Has the decline of knowledge work begun?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you hire Canadian software engineers, you can dodge this and deduct the expenses in your Canadian subsidiary. If you outsource software dev to another company you can usually get away with expensing it.
Historically there has been a brain drain from Canada to the US, but if Canada can set up favourable policies for companies maybe they can start reversing that.
https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/alerts/tax/2023/flash...
The TCJA amended Section 174 by removing the option to expense SRE expenditures, instead requiring taxpayers to capitalize and amortize SRE expenditures over a period of five years (attributable to domestic research) or 15 years (attributable to foreign research)The Canadian government also heavily subsidises this. Smart of them to do so.
And our government is busy prattling on about putting tariffs on Canadian maple syrup or something…
None of these big tech companies really need to grow bigger. The smartphone is essentially done. AWS just prints money. Social/consumer apps are "done". What more is for them to do but collect rent?
The US government needs to break them all up. That'll oxygenate the entire tech sector, unlock value for investors, and kickstart the playing field for startups.
Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and maybe Microsoft. Break them up.
I'm struggling to think of a part of the OS that hasn't had ads shoved into it... the terminal I guess... There have been ads in the start menu, the lock screen, in pop up notices, in the file explorer, in search results, in the control panel, on the task bar, in the share pane, in windows update and in a bunch of windows apps like ink workspace. They've even just force-installed random programs to people's systems.
I'd wager, too, that the addition of the garbage you're describing has coincided with the OS's worsening performance. File Explorer performance is so abysmal that it may as well be an Electron app.
On the other hand (edit: regarding your first paragraph), Microsoft seems very serious about not falling afoul of the law, probably because of the cost of the anti-trust litigation they faced in the 90s and 2000s(?). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were nothing for a whistleblower to blow the whistle on.
That's the definition of monopolistic behaviour that almost got them split up 25 years ago.
Apple was selling a desktop operating system that was a competitor to Microsoft Windows, Corel WordPerfect was a thing and so was Lotus 1-2-3.
Apple also had a much smaller desktop OS market share at the time. They nearly disappeared but are in a much stronger position today, which makes it harder to argue that Microsoft has a monopoly. There's no strict threshold for market share in these cases, but it's one of the factors taken into account.
Yeah, they do way worse shenanigans now.
If it was truly a decline in knowledge work in general, it should be visible in other economies as well, but I don't think that's the case, at least not here in Denmark. Arguably we typically trend a bit behind the US, so it could be looming on the horizon.
If your idea is only "use AI for X" your company doesn't have anything really. At least if AI isn't its core business like OpenAI.
We can't possibly have run out of consumer app ideas in a decade or two, right?
And those are just off the top of my head
- Slack: 2013
- Zoom: 2011
- TikTok: 2016
Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.
Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together convenient apis on top of IRC...
But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.
Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings
Skype figured out how to build an integrated login experience. Every morning using slack I keep having to remind myself it’s not early FOSS!
I'm as surprised as you are, I'd like to be proven wrong here!
It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.
That's my point. There are still creative ways we can use or improve stable technology to build new consumer applications.
I'm not seeing much creativity lately.
How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it.
Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.
For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit...
I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...
That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is.
Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.
There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
> There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that.
What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.
Most VCs doing 99 investments for the 1 big are akin to YC. They’re not doing series C for $100m and expecting 99 of those to fail. They’re expecting to get a return somewhat shortly back.
Holding the stock isn’t helpful for a VC unless they’re going to be using some financial mechanism for leverage - which means they’ve given it up for the other institution who now essentially owns it. A lot of these stocks aren’t giving you meaningful dividends. You have to sell or give up some form of control on them to be a successful VC. How else would you continue to invest?
I think about it quite often and there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.
There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to.
But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.
We’re coming out of a long growth period fueled by two decades of war and the inflation that came with it, first in asset values from ZIRP and then from the COVID capital infusions.
Look at where we sit economically, at least in the US. Real estate, a core economic and political engine is a bomb waiting to go off. Commercial real estate is totally underwater. Residential real estate is in another bubble. I won’t go into the madman in DC that’s gonna light the fuse.
Everyone knows it at some level, so projects are getting cancelled. Changes add value but create problems. Take away change and the implode demand for labor. Avoiding the need for marginal later lowers the marginal cost, so you start purging expensive people.
Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
In other words, the capitalists won.
Where I work in government we've stopped paying for important data from vendors (think sensors around traffic etc.) because the quotes are eye-wateringly expensive. But I've worked in data long enough to know the quotes probably reflect genuine costs, because data engineers are so incompetent (and if it's a form of pricing gouging it's not working because gov isn't paying up). So it looks like we're choosing to be in the dark about important data, but it's not entirely a choice.
Saying we can do stuff but it's unaffordable is imo just another way of saying we can't do stuff.
Isn't that how self checkout happens in every part of the world that has self checkout? I'm failing to see what's special about self checkout in Japan.
The staff will also instantly materialize if they are needed to confirm you can buy alcohol, or there is some kind of problem; which is also not my experience elsewhere.
It's not a worldshattering difference, but it is noticeable.
They are stuck with expensive legacy union employee contracts, while smaller and more efficient operations like TJs and Aldi and Lidl and Costco and Walmart and Winco eat all the consistent low margin sales, leaving the big grocery stores with only volatile high margin sales.
People per household has been trending down for a long time, which also impacts the amount/variety of cooking.
It was, but 2021-2024 was the first three year period that didn't end lower than it started since the 1960s (starting and ending at 2.51 average per household); it is possible that trend has arrested.
I love trader joes, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't be happy if it was the only grocery store I had access to. For me it's an awesome second-in-line grocery store, more like a specialty grocery than a main grocery.
I mean, like, Disney has been getting worse at CGI, but only because then whole company has given up. This is just normal companies shifting around, though.
The problem with CGI today is that it's over-used and mis-applied in areas that still have Uncanny Valley type issues (fight scenes, car chases/crashes, etc).
I think that's the main point, yes. There's a sense before that companies were trying to push the envelope. These days it's just a shrug and cynical minmaxing of funds to the shareholders. CGI 20 years ago was objectively worse but you can tell they had way to hide the flaws or redirect the eye away from them. Now... Ehh, who cares? Just get the first pass through.
If you want a relevant example: some people say Lili and Stitch's life action has a weird looking stitch model. Part of thst is because way back in 2005, the original Stitch was simply never meant to be looked at in a side profile for an extended time. Art directors made sure to avoid that angle in every frame they drew. 20 years later... meh. Ship it. Screw the outsourced CGI trying to model something better, the cinematography begin careful of angles, nor any reaction from "nitpickers". We got the IP, it'll make money.
It's not a franchise killer but it'd just one example of the many broken windows
I remember being bored and having to create my own fun. I remember being aware of my surroundings and being curious about it because I didn't have my favorite entertainment media attached to my palm. I remember learning about thing such as what was in my Cheerios because the box was the only thing in front of me when I ate my breakfast.
It would be a joke to say that AI exists to fill the void from what I mentioned above, but it does kinda sorta feel correct in a weird sci-fi conspiracy way.
Dopamine addiction isn’t the problem.
We've always been addicted to dopamine and we were always getting it in the easiest way possible.
Those all sound vastly more positive both on a personal and societal level vs getting dopamine from your phone
In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.
Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.
Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.
Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.
I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.
I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.
Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.
Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.
Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.
> Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network)[1] is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation, BlackRock, Inc. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios.
For any one firm to have this much director and/or indirect assertion over the world’s financial assets is ripe for problems of all sorts.
Seems rather indicative of the general consolidation of power and decline of social equality across the west
There are people out there who are pretty conflict-avoidant by nature, and any group tends to pretty significant levels of cohesion because of it. There are some classic stories out there about when it goes particularly bad and spirals into a bad case of groupthink.
In the economy there are supposed to be some slightly cruel feedback mechanisms where companies (effectively big groups) that get off track are defunded and their resources reallocated to someone more competent. The west has been on a campaign to disable all those feedback mechanisms and let companies just keep trudging on. We've pretty much disabled recessions by this point. A bunch of known-incompetent management teams have been bailed out so they can just keep plodding along destroying value. There is not so much advantage in being honest about competence in this environment, if anything it is a bad thing because it makes it harder to take bailout money with a straight face.
I cite the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as an interesting case study. A looot of companies should have gone bust with that one because they were imprudent with their money. They didn't.
They're managing capital. If they get bailed out because they turned out to be completely irresponsible in managing their capital then nobody can claim to be surprised that management tend not to be of the highest standard on any axis.
What is supposed to be the incentive here for appointing competent managers for most companies? It literally doesn't matter. Even company-bankrupting performance will turn a profit once the effects of money printing are factored in.
SVB has been a vital supporter of startups for decades. Why would a resource constrained startup spend time worried about it? Money goes in and out the bank, great, that’s all most startups should need to worry about.
The startups had a strategy of pooling their money - their huge amount of money, as it turns out - into a fund run by people who couldn't keep a bank solvent. If you want to shield the people doing that from consequences then, frankly, you don't have an interest in running a high-integrity system geared to competence. Because there need to be direct and painful consequences to an action that stupid. Oh there are only 5 of them! Well there is only 1 of me and I can tell you how dumb they were in isolation. The only reason to act this way and keep all the eggs in one high-risk basket is because of an assumption that the government will come in and conduct bailouts if any risk eventuates. IE, a management class that doesn't ever expect to succeed on their own merits. Although since the bailouts did happen that suggests that sticking to a dumb strategy is what winners should do.
The entire capital management system here is out of control.
Being a great engineer or researcher doesn't pay. You won't get your name known for your work. All your achievements will be attributed to whoever manages you at best, or attributed to the corporation above you with not a single human name at worst.
People like being recognized for their work. Every great achiever wants to have their name remembered long after they leave this world. Everyone wants to be the next Isaac Newton. The next Bill Gates. The next Steve Jobs. The next Elon Musk. It's a constant downhill path from being known for using your brain and busting your ass to discover or create something, to being known for managing someone who created something, to being known as someone who bought the company that managed people who created something. Motivations are all fucked up. No matter what you discover or create these days, there's a feeling that you're not going to have your name written in history books. Your best options are join a grift or manage someone who's doing the hard work.
I dunno, there’s something in the fact that Isaac Newton the imaginary cultural figure was hit on the head by an apple, and then invented calculus.
Meanwhile Isaac Newton the actual guy (recalling from memory so feel free to correct) was a bit eccentric (dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts), had some academic posts, some government jobs, and built Calculus on work that was ongoing in the academic community…
The imaginary Isaac Newton and the imaginary Elon Musk look sort of similar. Because we ignore the boring work that Newton did and the fact that Musk just bought his way around it—their real versions look very different of course! But if you want the actual day to day experience of being Isaac Newton, you can, just go be a professor and make some quirky friends.
The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild.
I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'?
>Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]
It's been like this for a while now.
I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.
Just quoting from Wikipedia:
>Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]
People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.
The difference is access to capital. Just like it was 150 years ago. Workers don't have enough holdings to sustain themselves without selling their body. Capitalists have enough holdings to not have to sell their body and can instead put their money to work through various means like entrepreneurship.
Also, I didn't even bring up the Down to the Countryside program as a good aspect of Mao... But since you brought it up, I figured I'd mention that his "harebrained schemes" doubled the life expectancy in China rather quickly. Like all world leaders I've studied, he did great things, and he did horrible things.
Well paid workers can amass the means to become capitalists.
>Let alone with the stereotypes Marx depended upon for his arguments?
Marx called these types of people that make enough money to own their own means of production "petit bourgeoisie". This is in contrast to the "haute bourgeoisie".
This isn't some exception to Marxist thought; this is literally one of the core components of Marxist thought.
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"Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.
The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labour-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie, defined by owning the means of production and thus deriving most of their wealth from buying the labour-power of the proletariat..."
---
The critical distinction being that they aren't 'selling their labor-power' to others.
And I just don't see how one can claim this makes any sense in modern times! Proles selling their 'labor power' are out-earning the bougies, anybody (even relatively low wage workers) can hire the 'labor-power of the proletariat' with things like Fiverr (amongst many others). And basically everybody owns the most valuable means of production in modern society - a computer. If you don't, you can buy one with a day or so of minimum wage work.
For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels. Bonds right now are at near 5%! And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
No, they generally are not. There is obviously overlap, as there was in Marx's time, in income, but that’s not a problem with the theory—class isn’t about income but mode of participation in the economy.
> For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels.
The “financial vessels” are instruments of other entities, most of which exist by rented labor power.
> And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
The distinctions have never been hard lines. In the most simplistic analysis class is determined by the predominant mode of interaction with the economy, while a more nuanced view sees class membership as essentially a fuzzy membership function, depending on the degree to which one interacts in the manner (selling labor to capitalists vs applying your own labor to your own capital vs. owning capital to which rented labor is applied) archetypical of a given class (both these modes of a analysis have been around for quite a while, thougj the fuzzy membership function language would only be used fairly recently.)
We can challenge this assertion by reductio ad absurdum. Imagine somehow all bougies earned less than all workers. Everything Marx said would be absolutely and completely nonsensical. There's nothing inherently impossible about such a world existing and it makes clear the point that income levels do absolutely matter. And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies. The concept of a 'factory' worker earning more than a factory owner would have been entirely alien to him, and most of the world, until fairly recently.
The most paradoxical thing about all of this is that the people most drawn to Marxist stuff are disproportionately in tech, the exact sort who, in many cases, already earn more than many, and likely most, business owners, work far fewer hours, and generally have dramatically nicer working conditions. I think it's mostly misidentified discontent. It's not the economic system that's at fault, but somehow building things in the digital world is fundamentally unsatisfying and unfulfilling, even if you get drowned in money, massages, bean bag chairs, and ping pong tables.
If people want fulfilling lives (so far as work as concerned) don't work in ad-tech. If you want stupid amounts of money work in ad-tech. You get the stupid amounts of money precisely because the work is awful and empty. It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
I mean, it wouldn't, if they still exercised power. But...they don't, while there is overlap on the boundaries, the classes defined by modes of interaction do, across every capitalist economy (including modern mixed economies, which are not the same system as the capitalism that Marx named and addressed, but share important features with it) form on aggregate hierarchy of both power and income in the same order that as the heirarchy of power Marx describes them in, even though the ranges of individual incomes overlap.
> And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies.
No, definitely the most well-paid person-living-by-rented labor would have had a higher income than the least-successful owner of capital to which rented labor applied. Capitalists (then no less than now) are capable of losing money continuously, eventually reaching the point where they fall out of the bourgeoisie entirely, and even among those that are more fortunate than that, there would have been many who were technically haut bourgeois because they relied primarily on renting others labor to apply to their capital, and many more who were petit bourgeois and applying their own labor to their own capital--like homesteaders with small holdings--who would earn less the most successful hired experts.
> It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
Yes, in modern mixed economies the condition of the median worker is better than in the capitalism of Marx's time, but, in general, work is awful and compensation is awful. Sure, the small percentage of the workers in well-compensated positions like the ad-tech you point to may do amazingly well -- but that's a minute fraction of workers.
Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.
And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'
[1] - https://altline.sobanco.com/small-business-revenue-statistic...
Investments into what? Businesses?
Businesses that have employees? Employees that are selling their labour? Who are they selling their labour to?
That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.
Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power
The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).
So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.
In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.
Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.
This can be changed in software, setting it to 70-80% or having a toggle is best for the battery.
If you have OSX, you can use Al Dente[1] to limit SoC to 70 or 80% while using it to reduce battery aging. There may be similar settings on Windows depending on your laptop's manufacturer.
If you can maintain a limited SoC rather than running the battery down, that's most preferable.
Otherwise, discharging lightly (but not below 20% or so) then charging to 80% or so would be a good usage pattern.
It's helpful to know that many chargers are designed to achieve 1C charge rate (this excludes "fast chargers"). That essentially means they go from 0 to 100% SoC in one hour. So start a 30 minute timer when you plug in electronics to charge, and you'll gain about 50% SoC.
[1] https://github.com/AppHouseKitchen/AlDente-Charge-Limiter
Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.
Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.
From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?
And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.
All the incentives are wrong.
Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate.
An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored.
Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.
And certainly some of these games are useful; abilities of this kind are highly correlated with other abilities, and having masterful language and perception manipulators act for the interest of your company or nation is valuable.
But it's not the only useful skill at the upper tier of organizations, and emphasizing it over all else is costly. So are internal political games-- when your organization plays too many of them, the benefits one gets from selecting these people and efforts are dwarfed by the infighting and wasted effort. It can also result in severe misalignment between individual and organizational incentives.
