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Directionally, I think that's certainly true for some professions. It is probably the case that it isn't true for software engineering. The biggest reason involves how software, as a business, involves a ton of problem space exploration and experimentation. Most businesses have an infinite appetite for software; there's always another idea, another feature they can sell, another expectation, another bug we can fix, or a performance problem to improve.

Tooling improvements leading to productivity boons ain't a new concept in software engineering. We don't code in assembly anymore, because writing JavaScript is more efficient. In fact, think on this: Which would you grade as a higher productivity boon, as a percentage: Using JavaScript over Assembly, or using AI to write JavaScript over hand-writing it?

Followup: If JavaScript was such a 10,000% productivity boon over assembly, to AI's paltry 40-45%: Why aren't we worried when new programming languages drop? I don't shiver in my boots when AWS announces a new service, or when Vercel drops a new open source framework.

At the end of the day: there's an infinite appetite for software, and someone has to wire it all up. AI is, itself, software. One thing all engineers should know by now is: Introducing new software only increases the need for the magicians who wrangle it, and AI is as subject to that law as JavaScript, the next expensive AWS service, or next useless Vercel open source project.

There's no reality in the next twenty years where a non-technical individual is going to converse with a persistent agentic AI to produce a typical SaaS product and maintain it over a period of many years. I think we'll see stabs at this space, and I think we'll see some companies try to replace engineering teams wholesale, and these attempts will almost universally feel kinda sorta ok for the first N weeks, then nosedive and inevitably result in the re-hiring of humans (and probably the failure of many projects and businesses as well).

Klarna said they stopped hiring a year ago because AI solved all their problems [1]. That's why they have 55 job openings right now, obviously [2] (including quite a few listed as "Contractor"; the utterly classic "we fucked up our staffing"). This kind of disconnect isn't even surprising; its exactly what I predict. Business leadership nowadays is so far disconnected from the reality of what's happening day-to-day in their businesses that they say things like this with total authenticity, they get a bunch of nods, and things just keep going the way they've been going. Benioff at Salesforce said basically the same thing. These are, put simply, people who have such low legibility on the mechanism of how their business makes money that they believe they understand how it can be replaced; and they're surrounded by men who nod and say "oh yes mark, yes of course we'll stop hiring engineers" then somehow conveniently that message never makes it to HR because those yes-men who surround him are the real people who run the business.

AI cannot replace people; AI augments people. If you say you've stopped hiring thanks to AI, what you're really saying is that your growth has stalled. The AI might grant your existing workforce an N% boon to productivity, but that's a one-time boon barring any major model breakthroughs (don't count on it). If you want to unlock more growth, you'll need to hire more people, but what you're stating is that you don't think more growth is in the cards for your business.

That's what these leaders are saying, at the end of the day; and its a reflection of the macroeconomic climate, not of the impacts of AI. These are dead businesses. They'll lumber along for decades, but their growth is gone.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/klarna-stopped-hiring-ago-rep...

[2] https://klarnagroup.teamtailor.com/#jobs

The new features in 18.2 GA release are a total shit-show. I've never seen Apple software this rushed out the door before, probably to beat the end-of-year shutdown.

Image Playground is full of so many bugs and weird UX patterns.

- The app is called "Playgrounds". Weird, especially considering Apple already has an app called "Playgrounds" (full name: Swift Playgrounds). Fine, weird, and especially weird if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who has no idea what AI is or what Apple is building.

- When you launch it, it has to download models, a process which took over an hour on my internet connection, but it gives you no indication the models are downloading except one informational popup when you first launch the app; nor the download's progress.

- Instead, I was placed into the full app experience, where I was allowed to try to generate images. The generations would fail with an error.

- However, the error is totally unreadable because its presented as a toast at the top of the screen, rendering underneath the dynamic island. All I could see was the first few and last few characters.

- I've heard confusion from two friends (techy-bubble of course) on "why can I only generate variations on these four friends" Its because the list of people you can generate images of seems to come from the list of facial recognition targets in Apple Photos. Yup. None of my friends who have tried this pay for Apple Photos, so their photos aren't being backed up, their list of generation targets are only those in recently taken images.

