Rolling the ladder up behind us
xeiaso.net
xeiaso.net
I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground.
No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.
We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a more valuable/desired output.
Sometimes it's quite obvious when a technology is superior to another as almost all the qualities of it are advantageous: it's made faster, less expensively, and the result is better with such a gap between it and the old way that there's just no denying that the new way is better.
Sometimes the new technology is really a mix of qualities. Let's focus on the mix that generally gets the most attention: the new way is faster/cheaper but the output is not of a higher quality. Sometimes this new way of cheaper+faster but lower quality "wins out" and the consumer prefers it.
And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
An imperfect and potentially flawed example: a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer. The old way of making a superior product still exists and some consumers still prefer it but most do not.
Fundamentally, this is a shift that is rooted in the perception, true or not, of the consumer that the new way is more desirable.
Some folks are not happy with the higher prices of the outputs of old ways of doing things or the effects that the new ways have on jobs, the economy, and/or society.
Fundamentally, this has to do with consumer preference and that's where any blame should be meted out.
Monopolies and pricing power clearly destroy this utopia but even without those I try to remember Pratchett's "boots theory" whenever I start to blame the consumer for "accepting" abuse from the capital in power of what gets made, when, and for whom.
Yep, capitalism fails in a few ways in the long run. Monopolies, imperfect competition, etc., which is why regulation is required to optimize the system.
I believe the science knows how to fix capitalism, and has known for decades. But nobody from the rules wants that.
YM "ruleRs", right?
I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.
They don't know it'll fall apart faster, to begin with… and then by the time they do, they've already spent enough of their clothes budget that they can't afford to buy proper cloth, and it's hard to find that nowadays anyway, so they'll just have to buy more of the low-quality stuff.
The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.
Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.
"They were skeptical that the shitty cloth that the power loom produced would be a net benefit to society because it meant that customers would inevitably have to buy their clothes over and over again, turning a one-time purchase into a subscription."
This is such an obvious attempt to reframe history to fit the modern discourse. What Luddites cared about was their own jobs, not "net benefit to society".
Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software.
Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.
That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.
It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.
I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.
Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.
This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
Not true at all. Apple and its expensive devices are the best selling devices in their categories.
I worked for a 100-year-old company that has one of the most respected brands in the world. I am quite familiar with what it takes, to make the highest-Quality stuff.
That said, it's downright impossible to start from scratch, creating high-Quality stuff.
I'm not so sure. It is not common, but it seems that some companies actually start with high quality and only much after offer popular options. Just a random example is uber, at least here it started with only uber black and only after it was very popular it offered uber x.
Another counter example to cheap stuff is luxury clothing/purse/perfume brands. Actually, I'm not so sure if this is about quality or status.
- the explosion of software needs due to the internet
- the scalability of software solutions (zero marginal cost for additional copies is a hell of a drug)
I still think that is true, but it may be fading away for many people. That said, the newer devs that I've met that have found jobs tend to find them at bespoke consulting shops (rather than product companies).
I think there will always be room for quality craftmanship in software, but it will be boutique, the same way that there is craftmanship for high quality furniture or cabinetry. ~95% is manufactured mass market and cheap, ~5% is high quality bespoke and expensive.
Why can't you get a team together?
I dream of working on big and meaningful things ever since a teenager (and I'm 45 currently) but yeah, I can't afford doing it for free. I keep being a drone.
But if somebody were to stretch out a helping hand and pay me to do the big and meaningful things I'll likely accept two days later.
Ay, there's the rub...
It is a lot more expensive to do high-Quality work, than it is to do shoddy (or, to be fair, barely acceptable) work. You need to hire more experienced (expensive) people, and then, you need to hire better managers, because you don't want the usual crap managers in charge of them.
And then, you need to pay for the time they take, "polishing the fenders."
Once you have an established brand, you can do these kinds of things, but it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
> it's pretty much impossible to start from scratch (without deep, patient pockets).
Well, I was not referring to myself here, FWIW. I ain't ever going below $10k a month (not to mention that for any meaningful life plans $18k - $25k a month is much more strategically desirable) but I was somewhat referring to many certain techies here on HN who (1) have the talents and tech skills and (2) are very well-off and could work for charity wages for 5+ years without a problem (think $3k - $5k a month).