Is this not A) ubiquitous, B) rich with incentives, and C) not downright implied in "They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance." and "the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good."
Management and executives had almost all worked their way up the ladder. Toward the end I think some of the higher-up ones were encouraged to get an MBA as they advanced, but they didn't do much hiring of MBAs.
The company got bought by another in IIRC the late 90s, and this other one had already been taking over by the "professional managerial class", and they quickly replaced most of the folks from the top down to the layer just above him with their own sort.
His description of what followed was incredible amounts of waste. Not just constant meetings that should have been emails (though, LOTS of that) but entire business trips that could have been emails. Lots of them fucking things up because they had no idea how anything worked, but wouldn't listen to people who did know. Just, constant.
The next step was they "encouraged" his layer to retire early, for any who were old enough, which was lots of them since, again, most of them had worked their way up the ladder to get where they were, not stepped straight into management as a 25-year-old with no clue how actual work gets done. I haven't asked, but I assume they replaced them with a bunch of young business school grads.
There are sometimes posts on HN suggesting that our dislike of business school sorts is silly or overblown, but if anything I think it's too weak. The takeover by them and, relatedly, the finance folks has been disastrous for actual productivity and innovation. Companies should be run by people who've done the work that the company does, and not just for an internship or something.
The fact that so many companies play tricks with CAPEX and OPEX completely misses the point that almost all corporate spending should be seen as investment or spending to support investment at some level.
The past 50 years of business school has taught people that outsourcing your core competency is a good idea because it gets things "off the books" and makes quarterly reports look better. The end result was shifting huge swaths of our economy to a hostile country.
Here in tech, I've literally seen companies shift stuff into the cloud even though it's more expensive, because OPEX can be written off right away and they don't want CAPEX on the books, only for a year later to want to shift back because they decided it's now better to optimize for actual cashflow. It's infuriating.
This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else.
It used to be that you were expected to be able to fix your own car or washing machine, and moreover that one you couldn't fix would be rejected by the customers. It was expected to come with documentation and be made of modular parts you could actually obtain for less than three quarters of the price of the entire machine.
Now everything is a black box you're expected to never open and if it breaks and the manufacturer doesn't deign to fix it you go to the store and buy another one.
The problem with this is that it poisons the well. Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. The knowledge and infrastructure to choose differently decays, so that you have to pay someone else to fix the problem, even if that's not what you would have chosen.
The result is a helplessness that stems from a lack of agency. Once the ability to do something yourself has atrophied, you can no longer even tell whether the person you're having do it for you is doing it well. Which, of course, causes them to not. And in turn to defend the opacity so they can continue to not.
Which brings us back to management. The C suite doesn't actually know how the company works. If something bad happens, they may not even find out about it, or if they do it's through a layer of middle management that has put whatever spin on it necessary to make sure the blame falls on the designated scapegoat. Actually fixing the cause of the problem is intractable because the cause is never identified.
But to fix that you'd need an economy with smaller companies, like a machine with modular parts and documented interfaces, instead of an opaque monolith that can't be cured because it can't be penetrated by understanding.
This is very insightful and, in my mind, a good preview of what is happening with AI right now. We will forget how to use the skills that built these systems in the first place.
The handy men of the future were like today’s tech bros. They were loaded, because people couldn’t perform basic tasks around the house. When a father was looking to teach his son how to fix the oven, he showed him how to call the handy man.
Do you own a PinePhone?
Or do you own a higher-spec, more familiar iPhone or Android that can't be opened up?
It's the second one, isn't it. Who made you choose it?
The reality is that you can have it both ways. I own an iPhone, I know how to build a computer, I buy software, and I know how to code. There is value in understanding how the things you have work, but that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't buy a high quality product just because you can't take it apart.
It's tiring to read again and again about evil external forces wrecking the world, when the choices are our own, and right in front of our faces.
I would prefer a scenario where monopolists were broken up and regulators mandated open designs that can be repaired.
That is what a 0201 capacitor looks like.
Yes. Its a piece of junk. Why do I own it? I like to throw my money away on ideals I never actually follow. Its sitting next to my unplayed guitar, my list of books on how to effectively get A's in college (I ended up a C+ student) and my Raspberry Pi that has only ever been powered on once.
Compare the market success of the PinePhone to the Framework laptop. Their laptops are technically competitive with the Dells and the HPs of the world, while also being repairable.
The PinePhone doesn't even beat the until-recently-current iPhone SE in performance. It's a terrible choice, technically speaking.
So this is why it's a cultural issue.
Let's consider a market that still works basically like it's supposed to: Desktop PCs. You have your ATX standard PC, it came with a Core i3 processor which is getting a little long in the tooth, but you can drop in a Core i7 and double the number of cores. Not only that, the parts are all modular and standard. You take your ten year old i3 6100 dual core, swap out the motherboard and CPU and now it's a 16-core Ryzen 9 5900XT from 2024, but it still supports the same memory, GPU, SSD, chassis, power supply, etc., any of which you could also have independently replaced before or after this.
So now I go and buy a PinePhone, and after a couple years the CPU seems a little anemic. No problem, it's modular, I'll just buy one of those fancy chips they put in the iPhones and put that in there. Or at least the top end things from Samsung or Qualcomm. No? That's not available?
Okay, but at least I can put whatever software I want on it. Now the way this works is, people can improve their own devices in collaboration with other people. Adding a new subsystem to your phone would be a full time job, but it could also be a dozen part time jobs. Somebody does a barebones implementation and throws it on github, then you personally only need it to do one extra thing and all you have to do is add the extra thing instead of starting from scratch, which is a tractable problem instead of a hopeless pipe dream. But when each person contributes a little part, you ultimately end up with a complete implementation. Most of the users don't even have to contribute anything, as long as there is a large enough community of people who do.
Except that 99% of people have locked down devices, so the community is suppressed and then even if you buy the device that allows you to do it, you're the only one working on that subsystem and it's too much work for you to do yourself, so you don't even make the attempt. And then what good is the device?
It's an ecosystem problem. A cultural issue. It can't be just you. You need the default attitude of the common customer to be "this despotism will not stand" and to give the finger to any company that locks you out of your own property. Regardless of whether you personally actually upgrade your own device or write your own code, you need everyone to have the ability to do it, because the alternative is a friction that erodes the community and in turn destroys a backstop against involuntary captivity.
Capitalism needs a deadly threat to be good.
Note: The implementation is out of sight, the vision of what it could be is the actual competitor.
> This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else.
Because every time a natural correction happens, the government bails them out
You got to offer good quality and stand out, which isn't easy without capital.
Not only that, but often with whole government backed companies where the government will gladly support them and even participate in espionage to gain competitive advantages. Huawei is the classic example, but is just the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile in most of the western world, executives are focusing on the next quarterly results...
My employer buys a crap load of crap stuff from Broadcom just because the procurement is easy.
Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion
In the web development community there is a near linear correlation between the number of “influencers” who sell courses that pray on this influx to make money and the influx of such folks.
I miss the days where developers generally had a passion for this work vs seeing only a big paycheck, though without artificial barriers we should have expected a lot of influx of people given how well it generally paid for a long time
Enshittification in action.
Close. They're not incompetent; we just redefined competence.
It used to be that competence was a mix of a lot of distinct, but interdependent, qualities. The end result was synergy that allowed for people and organizations (including companies) to compete and move society forward.
In the 1970s, we started to allow a bunch of psychopaths (I'm saying this in the clinical sense) to redefine competence. Instead of this array of distinct qualities, they just defined it in terms of ability to create monetary value, particularly if that value was then transferred to shareholders. That was it.
We also switched to quarterly reporting for for-profit companies, shrinking the window to evaluate this new definition of competence to 90 days. Three months.
An end result of this was that you could simply do whatever made the most money in 90 days and be considered competent.
Jack Welch was the paragon of this. GE shareholders saw massive gains during the latter half of his tenure at the helm. This wasn't because of groundbreaking new products or services; quite the opposite: Jack realized that selling off divisions and cutting costs by any means necessary was a good way to make money in the 90 day period. Institutional knowledge and good business relationships in the market - two of the elements of the former definition of competence - were lost, while money - the sole element under which competence was judged in the new definition - went up.
You also had managers doing a lot of the avoidance of real management, like you speak of. Instead of betting on a new product or trying to enter a new market, they took a Six Sigma course, learned a bunch of jargon, and cut costs at the expense of business past the 90 day period.
If you do this enough (and we did, far beyond just GE), that expense is taken at the societal level. Existence extends beyond 90 days. You can't mortgage the future forever. It's now the future, the payment is due, and we have an empty account to draw from.
Theoretically, we could go back to a more in-depth evaluation of competence and reward its display over the long term. In practice, there are a bunch of people who got unfathomably wealthy off of the shift to the "new" competence, and now they're in charge and don't want to switch back, so we won't.
Maybe it's really about wrong incentives and lack of technical excellence.
Government money keeps coming in and making it broken and buggy actually assures ongoing contracts. Investment in skilled workers or solving technical issues is not paid for and everyone - company and customer are completely disconnected from the end user and feedback mechanisms are broken or manipulated.
It's maybe a mix of all the different answers my post got.
On a long enough time scale, short-term oriented systems naturally-select themselves out of existence. The U.S. Constitution didn't survive 7 generations. The Civil War was in 1865 (77 years, ~4 generations). Reconstruction Era made it maybe 60 years (3 generations), as far as the Great Depression / Dust Bowl.
The current post-war ordering of the interest of short-term capital above all else doesn't have a well-defined start date, but 1968 (MLK Jr, RFK, nomination of Humphrey) is a solid one. We're hardly 3 generations in, and it doesn't feel great.
Really, when you look at American history, the periods endowed with bouts of long-term thinking are really quite rare (1770-1810, 1880s-1900s, 1930s-1950s). Maybe we're due for another one.
I know the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the US Constitution are often considered America's Second Founding because they legally eliminated [1] all the elements of racism within the United States Constitution, but saying that the Constitution "didn't survive" doesn't see accurate...
[1] That being said we all know that it took many many decades after those 3 amendments for the laws in the United States to accurately reflect the principles embodied within these amendments.
The 3/5ths compromise, and its implicit enshrinement of slavery as an American institution, is as an example of short-term thinking (compromising on the legal definition of a human being, in order to get the constitution ratified) that eventually caused the greater system to unravel. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the civil war, millions of people experienced slavery. It could have been avoided if longer-term thinking prevailed.
I hear you that the Constitution (inclusive of its self-mutating property) survived as a useful document of federal governance. This purported maintenance of a federal union was a huge legitimizer of northern domination of the post-ACW United States. But, I think you'd agree that the "system of governance" that begat the constitution did not survive, that's more what I was getting at. That each successive system of governance can still legitimately claim to be implementing the U.S. Constitution is indeed impressive.
I am not a lawyer but many years ago I read about the following doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
Basically prior to the American Civil War the Bill of Rights was considered to only apply to the Federal government and not the state governments.
After the Civil War, the US Supreme Court interpreted the 14th amendment such that overtime all the amendments of the Bill of Rights were considered to apply to the states as well.
So what you are saying about one system being dominant over the other system (Federal government being dominant over the state governments) makes sense and it is something that seems to have happened more extensively after the Civil War.
I used to deliver pizzas in the early 2000s. I would get paid
$4/hour (later bumped to $5 per hour)
$1/delivery (pass through to customer)
+ tips
I had good days / times where I was pretty much always busy and made around $20/hour by the end.
So delivery cost the customer $1 + tip (usually ~$3), cost the business maybe $40 a night (~2.5 drivers for 3 hours), and I made out pretty well.
I can't compare exactly but I feel like today the business pays more, the customer pays more, the drivers get paid less and it's all subsidized by investors to boot. Am I totally wrong on this? But I feel like delivery got so much worse and I don't know where the money is going.
It’s led me to learn to DIY as much as possible, making my own fun and experiences so to say.
The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.
Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.
I have not yet figured out how to manually change the settings, as the buttons don't do anything when you press them.
I leave it on "normal" and it seems fine, and surely there is a way to activate those buttons, but I haven't found it.
I could probably install the app on my android device and use it to connect them to wifi, where I could presumably configure them.
Instead, however, I am looking at electronics-free diesel trucks.
After a few loads I bought a hand crank cloths wringer, basically two rollers that squeezes the water out. That thing honestly works better than a spin cycle, cloths are more dry than coming out of the washer and I have noticed the dryer finishing faster (I usually run it on an auto sense mode rather than a timer).
Why? No idea.
The prepper nerds seem to advocate for Cummins 12-valve engines from the 1990s or the Toyota 1HZ.
There's a whole lot of old diesel LandCruisers out there. I'm guessing that's the sweet spot for it still being a normal car that mechanics can maintain while still being comfy and looking cool.
You are probably getting more, and the difference more than goes entirely into rent.
Real state is destroying the world's economy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-allies-call-tr...
It is exactly that! Food delivery is an excellent example of 'things just got worse'.
In 2019, 'delivery' was a specialty a restaurant would have to focus on to offer. Pizza places (Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, etc) and other specific delivery-focused restaurants (such as Panera Bread, Jimmy Johns, or your local Chinese restaurant) would have actual W2 employees who did delivery driving, as part of their job. The restaurant would want deliveries to go well (for both the customer, as well as the driver), so would make sure their own staff had reasonable access to food, some light training, and would ensure they could deliver it somewhat well. (They would reject orders too far away, they wouldn't serve food that wouldn't survive a delivery trip well, etc)
In post-COVID 2025, "every" restaurant offers delivery, but almost no restaurant still employs their own delivery drivers (locally, Jimmy Johns might be the only one left). Everyone else just outsourced to DoorDash. DoorDash drivers are employees who are 'legally-not-employees' (1099 employees), so they no longer have any direct access to the restaurants, and they can't train well for any specific service, because they might have to visit any-of-50 restaurants on any given day, all of which have entirely different procedures (even if they are the same brand or chain). Restaurants have zero incentive to ensure deliveries go well (the drivers aren't their employees, so they no longer care about turnover, and customers have to use DoorDash or Uber Eats or equivalent, because almost every restaurant uses it, so there's no downside to a DoorDash delivery going bad).
Prices to consumers are double-to-higher than what they were in 2019, depending on the restaurant. Wages are down, employment security is entirely eliminated. Quality and service have tanked.
Presumably, investors make slightly more money off of all of this?
But since it's all investor and profit driven for the bigger company, costs get cut on every side.
These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.
Cost of living from the fallout of '08 simply skyrocketed and most of the country didn't not increase compensation to make up for that. Despite that company simply charged more while cutting costs at the same time. So the driver and the customer lost out.
I know much of the answer is a mix of private equityb and an overload of debt taken from insane evaluations.
1. Pizza travels very very very well
2. Pizza is pretty cheap to make
3. Wages (and costs of transportation) were lower 20 years ago.
More generally, delivery as a model can work, but not when you have an organisation of really expensive engineers/salespeople working on a frontend to it.
Edit: ooo someone's mad I don't like DoorDash
Back when I was doing food delivery before the pandemic, we would actively promote placing orders with our restaurant directly. I would tell repeat doordash customers that they can save 15% if they just call or use the website.
None of them converted. The convenience of the app is just too strong for people to care.
DoorDash adds upwards of a couple dollars to every item. They charge a 5-10% service fee depending on if you pay them monthly. The default tip options are pretty egregiously high - it's not uncommon to see double-digit tips in all three options. I once saw a $22 tip in the top option for a single bag of food with no drinks less than a 10 minute drive away but that's likely an outlier.
All in if you don't have DashPass you're easily looking at a 30-40% increase if you get cheaper items which are more likely to be marked up only $.5-1 but represent a larger percentage of the total.
Nobody in their right mind would tip a delivery driver 40% of their entire meal, why are you happy to give most of that to a corporation that is doing very little for the transactions?
Edit: I just did this for an example order for a nearby restaurant - 1 appetizer and 1 entree so probably good for two people not super hungry to share or one hungry person to eat.
$31.59 in food, $2 delivery fee and $5.50 in fees (I subtracted sales taxes manually). This restaurant is 5 miles away and it's 11:30 local time. Tip suggestions are $9.50 (30%), $11.50, and $13.50 (42%). So at the lowest suggested tip amount, which is offensively high, you're looking at $49 before sales tax.
The exact same order is $26.36 including an online order service fee but before sales tax. Even if you were going to get it delivered and tip the driver 30% you're still saving a ton of money and this is on one meal with enough food for 1-2 people.