- You can upload arbitrary images to the model. But its... well, it doesn't do anything predictable. A picture of a bookshelf imagegens a piano. A picture of a person complains with an error clipping the dynamic island "choose a photo with the face more in view". A picture of a black SUV imagegens a yellow jeep. The immediate sense I got is that they're feeding the uploaded image into a "describe this image" LLM, summarizing it, then feeding that back into the imagegen model.

- There is one additional option in this menu, labeled "Appearance". I dare you to click that, put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't browse HackerNews every day, and try to understand why that's there and what it does. I think its presenting a way to generate a generic AI generated human, without a source real image? You get the choice of skin tone, and then some kind of ever-changing collage of Vibes of the person you want generated? I can't even explain what's going on because even I'm confused, its incomprehensible.

- The share sheet breaks like 20% of the time. On one occasion this break crashed the app with a popup that displayed a stack trace.

- We were told we'd be able to generate images in three unique styles: Sketch, Animation, and Illustration. Only two of these are available (Sketch is absent) [1].

Its really bad, even when it works the images it generates are pretty trash.

[1] https://youtu.be/RXeOiIDNNek?t=4180

I mean, not really; John's Hopkins puts Finland's all time test positivity per capita at ~26%, to the United States' ~30%. A bit better, but not enough to explain differences like this. Its not vaccination either: Finland only leads the US by ~0.23%.

One area where Finland had low impact is in deaths: 0.16% per capita to the US's 0.33%. But, if the theory is that COVID infections themselves caused a globally observable effect like this, that stat should cause the problem to hit Finland more, not less, given they had more COVID survivors than the US.

I think the better explanation might be COVID adjacent: COVID seems to have some direct neurological impact, but the lingering secondary cultural, economic, and psychological effects of the pandemic & lockdown feel a lot more likely to explain this. Additionally, I'd put money on social media also being higher on the sources list than direct COVID neurological impact.

COVID is global, obviously. The article specifically calls out Americans' scores dropping.

> he actively empathised with the protestors.

I have significant doubt that Sam is capable of empathy, period. It seems like what he's capable of is an extremely convincing caricature of it which he has practiced for many years.

The FDA's funding has increased every single year for the past 10 years, and possibly longer. Try again.

And what percentage of the world do you think are engineers/STEM?

Unrelated to the ruling: Why is the Department of Homeland Security investigating and pursuing a CSAM case in the first place? Isn't that more FBI's jurisdiction?

That's only true if your time is metered by the hour; and the vast majority of roles which find some benefit from AI, at this time, are not compensated hourly. This plan might be beneficial to e.g. CEO-types, but I question who at OpenAI thought it would be a good idea to lead their 12 days of hollowhype with this launch, then; unless this is the highest impact release they've got (one hopes it is not).

The reality is more like: The frothy american economy over the past 20 years has created an unnaturally large number of individuals and organizations with high net worth who don't actually engage in productive output. A product like ChatGPT Pro can exist in this world because it being incapable of consistent, net-positive productive output isn't actually a barrier to being worth $200/month if consistent net-positive productive output isn't also demanded of the individual or organization it is augmenting.

The macroeconomic climate of the next ~ten years is going to hit some people and companies like a truck.

Maybe someone at OAI should have considered the optics of leading the "12 days of product releases" with this, then.

The math is never this clean, and no one has ever experienced this (though I'm sure its a justification that was floated at OAI HQ at least once).

Oh yes, I'm sure that would be normal in, checks notes, oh you've gotta be joking, Germany, a country certainly not known for a recent proclivity for dangerous authoritarianism.

Well: Don't give taxpayer money to an unprofitable company. After all: There's a reason why they're unprofitable.

I think the title should read "most family farmers have second jobs to stay afloat", as that appears to be the statistic the article asserts. This leaves out large-scale factory farming, obviously; the statement might still be true when large-scale factory farming is taken into account, but that's not what the article seems to assert?

