But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?
That said, yes, what about them? These are people with real skin the the game - people who spent years learning their craft expecting it will be their life-long career.
Do we simply exclaim "sucks to be you!"?
Do we tell out-of-work coal miners to switch to a career in programming with the promise it will be a lucrative career move? And when employment opportunities in software development collapse, then what?
All while we increasingly gate health care on being employed?
Software dev opportunities won't collapse any time soon, any half decent dev who's tried vibe coding will tell you that much. It's a tool developers can use, it's not a replacement.
What's your solution to the miners of West Virginia?
https://www.wvva.com/2025/06/25/coal-miners-face-layoffs-fed...
"As West Virginians face possible cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, they are also being hit hard in the job market."
"“I’m worried for the people that are laid off, and are they going to be able to find another job? You know, are they my age? How are you going to start over? You’ve got to find a job back in what you know, because you can’t start over at my age,” said Ricky Estes, a former Coal Mining Safety Representative, who was laid off. "
"Even before these possible cuts, affordable healthcare can be hard to find currently in the mountain state"
I mention mining -> programming because that was the hyped solution a decade ago, eg, https://www.wtrf.com/community/from-coal-to-coding-new-progr... .
How well did that work out?
I wasn't talking about the recent LLM fad, but rather the decades of mass government funding of STEM[1], and programming training in particular (like Joe Manchin's Mined Minds), with the carrot of a high-paying job at the end, leading to a surplus of coders who, as a result, flood the job market and lower salaries and individual employee power.
[1] STEM government funding doesn't seem to end up in, say, marine biology or sociology or the theory of unbounded operators or other fields of science and math that don't make companies a lot of money.
I'm not opposed to having programs to help these people, not at all. I'm from Norway where we have free healthcare, education, social security nets etc. I'm all for that stuff, it benefits all of us.
All I'm saying is if new opportunities don't fall into your lap you need to find them yourself.
Or other jobs in West Virginia, with its long history of coal mining, with profits ending up in the pockets of mine owners, not employees.
Since you think people are only looking for jobs that fall in their lap, I'm certain you have no idea of the issues.
So, now you need find a new job yourself, and it requires a specific training, so you spend your savings on a one year training program, only to find that, once done, the job market has changed and now you also need two years of job experience .. then what?
In the meanwhile, your breathing has gotten more difficult. You think it might be black lung. Your union helped pass the law which helps provide health and financial support to miners who get black lung, and you became a miner expecting this protection, but Trump DOGE'd it so who knows when you'll get your legally required support.
I also can't say I have much sympathy for people who voted for Trump and then got screwed by Trump. West virginians overwhelmingly voted red. You can't vote against social security nets and then complain that you dont have a social security net.
Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, red blooded patriots. No one can tread on you.
I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a question and get thanked for it you get a little rush of endorphins.
Many jobs that suck only suck due to external factors like having a terrible boss or terrible customers, or having to enforce some terrible policy.
But imagine working in a nice cafe in a quiet small town, or a business that's not too frantically paced, like a clothing store. Add some perks like not always doing the same job and a decent boss, and it shouldn't be too bad. Most any job can be drastically improved by decreasing the workload, cutting hours and adding some variety. I don't think being a cashier is inherently miserable. It's just the way we structure things most of the time makes it suck.
Just like you think a human touch makes art special, a human touch can make a mundane job special. A human serving coffee instead of a machine can tell you about what different options are available, recommend things, offer adjustments a machine might not, chat about stuff while it's brewing... You may end up patronizing a particular cafe because you like the person at the counter.
There's a common fallacy that tries to argue that it'll be alright over time, no matter what happens. Given enough time, you can also say that about atomic wars. But that won't help the generations that are affected.
If you just sit on your hands complaining about the lack of opportunities then you won't get any sympathy from me. People aren't entitled to live wherever they want, humanity's entire thing is adaptability. So adapt. Life is what you make it.
People adapt to all kinds of stuff all the time. Saying adapting isn't a thing for most people is ridiculous. Of course it's a thing. It's what you do when your current situation isn't working. You adapt.
Sure, you can smugly say that the hard-working will survive. But i don't want to imagine what the USA will be like millions of unemployed and under-provisioned Americans. Poverty and the process of falling off the socio economic ladder is ugly for everyone, unless you're wealthy enough to afford to insulate yourself from the consequences.
The fact that this nuance appears to be lost on you makes me suspicious of your motives for posting your opinion.
The ironic thing in all this is that these rural people you're talking about are probably the exact people responsible for electing him. Evokes images of leopards eating faces and such.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the near future something like "Adapt. Life is what you make it" could be read in big bold letters above the entrance of a place like Alligator Alcatraz.
I hadn't heard about alligator Alcatraz until now, I'm not American so I don't keep up with all of Trump's shenanigans. I feel compelled to make it clear that I in no way support Trump. The fact that the US has elected that clown not once but twice is frankly embarrassing.
It’s why it’s so exciting.
Whats the benefit of LLMs to the many who barely can operate a search machine?
I am sorry but thinking this will benefit the many is delusional. It's main use is making rich people richer by saving expenses on people's wages. Tell me, how are these people going to get a job once their skills are made useless?
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
(Original source: https://xcancel.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?... )
Now with Claude Code, I've cleaned up years of technical debt, added proper test coverage, got everything building in CI again with automated release-on-tag. (Yes, CC will literally debug your GitHub Actions yaml.) My blind users are getting updates again after years of nothing.
I'm nobody special. By basic statistics, if LLMs are this useful to one random developer, they're probably useful to millions of others maintaining their own small projects.
Yes, job displacement is a real concern. But the idea that LLMs [only] help the wealthy get wealthier? I'm living proof that's not true. I'm using them to resurrect accessibility tools that the market wouldn't support. That's not exactly a venture capital use case.