The appetizer alone is $10 on their website and $14 on DoorDash. It's a crazy system and I can't believe how much money people burn on this every year.
Users want good fresh food delivered at a reasonable price. But they are willing to tolerate shitty cold food at an expensive price because it’s a tiny bit easier to do than picking up the phone.
We are lazy by nature to preserve energy and many many companies have just perfected finding the right ratio of how fucked we will allow our selves to be to tickle that lazy button.
If you order food directly, you won't have the delivery tracking on the map. Even within the app, if the restaurant provides their own couriers, you lose the visibility and arrival ETA info.
And 15% might look impressive, but if you are getting your food from a delivery app, you probably don't care that much about food price in the first place.
Consider the example of Amazon marketplace. You still have one payment button and you can still shop for things from different vendors. Yet the order fulfillment can be done by Amazon or the seller directly.
If such an arrangement is possible on Amazon, it must mean that there are shops that trust their own fulfillment more than they do Amazon's. It is entirely possible that some restaurants will want to own that delivery experience as well.
Only because the service is disrupting the business model for those wages.
It worked well(ish) in 2019, it failed by 2022. It's not some kind of mystery around wages or inflation, the introduction of these services (and their popularity and growth, due to COVID closing in-person restaurants for a while) is the thing that killed the economics around delivery, for much of the US.
Also, it is a little odd that people are dining out more often if the experience is worse.
But, yeah, wages and employment being down is the most relevant change.
I don't think this is a great example, because saving water (and thus the energy needed to heat the water) is both a social good and a private good.
Your new dishwasher program might take longer because, for example, (a) it's more efficient to soak residues than keep blasting away at them, but it takes longer and (b) if you alternate between shooting water at the the top and bottom drawers (but not both at once) then you can get away with using half the water, in twice the time.
Most dishwashers have an 'express' programme that uses more water and energy to finish faster, so if that matters you can still have it. If it doesn't matter to you (e.g. because you're running the dishwasher overnight, or while you're at work), you and everyone else benefits from the greater efficiency.
So I think this is an unambiguous improvement. :)
The average quality of appliances is a separate question. Anecdotally, I finally had to replace a 22-year-old Neff dishwasher. I got a new Bosch one (same firm, different logo), and have been pleasantly surprised that the new model is still made in Germany, seems pretty solid, washes well, and is guaranteed for 5 years.
Treating this mentality of "taking money out that you put in" as "taking handouts" is the exact reductive mentality being used to try and have the government steal the money you earned from under your nose.
Means testing will also make paying into these programs even less popular. Upper middle class people will ask why, exactly, they’re expected to pay more into a retirement program they will get less out of. That’s a recipe for political change from a party who promises not to do that.
Crude oversimplification: if all you’ve ever known are slow and bloated web app UIs on mobile phones, you’re simply not going to know how to make good design/development choices outside that environment.
If it were necessary to have seen something to know it's possible, nothing would ever improve, and nothing new would get made.
Some of this is inevitable as new products and services move from being high end to mass-market, and it’s perhaps a bit chicken-and-egg to determine whether we accept this because we most people never really cared about quality that much anyway or because we just learn to accept what we’re given.
But it feels like there could be a world where automation still reduces costs while still maintaining a high level of quality, even if it’s not quite as cheap as it is now.
But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.
Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.
But I think if you look at modern light-rail projects there really has been such insane cost-inflation it wouldn't be worth covering the city with trams even with a much bigger budget. Also because such a large fraction of the price is admin etc., it creates a bias towards more expensive infra (heavy rail) because the paperwork overhead is similar either way so you get more bang for your buck.
When we funded the majority of the big infrastructure pushes our rate of growth was lower, and gdppc (and revenue/PC) was exploding. This generally ended with the start of big multicultural Australia policy in the late 60's.
So in comparison, the amount of infrastructure we need to build is greater per capita, as it has to try to cover the future population predictions, it needs to be done over less years as well.
Then we can get into the migration policy that's causing a decline in gdppc.
So did we just run out of useful things to do with people? Or did we concentrate the wealth away from the masses and blame the same immigration that created Australia in the first place?
We had a hugely restrictive immigration policy, (have a look at the rate of growth over time) followed by multiple wars that meaningfully reduced the population... We were winning the Malthusian game, just by having lots of resources per person available.
The policies you have probably heard called "white Australia" were more accurately understood as immigration restriction policy. If you read anything published at the time, there was only slightly less animosity for white english migration as the rest of the world. This was the era of communism and workers rights, and the workers absolutely understood that their labour was being devalued.
That's a really interesting claim. Do you have any sources that explain this further?
Turns out that "will" is a vague concept and doesn't have great neurological or animal models.
However, we can use some reasonable proxies!
I would argue that "libido" is the most obvious one. I recently heard a multimillionaire admit (with some embarrassment) that "we really do all this to get girls."
( I assume "libido is a function of testosterone" requires no citation ;)
Testosterone directly affects dopamine levels, dopamine sensitivity, and willingness to engage in competitive behavior:
https://www.edenclinic.co.uk/post/testosterone-and-the-brain
Another factor is "goal-directed behavior", which is mediated indirectly by "increased sense of agency"
> these results further imply that through an embodied SoA, testosterone can ultimately modulate higher-order experiences of social power and goal-directed behaviour.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Effect-of-Testoste...
At the societal level there is a fascinating (and deeply disturbing) book by J. D. Unwin, who studied thousands of civilizations:
>The book concluded with the theory that as societies develop, they become more sexually liberal, accelerating the social entropy of the society, thereby diminishing its "creative" and "expansive" energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Culture
Notably, conscientiousness and executive function are not enhanced by testosterone. However, deficiency is associated with fatigue, depression, brain fog etc. So it supports "will" by supporting overall health, and a population-wide ~50% decline does not sound healthy to me.
Construction is not massively more efficient today compared to a century ago, while salaries have massively increased.
Today it is a commodity. So we are flooded with low effort productions.
With that being said, we have more capability than ever, at the cheapest cost ever. Whether businesses use that wisely is a different story.
There will always be outliers. I see many comments with people who derived value from whatever they perceived as something uncommon and unique they could do. Now AI has made those skills a commodity. So they lose their motivation since it becomes harder to attain some sort of adoration.
In any case, going forward, no matter what, there will be those who adopt the new tools and use them passionately to create things that are above and beyond the average. And folks will be on HN reminiscing about those people, 30 years from now.
Did our quality and capability get worse or did everyone become a journalist that can document every flaw and distribute it globally in minutes?
Hmmm....
All this discussion assumes that Boeing engineers didn't catch this stuff and weren't banging the alarm bells over how these completely failed inspection. The problem was the people in power ignored it. This is an entirely social issue constructed by business demands, not one lacking expertise nor standards.
30 years may be a stretch but 20-25 certainly isn't.
Incidentally this also applies similarly to risk issues. The biggest risk in a flight is not in flying, but in takeoff/landing. This is why the commonly cited deaths/mile metric is not only misleading but completely disingenuous by the people/organizations that release it, knowing full well that the vast majority of people don't understand this. If some person replaced their car with a plane (and could somehow land/take off anywhere), their overall risk of death in transit would be significantly higher than if they were using e.g. a car. 'Air travel being safer than cars' relies on this misleading and meaningless death/miles statistic.
When I see those statistics I think about flights like Austria to Finland and I imagine that is indeed safer by plane.
So it's a slightly less safe (in the grand scheme of things) airliner that's vastly more fuel efficient and cheaper to run than any in the past. Obviously this is of no comfort to the families of the people who died in the crash!
But to suggest that Boeing has somehow regressed decades in technical capabilities is just plain wrong.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
Boeing being better now than in the 90s doesn't mean that the stock shouldn't drop, because competitors and expectations are higher now than in the 90s.
The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself. That list you post includes any and all reported incidents that merely involve 737s (and involve incidents that were caused by factors that aren't necessarily related to the safety of the place itself).
It's misleading to say they prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over safety.
In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.
The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.
> The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself.
If you want to be pedantic about it, the reason for the crashes is that the pilots failed to recognize trim runaway during takeoff. The trim runaway was caused by MCAS, but this is not a new failure mode for ANY aircraft and pilots get extensive training on how to manage it [1].
MCAS failing was not an unrecoverable error [2]. It failed several times in the US, as well, but American pilot training standards are very high compared to the places where there WERE disasters and the pilots recognized and recovered quickly.
I say this not to deflect blame from MCAS. Its original implementation was unsafe and should never have been approved.
A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this - both Boeing and Airbus have been implementing these for decades and they have made flying much safer. Your suggestion that any system like MCAS is always unsafe (or that Boeing was somehow doing something wrong by adding it) is totally wrong.
1: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/july/pilot... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...
The internal Boeing emails literally say otherwise.
> In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.
I never said that MCAS had any issues in theory. And the 737 MAX was mostly "approved" by Boeing's self-regulators, where emails trails (again literally) had anybody raising questions or concerns sidelined.
> The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.
Yes, because Boeing's top priority was making it so that no expensive extra training was required to fly the MAX, despite the fact that MCAS was designed to deal with some situations that could cause the plane to fly differently.
> If you want to be pedantic about it...
Yes, I am being pedantic about it. The trim issues in the crashes were (intermittently) caused by MCAS, but there was no specific documentation or specific training as to how to deal with it in the case of faulty MCAS sensors. There were indeed several MCAS incidents in western flights, but they were different as the failures were different. The two crashed pilots did indeed attempt disabling MCAS but the intermittent failures masked the problem and there were insufficient checklists by boeing, because had they existed it could have allueded to the fact that such situations may need new simulator time.
The MCAS issue was totally and completely recoverable if it were properly documented, but doing that would have almost certainly guaranteed the simulator time that was Boeing's top priority to avoid.
Almost all the reports about pilot capability differences had more to do with experience than it did training. These "developing" countries have younger airlines and pilots who don't have the same pipeline of pilots with decades of experience, including the military like in the US. MCAS "acted up" on several other Lion Air flights that the pilots corrected for as well, but again those were different failure modes.
The fact that the Ethiopian Airlines had perfectly acceptable safety record on other planes negates that these are "poorly trained" pilots. They've had one major accident in 2010 that was attributed to pilot error, but most of the rest were due to bad luck (eg bird strikes) or hijackings.
> A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this...
I never even mentioned MCAS by name. Yes, modern jetliners are safe because of these kinds of systems. Airbus planes will not allow pilots to do many things no matter what, even. But these systems are documented, pilots trained on them, and go through rigorous testing because in most cases they're designed to make a plane safer, not try to deal with aerodynamic changes.
Boeing wanted no new simulator training despite the MAX being a very different aircraft due to changed engine placement. That was the cause. If Boeing wasn't trying to avoid new simulator training the 737 MAX is a perfectly fine aircraft as far as we know.
The 787 had similar issues as the overriding goal of the program was to get as much capital expenditure off of Boeing's books, but all of the outsourcing led to a nightmare when trying to assemble the plane and there was no unified quality control program, or even a straight line of responsibility.
The common person often doesn't realize this at all. Every modern plane is flying itself essentially, with hints from the pilot on what to actually do.
>MCAS failing was not an unrecoverable error [2]
Also this is frustrating, especially in the case of the second crash where every max pilot knew the procedure (including the one that crashed), they even performed the procedure but then disabled it a minute later. Both the NTSB and the BEA (French equivalent) agreed pilot error/CRM played a role in the second.
I only checked its production budget while writing my comment.
But more importantly, the other half of my point was that $250 million ought to be enough to pay for a high effort production. It's not like "well Blender is free now so of course theatres are flooded with amateur CG films since their production has been commoditized".
In the same timeframe Jurassic Park cost twice more to make and it was a very expensive movie at the time.
It also was because development budgets were microscopic compared to today, so a bad release from a dev team of 5 people and 12 months won't bomb as badly as a 500 person 5 year "blockbuster" release. So yeah, Superman 64 was laughably bad but didn't sink a company the way Condord or even a not-that-bad game like Saints Row would.
Economy is different, as is the environment. There's still quality, but when a game flops, it's a tsunami level flop and not just a painful belly flop.
Toy Story was a good idea because attempts at depicting humans with CGI at the time had a very plastic look.
I don't think talent is the problem either. There's a lot more talent now than in the 90's.
Thing is those high profile disasters are still supposedly the "cream of the crop". That's why they get compared to the cream of before.
Popular examples are easier to exemplify as well instead of taking the time to explain what Blinx the Cat or Midnight Club are (examples of good but not genre-defining entries)
In recent years lying has been normalized. Black is White etc. 1984 is here.
Don't replace an existing solution with exactly the same thing on a different platform.
Think larger. Solve today's / (near) tomorrow's problem's BETTER. That's probably going to require changes to process too. A full evaluation of what's the most effective way with the capabilities and needs that exist now.
Then bring up interfaces that provide what the old system did, verify the data round trips, and when it's approved cut over.
This just isn’t true. It’s not nice to make things up.
If someone is wrong, say so? I said "this just isn't true"
That doesn't count?
This is most definitely still the fault of management.
The problem is not refusing to fund replacements. The problem is refusing to fund maintenance.
A lot of managers in old school business were sold on IT as a tool. And tools? You buy them, use them and replace only when they break. Maintenance is minimal and you sure don't evolve them.
That's how you get couple decade old software chugging along, being so key to operations everything you want to add has to be aware of it and its warts which will then infect what touches it. And replacement projects cannot work because usually they mean changing how things are done.
But 20 years of rot are a symbiosis between users and tools:
- some tool does not allow a workflow, so users manage and find a workaround
- there is a workaround so next version of the software landscape cannot break it
- people want to do some new thing which is not in the software, changing it could break the previous workaround. So either people don't do the new thing or adapt and create other workarounds
Multiple rounds of this and you have a fossilized organization and IT where nothing can be easily changed. The business cannot adapt. The software cannot be modified to allow adaptation because it could break the business. Now a new competitor emerges, the business is losing and that's when everyone starts blaming everyone for the problems. But in reality? The cause is 20 years ago when some management decided to add IT as a cost center.
My solution to this problem? Create your own competitor and kill the old business.
The problem with replacement projects is when and why they're usually started. They're usually started once there's a fixed deadline on some technology ceasing to exist, creating the appropriate urgency.
Usually the people that wrote that original software have long gone, the last few people that were able to maintain it are also nearing retirement age or already gone as well, you have some ancient technologies used for which it's hard to get documentation on the internet today.
Now you're tasked with writing a replacement, and everything that doesn't work on day 1 is deemed a failure. It might have worked if you started earlier. Because if your original codebase is COBOL and assembly written for mainframe, it's really hard to find anyone that can understand what it does fully and rewrite it now cleanly.
If you had updated from COBOL and mainframe assembly to C, and from C to 90s Java, and from 90s Java to modern Java/Go/Rust/Node, you'd have plenty of institutional knowledge available at each step, and you would have people that know the old and the new world at each step. Jumping half a century in computing techonology is harder than doing small jumps every 10-15 years.
Objectively this isn't true as CGI technology has improved by leaps and bounds (think e.g. subsurface skin scattering in new vs old Gollum), however there's a lot of other factors at play; old CGI used film tricks to make it blend better, new CGI uses full CGI and digital whatsits and doesn't care anymore. It also depends on budget and what studio takes care of it. Good CGI is invisible, and there's a number of non-superhero films where the CGI just isn't visible / you're not even aware of it. Anyway, what 20 year old CGI are you thinking about, and what are you comparing it with? I'm thinking The Spirits Within (2001) or Beowulf (2007); the former did not age well, the latter was already panned as having poor CGI when it came out. Avatar (2009) pushed the frontier again I think.
> go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more.
This is a blinkered view of reality; there's thousands of game developers outside of this bubble, from single person developers making modern classics like Stardew Valley or even Minecraft when it first came out, to teams of developers that are bigger than those that made the games of 20 years ago.
Also, your opinion isn't fact; in the top 20 best selling games of 2024 [0] there is only one arguable remaster (GTA 5, which is on its 3rd remaster) and two complete remakes (FFVII Rebirth and CoD 3), with the former being a completely different game compared to the original. I share your cynicism about the "top of the line" video game market today, but you're not correct.
(meanwhile I'm playing 2007 video game (Supreme Commander))
[0] https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/2024s-best-selling-games-in...
Stardew Valley is 9 years old.
Minecraft is almost 16 years old. The current version of the game has not dramatically changed in terms of the experience of most players of the game in over 10 years. (Hardcore players of any game will always make a big deal of any minor changes).
I was born in the 1990’s. I was playing games regularly in the 2000’s and the 2010’s although I don’t play as much today.