I am just very sad that these people, who are in a 10x better position than I ever was for 23+ years of career, did not group up and did not create the next-gen lab experience, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of UNIX. :/
As for the rest of the world, the owning class are quite fine with what they already have -- they know tech currently is not 100% reliable but they are never making 5x the investment for what they see as a 10% improvement (which is exactly the part where they are wrong -- but these people can't think beyond 2-3 quarters ahead anyway).
But I also know that I am an outlier, and, quite frankly, an anachronism.
Just a little while ago, I made a new release of this app[0]. I talked to someone this morning, and realized that they had no idea that you could swipe the screen, to get to different times.
I added a small label to the bottom of the main screen, telling folks that they could swipe to see different times. I had to translate it to Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese, which ChatGPT was ideal for (I don't think that I'd use it for bulk translations, but it was great for a "spot translation").
That kind of thing may seem silly, but it's also exactly the kind of thing that many, many apps don't do. It's quite easy to say that "any power user knows to swipe," but that often excludes a huge number of folks. Since I started hiding the main time selection control panel, swiping has become the main navigation technique.
[0] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/VirtualMeetingFinder
It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.
The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address
im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.
to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up
my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated
* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.
There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.
This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.
EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.
> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.
Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.
To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.
And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".
The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The agricultural practices you hint at only make sense in a boardroom. I'm sure it seems rational or logical, but it's not based in experience or ethics.
> But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity;
It is probably the foundational discipline of humanity. Cultivating and cooking food is what allowed us to do everything since.
To repeat what I said before, more clearly
- Growing and cooking food is currently profitable.
- Growing and cooking food _a certain way_ is not profitable
- Growing and cooking food is a foundational discipline of humanity
- Growing and cooking food _a certain way_ is _not_ a foundational discipline of humanity
You specifically quoted a subset of what I said and called it out as wrong. Which is true, but also irrelevant; because it's not what I said.
Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.
For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.
Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?
The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.
Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
Food security requires food production at levels which demand industrialized agriculture, for better or worse.
That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.
Sure, I can believe that, but...
> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation
Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.
I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.
Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.
On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.
I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.
As for artisans, they'll do fine, but the point is that it's a much smaller niche, so very few people who have jobs today will be the lucky ones to squeeze into it.
That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."
Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.
To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.
Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.
If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.
Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
Look, as a programmer I also love writing code by hand, however it's childish to suggest that if I can no longer make a living doing so because automated code production is more profitable that that's equivalent to boiling in a pot or suffering from air pollution.
There are substantiative risks with AI, such as a potential for a singularity, that would make for an actual compelling argument. Some engineer's desire to make a living writing code by hand does not. That's a luxury.
From a change leadership perspective, walking in the door with a shitty prototype beats pitching vaporware every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And the fact amateurs can deliver (basic, crappy) "things" without budget accelerates growth.
My first projects were 80% copied off Github and some intro tutorials. Know what? They still work. We banked seven figures off of them so far...
Coders often don't think in terms of a broad investment portfolio, but that's how I've seen good executives phrase things. AI makes it cheaper and easier to build that prototype - I've been loving it for my own projects, because of how quickly I can deliver that first software.
Essentially, we now have a system that can turn a simple problem description into an interactive tool for that problem. Even if it still does so very imperfectly, it’s easy see already the beginnings of a powerful and empowering new paradigm.
- using BSD/MIT licenses instead of GPL licenses
- accepting absolutely no liability for security holes or data loss
- accepting absolutely no responsibility for poorly performing software that contributes to climate change
- shipping 17,000 web frameworks, founding one more blockchain startup, founding one more wrapper service around an MIT open source project
We're gonna turn around and be like "but what about the security issues" now? We made this bed.
A lot of "us" don't have the time to do programming as a hobby -- even if we started off that way.
Many of "us" don't accept blanket grouping with privileged others who had thousands of opportunities to improve the general IT area but were too cool to do it and invented yet another LISP interpreter instead.
And then they come to HN and use "we" as a big convenient scapegoat, obviously to escape responsibility.
