our happiness is mostly about relative well-being, not absolute well-being), but it is not remotely useful for comparing material living standards over time.
Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.
https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
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.
Air conditioning was extremely uncommon in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s. I didn't personally know a single family that had a/c until the 90s. The only places that were air conditioned in my neighborhood in the 80s were businesses. I'm sure it was more common in the South.
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?
Yes, the people who like living in the Pleasuredome of cheap and fast thrills have it better these days. The rare few who want a stable, thoughtful life with a lifelong partner far away from the racket? Well...
Secondly, you can't invalidate a list of net positives like longer life expectancy by objecting to one of the things on that list.
"TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.
You can't know the quality of new kia "for decades".
I still see 90s and earlier cars on the road all the time (nearly daily). I owned one until 2020, when someone totalled it while parked for me.
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.
The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.
I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.
Like what?
- 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?
Funny you mention that, we're bringing measles back. Check out the graphs on https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html . Seems it started Jan 2025.
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.
Notice that this is equivalent to ensuring that they crash three times as hard for the people being excluded, because they all still need jobs but are now stuck competing for not just fewer but also lower skilled jobs, and on top of that then have to pay more for housing etc. because trade work is being artificially kept in undersupply.
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).
And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.
Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.
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.
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?
> 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.
sounds like you're describing a paperclip maximizer and drives home the importance of zoning (or rather land allocation and geographical coordination) as a general concept.
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.
Yes, this is why many people think Universal Basic Services (food, housing, health care, etc) is a vastly superior model to UBI
And to the extent that it doesn't, it's because they were going to buy those things anyway (since they're necessities) in which case it's equivalent to cash because they can now spend the money they otherwise would have used to buy those things. At which point all you're doing is wasting tax dollars on administrative overhead and reducing utility when you get the numbers wrong and what a given person actually needs is more money for food and less for housing or vice versa.
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 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?!
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.
Whoever told you this or gave you that impression? It certainly does not reflect anyone in my life. It sounds like symptoms of major depression. But I strongly suspect it is actually just a lie.
What do you think people did before work was invented? Or rather, do you think evolution shaped humans in an environment that demanded 9-5 desk sitting, email sending, backcircling?
It's extremely revealing that people seem to not even be able to come up with things that might give you a sense of purpose in life. No wonder we're all depressed cynics.
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.
That's a baffling proposition. I think society benefits overwhelmingly more from the sum of average contributions, not the rare exceptional contribution.
I do think we're missing out on a huge number of exceptional contributions due to the circumstances people face who would otherwise be free and able to make such contributions. Instead they are sending emails.
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.
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.
If software genuinely becomes a solved problem, everyone is going to working in AI labs (or its verticals).
If AI is also going to maintain itself, then there is no need for AI labs either, at which point we've reached singularity and no one is safe.
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.
Counterpoint: reducing most of these metastatic organizations to 2-pizza level teams with AI would be positive across the board.
Countercounterpoint: But since the overlords of these fiefdoms are not stupid, just malevolent, they'll use AI to tighten their grip and terrorize anyone who dare oppose them. Basically, organizational Ponzi.
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...
Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.
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.
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 point of the commenter was that if we wait to have fun til later, there may not be a later. Life is about striking a balance of having fun now and sacrificing now so that you (or your family or community etc) can have fun later.
"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.
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.
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.
so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc.
they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more
But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
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.
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...
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.
The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.
To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.
For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.
Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.
IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.
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.
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
That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.
Once AI is able to replace all human work, that's a new situation. But this is not happening in the next 20+ years.
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?
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a7750bd-1538-83ea-840c-57266e366f...
If you don't think the NHS has any problems then I don't know what to tell you on that you either don't follow any information about it or don't interact with it.
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).
Now, not everyone can, because some people are very disabled. But the internet has brought new capabilities, and some disabled people are able to work remotely. And guess what, they do. They willingly give up the "free", say, 900 dollars a month on SSI to work for a salary.
You see "work" as a transactional unit.
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.
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.
https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/
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.
They weren't too big to fail.
Btw, from the author page:
> 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.
There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.
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. ;-)
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
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 agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.
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.
(Just mentioning this so you know the wording wasn't universally confusing.)
> 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.
I think he wrote enough for an internet comment, and anyone should probably ask for more context instead of jumping to a negative conclusion.
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 see.
You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign
[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...
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.
All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.
I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.
We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.
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.
When I'm trying to model a situation I consider a wide variety of possible explanations, and then rank them by how well they fit the facts. I also note when someone is trying to push a narrative on me, and consider what might make them do that. I also watch out for instances of trope-thinking, where the explanation is just a pattern match to some other situation, and am careful to distinguish cases where the exemplar is fictional (thus the B-movie tag above).