Hardly anyone in 2005 was playing 1996 games or 1989 games regularly.
Even in 2015 not many were playing 2006 or 1999 games regularly. (I think World of Warcraft was the only very popular old game in 2015)
But now in 2025 you bring up a 2016 game and 2009 game to argue with that other guy?
Hell what happened to the major big budget games? I remember playing Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077…but even those games are ancient now. Witcher 3 is 10 years old, RDR 2 is 7 years old, Cyberpunk is 5 years old…
In 2015 I was playing games more often but I was playing games that were more recently released…. Not really games from 2010, 2008 and 2005….
Hell the most popular game for kids now is Fortnite which is 8 years old and came out in 2017! I wasn’t playing Mass Effect (2007) too much in 2015. The difference between Mass Effect 1 or Elder Scrolls Oblivion and The Witcher 3 is the same time difference as when Fortnite was released and 2025!
Broad changes in the distribution of wealth, and government spending on education sharply declining, levels of critical thinking and open-mindedness have declined.
So now, if something can be made thats part of an existing franchise or consumer favoured products, then thats lower risk. It attracts more capital. Full on remakes again and again with idiots generally accepting bad games on nostalgia value means sales even of a bad game remain palletable.
I dont think the west is going backwards in capability, but people seem incapable of highlighting what has changed
Sorry but thats just not true. Sure there are shit VFX films, but I guarantee that the "serious" movies that people hold up as "all in camera effects" have hundreds of shots with digital set extensions and all sorts of VFX magic.
If you look at TV, where there has been huge competition, the use of VFX has exploded, mainly as a cost saving, but also as a story enhancer. stuff that would have cost £20m ten years ago is being done for £500k. Thats huge innovation.
> remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more
They are remasters because the people putting the money up are conservative.
Innovation is happening, just not where you expect. Look at the indy games market.
Much as I don't like it, but a huge amount of innovation is happening in the world of youtube and tiktok. New editing styles, almost a complete new genre of moving picture has emerged.
Where there is competition, there is innovation.
Now it is in the best shape ever and progress seems to be unstoppable. And West throughly dominates it in every dimension and that dominance seems to only be accelerating.
Boeing just failed in what was an inherently unfair game: they tried to compete with state-funded Airbus that could just burn unlimited cash not worrying about real profitability, Boeing tried doing it by cutting costs, and failed.
So alot unfortunately is a choice that consumers have made. Even in terms of media again, alot of modern viewers watch media more as self-insert fantasies, so quality of writing or novelty is often going to worthless or even detrimental to them. I don't believe that mindset, but having talked to many on /a/, /v/ or reddit, there's many who are just there to consume rather than actual interest.
Your average gacha may look lower effort, but it has to sustain thst effort longer instead of patching the game for a few months and moving on. It has to do a lot more marketing to get players in, because many are this pseudo-MMO experience, completely with PvP and Guild content to manage.
At the highest end, Hoyovervese's operating costs would even make Activision blush. But those games make billions to compensate.
That very much is an indictment of ambition and progress here.
None of the things you said are actually true. Only superficially, because you've only seen those mass market crap.
Good movies are still around, and yuo don't even notice the CGI, because they're cleverly done. For crap like the recently released snow white, it's obvious that the CGI is badly done - it doesn't make it an indictment against all movies released of late!
Same with games - just because there's lots of AAA studio flops that look terrible, doesn't mean the medium is all terrible. There's so many good indie games that you can never truly play them all.
But if your exposure to these products are only the mass market crap, then you might certainly feel that way.
Compare 1997 to today.
Major hit after major hit was being released that year, and they were overwhelmingly original and creative. There had been a boom in independent filmmaking and many of the big production houses had started up smaller studios to attract the talent. Unfortunately, Hollywood did what Hollywood does and killed everything that made them good.
Nowadays, we have endless releases of super hero sequels that are, fundamentally, the same movie over and over. We have endless remakes and reboots because nobody wants to take a chance.
Yes, you can find creativity if you look hard enough, but in 1997 it was everywhere, and in your face. You can't pretend that it doesn't matter or that it doesn't mark an enormous shift in culture (business and society).
What's worse is that comedy is a minefield, as somebody somewhere is bound to be offended and launch a cancel campaign. So comedy films, including the once-beloved rom com, just don't get produced anymore like they used to. Any attempts at humor in movies has to be rolled in to something else -- superheroes talking in aggressively annoying Whedonese and the like -- and housewives must content themselves with Hallmark Channel glurge. And what humor is there is cringey as fuck because it's either entirely toothless or it's a "Straight white men, am I right?" type of thing because you are still allowed -- and encouraged -- to mock that group.
I mean, the normally sequel-averse Jim Carrey came back to do three movies about a video game hedgehog because those are the only movies being made in which he gets to flat-out do Jim Carrey stuff.
So there has been something of a renaissance with television, starting around the time of the Sopranos release in 1999 I think, which there was a market for shows which didn't 'reset' somewhat between episodes.
Uh. 1997 had Oz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate SG-1, King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, Ally McBeal, The X-Files, Friends, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and MTV still showed music videos. Cable television hadn't yet been completely overrun with 'reality' television. We joked about The History Channel becoming the WWII channel, but it hadn't yet become the Ancient Aliens, cheap, pseudo-reality parody of itself.
I get your point about serialized stories, but I'd still take the great entertainment of the 90s over today's over-reliance on digital effects and low-quality writing to generate cheap drama. Besides, most shows aren't written with a set arc, they just keep writing more so long as the numbers stay up. So we get a couple of seasons of increasing drama and mystery, then it gets cancelled with no payoff. I'd rather have the amnesia-based reset system than that!
Even more glaring is TV shows, where you now get an 8-episode 'season' every 2-3 years rather than the old days of 20+ episode seasons every year, often non-stop for 5 or more years.
It's not so much about capability/competence as pushing production values to unsustainable levels. You could get away with much less expensive VFX, sets, and costume when filming in standard definition. Now every pixel is expected to look flawless at 4K.
Another more controversial factor is that everyone brings their politics/activism to work and injects them into everything that they do. Now everything has to be pushing for social change, nothing can just be entertainment for the sake of entertainment.
Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".
Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.
Compare+contrast with 'The Last Jedi'. Turning the male characters into total idiots and sending them off on a massive wild goose chase, before the day is saved by completely breaking the physics of the Star Wars universe, making all the previous heroes look like idiots for not using a relativistic kill vehicle against the Death Star!
I don't remember hearing any complaining about strong female characters in the era of Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Major Kira, Susan Ivanova, and so on.
I like to use Star Trek in the 90s as a good example of what I mean. While there are episodes where the writers got preachy (they're only human I suppose), most of the time the writers were very careful to not openly take sides on the issues they raised. Even if you got the sense that the writer for an episode might feel a certain way about the topic, the characters wouldn't tell the audience how to feel. They didn't call other characters who disagreed with them names. They didn't just bully their way to victory in the story. The topics were treated as complicated issues where reasonable adults could disagree.
Compare that to shows/movies/books today. The writers treat the story primarily as a vehicle to express their opinions on issues. They have characters tell people "this is how a decent person behaves", with the understanding that the message is really meant for the audience. They have characters who agree with them call their opponents bigots or worse insults. They portray said opponents as villains or morons who only hold their beliefs because of how evil/stupid they are. They have the "good guys" run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with them, and they get to win despite their bad behavior. And often, the writers (and even other people involved like actors) will openly express their contempt for their audience when speaking about the work. They pick fights where none needed to happen, saying stuff like "if you don't like this then I don't want you as an audience member anyway". They are, in short, bad writers who don't have the skill to successfully let their social views influence their work.
The result of all this is that these writers don't succeed at persuading anyone. In years past writers could actually make progress on advancing the things they believed in because they had the wisdom to not openly preach to people and call them names. They respected people enough to let them draw their own conclusions, and as a result were successful. But writers today aren't good enough to persuade people to continue breathing, let alone something more controversial than that.
There is also an uptick in how much politics get forced into art, with people trying to claim "everything is political" and the like. But that isn't nearly as big a factor as how bad today's artists are at using political themes in their work.
That's often a good change. Less filler for the sake of having another full season.
For example, when the internet emerged, everyone wanted to be online; when smartphones appeared, everyone wanted to have an app; and when VR emerged, Facebook changed its name and lost half of its value in the stock market. Now, it's AI. Capitalists do not focus on the details of the technologies; to them, every new technology looks the same. They see new tech as a growing opportunity and old tech as a saturated market. Obviously, this perspective is flawed, but it doesn’t matter.
In my opinion, AI is not going to create more value. The only real impact it will have is reducing the amount of workforce needed to generate that value, which will ultimately push the economy into a recession. As consumption declines, I don’t see what new technology could come after AI to offset this effect through further investment.
People do, but they aren't in AAA studios. They're doing indie games, because their large corporations were captured by the professional glom-onto-success management class.
This makes it sound as if management only decide whether to engage in modernizing or not. I think it's only fair to also give them full credit for the failures - profit over people, dogma over pragmatism, etc is their fault.
Maybe arts shouldn't have been industries. Look at sculpture or painting from the Renaissance and then postmodern sculpture and painting and you'll see a similar decline, despite the improvement of tools. We still have those techniques, and occasionally someone will produce a beautiful work as satire. We could be CNC milling stone buildings more beautiful and detailed than any palace or cathedral and that would last for generations, but brutalism killed the desire to do so, despite the technology and skill being available. There's something to industrialized/democratized art being sold to the masses that leads to a decline in quality, and it's not "because no-one knows how to do anything any more." It's because no one care nor wants to pay for anything beautiful, when there are cheaper yet sufficient alternatives.
This annoyed me, because it's so manifestly untrue. The games of the year of the last few years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_the_Year_award...)
- 2024: Astro Bot
- 2023: Baldur's Gate 3
- 2022: Elden Ring
- 2021: No consensus pick, but It Takes Two stands out to me
- 2020: Hades
All of these, with the exception of BG3 are original IP. A lot of them have really unique game mechanics that I haven't seen before. Hades has some of the tightest combat that never gets old even after hundreds of runs. It also has extraordinary music and voice acting. Truly a labour of love.
It Takes Two is a co-op story adventure. Every single level has a new fun mechanic. In one of them you literally control time. Please, do tell me which game from 20 years ago was a co-op adventure where every level was unique? The best co-op was probably Halo 2 (2004), but that's just shooting from beginning to end.
You're thinking "well, ok there's one sequel in there. That's proof that video game companies want to play it safe". But you'd still be incorrect. BG3 is inspired by its prequels BG1 and 2, but those released 20 years ago. Open YouTube and check out how different they are in every single way. I'll bet there isn't even a single line of code common between the BG3 and the originals. BG3 exists because the developers grew up playing BG1 and 2 and wanted to make a homage to the games that shaped them. And they succeeded, good for them.
I will admit that I didn't play Elden Ring. I didn't even attempt to, because I already have a full time job. But that's great too, because it shows that there are games being made for people who love a punishingly difficult challenge. That's not me, but you can find that now if you want.
Your comment is just rose-tinted whingeing. It's so easy to write a comment like "man, the good old days were really good weren't they". But ... no. I can play all of the games from the good old days and I can also play Hades, It Takes Two and BG3. And that's just the surface! There are so many incredible games being made and released. Factorio is great in many ways, but the most remarkable part is how they've optimised their game to a mind-boggling extent.
No one knows how to do anything anymore? Then how did these incredibly innovative, flawlessly executed games get made?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493740
I don’t want to retype everything I posted in that reply but it kind of applies to your comment as well.
In 2015 if we were having this discussion I could easily pull out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2010 to 2015.
In 2005 if we were having this discussion I could have easily pulled out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2000 to 2005.
But we are having this discussion in 2025 and I know both you and I would struggle to pull out a dozen high quality new innovating games that have come out in the past 5 years.
Clearly things have gone worse.
In 2005 I could play a game for 12 hours straight and then hardly be able to sleep I would be so excited about playing it the next day.
Today, even for a game like BG3 that is objectively an incredible game, I can do maybe 2 hours every few days and feel fulfilled.
I don't think this an outlying example either. Most of my friends are now the same way, and frankly when you login to play games online, it's not exactly overflowing with the 35-40yr olds who saturated servers 20 years ago.
What I suspect is the problem is that you also want them to be groundbreaking and innovative. This is an impossibly high bar to meet in a mature industry. There are some games that still meet this bar. Half Life Alyx is from 2020, ever played anything like it? Have you truly built all the possible contraptions in Tears of the Kingdom (2023)? Last of Us Part II (2020) is going to premiere on TV in a couple of weeks. How many older video games have a story that was shot so perfectly that they be translated shot for shot into a hit TV or movie?
Check out these two videos of a guy horsing around in Tears of the Kingdom - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpFXlkjAurc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyQdn5bwF_Q. Look at how much fun he's having! Yes, it takes an incredible game to enable such creativity. But he's having fun because he wants to have fun.
If you're finding less joy in games than you used to, you should be open to the idea that it's not the games that are causing that effect.
Elden Ring is just Demon's Souls 4 from 2009. It's good to the point that I'll still preorder its successor, but nothing is original there any more.
Edit: not 4, more like 7?
Edit 2: Hades seemed more difficult to me than Elden Ring. Maybe you shouldn't trust the marketing and check for yourself.
You're right that an important reason why it's hard to replace those 30+ year old systems, and that part of the reason is that the current devs are not necessarily at the same level as those who built the original. But at least in part, this is due to survivorship bias.
Plenty of the systems that were built 30-50 years ago HAVE been shut down, and those that were not tend to be the most useful ones.
A more important tell, though, is that you see traditional IT systems as the measuring stick for progress. If you do a review of history, you'll see that what is seen as the measuring stick changes over time.
For instance, in the 50's and 60's, the speed of cars and airplanes was a key measuring sticks. Today, we don't even HAVE planes in operation that match the SR-71 or Concorde, and car improvements are more incremental and practical than spectacular.
In the 70s and into the 80s, space exploration and flying cars had the role. We still don't have flying cars, and very little happened in space from 1985 until Elon (who grew up in that era) resumed it, based on his dream of going to Mars.
In the 90s, as Gen-X'ers (who had been growing up with C64/Amiga's) grew up, computers (PC) were the rage. But over the last 20 years little has happened with the hardware (and traditional software) except that the number of cores/socket has been going up.
In the 2000s, mobile phones were the New Thing, alongside apps like social media, uber, etc. Since 2015, that has been pretty slow, too, though.
Every generations tends to devalue the breakthroughs that came after they turned 30.
Boomers were not impressed by computers. Many loved their cars, but remained nostalgic about the old ones.
X-ers would often stay with PC's as the milennials switched to phones-only. Some X-ers may still be a bit disappointed that there's no flying cars, Moon Base and no Mars Colony yet (though Elon, an X'er is working on those).
And now, some Milennials do not seem to realize that we're in the middle of the greatest revolution in human history (or pre-history for that matter).
And developers (both X'ers and millennials) in particular seem to resist it more than most. They want to keep their dependable von Neumann architecture computing paradigm. The skills they have been building up over their career. The source of their pride and their dignity.
They don't WANT AI to be the next paradigm. Instead, they want THEIR paradigm to improve even further. They hold on to it as long as they can get away with it. They downplay of revolutionary it is.
The fact, though, is that every kid today walks around with R2D2 and C3PO in their pockets. And production of physical robots have gone exponential, too. A few more years at this rate, and it will be everywhere.
Walking around today, 2025 isn't all that different from 2015. But 2035 may well be as different from 2025 as 2025 is to 1925.
And you say the West is declining?
Well, for Europe (including Russia), this is true. Apart from DeepMind (London), very little happens in Europe now.
Also, China is a competitor now. But so was the USSR a couple of generations ago, especially with Sputnik.
The US is still in the leadership position, though, if only barely. China is catching up, but they're still behind in many areas.
Just like with Sputnik, the US may need to pull itself together to maintain the lead.
But if you think all development has ended, you're like a boomer in 2010, using planes and cars as the measuring stick that thinks that nothing significant happened since 1985.
It increasingly applies to nearly all aspects of the economy. Everybody wants to lock you in and take a cut. Almost all new innovation these days is just rent seeking gatekeeping. Even genuine innovations are unable to get their innovations out without either recreating entire software stacks (or supply chains) that's under feudalistic/parasitic control, they often remain niche and undermonetized. This will have an effect on the economy like a % yearly reduction in atmospheric oxygen will destroy biodiversity.
I don't think specifically AI has done this compared to a broader view of constant stream of digitilisation of every departments function.