Most of "us" are trying to have some semblance of a life, man.
Whoever could collect $200k+ a year and be comfortable should have been helping the IT area. Not me who still doesn't have his own house in his 40s.
The irony is that the easiest time to establish those was back when software developer jobs were abundant and we had a stronger position wrt employers. But, of course, back then most devs not only didn't see the point of a union, but were actively hostile to the idea. Now that employers have a much stronger upper hand and are flexing their muscle with layoffs etc the idea is suddenly much more palatable to many, but it's also much harder to get going because of the risks involved. But the longer we sit and wait, the more code is written by the robots without human involvement, and the less powerful such a union would be.
New geopolitics are in place, too. Our entire branch should do much, much better than they currently do.
One prediction: cybersecurity jobs might see some surge in the EU. Maybe.
In general though, I would work on transparently syncing world-wide database with partitions for personal data (photo galleries, contacts, calendars, media collections, game saves, anything at all) that is akin to, but much better than, torrents -- another very good example.
In general I am extremely mad at the privileged techies who just wrote philosophical essays about what "we" should be doing... while they themselves spent their riches on expensive (and likely sub-par quality) food in the restaurants of a certain coastal US city.
Stealing it...
* The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else has; today, though, you just do security at a higher or lower level.
* LLM code generation is better at implementing rote best-practices and isn't incentivized to take shortcuts (in fact, it has some of the opposite incentives, to the consternation of programmers like me who prize DRY-ness). These shortcuts are where most security bugs live.
* LLMs can analyze code far faster than any human can, and vulnerabilities that can be discovered through pure pattern matching --- which is most vulnerabilities --- will be easy pickings. We've already had a post here with someone using o4 to find new remote kernel vulnerabilities, and that's a level of vuln research that is way, way more hardcore than what line-of-business software ordinarily sees.
* LLMs enable instrumentation and tooling that were cost-prohibitive previously: model checking, semantic grepping, static analysis. These tools all exist and work today, but very few projects seriously use them because keeping all the specs and definitions up to date and resolving all the warnings is too much time for not enough payoff. LLMs don't have that problem.
LLM-generated code (and LLM tooling) will inevitably create security vulnerabilities. We have not invented a way to create bug-free code; would have been big if true! Opponents of industry LLM use will point to these vulnerabilities and go "see, told you so". But each year we continue using these tools, I think the security argument is going to look weaker and weaker. If I had to make a bet, I'd say it ceases being colorable within 3 years.
Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.
What is the use of the right to repair, if we do not have the imagination to use it?
I patch my clothes
So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.
If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.
> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time
Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.
Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.
Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.
Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
The article says clothing was passed down generations.
> Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear
What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.
Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.
We're not talking about goods produced in bulk, but rather about a new intelligence that helps produce job shop type goods. That intelligence itself isn't a physical good though, and it can be copied freely and run elsewhere at almost no cost, and copyright won't save it. It's like toothpaste out of the tube once it's on the internet.
If we want to keep on track with the analogy to frame weaving machines, the difference is that capital and the availability of power were required to use those machines, which provided the moat required to protect profits.[Econ 101]
Models can be copied, and all of the investment in training used freely by anyone possessing a copy. This might have been how DeepSeek was trained, we'll never know. This is clearly different than in the case of weaving machines.
So instead of the cost of cloth, the cost of thought is going to drop considerably, and the quality of that artificial thought is (likely) at the lowest point it'll ever be. I can already run quantized versions of Deepseek on my CPU with 32 Gb of RAM. The future really doesn't seem to have an upper limit on what can be run locally.
With the ability to run models locally, the costs of running models will always have competition to lower prices. The other force is the capture of prompts and responses, whether covert or in the open, for other use, which must always be kept in mind.
The ability to build completely new things, will, I think, help to usher in a new era of innovation and allow anyone, anywhere, to start up companies to service the world.
[Econ 101] - In Economics 101, I learned that in a free and fair marketplace, it was impossible to maintain an outsized profit, because competition would always show up to take part of that profit.
