MichaelRo

>> Friends whose family also worked for the company were sort of privileged as a result.

Well to tell the full story, my father was an employee of the Agricultural Production Cooperative (CAP - Cooperativa Agricola de Productie - in Romanian), the national company who owned the land (forcibly nationalized in the 50s) and grew food. No individual would have been able to afford a private telephone line in the village, there were two of them, one to CAP one to the Post office. While it was possible to go to the post office and pay to make calls, it was more awkward getting them. So we hooked a phone to CAP's line, meaning we shared the calls with it's office, phone rang both at out home and in the office and everytime we made a call, someone in the office could pick up the phone and listen (and we could do the same with them). And of course not every employee of the company was allowed to hook up a personal phone to the company line ;)

My first phone in the early 80s was a hand-cranked magneto phone like this: https://images.okr.ro/serve/product/572e8fdd848db2d3b02d36d2...

Connected by 12Km of telephone wire to a manual switchboard where an operator would pick my call and connect wires for local or long distance: https://alexandrone.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02...

Yes, in the early 80s, Romania was still using 1950s technology. And with only 3 telephones in the village, it was a big deal to have one.

Then at the end of the 80s moved to a nearby town and was amazed at how much more convenient a rotary dial phone is.

>> I have a hard time spending, to the point where I would often procrastinate on buying things that I know I’ll need in the future.

Well, what I noticed is that I go to great efforts to avoid buying me some stuff that would make my life easier (say an electric bike or a better computer). Month starts, I get my paycheck and every day I fend off the desire to buy the stuff I want/need. And then come the bills. Like some surprise "regularization" gas or electricity bill that costs more than the item I didn't buy. If it's not that, some darn thing breaks and needs repairs. And if it's not that, kid has to go in some school trip, there's some birthday or wedding we have to attend, someone asks me to lend them some money (coze they know I save) or some other event happens and requires a ca$h infusion.

By the end of the month, money's gone and I haven't got nothing. At some point working just to pay bills and expenses makes Jack a dull boy. So funk it, I buy that stuff AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH. And when shit arrives demanding money I can truthfully say: "I don't have any money left". But at least I got the thing, opposed to neither money, nor item.

>> With AI, we‘re cargo-culting understanding

We're cargo culting "the manager view". Like the critic you can read on Bret Devereaux's blog about Game Of Thrones having been written from an elite's point of view, it's utopian and sounds good ... for the elites, the people who benefit from the hard work they never have to do themselves. But like any elite bubble wildly disconnected from reality, this one will fall bad. Maybe French revolution bad, when the answer to the masses of unemployed "displaced" by AI screaming "we can't get a piece of bread to eat" is "let them eat cake instead".

My wife gave birth by C-section. That would have killed her up until very modern times.

She may theoretically birth another child but there's a substantial risk.

There are "physical aspects", just because it's all theoretical and principles to you doesn't make them go away.

I don't understand the "knowingly stunting the growth of your child" attack. What makes you conclude I'm stunting the growth of my child?

He's not chained to a tree. He goes to private school in a country where public schools are free and excellent. Visits his friends and play in the public park or the private yard. Spends vacations in the countryside unsupervised by me because unlike the city, chances of being run over by a retard driving a car are much lower. Still, I advise him not to wander around freely as I did in my childhood because the world has become much shittier. One thing, there are bears everywhere, thanks to the animal rights lobbyists. I feared dogs and bulls when wandering across countryside as a kid, now I have to add bears too for my kid.

>> But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk.

ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury).

Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene.

Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.

>> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.

I would bet on "I'm old and I don't care".

What I'm curious though is why would he sell the physical collection.

>> But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.

This. It's a number's "game".

My father, born in rural Romania, had 8 siblings, one of them died of an accident in his childhood (yeah, during "free range stuff"). I was born in a town and have 2 brothers. Live in a city and have one kid.

I can't send my kid out carelessly because I don't have a backup.

>> Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards.

Doesn't help much, accounting needs accreditation and standards, but that doesn't prevent competition level of some 100 accountants per job. Only way you prevent that is by limiting numbers, like lawyers do, case when connections and nepotism matter, you basically get a hereditary aristocratic caste.

I guess we better get used to going back being peasants working shit jobs barely above starvation since that's what the future of capitalism seems to bring: https://realityraiders.com/fringewalker/irreverent-humor/mon...

>> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.

>> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.

Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?

Well, Alt+Tab in Windows is supposed to switch windows. That's unless you're in Microsoft Edge where obviously, it switches tabs. Inconsistent and annoying.

While I agree with the sentiment that sending manned missions to the Moon is kinda useless, unfortunately diverting those money to "noble purposes" is an utopia because that's not how things work.