To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".

Functionally; like skid row? Certainly, that hasn't worked out well for LA; because it literally just doesn't work. Even many homeless don't want to live in places like this, because they inevitably become extremely unsafe, because the idea that a 24/7 police presence has a significant positive impact or is even possible is a fantasy. Police become jaded overnight, like trying to mop up the ocean. No one in the public (read: voters, taxpayers) would support a place like this in their backyard, for good reason. A person pitches a tent ten blocks away; what does the city do? Forcibly move them? They're back ten blocks away the next day. Repeat.

Prison being too expensive is, to be fair, true, but a problem local to only some states, and a different problem that we should be motived to solve independent of whether its a tool in the solution of this problem.

But, beyond that, maybe my point is more generally (and contentiously) stated as: I believe homelessness should be a crime whose punishment involves the forfeiture of the person's freedom of movement and work. That's a general way of saying "prison" and that's fine, but I'm comfortable stating that governments need to think about building a (undesirable, forced) path toward finding a home for these people, and making them work to earn it.

If a homeless person walks this path, gets to their freedom, and reverts back to being homeless again; well, its a revolving door, but at least its one which rotates over a span of years instead of days, and its one that makes a good faith attempt toward rehabilitation.

My general take is: Finding an empathic solution to the problem is surfacing increasingly end-to-end solutions; government subsidized/paid housing, subsidizing food banks, etc. Homelessness is a bigger problem in urban areas with high density, where all of these components to a solution (e.g. the land upon which a shelter can be built) are very expensive and difficult. The first step toward finding a better life for many of these people is actually to get them into areas where the cost of living is lower.

This angles into, any solution to this problem has to happen at the state level. It can't happen at the city level because cities are usually homogenous; they don't have the right levers to pull. It also can't happen at the federal level because homeless problems are definitely regional and local. This is, I think, actually the root of many of America's homeless problems: Cities are usually blue but states are usually red, so any suggestion that the rural areas need to help with city problems, despite the fact that cities are massive economic subsidies on rural areas, is rejected.

One angle around this is, I suggest, to leverage the prison system. Most large prisons are built in more rural areas; or at the very least, most cities have a rural prison nearby. All of the real costs should be lower than even partial-end-to-end costs of caring for the homeless inside the bounds of a city; housing is more dense and lower quality, meals are cheaper, land is cheaper, prison labor recoups some costs, etc. Rural populations will be more accepting of a migration of homeless through the prison system versus just bussing them out of the city and leaving them (an extremely untenable solution).

But, obviously beyond this, there needs to be support beyond just dropping them in a prison in a cornfield somewhere. This gets into: States should seriously think about a New Deal-ish jobs program utilizing outgoing prison labor. Many of these rural areas are short on hands for hard labor. Housing is cheap to build in these areas. We should have a paved path to tell people migrated like this: "We aren't going to stop you from going back to the city. But, if you stay here and commit to two years, here's an apartment, its free as long as you work this job, and you'll also make minimum wage."

For the red-leaning rural areas, this is a great opportunity for private-public partnership. Lots of private farms would love a source of labor like this (in fact, the idea mirrors a very real source of labor for many farms in the west historically; farms provide a bunk house and food, and recruiting happens when people walk out of prison, this is a very Americana solution).

I don't think a solution like this works for the major-major hyper-blue cities like NYC/SF/LA; their homeless problem is just too big. But, Halifax is a city of ~400,000 people. I've spent many years in American cities in the ~500k pop range; obviously something might be structurally different in Halifax that I'm not aware of, but the homeless problem in these cities is far more tractable. Most of these cities are in states which lean red; the biggest problem up to this point is usually just getting state government on-board; telling the red state government that they can jail the homeless? They love that. Then its just a matter of the second half, which becomes the new hard part.

