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Comment by haburka | Hacker News Reader

I think this kind of overly dramatic writing makes me struggle to respect the arguments in the piece. Like the blog writer has this style like they’re documenting the collapse of humanity or something when really it’s just a massive cloud company taking some direction that may be suboptimal. I understand this tone can be helpful to drive effective change but I think it should be reserved for situations where people are actually suffering as opposed to when extremely well paid people engineers are laid off.

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I get that the writing was a bit over the top.

But the story, my goodness. Giving a damn is such a rare commodity. It makes me sad when companies throw away people with that quality.

I hope that Tarus Balog finds a good spot to land. Here's his LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarusbalog/ if you're in the market for an "Open source wonk. Catalyst. Storyteller. Collector of Memories"

i dont think employees are expected to prioritize one customer of (we would assume) little monetary consequence in this way. amazon would rather everyone keep heads down, dont let the casualties slow down the machine or create exception cases, and definitely dont bother upper management with your personal salvation quests.

Well then you get PR disasters like these, I have moved off of AWS and helped several services that use AWS at atleast 4 companies, who used to pay AWS mid 6 figures, and been paid chump change to do it, but I helped just cause AWS sucks I didn't spend much time really, 1 weekend each.

Was the pay worth yeah, was seeing AWS's revenue hopefully take a minor hit worth it, most definitely would do it again hit me up if you really need help. If you pay Amazon over 10M I am certain we can bring it down below 1M lmao.

AWS is just unhinged in terms of pricing and costs.

Jeff Bezos went on NYT dealbook and had the gall to say "we did layoffs at the WP because it needs to be profitable; if it's not profitable, it's because people are not willing to buy the product it's selling"

after he literally single-handedly ruined the product by personally censoring the editorial team and/or firing large numbers of journalists on multiple, extremely high-profile PR-disastering occasions [1] [2]

from that perspective, Bezos seems perfectly content to weather PR disasters from his companies and drape them in bizarre rationalizations.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-pos...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-60-000-washington-post-2...

A single wronged customer can cause 100-1000x the PR damage across the internet across 1-10 years. It is not an exception case; it is the textbook case. Management who don't understand it don't deserve to be management.

Claude's style is now overuse of sentence fragments, which this "article" has in spades. Fragments are the new emdash or "delve".

I’ll miss when em dashes were a key giveaway. This generation of LLM has one sure fire tell.

We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.

Beautiful, lovely sentence fragments. Last I heard, I was on the HN em dash leaderboard, and now sentence fragments?

And here's the thing

I quit reading after the first paragraph when I saw this pattern:

"Not X, not y, not z, A!"

The overly emotional paragraph headlines were also off putting.

> "Not X, not y, not z, A!"

You know, humans do that sometimes as well. Not GenAI's, not Agents, not automated systems, but actual humans!

Sometimes! But when the cost of generating pages upon pages of bombastic text is near-zero, I have to apply quick heuristics to decide which text by people I don't personally know is worth my time to read in detail, and this article doesn't pass.

Fair enough. I just wouldn't lean on one single "tell" like that to judge an entire article, at least not as a general rule. But that's just me.

100% agree with this. The irony of this article critical of AI development culture is that the author used AI to write it.

The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.

Humans do it sometimes, for effect. Not all the time, giving every phrase the same impact.

"Not snow, not swans, but the tent of Hasan Aga" - cca 1640.

Looking at the AI-generated image, the vibecoded visual design, and the constant use of these phrases in the text, this isn't one of the exceptions to the rule.

This is an AI-written story. It exists to get upvoted and reshared, so overly-dramatic language is the point.

> overly dramatic writing

I feel like everything posted to HN that talks about technology or the business around it while trying to show personality or make arguments from humanity gets this kind of response. Sure each time the reason is tailored, but they all add up to point the vector in one direction. Unless it's bland buisnessminded blandness, it can't be taken serious. Even the cringe coke-fueled rants about tech are received better because they're in the direction of excitement for building future product.