This is all "perfectly spherical cow" economic theory which does not apply in reality. Do we really have a free and fair marketplace? Where's the competition that's shown up and been able to get any kind of substantial piece of the outsized profit of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google?
What you should have learned is that in an idealized, perfectly rational, perfectly competitive market this is true, and you should have also learned that such markets do not exist in reality, not least of all because rational choice theory does not accurately model human behavior, but also because perfect competition is not an attainable condition.
However, the oversized profits are a significant source of incentive for investment in alternatives. Kharma will catch up.
And this wouldn't even be very difficult to enforce. Running SOTA models at useful speeds (which you'd need to actually compete - a local setup like you describe where time to first token is measured in minutes for a decent sized prompt is not going to cut it) requires a lot of compute. Which is to say, hardware, and energy to power it. Both things that can be tracked.
If we do then we must ensure that we get the social benefits from new technologies, and we suppress the harm.
Does anyone still believe that "self interest" in the aggregate is what is best for society? I think it is clearly untrue
So we need to take collective action.
AI/LLMs are a "steam engine" moment. We can make life better for everyone. But we do need to change course, together, to get there
So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.
Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.
The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.
Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.
All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
"A picture of two patches of wild grass bifurcated by a retaining pond"
Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.
Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.
I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.
...until SkyNet.
Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.
0. The people must take their governments back from corporate technofeudal overlords.
1. Society must shift away from lionizing unbounded capitalism.
2. Workers must form employee-owned co-ops for more stability and better morale and share profits of their labor more fairly rather than extracting maximum amounts for the ownership class that will fire them whenever it suits them.
It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.
We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.
Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.
I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?
They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.
But I want that to happen in a way that results in a Star Trek communist utopia, not a hellscape where 90% of humanity is "redundant" to the very few people who own all that automation and its outputs.
What if you don't and they stay?
If you're sending the first say 12-months worth of experience work to india then local gang straight out of college end up with a pretty tangible gap. There are key formative experiences missing. The programming equivalent of fighting with manual array memory management. Or shooting yourself in foot with a pointer.
Worse they don't realise that they're missing pieces. By necessity you start them off at a higher level and their understanding ends up fuzzy for lack of better word. It's not their fault...to them it looks normal, to the previous gen it's all "how can you not know this"
...still the world keeps turning
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.
If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.
so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job?
what a shame
The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over the direction or use of AI. You are doomed to have your life disrupted and changed by it, with no input whatsoever. To quote the article, your six shillings a day can become six shillings a week, and you are left to just deal with it however you can. You are "free" to go find some other six shilling a week job. If you can.
And if you think, "Oh, every technology is like this, it's always been this way", you are right. You have always been at the whims of the owning class, and barring a change towards economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives, it likely always will be.
Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.
I wonder, combo that r&d rule, general economics, saturation in the field
The norm for new grads seems to be "apply at least 2000 times, get 1 job"
one dev to rule them all, and in darkness bind them
sounds like a 10x dev to me
Must be a convenient worldview
I was replaced by outsourcing
Seriously. Fuck off
Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.
Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders and effecting change.
Unless you stuff your cash under your mattress, you are the owning class.
All or nothing fallacy. People have VASTLY different degrees of ownership, and this is reflected in their degree of control.
> Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders
Such coalitions already exist. They have names like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments [1]. Good luck competing with them. Especially if you abdicate your role in democracy, don't agitate for legal change, and restrict yourself to only market-based means of change (not BlackRock and ilk though - they use every lever available to them, they don't handicap themselves).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
I get that you alone have probably an insignificant amount of control, but forming a coalition would allow you to make change.
I’m aware that there are asset managers. Whose assets do you think they’re managing? Yours!
Do you own VOO? Awesome, that’s why Vanguard owns 10% of almost every large cap company.
Take control of those shares and go make change.
Look up John Chevedden. He owns a minimal amount of shares in companies where he causes huge changes. They call him the “corporate gadfly” [1]
Don’t be lured into thinking that you have to invest your money into a predesigned portfolio because it maximizes returns. If you care about control then maximize control. You already have the power!
[1] https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-23-19/s72319-6733874-207512....
Sweet lies.