Orgs don't need grads to learn the ropes from the bottom and make their way up the career ladder, when the ladders might only be 3-4 rungs high now.
The loaded term for that is simply "cutting corners."
Tried it again and hop the same issue. Now he is going for a chargeback. There is nobody in quickbooks that can solve this problem as most of the support (from India) seems to be there just to re-read manuscripts.
But hey you should buy into the stock as they are going into an AI transition: https://www.tipranks.com/news/intuit-stock-nasdaqintu-layoff...
Justify to whom? Shareholders just care about metrics like earnings and revenue. If they don't need workers to optimize this metrics, they have right to hire fewer workers.
Outside of places like Meta, who are printing money at a ridiculous rate, finance acts as a break on any long-term or big bets. There can be no risk taking.
I feel like this is one of Google's problems now. Once upon a time they were willing to take big swings with their piles of cash, now it's all about revenue maximisation at the low level. I forget which change it was, but they started charging for something, or limiting quotas on something, and the email contained the phrase "in line with industry norms", and I just thought that was very tellings. Back in the early 2000s Google was constantly defying and upturning "industry norms", now they are just like everyone else, squeezing every last drop from the smallest stones. Getting rid of the previously grandfathered in free Google Workspaces was a good example. I find it hard to imagine that the cost of those even registers in their accounts compared with everything else.
The first prioritized engineering 'most everything that a modern nation might need. The latter prioritized only engineering its own financial statements.
Both did very well...at least at their top priorities.
b) I really must make the time to watch The Wire.
There is of course the trend of influencers, quiet quitting, gig economy and people going to work for themselves. That assumes that there is enough capital floating around for everybody to survive on their own... If you can't land a decent job in an established company, maybe you should think twice about being able to float above the waterline when you go at it by yourself.
Every conversation of this sort should involve his name being shouted from the rooftops.
It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.
In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.
It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).
The commodification of education will eventually make it useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's usually prohibitively expensive.
As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's success is mostly based on their ability to take you from zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)
If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just that.
Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been taught much and so there is no standard, but that only happens late in your education.
Of course education itself needs more research. "learning styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some variation that says some people need different teaching? Is there a better way to teach things? However if you are not involved in this research you should be teaching in standard ways that have been proven to work.
It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational utility in the last few decades (despite the memes).
A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.
I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.
But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.
But supply and demand happen in every economy, even those without money and even post-scarcity sci-fi. And unintended consequences are just a thing everywhere.
Unless "unintended consequences" was shorthand for "if you hurt stock market investors that's bad for the country", of course.
It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of useful skills.
Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get screwed when available careers change.
Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly the 4 years of lost time.
I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni.
Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.
Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return
We already have a way to discuss that benefit, it's the political process. Doing politics IS figuring out the benefits.
You don’t have to tie the benefits to money, but you do need to understand that there is a cost, some of which is money, and the benefits should be worth it if you’re going to be doing it. Who pays the money is a secondary concern to that.
Calculable.
> What's the "ROI" of creating beautiful works of art, or producing great culture?
The academy doesn’t do this anymore and hasn’t for more than half a century.
> What's the "ROI" of happiness?
Is there any evidence to suggest college graduates are happier which account for differences in childhood socioeconomic status, lifetime earning potential, and similar confounding factors?
> Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return
While I agree with you in principle, this rationale can be used as a cover for bad policy. You take a measure that is widely accepted as an indication of worth, and then insist that the system’s failure to produce that indication of worth may actually just indicate that it’s providing an intangible goodness that cannot be measured nor accounted for (beauty, happiness, etc.).
I'm not going to read this entire study just to respond to a single comment, but according to ChatGPT, the answer to your question is yes.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.1.159
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e5793f-e284-800f-8bb4-ebd340e4c9...
"Yes, the evidence strongly suggests that schooling has nonpecuniary benefits like increased happiness, beyond what can be explained by income or family background. But the authors remain cautious and emphasize the need for further causal research."
It will also be interesting to see what happens now that Europe has to get real about defense spending instead of freeloading on US security guarantees. Since defense spending is going up there's going to be a lot of political pressure to cut higher education.
To an extent this also applies in the USA. Public universities in most states have relatively low tuition (although still higher than their European equivalents) for in-state students. But they are unable to meet market demand, so many students take out loans to pay tuition at lower-tier private universities.
Realistically maybe we reform community college to be the required thing instead of traditional undergrad, since the cost and length is more comparable.
in fact i would say I don't know how much additional value an associates' holds in that context, and maybe we just merge the two concepts. I haven't ever really seen a posting that is okay with just an associate's.
Here’s a pointed take on it from one of New Zealand’s successful businessmen: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/education/the-art-of-business-...
I'd like to see this study. Most of the data I've seen that is pro-college still has massive confounds.
Two twins graduate high school. One gets a crappy copywriting job, and spends her free time reading books on how to write better, and specifically how to do copywriting. The other gets an English degree. I'm not nearly as confident as you are the one with the English degree is going to be a better copywriter.
I don't disagree you can learn skills, but cognitive science literature solidly shows far transfer is not a thing, and when it is it's incredibly inefficient. i.e. Reading the great works of Russian literature might make you a better copywriter but at a vastly slower pace than writing copy, or reading a book on copywriting.
If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?
That's unrealistic.
1. That's just one subject.
2. Semesters and/or quarters are not 6 months.
3. Most colleges don't charge $10K for one subject for 6 months.
My college intake class had 60 enter in the first year, and I was paying $2000 out of pocket a semester. Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course.
What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?
And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.
Well for a high school grad today, most likely the opportunity cost is minimum wage service sector jobs. Those "temporary" jobs are also really easy to get stuck in for life. That's not a good life.
>Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course. What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?
They're fucked, but at least they know where they stand. They should know their chances with the standardized testing somewhat. You definitely shouldn't go to college if you don't have the aptitude or motivation, but you should go to some sort of trade school: electrical, carpentry, plumber, etc. The safest path to college is graduated study, community college for the AA, then full blown university for the last two. At least you get an AA degree, and if you can't handle community college, at least it isn't very expensive.
>And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.
The value proposition is pretty muddied with the negligent inflation of tuition over the past few decades, that is a certainty. Unless you are Ivy League, any college will do. I'm fortunate to live in a state where tuition for public college is on the lower end.
Why are you assuming they would fair any better in trade school?
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but if they find themselves in service work, they should do anything they can to not be in that position. Some people just don't have any other options due to aptitude or attitude, so that's where they stay. That's not a great place to be in the US for the limited existence we have on Earth.
Something I learned in high school sports, particularly wrestling, is you have to always work to improve your position. That lesson holds very true in life.
I do not regret any of the classes I took. I learned something from all of them. And it's not putting a rosy shine on something I was forced to do. I genuinely appreciate being well-rounded and knowing many things. It made me a better person.
If people just want to learn core skills, get a technical degree like a certificate or associates. That's why those things exist. You can do a 6 month certificate in coding at my local community college if your goal is just to go work and not learn things other than that.
I don't care what you "look at it like." I car what the actual statistics demonstrate. Facts don't care about your feelings.
Im not totally sure I could tell you most of what I even took let alone what I learned in those classes.
Maybe right after college there's a window of a couple years.
No one really values the intangible personal development that comes with education. If they did I'd have 5 friends who went back for a second degree to enrich themselves instead of 0.
This is definitely true. I think pre-graduate college is pretty eye opening, at least when I went. In most high schools, they just cover the top layer of knowledge; in college they go quite a bit deeper. "They never taught us that in high school," is a saying that applies.
Equally likely, the kid just didn't pay attention.
Yes. A broad, liberal arts education made me a better, more informed citizen. One might even say I know more than the current President (certainly his supporters) about tariffs, what affects the price of eggs, etc.
“Yes but I’m right and they’re wrong” — When you’re 49% of the population, it doesn’t matter.
This may have been some policymakers' intent, but it never really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong, that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have heavy course loads of liberal arts.
So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as vocational school, while getting the high-class university experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor, in many cases, the parents.
>It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it
It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic implosion).
>and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).
At any point in history, most of the output from workers went (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98% of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product, no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so diamonds would go to diamond miners.
If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any other thing) for the relatively amount of those products consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.
Not all software is like webshit boilerplate.
American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.
I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down.
But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.
There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.
???
We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.
If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively.
Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses.
We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.
However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.
So yea, surprise that once again it comes down to companies that don't want to pay for the talent they yearn for.
The point of teaching useful skills is so people can be helpful to other people. While coded as right wing this is fundamentally pro-social. Finding a useful and needed place for yourself in society tends to result in more stable families, communities and mental health.
Spending decades indulging your own ego tends to do the opposite.
I'm apparently living deep underneath bedrock and/or have spent too much time worrying about [EDITED] "weird math"
When and where/how did the "helpful to other people == coded as right wing" happen? And does that mean people are finding fault in the first half because of the second?
Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.
Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc
Prompt: { Someone posted this:
The current zeitgeist according to chatgpt in the west: Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.
Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc
Does this sound like something you'd say, chatgpt? }
ChatGPT: { No, that post is not an accurate reflection of how I analyze political or cultural dynamics. It presents a highly polarized and caricatured view of different ideologies, using broad generalizations and subjective judgments rather than a nuanced or objective perspective.
If I were to discuss cultural or political trends, I would aim for a more balanced approach, recognizing the complexities and overlaps between different worldviews rather than reducing them to a list of traits with implicit value judgments. Real social and political identities are more fluid and context-dependent than what that post suggests. }
Response: { Can you expand on how it's a polarized and caricatured view? }
ChatGPT: { 1. Using Broad Generalizations It treats political ideologies as monolithic and assigns rigid, opposing characteristics to "right-wing" and "left-wing" identities. In reality, individuals across the political spectrum may value personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, education, and community—just in different ways.
2. Assigning Subjective Value Judgments The post implies that one side has positive traits (e.g., "practical," "hard-working," "responsible") while the other is marked by negative traits (e.g., "egotistical," "performative," "irresponsible"). This makes it less of an analysis and more of a partisan framing.
3. Over-Simplifying Political and Cultural Attitudes Not everyone fits neatly into the categories presented. There are libertarians, centrists, populists, progressives, social conservatives, classical liberals, and many more who defy these stereotypes.
4. Framing Complex Issues as Binary Opposites Instead of acknowledging nuance, the post forces everything into a binary left vs. right framework, when in reality, people’s values often overlap.
Conclusion The post is more of a stereotyped narrative than an accurate representation of political and cultural trends. It distorts reality by exaggerating differences, dismissing complexity, and reinforcing partisan divisions rather than fostering real understanding. }
Really fascinating stuff if you ask me.
Fascinating indeed.
There are statues that I go by every day that generate zero revenue for the city, but they make getting around town just a little bit nicer. Nobody is coming to this city to see these statues, so they don't drive tourist revenue. They're just there and nice to look at.
The artists made some money, but there's no return on investment in straight dollars for the city that commissioned these works. And yet it is valuable to society.
...every social structure throughout time. An educated populace is more likely to be successful in achieving goals than re-learning from nothing.
> It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job.
Since education is generally funded, it makes sense that subjects are self-reinforcing. "Worldview" is, contextually, an anthropomorphism of a social process. The cause, not the effect, is people doing what people prefer to do. There's nothing outside of society pushing. People still make art, to their parents' chagrin.
The situation of forced subjects, is not rigid. There is education for other subjects; almost everything or anything that meets some arbitrary qualifiers. Crystals, dog breeding, board game design? Humans tend to share knowledge (even when it's wrong). There's no shortage of learning in subjects that aren't primary subjects in some accredited college.
The question is always who is footing the bill while you find yourself? Education that leads to productive vocations can arguably have some public funding because that gets paid back in taxes, etc. If you're paying for expanding your own horizons through education, then sure, have at it.
Charging the government $50k a year to force hungover 18 year olds to plagiarize essays at 7:45am before class to get a required credit benefits no one.
I disagree. I get food from the supermarket, my roof is built by someone else, unlimited water from the faucet. This stuff isn't coming for free, it is other peoples work. Of course i want to learn something useful to contribute back. But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.
We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets.
But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.
Exactly. Privatize profits. Socialize costs.
We do, it's called the price of labor. We currently need highly educated healthcare professionals like a forest fire needs rain. These wages are literally off the chart:
BLS list: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm
Another list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-c...
Everyone wins, right? You know, except university administrators and lenders.
It's likely also partly why the west moved away from contract-based knowledge work and towards full-time work... It decouples the product of one's labor from its costs (salary) and it makes managers' lives easier as it gives them much more flexibility and less pressure with regard to how they measure and rank employee productivity. If costs were proportional to output, managers would pay a lot more attention to efficiency as their paychecks would depend on that efficiency.
Instead, managers' paychecks and career prospects are mostly based on political nonsense like how many people are working under them; literally creating an incentive for inefficiency.
Historical point you've completely missed. You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. This was not "decided" this was a trap sprung on the working class at a time when blue collar labor was almost entirely off shored.
> and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive
That's why you discharge the debt instead. This is an institutional failure. They knowingly pumped a market at tax payer expense. The hair cut is theirs to take.
> You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work.
In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours.
There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.
I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere.
With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.
If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.
1. Personal knowledge management
2. Digital literacy
3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)
Typical scenario: Industry I is not doing fine in country C (i.e. the fund managers are not happy about lack of growth of the public companies in this sector) due to reasons R1, R2, ..., Rn. Then management decided to outsource and eventually dismantle the factories to "globalize" it. Knowledge retained by the older generation of engineers, technicians and workers were completely lost when they passed away.
There will not be much work that cannot be done by Figure, Optimus, Atlas, Claude, Grok or GPT by 2035.
That has happened quite often in the past [1].
Petrification: no real loss to society but I will concede that this appears to be an example of actual loss of "progress". Very few people are saying "oh diety, if only I could preserve this animal with perfect color and texture (but discarding all other characteristics).
Greek fire: the history of when this knowledge was lost is unclear. Also it was intentionally kept secret. Certainly we have functionally similar tech now. I'll give 50% credit.
Panjagan: We don't even know if this was a weapon or a technique? Everything about this is incredibly vague.
In summary, this has happened approximately 1.5 times in the past. Not "quite often".
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...
Similarly expertise in plutonium manufacturing has been lost, and now that countries have run out they are re-learning how they did it 40 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
Edit: I see someone beat me to the punch with Fogbank. For another example, look to the F1 rocket engine that took us to the moon. Despite having the actual engineering documents, we just don't have the manufacturing skill to rebuild one: https://apollo11space.com/why-cant-we-remake-the-rocketdyne-...
The F1 is particularly interesting, because if we'd undergone a program in 1985, we probably could have restarted production, maybe even 1995 - but every decade another n% of the engineering knowhow sluffed off into the permanent dirt nap until there wasnt enough left.
Another recent example was when Jay Leno had a new heat exchanger made for his Chrysler Turbine car, and they were able to call some retirees in to help make a new one.
Us Europeans learned that lesson the hard way three years ago and we haven't made much progress ever since the first Russian boot set foot on Ukrainian soil. 100k artillery shells don't sound like much of a thing... but apparently it is.
Really fascinating bit of trivia though!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
Film has been getting increasingly popular. Local film labs are busy and new ones are opening. It is the vinyl record of imaging. Yet despite this, kodak and fujifilm have responded as most lack of forsight businesses do and cut film stocks, raised prices, constantly trying to squeeze more blood from the stone which goes on to kill growth in the industry vs supporting it and fostering actual growth and more profits more than 1 quarter out.
While there is tons of money to be made for niche-enthusiasts, these niche's aren't always large enough to properly re-industrialize (chemical regulations, expensive machinery,etc).
Kodachrome homebrew efforts don’t get close either. The process is too bespoke and reliant on instruments that no longer exist. Even proper c41 chemistry is down to just when the full kodak kit is in stock and not backordered by desperate developers: those instagram brands kit contains blix and are inferior as a result to a separate bleach and fix kit. Fuji press kit the old alternative is hard or impossible to find.
And no one is making new cameras. Only fixing old ones and only popular models able to be fixed and worth the time creating a secondary market of parts for (so basically Leica and pay for that or be relatively SOL to varying degrees for most else).
The biggest issue is this stuff was created when film was a global industry. tens of thousands of engineers were working on every step of the process for decades. That is gone now. All that old knowledge and learnings mostly gone because these companies kept poor records and destroyed old obsolete notes and material. Not just how the camera works but how to manufacture it and everything else at scale or at least in a way that it is actually profitable. And perhaps it could never become profitable without efficiencies brought on by scale and massive investment in manufacturing. And it would actually be forever be lost once all this equipment we still have falls apart.