And thanks for your expressed concern about my mental health!
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"
Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?
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!”
We do, and we knew decades ago.
The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.
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.
A reflection of human nature at scale?
[0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling.
[1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).
This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.
It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.
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.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
> 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.
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.
The assumption I had not was false.
But... you do notice the cracks. Slowly. You see it at Walmart, I see it when I go out to the clubs. Lots of cops around. Nobody dancing. A bouncer for the bathroom? Hm, okay. I travel to south Texas sometimes and you see it there, too. Lots of protesting. Fear everywhere. You drive through maybe 50 abandoned, impoverished towns. I see it in my community. Businesses closing left and right. Replaced. I say "I give them six months". I'm wrong, they close their doors in three. Weird.
And then I got cancer. I knew the healthcare system was bad, but I was young and healthy, so out of sight out of mind. Not anymore. However bad you think it is, it's worse. 10 people in the infusion room, one nurse running with her head cut off. My IV has been beeping for 30 minutes. The oncologist? She's not in the building, because she's the one oncologist for three different clinics 50 miles apart. Luckily, I only have to pay an arm and a leg for this. They had iPads in the infusion room. They removed those after a couple weeks, I guess they were too expensive. And I can't trust my care team. I have to review every single medication, every single scan, everything. My oncologist mentions medications I've never took. She misreads tests. I don't blame her, I know she's overextended, she probably barely knows who I am. So, I review everything, which means I need to call and request they fax it to my line. I guess a portal is too expensive. My primary care? The next appointment is in two months. Well that's okay, I only have cancer. He barely knows who I am, too. "You never did chemo, right, just surgery?". No... I did four cycles of chemo, we talked about this a couple months ago. He sets his phone down on the table and records our conversation. OK, I guess that's a thing now. I go home. Bills just show up every few days. I don't even know what for most of the time. I had surgery a year ago at this point. Random departments in the hospital still send me bills. I did prepay ~3,000 dollars for the surgery, but I guess that money is for something else? Not sure. I would call the hospital and ask to speak to billing, but I don't have the time or energy to be on hold.
Anyway, I guess my thesis is: yes things are good, for us. We need to remain humble and recognize our experiences are tinted by our privilege.
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.
I think your word choice ("enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state", "martyrdom") seems to show more outrage than a lot of the people you rail against.
It's also my impression that most people who want everybody to turn off the news agree with or don't care about any bad things happening to people that are being reported on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pay me for my commute and I'll gladly work from wherever you like, just recognize that I would get more done if you weren't paying me to travel to and from work. If you don't pay me for the time I spend commuting, you aren't interested in paying the total cost of employing me and you can kindly go fuck off.
If you don't naturally prioritize those things, the impact of missing them will sneak up on you.
Walking to work would be nice and would provide those benefits, but the vast majority of workers don't have that luxury.
I was referring to riding public transportation, then walking through the city to the office. I agree that driving doesn't meet the criteria, but commuting != driving.
Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore
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.
Actual introverts (especially in our computer world) don't have that and often lack a healthy social life, which can be partly fulfilled by the office's interactions. Some of us even are chronically depressed, which means escaping home is important to allow changing our mindset (which becomes attached to a location given enough time).
NB: in Europe and worked mostly for small to very small enterprises.
Most people prefer remote, but in-office requires bodies to provide interaction for those who like it.
While yes, I do think offices are largely a waste of space and resources, I really do not mind much if you like it and want to do it, as long as you leave me out of it. As soon as the office comes with a demand for me to be there too, even some of the time, then I'll shout.
I am back at the office now, and am enjoying the separation between work and home.
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.
* simplifying, of course.
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.
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
It's a miserable grind. Routine includes alarm, after a poor night of sleep, getting ready, commuting in, loud, bright offices where while you enjoy the convivial nature of joking and commiserating with colleagues, it's so distracting and noisy and visually distracting that you can't be productive technically.
Next you go home at 6, 630, sleepy, go to the gym or do your shopping, home, sleep, rinse repeat.
Suddenly six months has gone by. Then a year.
I cannot sympathize with the work from home complainers. You folks are like people who came across a lot of money, retired early and are depressed due to boredom.
If WFH is misery, is it possible it's the town you live in that's causing the misery?
Maybe it is my town, maybe it's me. But I just don't think it's healthy to wake up, walk down the stairs and sit in front of a computer for 8-15 hours every day, rinse and repeat. Maybe things would be different if I had the discipline to consistently shower, cook, exercise, go outside, spend time with friends, pursue my hobbies, and maintain my household.