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
It is a good practice for companies to include stock as part of the pay package. It encourages alignment of the company with the employees. Very, very successful companies follow this model, such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
Workers should be able to vote for their bosses.
Democratic societies are good for human flourishing. The only way to flourish is to have a thriving middle class.
Workplace democracy would be a boon for labor.
I wonder how many people who repeat things like this know that Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon. About 2/3rds of Amazon is owned by institutional investors, much of which is in turn owned by individuals in their 401ks and other retirement plans. So "the people" own more of Amazon than Jeff Bezos already.
If you're implying that the government should confiscate Jeff Bezos' personal ownership stake in the business he created and redistribute it to other people, that's a very different topic. It's in the realm of fantasy, not reality, so I don't consider it very interesting. At minimum, it should be noted that if the government gets into the business of confiscating shares from people, the value of those shares will plummet as investors move their money into safer investments, so it wouldn't be a simple numerical wealth transfer from Bezos to others.
Regardless, there's nothing stopping people from getting together and starting an employee-owned collective company that enters the market. They can compete in the market and try to hire away talent from the other corporations.
If warehouse workers want better conditions they have to solve a national coordination problem without getting crushed. If Bezos wants their working conditions to be more efficient he has to write a memo.
Edit: to connect this back to ownership. This disparity is directly responsible for determining whether profits pay fair wages or got to Bezos and the other owners.
There are probably better means to achieve better ends, but the status quo is very fucking rotten
If we can do twice as much with half of the labour people should work 20h weeks, not be unable to afford a home.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?
I never said American free markets were perfect. They certainly aren't. But they are very successful.
> responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall
I could say the same of the people I respond to! I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. The average stay at a commune is about 2 years, after which the members leave, cured of the notion that communism is better. I encourage you to join one.
I also would consider many nation level communist movements that are held up as examples of failed communism to not really represent basic communist values very well at all, and to be mostly a thin PR cover for changes and turnover within the ruling class. Its not like the USSR was actually paying fair or equal dividends to the working class citizens who they claimed owned and controlled the country, the vast majority of the wealth, power, and control was still mostly diverted to a small class of elite.
Communism as a pure failure is literally propaganda, but I don't have time to cover the full comparative history of economic development under capitalism and socialism in a comment. All human projects have flaws and it's hard to compare them if you don't get into the nitty-gritty of both the successes and failures.
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.
https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...
We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.
The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.
Or are those "unintended side effects"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis
I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform 2. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
Prices did go up and down, but gas was always available.
From "The U.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR. Here are some examples of problems that were identified:
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently" The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
You nailed it.
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
> capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Absolutely correct. And competition is what drives prices relentlessly downwards.
The democratically elected government in the 70s that tried to manage the nation's gas prices and allocations with the best of intentions failed miserably.
Democracy also created the FAA, which used to regulate airline schedules, routes, and fares. Having lived through that era, too, I can attest how costly and inefficient that was. Air fares are amazingly low since, and the scheduling is very tight and efficient at placing airplanes where the people want to use them.
> this is not because central planning is inherently bad
Nobody has ever managed to make it work. Consider rent control. Endless variations of it are implemented, and all produce the "unintended" side effects of higher prices and shortages.
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
Are you suggesting that suppression of wages is what gave us "more interesting things" to do?
> History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
How is this different from the "free market" assigning me a job?
> For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
Concessions are the price to pay for living in a civilized society.
Join a trade union!
Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.
> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?
During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.
Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
Minimum wage is one indicator of critically substandard living. Here is a small sampling of some others:
well over minimum wage + below the poverty line
no discernible exits off path to unhoused retirement
current, recurring or impending homelessness
food insecurity and recurring hunger
medically triggered impoverishment
only possible caregiver for loved one with medical issuesIf you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear?
No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic insignificance many times over, have not resulted in the ability for normal people to work less. Clearly, the benefits have gone elsewhere. "The benefits went into technology! Think of the iPhones!" The median financed smartphone is 1/50th the cost of median rent, try again.
Also, it's known that as medical prices rise, the percentage of the prices that insurance actually pays goes down. Are you sure they're paying more?
Also, why do countries with universal healthcare have such cheaper healthcare of a similar quality?