Quite a few new 35mm cameras are being developed and sold. From the budget Long Weekend, the uber-pricy Leica M6, and the mid-range Pentax 17. Even some half-frames are coming out, including from Kodak.
I think the same can happen for knowledge work. Country A ends up turning into a bunch of managers outsourcing to Country B, and then at some point Country B realizes they can manage themselves. Companies are quite literally training their future competition. Once it reaches a tipping point, I don’t think it’s easy to reverse.
Can't blame them though, this is what Capitalism teaches all of us. I'm short sighted too, but the thing is I won't be able to go wherever I want when SHTF while fund managers can probably do so.
why the need to be hypothetical? this is more or less how it played out between china and america. America outsourced all manufacturing to China while doing all the R&D and "innovation." one look at companies like DJI, BYD and Bambulab and its clear that china can innovate just fine on their own now. Their products are becoming objectively better than the US designed ones.
If China could turn democratic and open, the World would have such a bright future.
Alas, I think we're headed into some distopian future because China is not going that way but indeed, they're very likely to surpass the USA in every other way.
Doc: No wonder it failed, "Made in Japan"
Marty: What do you mean, doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
"More than thirty years ago I stood beside the desk of Professor Richard Rosenbloom, who taught courses in manufacturing management. In those days they called the field 'production.' I was a research assistant, and Professor Rosenbloom had just stood up to welcome one of his students into his office. The student, of medium height, was dressed in a dark suit and tie. He stood before the desk, bowed deeply, and handed to his professor a beautifully wrapped gift. He had completed his studies and was returning to his home in Japan.
"The professor murmured thanks and then, to demonstrate his appreciation, he unwrapped the gift. It was a black fountain pen with gold trim. He sat down at his desk, took out a piece of paper, filled the pen from an ink bottle, took the pen in his hand, and began to write. The student beamed. But then he looked stunned, as we all did—the pen was not writing. Professor Rosenbloom pressed harder. The student frowned more deeply. Nothing. Professor Rosenbloom tried swirling the pen. Still, no ink flowed. Finally, in exasperation, the student reached across the desk, grabbed the pen, shook it forcefully, and said with great feeling, 'Cheap Japanese pen!'"
They can take over existing industries like autos because they do it for cheaper. They can compete in niches for innovation. But they are all capped by structural issues that will prevent them from matching the economic innovation of the west.
That's a thing we were taught in "Civic Culture" in grade 5 -- that slaves can become masters through hard work and making the master dependent on them.
But now I see it more in a figurative way, because it rarely happens with actual slaves, but in a more metaphorical way, it certainly can happen.
The effect even applies on a larger national scale, where if a country stops investing in infrastructure projects for a long period, they will find themselves incapable of executing these projects properly in the future.
I use LLM's daily, but as a tool to brainstorm, mostly, or to write small parts of scripts (e.g., shell, not TV shows). But everything has to be verified.
Last weekend I was using ChatGPT Music Teacher (or, trying to anyway) to prep some voice leading practices for guitar. I spent almost a half hour trying to get that model, then the base ChatGPT model to give correct information about inversions and the notes in the chords. It was laughably wrong over and over again.
It would misidentify chords, say that a chord had the base attributes of a triad (tonic, third, fifth) while giving me a chord shape that had the root twice, and a third, and calling that a second inversion. Or giving incorrect fret/note information.
If I didn't know theory and how intervals work on a guitar I would have been pretty screwed.
As it was, I wasted a half hour and never got anything usable.
I'm not saying that the technology isn't fairly amazing, but like, don't believe the hype.
LLMs are pretty cool, but they make all sorts of unpredictable errors, and - especially when you're using them for things you're unfamiliar with - introduce all sorts of hidden costs you won't catch until later.
I've entirely given up on using LLMs for exploratory exercises.
You can see how this is more like listening to a crowded room and relaying random words than actually learning through understand ideas and building off of them.
Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.
It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.
This doesn't add up with the number of billionaires and the growth over the last decades - it just seems that there's a bottleneck and the value captured from technology isn't trickling down.
Of course, you can claim that such "billionaires" and that part of that "value" is the result of speculation, but since billionaires can use that speculation to buy money and acquire more assets, then for sure there's some value there that isn't getting to the vast majority of the people.
ChatGPT is the first time in a while that a new technology is easy enough to use and integrate that the productivity gains could be captured by the lowest-skilled workers.
Uber/Lyft are the antithesis of this: their apps do very simple things but at scale and with an eye towards confusing their drivers. It's not unthinkable that a co-op version of these apps could exist, but the folks with the skills to build them get snapped up by big tech pretty quick.
IMO if we want to share the wealth, the ONLY way to do it is by upskilling workers and simplifying technology.
The hard part of course is investing the money in marketing and support to match the user recognition and experience that Uber and Lyft, subsidized by VC wallets, can provide to their customers.
Uber, Airbnb are good examples of this. When regulation caught up with them, the damage was done for better or worse. To this day, some regulators still struggle to keep up due to the lack of resources, and the tech does achieve this... and now you have tech oligarchs dismantling the government bodies responsible for regulation.
So I don't think it's just a matter of people upskilling to generate more value, because people pay taxes for the work they do - they can't afford the lawyers and structures to avoid this. The people who have the luck and the opportunities to generate this kind of value are already doing it, or will do it, or don't want to do it.
So while I agree with you, and people should have access to the opportunities to upskill and to generate value, I also think there's a massive gap in income and taxes in a lot of democratic countries. These things can go, and should go, together.
There are a bunch of white-label ride share apps. When Austin banned Uber and Lyft in 2016 it took about a day before new services popped up to replace them.
1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity
2. Democratize ownership
That's it.
It is the same just with extra steps which put politicians and such in control of it all. Which is why something like these really are the only viable tactics to the overarching strategy. Politicians won't allow change that excludes them from power
So if a factory used to employ 100 people, who were paid a salary, that salary was taxed generating income for societal benefit like roads and hospitals. But if automation comes in and produces the same with just 10 people, the money from income taxes for societal benefit is reduced by 90%. The net effect is that society may have less money for the collective benefit even as production gets more efficient. An automation tax would make up the difference.
It’s not altogether different than the “mileage” tax for electric vehicles to displace the gasoline taxes that fund roads. It’s a different tax scheme because the fundamental premise has changed (road use is proportional to gasoline consumption/tax needs are proportional to human salary). Taxes are systems of convention so we don’t need to pretend they must adhere to some immutable physical law.
To your question about how it could be implemented, I’m sure there’s lots of nuance. But to illustrate it off the top of my head, industries may have baseline rates of per-capita production and if they implement automation to exceed that substantially, that excess production would be taxed. So a craftsman woodworker who makes five items a week wouldn’t be affected, but a cabinet factory making 300 per capita items per week would.
I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it. There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity and self worth. The value of work is not just about earning money, or the portion of that money that is transferred to social uses through taxation or otherwise. If you just implement UBI there'll be bored directionless people, drug use, criminality and social problems. What we need is recognition that (a) we don't need the people anymore (b) that's OK (c) different people may freely choose between social engagement and hibernating in a room with VR or going full artist hermit mode or becoming a triple PhD or being a psychonaut or whatever.
The oddball reality is we're sort of there already, it's just not evenly distributed. Ask an anthropologist or an economist or a technologist: what policies should governments put in place to support people and society in a transition to "nobody works or needs to work or engage with one another at all?" Turn them all in to GPS tracked phone zombies? Build sovereign wealth funds? Redefine collective identities in virtual spaces? Slowly introduce methods to reduce fertility? Reject technology and return to nature?
It seems to me that our ape minds are not well suited to the new reality. Most will seemingly choose to live a reactionary life of experiential consumption in a bubble of consensual hallucination crafted by technology that is controlled by others... and soon, controlled by endless generative AI. As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.
In an era where similar popular experience increasingly lies at every corner of the globe: ask yourself - what kind of life do you want to lead? As technologists, we now arguably have greater ability to alter humanity's course than the politicians. We should think about how to use it.
1) The past gives context and so we shouldn't dismiss it. In this case, it provides insight into why the current tax structure is the way it is. If the underlying premise change (ie the nature of work changes) we should look to also changing the tax system. To me, that is looking forward, but using the context of the past to inform our judgement. Imagine if the past tax was based only on agrarian income because that formed the basis of the economy when the country was founded; I don’t think we’d want that same tax structure in a modern economy when the proportion of farmers is in single digits.
2) I think this ignores the overall system. The economic system isn't one dimensional. Society benefits from the factory, but the factory also benefits from society. They don't work in isolation, so a single end goal ("just skip the factory and give people money") is an over simplification of the system and its goals.
3) But you would all pay an income tax, so (in an ideal implementation) it balances out. No automation tax collection, but higher income tax collection. The inverse is true when it spills over the automation tax threshold: lower income tax on per capita production, but higher automation tax collection.
>I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it.
Of course there is, and I've admitted there would be a lot of nuance. We should be careful that the nuance isn't gamed, but that doesn't mean the best alternative is the current system, or worse, an overly simple system like a flat tax that disregards nuance completely.
>There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity
Yes. There's some benefit to this, but it can easily spill over into a toxic mindset. I don't want to live in a society where people's identity (and potentially moral self-worth) is at the whim of an employer. I think the job/identity coupling is a very Western mindset (probably rooted in a Puritan work ethic), but not a particularly healthy one. That's why we have issues with diseases/deaths of desperation like you allude to. I think the better solution is to decouple people's self-worth from their work, rather than ensure people keep working.
>The oddball reality is we're sort of there already I hear this a lot, but it reminds me of when I was in college (decades ago) and I had a professor (who was nearing retirement at the time) and he spoke about when he was in college he had to write an essay about how people would manage their lives when they no longer had any work to do because of all the efficiency gains that were just on the horizons.
>As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.
I think this is the Aldous Huxley A Brave New World viewpoint (written in 1931) so I don't think it's anything new. FWIW I tend to agree.
Imagine an early human group of 40 people. If one person hoarded the food of 37 others and employed the remaining two just to guard it, it wasn't long before the ruse was up and there was a revolt and the food reclaimed.
Now, only because of scale and abstraction, basically the same setup is possible (0.1% owns as much as 50% of the population).
Our time is perverted ownership-wise, and it's time to go back to a truly cooperative society.
Cooperation, not hoarding, was the foundation of the beginning of civilisation.
---
My ideal future resembles Star Trek: a world where money is obsolete (at least on Earth), and people pursue exploration, science, and the arts purely out of passion and curiosity.
A society driven by innovation, not profit.
I love this, thank you for specifying the condition under which you might be convinced otherwise. I respect your position more for this. (And unfortunately as a Star Trek fanatic myself, agree with it so far as well).
Step 2) some drunk invents FTL
Step 3) the Vulcans show up
What's worse (for the society), is that in this world nobody has an incentive to create wealth, because they know it'll just be taken away. When rich people aren't in power, people with political capital and big guns are. I don't think that's better.
If AGI takes over, that changes things, somewhat. If it creates unlimited abundance, then it shouldn't matter who has the most (if everyone has plenty). Yes, it would create power disparity, but the thing is, there'll always be SOMEBODY at the top of the social hierarchy, with most of the money and power - in the AGI scenario, that is someone who is in charge of AGI's actions.
Either it's AGI itself (in which case all bets are off, since it's an alien god we cannot control), or the people who have developed AGI, or the politicians who have nationalized it.
Personally, I'm uncomfortable with anyone having that much power, but if I had to pick the lesser evil - I'd prefer it to be a CEO of an AI company (who, at least, had the competence and skill to create it), instead of the AGI itself (who has no reason to care about us unless we solve alignment), or one of the political world leaders (all of whom seem actively insane and/or evil).
Where are you getting the 'earn' part from, and why isn't it in scare quotes like 'hoard'? It seems like you're just changing the parameters of the argument to support the conclusion you prefer.
I know this has been discussed at length in many places, but I just want to point out that it isn't binary. There is some kind of distribution where "sovereign ownership" (full protection, no taxes, no redistribution) would entice the most people to create wealth (and even then, I doubt it would be 100% of the population), all the way to "mob rule" where a minimal number of people would be enticed to create wealth (and I don't think it would be 0%). People do things for multidimensional reasons.
That said, our societies have tried many variations along the spectrum between these two extremes, and I think we have uncovered the importance of protecting wealth and the incentive to create it.
The less need there is for human labor, the less disincentive humans have for killing each other over raw materials.
I'd be happy to live in a version of society where there's enough abundance and good will that people just give to charity, and that is enough to support everyone, and nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want.
I only dislike it when people advocate for involuntary redistribution of wealth, because it has a lot of negative side effects people aren't thinking through. Also, because I think that it's evil and results in the sort of society and culture where it would be a nightmare to live in.
I live in Germany where we have taxes & don't consider it a nightmare.
Places with governments that weak also tend to prominently feature involuntary redistribution of wealth. It tends to be more self-service at the hands of the end-recipients and without the kind of ethical theory behind it that is at least the notional framework fo redistribution by functional governments, but it still very much occurs.
Most western countries mostly respect individual freedom and property, taxes being an exception to that, somewhat limited and controlled. I see that as a necessary evil - something we can't fully avoid (at least, I can't figure out how we'd do that), but should try to minimize, to avoid sliding down the spectrum towards more and more evil versions of that.
I think most western countries are nice to live in because they do comparatively good job at respecting people's freedom, property, and the right to keep the stuff they earn.
Advocating for more redistribution is taking steps away from that, in the direction people don't realize they don't want to go in.
> Advocating for more redistribution is taking steps away from that, in the direction people don't realize they don't want to go in.
I hate to break it to you, considering how much effort you put into your comment, but this is already the case. Global economics is something we CANNOT control already, so the world you live in, is ALREADY governed by alien God. The self-described "optimists" here are naive at best, and delusional at worst.
Capitalism favors success and dominance over virtue, but some social subsets (eg clergy) get status through virtue.
If we had a hyptothetical coloured currency where one kind could only be spent buying property, other necessities, some luxuries like travels. As long as the currencies could be enforced to not be interchangable the "dominance" becomes realative with respect to influence points one has collected.
The problem with the Star Trek fantasy is that it's a lie even within the show. There are still people with obligations. There are still treaties and trade. There is still a hierarchy where some people have more important jobs and report to others. The only thing that seems different is that no money changes hands.
If we actually automated everything so no one had to work, there would still be a gradual progression and a time when some people have to work while most don't. I'm not sure how you get through that phase, not to mention what it looks like on the other side.
One thing I think should be considered is not so much how to pay everyone "enough" but how to reduce cost of living so more people can work less, or eventually not at all (somehow without owning everything and amassing control).
Money exists fundamentally to motivate people to perform some action. In the end, it comes down to paying labor. No one pays the earth, the forest, the sun.
Automation stands to make human labor too expensive to compete, since our needs far exceed the energy it takes to operate and manufacture us.
Without human labor, you don’t need money. You just need more anthropoid robots to make more anthropoids and to execute on whatever it is you want to do, own, or construct. You don’t buy a yacht, you build a one-yacht factory to make a yacht.
Capital will become human-sparse, needing only resources and energy and will exist to serve a small group of beneficiaries, if anyone.
3: The top of the economic ladder reacts to worsening conditions by switching from promoting riskier growth based economic policies from which they might glean opportunities from new wealth, to allowing only status-quo reaffirming policies in an attempt to protect their already aggregated wealth and positions of economic power.
This leads to worsening economic and social conditions for all non-elite parts of the population, as their economic and social issues are left unaddressed and thereby worsen under the status-quo.
This leads to more pressure for the body politic to act to solve those problems, but as the top of the economic ladder now only endorses policies that support the status quo, a new political movement will need to grow that focuses only on stagnating and blocking any attempt for the government to act. All proposed reforms that allow the government to act for the benefit of the masses are blocked, all existing abilities of the government to help the masses are hollowed.
This worsens economic and social conditions, which then means this becomes a catch-22.
The political entities that are responsible for this dynamic, out of quiet guilt, instead begin lauding themselves that their actions are not the cause of worsening conditions for the masses, but are instead the realization of the representation of the ideological soul of their nation. This leaves these individuals intentionally deaf to the possibility that they might be wrong, and further reinforces their inability to compromise or present solutions that would challenge the current status-quo. This also becomes a catch-22, and can reach the point of fetishization. It also increases the tendency of this political class to promote policies that are ideologically driven political projects that hurt the country economically, because they fundamentally arise from a position that large parts of the population are not true citizens and deserve punishment.