Discipline is a personal problem not an office policy issue.
Yes obviously?!? Nothing about work from home makes you sit on your ass all day.
You're projecting your lack of discipline about the things that make life worthwhile (feeling good physically, bettering yourself mentally, enjoying the world around you, and sharing it with others) onto a working model.
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
The hidden tolls of what I've been missing have caught up with me.
I don't know if you were around hn when the soylent guys were posting on here, but at one point one of them was having problems because they left out some trace substance that only becomes an issue after a long time of not having it. That's how I see it, there are trace elements required for happiness that I discounted at a young age. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but I was getting them previously, while being miserable about the macro issues.
I brought up money, because I was specifically thinking of my best friend, and his friends, and others who all work in construction. They work way harder in a day than I have my entire life. They have a refined skillset that took decades to master. They are outdoors, sometimes in horrific conditions. They get to bullshit and joke and call each other a bitch. They get to come home and enjoy the simple things like cooking a burger on the grill, without feeling bad about missing an unreasonable deadline, or not filing a patent for those last 20 ideas that would change the world. They get to be strong and feel confident about their chances of winning a fist fight and have wives that understand and except their flaws.
Meanwhile I am over here with a pile of old electronics I don't want to give up because they have cool components I dream about using. I have sex with hundreds of women that I have no future with. I look intimidating at a glance, but have no muscle to back it up. My kid is an adult and doesn't need me anymore. It just feels pointless.
At some point I convinced myself that making more than most of my friends and family gave me worth. That I would be a loser if I switched careers to something more fulfilling that made less than 6 figures. I know in my heart that is not true, but I am still struggling to make the leap.
...sorry for spiraling at you, I am aparrently going through something at the moment.
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.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.
Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.
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.
Management is quite happy with the resulting output, and I'm fine with matching their energy. I can do things that I care about on my own time.
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 demand for this type of software is wildly overestimated. Users mostly don't want a bespoke weather app that is customized to their prompt they want one which they can trust.
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.
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.
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.
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
Whenever someone writes something like this "nobody talks about it, nobody cared" I always think that just tells you more about the media sources and community of the author (you) than anything else.
Of course people talked about it. They are still talking about it. Of course they cared. They still care. Don't be ridiculous. Go talk to some human translators in real life.
"Nobody is talking about AI". Sounds even more ridiculous when written like that.
So far, what I see:
I have a few friends making a proper living translating AAA games from when I worked in the area. So far there's been a lot of talking but AI hasn't been able to replace them. Whether it's "yet" or not, I won't speculate.
I also know a few people doing freelance translation online, mainly through marketplaces. Those were mainly done in bulk, for websites/apps they never heard about, probably the websites/apps I worked for.
The second group is getting very very few jobs after AI.
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.
First of all I doubt the 250K a year number just looking at the amount of produce in the field. Second of all, by the time all the expenses and distribution costs are figured in whatever the real number is shrinks by a lot. Third of all you need to be an area where a large number of people will pay double what it costs at Walmart for your produce. Lastly it takes years and a lot of trial and error to successfully produce efficiently and a couple of mistakes or bad luck and you are wiped out.
I actually have a lot of experience with this. I have a BS in Agronomy and managed a youpick/market garden back in the 90s. I still garden extensively you can see my YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@pecospablo
I wish reality was as rosy as this video I really do. But I don't bother to try to sell my produce or expand, I know better. I just do it because I like it and eating top quality fresh picked food with high nutrient density is important to me.
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.
It's definitely farther away for this than it is for coding, but 2 years ago it was also totally useless for coding.
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
I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it...
Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.
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".
I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I'm currently working to get my 2nd autistic child covered for ABA services, been fighting insurance for 2 months now with 4 qualified professionals, 2 MDs, a PhD Nurse and an ABA Supervisor, from multiple providers saying she qualifies. Insurance's own in-house doctor agreed that they followed state recommendations, up until another internal doctor just some days ago contradicted them and said there's one part that they don't, which just so happens to invalidate her entire diagnosis (which took 3 separate appointments over the course of a month and was more thorough than most). The doctors who diagnosed here are livid, as they have a major insurer essentially telling them that their entire program and every diagnosis from it is invalid, while other programs are not held to the same scrutiny. I know first hand, because her older sister is also autistic and she got approved by this same insurer on a much less stringent examination from a different provider.
We'll get it solved, in the worst case we're fortunate enough to be able to hire lawyers. Not everyone has that kind of savings. Oh, and in the meantime this is 2 months my kid is going without therapy, and a bunch of wasted time for all involved.