I think it’s rightly and plainly frustrating for the sole reason that the e.g. parks, sidewalks, bridges, etc that the homeless live on (and, are now directly christened by the government to do so in Halifax) are quite literally funded by taxpayers for public (read: taxpayer) use. Rightly or wrongly (but let’s be real: often rightly) parents (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe bringing their children into these areas; young women (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe walking in these areas. Crime is higher, drug use is higher, broken window theory, etc.

Here’s my unpopular opinion: I fully support making homelessness a jailable offense. A bed, meals, and heat in the winter; we’re not talking about the end of the world here, and I’m comfortable with my tax dollars funding that because I _do_ have some empathy for the homeless. But, not infinite empathy. We need better social programs, we need to work with the charities and churches as you say, I’m also very supportive of some kind of jail-adjacent jobs program that houses and feeds the homeless in exchange for employment.

I am 100% sure that the author of this post has never "built a kubernetes", holds at least one kubernetes cert, and maybe even works for a company that sells kubernetes products and services. Never been more certain of anything in my life. You could go point by point but its just so tiring arguing with these people. Like, the whole "who will maintain these scripts when you go on vacation" my brother in christ have you seen the kubernetes setups some of these people invent? They are not easier to be read into, this much is absolute. At least a shell script has a chance of encoding all of its behavior in the one file, versus putting a third of its behavior in helm variables, a third in poorly-named and documented YAML keys, and a third in some "manifest orchestrator reconciler service deployment system" that's six major versions behind an open source project that no one knows who maintains anymore because their critical developer was a Belarusian 10x'er who got mad about a code of conduct that asked him to stop mispronouning contributors.

The reason social media apps use more complex global discovery algorithms (over a chronological feed) is because chronological feeds always run out of content. That's literally the only reason. At some point, some team at some gigacorporation invented the "hours spent with us" KPI, and tasked their hundred reports to increase it. It turns out, it doesn't matter how many people complain, if the "hours spent with us" KPI keeps going up.

"But users prefer algorithmic feeds": There's no evidence of this. The KPI is measuring an increase in hours spent with the app; it is not scientific-method A/B testing a preference between two options. Even if an app could do this, what does "preference" mean? You could measure how many users pick one experience versus another, but I've never found an app that, if it offers both experiences, durably and reliably saves your choice for a chronological feed between re-launches. Also: Maybe I want both experiences, at will. Hours spent in one experience versus the other? This is not communicating a preference; if I choose spending an hour driving during my commute to one job, versus ten minutes walking to another, have I revealed a preference for a longer driving commute? Obviously not.

You can ask users directly: And users may actually reveal their preference that social media never existed at all because your company isn't actually delivering value to the world [1]. Oops. Uh, don't run that survey again, bury it, make sure shareholders don't find out.

All social media is trash, and should not be consumed by anyone who has even an ounce of self-respect. Honestly: HackerNews is in that bucket, but at least its not as bad as most platforms.

[1] https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...

Meth producers need users, and they need users to return and re-engage. The data is clear that even a small amount of meth introduced into a community generates higher return on investment, presumably by giving its users a high that's better than not being high.

You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this".

Well, its a department that literally does not exist yet because the regime that wants to build it isn't in power yet. So, maybe have a bit of patience before breaking out the name-calling.

Fair! I hadn't known they'd trademarked it and at least tried to enforce it.

Owning the domain name isn't a singularly valid way to assert trademark control; it has to be used. Elon had an "X" company way back when, but it became Paypal; they didn't really use the X name in a public fashion for very long at all.

The reason is probably more-so that Google's "X" isn't apparently a legal entity; its a division within Google. So, it doesn't have consumer sentiment around it, its not a product name they're selling, its not a registered entity, etc. In other words: "Skunkworks" as a term originated from a division at Lockheed, now its a term many companies use, oftentimes in legal & public ways, but Lockheed really doesn't have grounds to stop them from doing so.

Elon did not say that. Tesla The Company said that.

Ask yourself this: I bet you a thousand dollars that Tesla will release either a lower cost model or a lower cost trim of an existing model before the end of 2026. Would you take the other side of that bet?

That's directionality. Deadlines might get missed. I'm talking about directionality.