If this trend continues unchecked, as things continue to worsen, merely rendering government unresponsive becomes insufficient. So it results in the election of strong-men type characters that sell themselves to the populace as being the only ones capable of breaking the political deadlock that prevents solutions to issues within the country, while simultaneously promising to their richest funders that they will actually use their power to further entrench the positions and wealth of the existing economic elite.
This creates a new group of politicians that seek power for themselves by exploiting this new dynamic, where they compete by their willingness to break cultural norms in order to service these two groups, and much later, a reactionary progressive cadre that functions similarly on the opposing side.
This new dynamic worsens the economic and social issues at play, as the crumbling competency of hollowed out social norms and institutions lose their ability to function as effectively for the mass populace until the standard of living has fallen sufficiently to match the capabilities of the country to support it, and an increasingly deaf and authoritarian political class is far less effective at managing the needs of the people than in the previous more-decentralized state. Quality of life continues to drop, either slowly over time, or violently.
At this point, the new political class will consider usurping power and wealth from the rich elite, as there are no longer legal norms to constrain them.
Regardless, with decreased capacity in an ill functioning state, where the new political elite has acquired power by servicing an elite class focused on maintaining wealth instead of driving growth in the nation, the country loses its ability to compete economically with rival nations, and begins falling further and further behind, thereby worsening the above cycle.
But what you have to remember, is its all worth it, because the alternative includes potential taxes, promoting policies to raise wages, or reinvesting in your fellow countrymen, and those things are all worse than what I just described /s
Unfortunately, due to the way politics and money work in the US, we have zero real choices...
>1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity
This is blocked by our two-party political system. Openly by Republicans (at the moment) and practically by Democrats. Both of our political parties seem to serve the people that actually pay them (ie. rich business owner donors) vs. people that vote for them. At least if it comes down to a problem between the two. This is shown in sharp relief in the famous chart by Martin Gilens showing which laws get passed in the US based on interest group.
>2. Democratize ownership
This is blocked by actual owners. Money equals ownership in the US. So, perhaps we can use our dollars and spend a certain way, one might think. Just BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street combined have more assets under management than the entire United States GDP, and they are just 4 companies. Good luck!
>That's it.
That is probably not it, but if it is we are fucked!
Sorry to be a pessimist, but progress is not guaranteed. I see the mid twentieth century as largely an anomaly in human history. Going forward, I see wealth concentration continuing to accelerate, with a widening gulf between classes that control the means of production and everyone else, which due to technological advancement will make a lot of people's labor much less profitable. Basically, a reversion to a more feudal system, where there is essentially an aristocratic class that hoards and lives off its previous wealth, and pretty much everyone else living at a subsistence level. Think Ireland in the early 1800s (not necessarily that level of absolute deprivation, but same level of relative deprivation compared to the land owners).
The reason I see this as the most probable outcome is when I hear people talk about "raise wages to march global productivity" or "democratize ownership", I don't see any rationale as to how or why that would happen. Do you think the people in control will just give that away from the goodness of their hearts? There is literally no economic or social reason to expect this to happen. It's clear that democracies can be successfully manipulated into "blaming the boogeyman", so I don't think the democratic process will bring about these changes.
Happy to hear a rational argument to the contrary, but my primary point is that I rarely hear any argument about how we get to there from here.
I'd start with changing what and how we measure. A move away from single-dimension variables like GDP and simplistic closed-form calculations like the Black-Scholes formula and all it led us to believe.
If we agree simple-but-wrong metrics are bad, then we can (I believe) move towards simulations--not "my simulation" nor "your simulation", but ways to talk about beliefs and outcomes. I think the future will involve AI-assisted computable discussions, where multiple variables and the ability to dynamically incorporate or exclude assumptions from opposing perspectives will lead us to some shared agreement and mutually beneficial outcomes (while allowing for many areas where people will continue to disagree).
I'd propose next that we continue to raise the prominence of evidence showing how cooperation is often better than competition. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom spent her life identifying systems and methods of cooperation. She proposes, "We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies [e.g. of the commons] nor free of moral responsibility."
Robert Axelrod ran simulations on the iterated prisoner's dilemma and concluded, "forgiveness, cooperation, and reputation" are a stable strategy in most real-world conditions.
Strong ideologies that promote extreme individualism, marketed as scientifically sound, deserve great skepticism IMO, and should be treated with the same wariness as two missionaries knocking on your door.
It's an incredibly murky train of logic though. Most wealthy people have done nothing directly to cause the poor to suffer. But if you examine it closely, you can find links from greed <---> suffering everywhere.
I think there is another word for this.
read To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.
There are only a very few cases where Democratize ownership worked and it was under a benevolent dictator. After the dictator died, everything fell apart.
1. The boomer political class that is perfectly fine with spending more and more money but unwilling to pay for it, mortgaging everything the previous generations built. Basically sucking all the value out of it for themselves so that their children and grandchildren will have nothing.
2. A big symptom is that tax rates on the richest have been going down for the last 50 years, and are now ridiculously low.
3. The thing that makes that work: unnaturally low interest rates, for the last several decades.
4. A complete unwillingness to use antitrust to break up the largest companies.
I don't see how this is going to turn around, because the propaganda is now so good they have convinced the poor that all of this is somehow good for them.
Since 1960 American GDP has more than tripled in real terms (constant dollars): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDUSA
And if knowledge workers are more productive, then knowledge work is cheaper. Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work. So the number of workers required might actually increase. It also might not, but first order analysis that assumes decreased knowledge workers is not sufficient.
C.f. garment makers. Partial automation of clothes making made clothes cheaper, so now people have closets full of hundreds of garments rather than the 2 sets our great-grandparents likely had. There are now more people making garments now than there was 100 years ago.
garment makers chosen because of this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450515
I found this document: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126040017/https://ribevikin... It asks the question "How long would it take to make a Viborg shirt?". The answer seems to be 354 hours per their experiments. This is from seed to shirt. (linen)
I'd be surprised if we had that many man-hours, let alone 3 or 4 times that (this is a single piece of clothing), in our wardrobes. Conservatively assuming a man-hour in the wardrobe costs us $5 (while people are often paid less, their salaries are also but one expense), you'd need at least around $1500 to equal just that shirt.
From your document, weaving and spinning are > 85% of the labor in your shirt. Those would be almost 0% for a shirt made 100 years ago. And those wouldn't be the only steps mechanized 100 years ago.
Only the recent trend of online banking services is really actually turning this around.
This is Jevon's paradox.
> So the number of workers required might actually increase.
The increased demand for work turning into new jobs for existing workers, that is where the question is more complex.
This has gone the other way too in matters of muscle - people who wouldn't have been employed before can now be hired to do an existing task.
When you go from pulling shopping carts to an electrical machine that pulls carts for you, now you can hire a 60 year old to pull carts in the parking lot where previously that job would be filled by teens.
This is all a toss-up right now.
In an ideal world, I will be paying less for the same amount of knowledge work in the future, but as a worker I might get paid more for the same hours I spend at work.
My hours are limited, but my output is less limited than before.
You would write it Jevons' paradox. Six sources on its wiki page write it as such in their title.
Now imagine dystopian world where AI can solve most data / engineering / science problems for cheap. Or even for free, just ask.
That's the dystopia.
There are trends in both directions in manufacturing. On the one hand, we had amazing fountain pens with forged gold nibs hand-tuned by a nibmeister that can do things you can't replicate now. The trend was toward really crappy pens that could be mass-manufactured and required less skill by the consumer to operate, but are demonstrably inferior. People chose to buy the cheaper, barely passable option more often by orders of magnitude.
On the other hand, we have automotive manufacturing. Modern cars are more reliable, safer, more comfortable, more performant, more featured, capable, (and expensive?) than ever.
With knowledge work, it's clear that certain things will get "optimized" into disfunction. (Look at the complete lack of agency corporations have taken away from the people operating the public interfaces to the company.) Be it help/support centers, resolving unusual issues, or dealing with automated bans/account deactivations.
It's hard to say what direction it will go...
I don't need to imagine, that's the reality we live in right now
I don't think AI is really following Moore's law here.
Then we need new. The important last year step was distillation as mainstream. In my opinion. Now using old models to train new is normal or even necessary. That was done before, but it was sort of experimental. Creating targeted datasets is a very powerful thing. Now big models can be trained on quality data instead of internet random mix. This includes long thinking and tools use examples from the beginning and not as fine tuning.
Another way of thinking is AI is steadily getting close to human level IQ. Not approximating, it will cross the line. This distance had reduced dramatically in last few years. Then it's singularity that everybody was talking about for so long.
This year we already have google's robotic multimodal. It's closed, but likely will be reproduced. Significant step toward useful generic robots.
There's lots of promises out there but not much action nor real world appeal to this stuff. That's pretty much textbook gifting as of now.
I'm also sure you can take an average personal computing consumption and multiply that by # of PCs to approximate your compilation example. I'd wager it pales compared to what the Last year of crypto mining has done alone.
Exponential population increase only began 75 years ago. This is correct but the analysis is wrong.
1) AIs enable knowledge workers to be more efficient. They don't replace them. But they'll get more done. So, you might need fewer of them.
2) This frees people up to do different, more valuable things. There's a scarcity of people on the job market. We have record employment, not unemployment. In short, freeing people up to do valuable things that need doing is a good thing.
3) A lot of the economy is the service economy. It's not about producing goods, or providing essential things like food, health care, etc. Instead it is about providing services to people at some value. The reason the economy has transitioned to that is the industrial revolution. A few hundred years ago, most of the economy was about scraping together enough food for people so they wouldn't starve. That's a solved problem. Farmers use machines instead of dozens of employees. Some of those machines are autonomous.
4) Economies are about value chains and upcycling low value resources to high value services and goods. AIs make certain things cheaper which just frees up spending on more valuable things. What's valuable is determined by people and what they value.
5) If you fire all the people and replace them with AIs (the dystopian view of AI) and they no longer make money. So their spending behavior changes. The economy changes and adapts. Spending just shifts to things we value. Like maybe a human touch.
6) You could argue that much of the economy is already bullshit jobs. Who needs managers, marketing experts, social media influencers, and all the other fluffy jobs that we invent? Somebody values that. That's why that stuff exists.
I think people talk excitedly about this post-labor society without considering how we upkeep it while all the value labor is managed by billionaires and worked on by an exceedingly small labor force maintaining the real labor force of AI. Current directions don't support topic ideals like UBI.
You mention UBI. You could actually argue that we already have some notion of that. It's just a terribly inefficient, poorly administered, and very costly, and not very good version of it. People don't starve, they mostly have access to health care (the US being an exception to this relative to most countries, including most developing nations). And shelter too (people freezing to death because they can't hide from the elements is pretty rare). Many people live on what they get for free. It's called charity, social security, unemployment, pension, childhood, etc. But one way or another, somebody provides for them. And being dependent on just the free stuff is something that would horrify most normal people. But it's there for pretty much everyone.
Feudalism is cyclic. It comes and goes. We had a lot of it early last century. And then we got communism, socialism, unions, etc. And a surge in economic wealth for the middle class after things were rebalanced. The post WW II economic boom in the US was powered by Roosevelt's new deal. I don't think there's much respect or loyalty to the current batch of trillionaires. They can exist only because people allow them to. Future governments could find themselves empowered and tasked to do something about the economic wealth distribution. Such things have happened before. Often after some kind of revolution.
I dunno about this citation. I just read the paper and it considers "productivity" in this context to be the number of builds, commits, and pull requests in a developer week. Interestingly, there was no statistically significant difference in build success rate between those who used the AI tool (Copilot in this case) and those who didn't.
On the other hand, the worst developers reach out for help the moment things start to look unfamiliar to them. Over the years I've tried to encourage such developers to think for themselves, but I've come to realise some just can't do it if they know someone else on the team probably has the answers.
Availability of LLMs seems to be the worst thing for this kind of developer. Now they don't even have any kind of social barrier to reaching out for help. I just don't see how they're ever going to learn to do anything.
Code monkeys have always existed, and can be useful, but why wouldn't the engineers just go straight to the LLM instead of going through code monkeys?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
> The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high.
I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era. There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then that's a bonus.
I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession and want to be on good footing before it hits.
As usual, they didn't read the article. They read the headline, assumed it was about AI, and wrote the same boring "management bad, AI bad, the present bad, programmers good, the past good" rants.
That said, AI, as it improves, will only exacerbate. At least until it becomes so multiplicative that having an AI + pilot is so productive that you'd never not be happy to hire another one.
Aside from tech making information more accessible, centralization and monopolization likely played the biggest part. Driven by the design of our monetary system. Most new money enters the economy backed by endless streams of real estate debt (mortgages), public debt and corporate debt... All these well-moneyed areas (real estate, government, corporations) have become monopolized and highly political. There's just no room for real knowledge work. It's all about status games and BS internal politics. People who benefit from Cantillion effects have no interest in bringing nerds into their organizations to compete against them for their spot in front of their easy money printer.
Insiders are mostly hiring people who are dumber than themselves; people whom they can control.
I understand your sentiment and I partially agree with it. But this kind of phrasing implies that "doing the bare minimum" (to put it in another way) is a strictly bad thing.
Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort.
Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no". All I care is that he comply with all regulations and that his bread tastes good, I don't really mind if it's not best bread in the world. And even if it was the best I probably would find it too expensive to buy in a daily basis.
Another example would be blacksmiths, at some point they we our only option to make something out of metal, and they would put quite a lot of care and attention to every piece they made. But at some we created some machines that can create things out of metal. These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods.
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the "low effort" option is the correct choice. And I don't think this means the decline of knowledge work, this just means we will see a change in what is considered "relevant skills" for knowledge work.
Nope; just mine.
It sucks, because so few things in tech _are_ meaningful, and exist for a reason other than to enrich whoever owns the company making it.
I want to make things that respect the user and treats them with the love they deserve.
Looks like you already know what you want to do and how you want to do it; obsessing over assholes won't do anything for you, right? I'm only saying this to provide perspective
It is. It shows a lack of character. Have some pride in your work. Have some pride in yourself. Being lazy is pathetic.
>Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort.
There is no such thing as "need". You don't need anything. People lived for thousands of years on a diet of mostly grains living in uninsulated houses with open fires. Everything is a want. People's wants are never satisfied, you can always want more.
But even if nobody else will appreciate it, you should do the right thing anyway. You should do it because you take pride in your work.
>Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no".
Nothing to do with what I want. He needs to put in the effort. He needs to do it for himself.
>These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods.
The men that designed the machine, or ran the machine, or made the moulds, or assembled the parts, all of them worked bloody hard and were proud to do so for their families and for themselves. Work ethic was prized. This wasn't low effort. It was a different tradeoff between material inputs and material outputs, but it required no lesser work ethic. It didn't permit laziness or idleness.
The flip side is that "taking pride in your work" nearly always results in being taking advantage of from your employer, at least in salaried positions. And if you can spot the social patterns and games played such as valuing employees that work overtime (without pay), on weekends, etc, it is clear that employers love getting more value from employees without compensating them. Work extra hard for 6 months to maybe possibly get a promotion? People are generally waking up to this reality, hence the 'quiet quitting' mindset.
One can both take pride in their work, and respect their time by adhering to their employer-employee contract as written.
Lastly, in the baker example, they have a direct reason to put in their best effort (assuming the baker owns their bakery): they will gain goodwill and repeat customers if they bake very well. A salaried worker is so far removed from being directly compensated for their work. I predict the situation would be very different if salary work got commission based on sales and overtime pay.
That's part of the issue. They ignore regulations and the bread has mold. But we eat it and say "well I'm not dead". Because we're being conditioned to eat, not taste. To consume, not question.
Meanwhile, I complain the bread tastes stale and moldy and I get argued down by fake bakers that "no you don't understand this is the future of bread". Well, it sucks. I don't csre how much you're paid to say otherwise or promise they it'll taste "good" (read: not crap) in a few years. I'll go to my bakery until then instead of having your bread shoved down my throat.
Make it taste like bread first instead of hyping up how it looks so close to bread. That's the whole issue causing the downfall of society.
And what’s more worrying is things where the negative impact is higher order.
If the bread has some poison that will kill you in 5 years time etc.
Currently we maintain a bar partially with human ethics and processes, whether that is directly preventing bad outcomes because of liabilities or reflecting on bad outcomes once they happen to improve regulations (a lot of which relies on introspectability).
Once AI starts replacing the decision-making layer, we lose the collective understanding of how processes fail. Once you start needing to constrain the space of machine error, you’ve basically arrived at almost solving the problem again.