You want more? Earlier this year my father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan denied him coverage for in-patient rehab after brain surgery, which the surgeon, doctor and every medical professional who looked at him said he needed. We appealed, they denied the appeal. Later that week he tried to get up at night to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and fell, suffering a skull fracture that necessitated a second brain surgery. That second surgery was fully covered, but they still refused to cover in-patient rehab. He died some weeks later, have never received more than rehab 2 days a week and whatever improvised rehab the family could cobble together between our work schedules.
And that's just my personal experience in the last year. I have stories from previous years and more still from relatives. Anyone who's had to make extensive use of the medical system will have many such stories of various severity, it's just a given that when you file a claim you must be ready to fight and hope you don't have to. These are not innocent mistakes, and if they are than the insurers making them should be shut down for negligence and those in charge held responsible for resulting damages.
Rationing and wait-lists are a problem in some countries, and they're preferable problems to the ones existing in our current system.
You don't want to help, and you need a fairy tale to reframe your selfishness so you can lie to yourself in the mirror. Many such people, you aren't insightful.
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".
They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.
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.
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.
Yes, it's true. It's been true for a long time.
It's a bifurcated world where the people that made it big in finance /tech ended up climbing the corporate hierarchy. Even a "distinguished engineer" in an investment bank is a politically savvy project manager who goes home after work to code.
How people have lives outside of work, when work is meetings, is a mystery to me.
Are the rest of you joining the misery since 2023? We've been in this boat for a decade already.
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!
You are the art.
Before, we got paid well to do what we loved, and we were sought out for our ability to code.
Now, the "fun" has been automated...by our own hands. Seeing the thing that was so highly-prized be minimized and ground into dust is fucking depressing.
Well, that and the massive layoffs from "efficiencies" brought about by AI. And the compensation "rationalizations" that come from an employers' market with no end in sight. And the ABSOLUTELY LEGENDARY amounts of cope, especially on this forum.
"It was never about the code," they say, as they write the equivalent of a TRD [^0] into a slot machine and pull the lever, hoping to get their hit of efficiency for the hour.
So, yeah, I get the BA dude in the article who lights up when they pull out the piece they're knitting. The end is coming for us; might as well take up knitting while waiting for the fall.
[^0] https://www.timelytext.com/technical-requirements-document/. I did a stint as a BA in college for a pharma company and converted FRDs into these all of the time. You had to be technical enough to translate business-speak into nerd-speak, but not necessarily technical enough to actually implement these solutions. As a result, we never saw a line of code, since these were handed off to some PM who, I'm assuming, turned these into tickets in whatever their ticketing system was. This was during the waterfall days, so it was probably something god-awful. Writing these was soul-sucking to the maximum degree. How people get satisfaction from this process befuddles me. Maybe it's the real-time back-and-forth arguing that's fun? I'll never know.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
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 well paid, just wished I could work less. But well paid part time is harder to come by)
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.
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.
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
The pleasure...
I am actually more excited about tech too in my 15 year career. Coding agents have allowed me to streamline things that were really frustrating to do, the senseless work of updating config files or terraform files etc. and allow me to focus on things that always had more meaning, like solving fun problems with code. At the same time, I can super-rubber-duck with AI around pieces of code or tools that Im unfamiliar with, so it's supercharged my learning (I still read 2-3 tech-focused books per year, try new languages, etc.).
So yeah, I only remember being this engaged when I was a junior developer and spending 90% of my time coding. Now I get to spend a lot more of my time coding because claude can handle most of the "meh" stuff for me--even stuff like cutting jira tickets, filling in reports, etc. (I still write post-mortem because those documents are all about education and communication, but in my org, jira tickets are just loose markers of effort and dont have anything to do with design and very little with planning.)
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.
I would argue this, the 'messy place' is where a huge amount of real innovation happens in knowledge working. I see this with my team, only a handful of them can operate effectively in this space ( I refer it to as they grey area) but they are the ones that end up taking bigger bolder bets which payoff more often than not.
It's also the space where you let your mind wander and discover associations between topics that you didn't first realize, it's the place where you ask questions a lot rather than relentlessly focus on solutions, KPIs, OKRs and all that other process driven BS.
This is the space AI can't operate as effectively as those chosen few in my team...but it's getting damn close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.
With Trump and everything else.
There is a ton of work to do. We don’t even know how to stop aging and haven’t sent people to Mars, have still not really invented AI, and tons of business is still clunky and offline.
The whole anti-smart people (and anyone who tries anything) movement feels very backlashy and full of revenge from a group who felt left out by us - all while we had no idea. We were just going to work.
There’s still a lot of work to do IMO and yes money to be made. If we can turn it around.