Absolutely; but it is at least indicative of the direction Tesla is taking. It might be the end of 2025, 2026, whenever; but they've said they're working on lower cost models. That's all I'm asserting.

Maybe their strategy will pan out, but generally any economy which critically depends on a restless and despondent class of basically slave labor (and, in some cases, actual slave labor) isn't going to sustain itself. As they said in Silicon Valley (the HBO show) like 8 years ago: "There's no New Bangladesh; there's just Bangladesh."; China's population wants upward social mobility in a way that's basically just westernization. On the flip side, they have a government that wants the economic benefits of a cheap labor pool, they want to be a cheap western manufacturing destination, and they have the surveillance and police state to push the issue further than western democracies would; a scary combo.

The other unrelated point I try to impress on people: You can assert that China's lead in manufacturing solar panels, batteries, etc is indicative that they're "ahead" of us, or whatever. You sure? I don't know what job you have right now, but the US was a destination for high tech manufacturing many decades ago. We largely moved past that. We make poorer countries do that for us now. How is it desirable that America become better at, I don't know, mining lithium? Are those jobs that we want our population to have? Versus what are clearly higher-margin email jobs? China manufacturing solar panels to sell us is our benefit, their expense; their economy is built on attaching a 2% margin on physical goods, ours is attaching a 200% margin on services, software, and financialization we build on top of those physical goods. Every economist on the planet would agree, you want to live in the second one. Lithium mines suck. Assembly lines suck.

But even looking beyond that: The US has an unemployment rate of like 3% right now. You can open the world's biggest solar factory out in Iowa; good luck finding workers to staff it. The US is not "behind" on manufacturing; we LEFT it behind, for good reason.

> Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?

It doesn't seem to me like the problems that the automotive world are going to face over the next five years will be isolated to US manufacturers; its going to be global. Its going to get harder to financially-engineer your way to higher margins and revenue. That means prices need to come down. But, prices are higher because consumers want these nicer cars, nicer materials, there's a lot of cost in mandated safety features and safety engineering as well, not to mention all the export controls and tariffs Trump is threatening. So, how do they get cost down? That's the challenge.

There's many people who would reasonably disagree with a course like this, because there are no elected positions in the EPA.

The whole "overstepping their mandate" thing is perceived as a very real and present threat among MAGA people, for this reason specifically. This is the whole notion of "The Swamp" Trump was going to drain; unelected career bureaucrats.

> Republicans have made no effort to appropriate funding for this work at either the federal or state level, for example.

The article states that drinking water systems for 26 million Americans are vulnerable to significant cybersecurity risks. What that obviously implies is that the drinking water systems for... 308 million Americans face an at least mitigated and acceptable level of cyber-risk. Are you stating that 308 million Americans live in counties led by Democrats, as they're the only ones capable of securing their water systems? Clearly that isn't the case. Are you crediting all of the good things about the good water systems to Democrats, and all the bad things about the bad water systems to Republicans, somehow? That feels unlikely; though I'm sure the federal government funds a significant amount of our local water systems' budgets, and currently the Republican party is the party of anti-federal government, obviously past and current Republicans also had a hand in creating some of that federal infrastructure and no one is saying it should entirely disappear.

> This sounds like a recipe for fraud and waste due to the sophistication of those responsible at the local level, with no accountability.

Its actually fascinating how Republicans would say the same thing of some of our federal institutions: That they've become so big that they're impossible to hold accountable. There's some truth in both extremes: but the Republican view is that the voting populace can more-easily hold their local government and utilities accountable than we're able to hold the federal bureaucracy accountable. Given the measurable performance and efficiency of some of these federal institutions; I do believe that Republicans are, at least, operating in good faith, even if I tend to side with Democrats directionally. Of course, we've become a culture of extremes: you're either in the party of "don't touch it, touching it is anti-federal and anti-democrat" or "tear it down and salt the earth it stood on", there's no in-between take that maybe these institutions just need an overhaul (well, there was [1], but it never panned out).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/3...