> Some switched to farming. Others opened coffee shops. One bakes bread now. That’s the level of abyss we’re talking about. These are people who know they can’t do anything online anymore. Not because they lack the skills. Because their brains were so filled and indoctrinated with complexity that they found decorating a cookie more fulfilling than maintaining 87 files of Kubernetes manifests plus CloudFormation templates plus Terraform state plus whatever abstraction layer Amazon invented that quarter.

This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

The wording also suggests decorating a cookie can't be as fulfilling as working on a complex software project.

This "author" certainly never baked his own bread or grew his own vegetables. Let alone becoming a professional, which is hard work, probably more hard work than sitting at a desk asking claude to change this or that react component.

Yeah, a lot of software devs think somewhat wistfully about possibly running a bakery or whatever.

To me that sounds more like letting circumstances nudge you into implementing your "Coast FIRE" plan than taking some kind of principled stand.

> This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

A lot of pretty normal people without much to their name are deciding to call it quits over the AI craze. I'm one of them, I'm heading for electrical engineering - even if the "engineering" part gets replaced by AI sooner than later, I'll still be more qualified running wires than some robot.

Besides, opening up coffee shops and bakeries isn't that capital intensive. Don't need millions for that, there's a reason a lot of non-chain restaurants are founded and operated by immigrants.

How are you effecting that transition?

I've been filling the war chest against the potential need to re-train. I'll do nursing school if I have to but if there's a path for someone who spent many years studying computational plasma physics to get into EE I'd want to look at that.

I'm heading off to the local university for three years. Thankfully I live in Germany which means no student loan BS and the university is maybe 20 min with a bike away.

Ah. Damn.

I'm in the US myself and I have a family so minimizing costs (including opportunity cost of the time spent) is critical.

Look into apprenticeships if you're just wanting to get into the trades, that way you can already earn money while training. Maybe your state government has some sort of "board of electricians" that deal with licensing, maybe they can help set you up.

Any business with an aws account should by default pretend like that world revolves them and their company.

Because if aws tanks, they will likely tank.

I pardon the drama. If you were in those shoes and the costs being spent for operating business costs- wouldn’t you be freaking the heck out?

If I scroll down and you do animations to the text I am out instantly.

It's just Claudeslop. It's everywhere. An epidemic. If you're familiar it stands out instantly. (Would you let someone else talk for you? In real life? Like open up your mouth and let a TTS system spit out the sounds and pick the words? No? Then you shouldn't do the same thing with writing!)

I actually think many people would choose this option, if it was possible.

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.

> 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.

This was false. University of Alabama said this was according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.[1] NCES said 21% of US adults had low English literacy. This meant could not participate due to a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed, below level 1, or level 1. Their definition of functionally illiterate in English was below level 1. This was 4.1%.[2]

[1] https://risingtide.ua.edu/education/statewide-ua-literacy-ce...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

Independently of literacy, I think many people desperately yearn for someone else to write or speak for them.

"Putting their name on documents" or "speaking publicly" is just an excruciating requirement to keep cashing checks, and each time it comes up the first thought bubbling up from the autonomic system is "how the fuck do I get out of this".

It worked for Stephen Hawking, and he was totally worth listening to.

This extra dramatic writing style really appeals to the current doomer zeitgeist. The rhetorical trick is to write everything so dramatically and exaggerated that when any point is challenged the critic gets attacked for taking it too literally. These articles exist in a duality of wanting to be taken as deadly serious but also immune to criticism; If you try to challenge any point in the story it will be brushed off as taking it too literally. The real point remains hidden in the mist behind the dramatic tone and will shape shift any time it is challenged.

Even the premise of the article has built-in ridiculousness, as if the author has enough special insight into all of AWS to conclude that all of the other employees are bad. Of course by point that out I’m sure this comment will be critiqued as missing the point. The point is you’re supposed to be angry and not think about the details of the story in a way that diminishes that anger!

> Like the blog writer has this style

You mean Claude has this style.

Claude is a bit of a drama queen.

I am so sick of reading this horseshit AI writing. It's like eating vaseline.

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