They got us with bullshit and lies but we can get them with hard work and organization.
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?
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.
Back in 2010-ish, many developers thought that, in the future, they'd all be running their own systems and servicing their own customers and making a good living like that (there would be enough customers for every dev). They didn't expect that the entire industry would be monopolized by a tiny number of companies, everyone using the exact same product, no alternatives or competition, and that the value of our labor would be artificially suppressed down to $0... This happened long before AI. AI is just the latest assault.
It's impossible for a solo developer to find their own customers nowadays. You could literally offer the same product or a better product for cheaper, but you won't be able to find a single customer because it's too centralized. The trust barriers are massive. Nobody has money to try anything except large corporations and they never try any product based on what it offers; it's all business networking.
It's like; the same conditioning which caused business people to pretend that Linux didn't exist for the first few decades has now spread to all non-VC-funded software.
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
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!
> 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.
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).
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.
Hate to break it to you, but we're on a dark age, and this whole thing is just another unremarkable development that follows a trend that has been going on for about two centuries now.
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.
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.
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.
Seen that happen once before.
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.”
Because I spent my career working in tech in the Bay Area there are some things that I just think of as 'normal' that other people, without that exposure, are surprised by. During the last 40 years start ups and tech companies have minted tens of thousands of millionaires across a wide distribution of 'net worth just over a million dollars' to 'net worth of tens of millions'. The largest chunk of that cohort leave tech directly and go do 'fun' work. The smallest chunk of that cohort are still working for someone else trying to get a bigger score. What I realized was the most people aren't sociopathic wannabe billionaires. They don't get headlines, they don't show up "out of place", they are just the people who are living their lives doing things that matter to them.
So when the author is on about 'sharing the dream of doing what you want' I was like, "Yup, same as it ever was." The author also does not appear to have the benefit of having been in the area when semiconductor manufacturing became 'foundries' and all the process engineers and other workers in all of the small fabs in the SF Bay Area were now displaced. That was a class of workers who lost faith in their careers. But what was true then, and is true today, in the US we take kids out of High School and spend four years teaching them how to think and generally how to think about some topic in college and then they go out and get jobs. For someone who has been through college, getting a new Bachelor's degree in an entirely new subject takes two and a half years tops. You don't need the general ed, if its another STEM topic you don't need to redo the math, its just "lets take the classes that are specific to the <foo> major."
And before everyone jumps on this and says "But Chuck, now I've got a mortgage and responsibilities and I can't be taking a couple of years off just to go to school." Yeah I get it. That's especially true if you don't have a support network. So it sucks and is depressing and you don't want to even get out of bed because you feel like years of your life were just wasted and now you need to start over. The alternative though just gets you deeper and deeper into a hole.
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.
a16z, Sequoia, Accel - people like that started showing up. (a16z invested in the first startup I worked at, they were only founded 1 year prior in 2009).
The Facebook movie, Justin Timberlake, I mean Sean Parker, I mean Justin Timberlake. Ashton Kutcher? Wtf
It got out of control, but at least the cash was flowing.
2016 is the year I use for "when it all fell apart".
The young guns always point to 2020s as the "overhiring boom" etc. but they have no idea what a frenzy it was in ~2010. If you knew basic HTML and jQuery you could literally get a $1M Series A in the right circles of people. It was like they could not find enough web designers and would do anything to get one.
Fun times. But of course, that could not have lasted.
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.
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)
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
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.
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'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
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.
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.
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.
It's already out of reach for most small businesses to justify spending on it, and some LLM consumer plans are going for $200/mo.
If a chatbot is $200/mo, what's a full human AI robot going to cost to do general labor? $100k/year? And let me guess, you have to replace it with newer models each year?
Companies will ask: "What's the point?" in losing the people resource, accountability, and everything else in exchange for the same cost of labor (or more).
AI tech needs to be freed up so we can innovate with it, like the Internet was. It's currently too locked down and the K-shape thing only works with goods and assets. I don't think you can lock the majority of people out of technology (and it be as good) the way you can lock people out of home ownership (and it improves home value).
If the plan is that only a minority of ultra-wealthy have the best technology and everyone else is some underclass who can't afford it, then the technology just won't be very good or useful. It will be like the $200 chatbot or an Apple Watch or a Tesla. Some specific kind of wealthy geek will get it, but it won't be that world changing.
If individuals and companies can't meaningfully save time and money without significant additional engineering, then it'll be like flying cars or robotic bartenders and the dream of displacing all people (lol) just won't materialize.
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.
In the real world, the markets are regulated. We are talking about where there is a free market. Was your comment posted just to let us know that you don't give things much thought?