Far too high. Abject failure. The US's minimum wage is approximately the wage where you could work 24/7 and break even. Anyone working at that wage is in a very bad situation or someone else is paying all their bills.
Wage grow has not kept pace with corporate profitability. Why?
Total compensation is the costs to an employer to hire some one. It includes:
1. contributions to retirement plans
2. so-called "employer paid" social security contributions
3. sick and paid vacation days
4. employer paid health insurance
5. stock plans
6. 401k plans
7. other payroll taxes
Last time I checked, these often added 40% or more over the takehome pay.
Also, the pay is based on the value the employee as an individual provides, not the value the company as a whole created. Just like the compensation for pro football players varies in a single team.
It's like saying, a CEO gets a housing allowance and travel allowance and can expense most of their meals, so the entry level worker is doing okay.
Now include profit (surplus) in your analysis.
Total compensation has not kept pace with corporate profitability. Why?
--
> Just like the compensation for pro football players varies in a single team.
Then why do professional athletes have unions?
This hasn't been true for at least two decades. Employee compensation severely lags productivity increases, and the capital class captures the entirety of the benefit of that lag.
The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
No. If that were true CEOs and VCs would get paid pennies, and most software programmers would get paid close to minimum wage today (programs are slower and buggier than they were 20 years ago despite having 100x or more increase in hardware resources and offering the same or reduced functionality).
> You are so politically naive and indoctrinated
How can you be sure it's not the other way around? :-)
But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)
The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.
Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.
"It's just how things are."
"That's what generates profit."
"If that's what the market demands, who are we to judge?"
"Guess we do nothing."
We've all heard it before. We get it, so many HN and Tech folks have thrown in the towel and given up on changing anything within their own lives, or within the lives of others. So many more are content just "going along with the ride", abdicating all responsibility to an imagined god in various forms ("invisible hand of the free market" being most common among our peers).
For the rest of us who want to actually discuss the merits of the piece, we're sidelined by those who found reward in the path of libertarian ideals and seek to punish or discipline those of us who seek to make any sort of change or improvement beyond direct profit motives. Serious discussions of organization and direction are derailed in favor of blatant troll bait and bad-faith arguments.
This, I think, is also what Xe is trying to highlight: those in the position to enact the most positive change are staunchly refusing to do so, which in turn exacerbates the harms caused. Too few people with too much power and too much capital believe themselves to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than anyone else, denigrating any thoughts that may come from the slime beneath them on the ladder. When Xe said "Rolling the ladder up behind us", they make it very clear who they're speaking to:
> Look, CEOs, I'm one of you so I get it. We've seen the data teams suck up billions for decades and this is the only time that they can look like they're making a huge return on the investment.
They're basically shouting that "the call is coming from inside the house", and that the only place - right now - to address these harms are by and from the people inside said house. Nobody is coming to save us, but history books are filled with examples of what happens to those classes, those societies, those civilizations for whom greed becomes all consuming, standards of living collapse, and meaningful progress stagnates.
> Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.
It’s hilarious to read such defeatist takes on the current state of things on a site called Hacker News. The classical definition of a hacker was someone who wielded tech to circumvent power imbalances in whatever form.
Now I fear we have plenty of technologists that are happy to use tech to further cement and centralize existing power structures. IMO, this has been brewing for the past ten years or so, where technologists wrongly believe they have an in to this power just because they work for a FAANG.
You are labor. Where you work does not matter. So long as you need to work, you are labor. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Doctors are finding out this same lesson.
The way out is to build ventures that don’t involve the capital class. Autonomy and independence are worthy goals to strive for.
We need more Hackers.
Given the author's eccentricities, when I read "art commissions," I immediately suspected they really meant "furry porn art commissions." Then a few paragraphs later:
> A friend of mine runs an image board for furry art. He thought that people would use generative AI tools as a part of their workflows to make better works of art faster. He was wrong, it just led to people flooding the site with the results of "wolf girl with absolutely massive milkers showing her feet paws" from their favourite image generation tool in every fur color imaginable, then with different characters, then with different anatomical features. There was no artistic direction or study there. Just an endless flood of slop that was passable at best.