But the analogy here is, if all bakers started using bread machines every day, and new bakers only learn how to ask the bread machine to make bread, the decline of baking will surely be a step closer.
And sure we can quibble over tools the baker uses such as ovens or dough mixers or what have you, but ultimately they must know how to make bread. AI platforms attempt to remove the need to understand the code, so that people don't need to learn how it works to make it.
Quiet quitting is having no safety net when you're no longer satisfied with your job for any reason but your Healthcare is tied to your employer as ransom.
Quiet quitting is realizing you are going to be terminated in the next wave of layoffs 3-6 months later and that your efforts will not save your job anyway, so focus on jumping ship.
Greed has always existed, this was just a new name companies tried to gaslight with. I don't want to hear about "lazy workers" in a time where layoffs (that aren't performance based) are only increasing in a society thst decides it lawful to treat an employment contract as as a toy to be thrown away at any whim.
My wife works in healthcare and they just announced that AI would generate 50% of their documents. According to my wife, every in every review she's done of the work, there are critical errors in logic or reasoning (hallucinations), but leadership doesn't care because they a "grading" the AI on things like grammar and spelling. So, yay, it spelled "fusospirochetosis" correctly, but unfortunately it attributed that to a 23 year old woman who came in for a broken arm.
I think we need to be prepared for "vibe coding" taking over every industry. Leadership is going to blindly implement broken AI to replace workers.
Now, you might think that threat of lawsuits, regulations, and ethics standards will save your industry. And maybe that's true, but I personally don't think so. I personally think we are going to see country-scale enshitification of everything as lazy people use AI to generate everything which is then reviewed by lazy people who also use AI to review everything and no one notices or cares until it's too late (and maybe not even then).
I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced.
Sound about right to me. A large quantity of documentation is written solely to be written, not read. If it's your job to write reports, article, memos, whatever, and you deep down know that this isn't being read, then why not have to AI do it?
I think that we're producing way to many documents/reports/content in general and we need to slow down. Humans can't keep up, neither on the production side, nor the consumption, so we employ computers to "help", but it's all busy work.
After about 3 months of doing this, I asked my manager why I was doing this if no-one cared or noticed. He told me to stop and see if anyone said something. I stopped, interned another 15 months and it wasn't ever mentioned.
Hell of a lesson to learn as a newbie
Not saying you were wrong to drop, but multiple people dropped the BL there if there how they are treating their testing.
Medical records seems to be the opposite of this. Nurses document to report to doctors so they can diagnose and advise. That seems like the worst step to cut corners on. Accountants document reports for patient for prescriptions and diagnosis that can affect their lives. Heck, as a CYA you document records in case a law firm comes in demanding papers to read. Do they think lawyers don't care about this stuff?
Just because not everyone is gonna pour over ever word doesn't mean no one will.
If AI could cause a fiasco on the level of Toyota's unintended acceleration debacle from 2008, which caused the largest auto recall in history, that is something that would give pause to using AI, no? If AI leads to bad products that kill people, companies will lose money and they will not want to use AI.
Oh lord, that is a phrase I did not need to think about today
I dunno. Anyone who’s been at a big company (the kind that are inclined to over-hire) can attest to the massive population of folks who don’t seem to have any productive job. Does AI spell doom for those people? I have no idea, their job wasn’t to be productive in the first place. Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right?
I guess maybe just engineering jobs are on the chopping block. Doomed, by the nature of their productivity actually being tangible, to be replaced by an AI that does their job worse.
If you over-hired and now need to layoff people, because founding and cheap loans aren't available, then AI provides a convenient excuse. You don't have to admit that you paid people to do nothing/very little for the last ten year.
Honestly, any company that's still laying off people that they "overhired" during the pandemic needs to take a hard look at their leadership teams, because they've had ample opportunity to be rid of such people.
I don't think it was a grand conspiracy. Executives are just panicking and don't have much more of a clue than the workers. It's just too bad they could weather the storm regardless while people relying on paychecks suffer consequences.
If I quizzed someone in the middle of that curve on (1) basic keyboard shortcuts, (2) how to VLOOKUP in excel, (3) how to buy a domain, (4) how to make a presentation that truly looked good, (5) detect if an email is a phishing campaign, (6) make a secure password, (7) do research in their industry…
You get my point…The skill of an average knowledge worker today is miles and miles away from elite levels.
Knowledge work is not declining, we’re just watching the average ability of a typical worker go way up, over the course of a generation.
Wouldn't that by definition always be true? Average and "elite" are dynamic values. I'm unsure if that gap is increasing or not.
I will focus on making small startups(will clamor around for ideas since I'm not very creative) since getting a job is ALMOST impossible. I've GitHub projects, degree, don't expect anything crazy since COL is low in EE but it feels like unless you are Jeff Dean nowadays is auto-rejection.
Very low number of callbacks. I do have a multi-year gap since graduation which I know it impacts but this market is INSANE and has been for years.
For comparison, just with HS degree while in uni, I had more callbacks for orders of magnitude better companies than I do now. It's like instead of progressing my career prospects have winded down. Crazy times.
Instead of paying people more and reducing hours we let enough be taken by some at the top it unbalanced the whole system.
We should be working 3 day weeks on the same wages by now.
4 day week would be a start, it would give parents enough time to do chores and have a weekend.
In fact, we produce so much that it's making people sick: obesity, diabetes, atrophy, cancer, loneliness, depression etc.
At some point a long time ago productivity stopped being the thing that made us happy and started being the thing that made us sick.
But our politicians never stopped using this crude measurement as a target. If there's one thing people love it's a number. Number goes up: good, number goes down: bad. Easy. But there's no number for happiness, so our political systems are incapable of targeting it.
Now that productivity is long behind us we now need to start working out how to climb out of these local optima we've dug ourselves into. We need to solve problems like cancer. This doesn't get done by people going to a building and turning a handle all day. This gets done by thinking.
GP didn't claim it was
Really? An economist has the authority and understanding to say that? People are getting carried away by projecting the gains seen from AI assistants. They need to understand that they can't simply project some trends so linearly.
The same people saw cars and aeroplanes and said that we are going to have flying cars very soon. Nice projection of the trends!
My null hypothesis is that interest rates are over, fat is being trimmed, of course the people most affected are going to be those at the bottom of the food chain: inexperienced new grads.
Sucks to be a new grad (as it did in 2008-9), but in macro terms I'd say wait and check back in two years.
I also remember seeing some study that says that 2008 grads' pay never caught up, and that e.g. 2010 grads' pay is higher despite their having less experience. Sucks, but you play the cards you're dealt.
I was more talking indirect, but simply voting in whatever rep that sounded better without keeping the policies they focus on.
It just caused a massive drop in supply and landlords moving to alternative stuff like temporary contracts to get around it. The latter could be legislated against but would probably just cause a further drop in supply.
Ultimately you can't cheat the market, if you want lower prices you either increase supply or decrease demand.
Goofy energy wasting language models take an extreme backseat; however, this is "private equity world" and the rules are just to rip everyone off regardless of long term outcomes.
What are "quality of life improvements for everyone on the planet"? What does that even mean? Are you proposing some sort of communist system? Why, in response to an entirely unrelated comment on an unrelated topic?
What the hell is "private equity world"?
As a result, we have a huge supply of young people who are college educated and have eschewed the trades because they believe that physical labour is below their standing. They're not wrong, since that's what they've been told their entire lives. They're all looking for white-collar work, but we simply don't have enough jobs for all of them.
History is rife with examples: Galileo, St. Francis of Assisi, Boltzmann, Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Parker, Bernie Sanders ... the list goes on and on.
Most every tradition in Earth's various societies consists solely of excuses to keep doing the same stupid crap, for the same stupid reasons, with the same willfully ignorant disregard to better ways of doing things.
Only compassion gives us the clear perspective on how we can best apply our energy to lift everyone's boat, without harm or misery to either ourselves or our blessed Earth.
"Same as it ever was." --Talking Heads
So now they are downsizing and moving teams to India. From Google to American Airlines. What could possibly go wrong.
Why anyone continues to use it is another question entirely.
It suffered through a fairly common problem where due to its value and revenue it tries to justify a huge headcount, usually due to managers getting paid based on headcount numbers. In reality it always should have had less numerous, better paid engineers, rather than management parasites.
Perhaps AI is the death of corporations. Corporations are designed to extract money by charging as much as possible while spending as little as possible. That seems fair to me, right? We do not expect a corporation to understand the concept of common good. What AI does is to make it appear as though people are not needed, you can just replace them all with AI & machines. Profits go up, yes? Corporations make more and more money. What could go wrong.
The first thing that is going wrong - currently - is that if you do not pay people enough money to buy things, then guess what happens to your business? Goodbye Apple. Goodbye Google. Goodbye moon. Oops, sorry. This is already happening. If the wolves on Isle Royale get too good at catching and eating deer, guess what happens?
Secondly and perhaps most importantly is that corporations are good at exploiting. If you know how to make a car, a corporation can make one so easily that you do not need to pay any people. Exploit. If you see a corporation pursuing lock-in (here's looking at you Apple, Walmart, etc) then you see a corporation that has no good business model. This does not mean they are dead or not going to be around, it just means they are a dinosaur waiting for some event. But the question is whether they can invent the next car? And what if the thing in short supply is not in the category of commodities. We still do not really understand what we can do with computers, the internet or block chains. Corporations know how to exploit those technologies. After all we still have windows. But is that the best we can do? Track people? Wow.
So if you are a person who can actually think, and do. If you can figure out how to cross a stream in the winter, or make sour dough bread or even just raise chickens, there is going to be a massive new opportunity. For you. Because AI cannot create new concepts that are people based and even if they can, then corporations will fire them if they do.
If your job is however a corporate pablum thing, like for example if you write pablum pieces for the NYT, then my advice is to run for the hills. And run fast.
Look, the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination. This used to be common knowledge when software jobs were far fewer and still has not realistically sunk in with the modern work force. People that don’t fully embrace this as a value consensus are ripe for elimination.
A lot of software employment has also seen rising wages inversely proportional to return on investment until so many of the layoffs started. There are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training. For years employers have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth. Now they are doubling down with AI. You still have a population of people unqualified and insufficiently to perform the work assigned.
All of these things mean software employment is a liability of declining worth that employers are still not willing to accept.
Every time there's a downturn in labor field, common courtesy goes out the window (I might say more nasty things, but the truth is I don't know you so it might very well be unwarranted for in this case, but I do know many callous people who spew/project similar things). Sort of like what Buffet said about the tide -- you see people's true colors.
The company I'm working for fired people because of financial issues and the new CEO instead of being humble and just saying what it is, indirectly called those fired or about to be fired "lazy". I know those people, none were lazy.
I've worked in this field for 20 years and very few people are actually incompetent or lazy (mainly banks) -- and those are not the people to get fired in a downturn, because those people usually move into management (because why would you get rid of a good sd, qa ? or if you're a good senior sd or qa, why would you move to a junior manager position?). It's usually the environment and management problem, not a incompetency or laziness problem for why things go wrong when they do.
And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?
> have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth.
It's not a short circuit at all, just common sense. Every time I see a long running java project that uses some obscure bullshit frameworks ("spring is overrated") I KNOW there's huge cost in the future for the re-invention of features spring boot has out of the box and solving many many issues and quirks with library integrations, lifecycle management, hours upon hours of people learning the quirks of the spring-less project idioms, that spring users will never encounter.
* I never described anyone as lazy.
* Incompetence and laziness are completely orthogonal. A lazy person can still achieve higher than average productivity while an extremely hard working person can under deliver.
* People are not generally protected from layoffs by moving into management. Furthermore, movement into management is sometimes not voluntary.
* The excuse mentioned by one employer does not describe or qualify conditions in the industry either on average or as a whole.
* A person’s common sense personal opinion is not an objective qualifier.
Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.
> And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?
If your comment were limited to just that one quote it would have been much better as it alludes a deeper cultural failure.
I never said you did, I just added another bogus reason CEOs use to justify why layoffs are necessary, when really, the only reason is the market is bad and we want to have more profits and we thought we needed more people but really we don't. Or we just like to keep people in line with a 5% culling like facebook (?) now does -- things we could not do in the market conditions before but we can now do with impunity.
But all that shines a negative light on management, and people are generally empathetic to other people losing their livelihoods and why do that when it's so much easier to scapegoat.
>Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.
But you feel your original perspective is objective?
This is what I call first person problem. I have had two separate careers spanning decades each: software and military. Then because of community connections and decades spent talking with military members who themselves have other primary professions it seems clear software has a problem of self orientation that I don't see in any other profession except education. Entertainment may have this too, but I don't have any exposure to that industry.
Extreme self orientation is the inability to perceive the world outside of what is immediately limiting or gratifying to the person in question. This impacts perceptions of risk, statistics, measures, power distance, empathy, social intelligence, and much more. Convicted criminals acting in their own interests convicted of white collar crimes in industries like law and finance demonstrate this first person problem less than the average participant in education and software, which could be horrifying except many of those guys are sociapaths with high social intelligence and learned masking behaviors.
Outside of employment extreme self orientation is typically associated with a variety of anti-social behaviors like: autism, narcissism, sociopathy, and more. These are mental health concerns because they are limiting to the person in question and/or harmful persons around them.
The difference between our comments is that your comment was littered with first person pronouns. It was all about what you witnessed in limited contexts and what affects you. My comment was about the industry at large absent any participation from myself.
But we are both humans, limited by our own experiences. I have no problem admiting these are my own deductions about the world and my own perspective.
Unless I had scientific data to back the generality of my statements, I see no reason to use such a third person view.
Often good people become bad for common corporate reasons:
1. They are hired with 100% benefits and slowly benefits are taken away, effectively a paycut (e.g., higher health insurance premiums, higher co-pays, no more educational reimbursements promised on offer letters)
2. They are not given pay increases in line with cost of living (sometimes given no pay increases) despite company products costing more with inflation and despite growth (employees arent dumb and notice this)
3. Promotions are popularity contests, not based on merit, and ambitious engineers realize merit doesnt matter and clock in/out w/o care
I use software to design algorithms to make capital decisions, where distribution centers and warehouses are built. I am not automating a human job.
In fact I would argue that while people were still making capital decisions, the idea of optimizing them is only practical WITH some kind of software / calculator / computer. The tooling I write has added jobs, not eliminated them.
This point is so wrong.
Software/information machines also eliminate errors and reduce latency. There are other benefits. Sometimes they eliminate unnecessary labor as a side effect.
My observation is that software that attempts to replace people dies and the software that persists elevates people. It helps them concentrate. Good software helps people focus even better on the problems they are solving by eliminating or dissolving the noise into the background.
You secure an asset (specialized knowledge), and then you just live off of it while doing the minimal work you can, by turning yourself into an asset.
Even though this affords many people a comfortable life, much like being a landowner of a vast portfolio of properties, it contributes to the inequality and degradation of society, splitting people between those who must labor physically and those who look down at them comfortably from high balconies.
Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor. It was that way for thousands of years and humanity flourished. People may not like it, but humanity can only truly relax and do nothing when it has reached its peak and every problem is solved, and we are just not there yet. Back to work.
How is that any different from any other skilled labor? Recall the old joke about the plumber who charged $1 for banging on the pipe and $1000 for knowing where to bang. Even purely physical labor like digging ditches requires that you have certain physical traits (strength and stamina) that you can look at as assets.
> Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor.
Like what? There is virtually nothing that used to be done with human labor that can't be done by machine nowadays. Even ditch-digging is mostly done with backhoes, not men with shovels. For the moment we still need (some) humans to run the machines, but that's knowledge work too.
That can be true for physical labor as well. Fire fighters. Ambulance drivers. Soldiers. All get paid to be on-call.
Rent-seeking is different. Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth [1]. That is not at all the same as making your living off of assets that you've earned with past labor.
What's the evidence that humanity flourished? The elites flourished off lots of slave and peasant labor. The standard of living was much lower while inequality was a lot higher. You would need to go back to hunter and gatherers, and it's hard to compare those lifestyles with today. For one things, billions of people don't live in nomadic tribes. Not everyone wants or can do physical labor. As a hunter gatherer, you had little choice but to pitch in.
The fact that you do not understand anything besides physical work as work is perplexing and, honestly, pathetic. It smacks of someone who has failed to make a life for themself, and is lashing out at anyone who is a viable scapegoat.
But there is some knowledge work where you are simply being paid in case people need you a small % of the time, and most of the time you’re not doing much or very trivial tasks. Like a consultant.