In practice if those billions don't fund NASA programs they go into making some billionaires richer, Oracle laying off 30,000 people to fund data centers that will be obsolete by the time they are ready and similar stuff. Not a dime towards noble goals of humanity.

Question is weather the guy who got his account banned and lost access to all his data, was paying Google for cloud / hosting services or not.

If it was on the free plan then all bets are off. If he was paying for a service, I believe there is enough case for a lawsuit where Google pays through their teeth for basically taking the client's data hostage.

At some point I'll move my hosted services to one or more companies, which for a cost - essential point if you want legal protection - offer me their services. And if shit happens, I get my data back. And there is someone, a physical person that I can call when shit happens and they can't hide behind AI and automated replies. Otherwise I have real leverage to sue their ass and settle for mucho dinero so they learn to behave.

Seems to me Google is not such a "service provider" company, so it's naive to let them hold your data, with zero legal protection if they decide to take it hostage.

Kids today probably won't get what's the big idea with "just" some TV, no DVD playing capability, no computer games. But in the early 90s I would have sold a kidney for one of these, on a boring 8 hour train trip, they would have been the ultimate gadget. Not just for entertainment purposes, watching TV, but also bragging rights since noone even dreamt of having one of these in that time period and that place (Eastern Europe). At least I didn't see or knew anyone that had such a thing.

>> then the software industry will enter into a self-serving productivity craze building all sorts of software tooling, frameworks

>> Smart organizations will not just deliver better products but likely start products [...]

This is not the 90s anymore when low hanging fruit was everywhere ready to be picked. We have everything under the sun now and more.

The problem with bullshit apps is not that it took you 5 months to build. What you build now in 5 minutes it's still bullshit. Most of the remaining work is bullshit jobs. Spinning useless "features" and frameworks that nobody needs and shove them down the throat of customers that never asked for them. Now it's possible to dig holes and fill them back (do pointless work) at much improved pace thanks to AI.

>> It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

Exactly this: "Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens" : https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...

Well, it's a skeptical take on AI so it will be downvoted to oblivion and buried.

>> Teaching and research should be decoupled.

This is like saying peasants growing vegetables in the field should not mix with philosophers questioning the secrets of the Universe.

Problem is most research is just pissing in the wind. No real results. Show me the cure for cancer. Show me the warp engine.

So it's very nice to sit in their ivory tower doing ivory tower stuff while the peasants feed them with the vegetables they grow plowing the fields.

In reality, let them also teach. That's real, palpable work. I can't do all nice things and never touch shit work, so should professors because unless they cure cancer or invent the warp engine now, they are not a privileged cast.

"They" want you to be! :)

>> I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company.

LOL, it's the age old "responsibility without authority". The pressure to use AI will increase and basically you'll be fired for not using it. Simultaneously with the pressure to take the blame when AI fucks up and you can't keep up with the bullshit, leading you to get fired. One way or the other, get some training on how to stack shelves at the supermarket because that's how our future looks, one way or the other.

Also I'm getting downvoted and don't really understand unless I fall back to experience from 30 years ago, after the Romanian revolution and fall of =~ 50 years of dictatorial regime (not that before that was much better, with small interruptions).

At that time (1990), when everything seemed possible and a quick path to democracy and all that it brings (in the imaginary of the poor, oppressed people that we were) along with it, this guy came along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Ra%C8%9Biu

He ran for president in the first free elections and made some 0.5% or something. I remember him for his words which go along the "it will take 20 years at least, for democracy to settle in Romania". He was right on. Now, 30 years after, we have a strong, frile democracy. Everyone can run for president but not everyone can win, even if they could: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4x2epppego

All things considered, I live a much, much better life now than 30 years ago during the communist dictatorship. Perfect? Far from it and perfection is a moving target. But we're definitely a solid democracy, and also definitely, it's a miracle the first 5-10 years didn't erupt in a full scale civil war. And the despised "revolutionary guards" had some involvement in making sure it didn't happen, so as much as you hate them, you need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_clashes_of_T%C3%A2rgu_M...

Forgot they aren't already in EU.

In Romania it took some 10 years to reach some degree of functional democracy after the fall of communism and the execution on Ceaușescu, who coincidentally, just returned from the crowning of Khamenei, while learning, dictator-to-dictator, how to suppress a revolution: 1006 killed, though most of them not by the initial "Revolutionary Guards" reprisal but in the semi-civil war that followed.

And that in a country/region without Islamic radicals trying to take over. So far, apart from Israel, no Middle East country has managed to function as a democracy. Turkey, the only Muslim majority who has the faintest chance of joining the European Union, only keeps stuff under control due to the army enforcing a secular state, which the liberal patsies in the West can't take, because authoritarianism is bad and diversity in accepting radical Islam creeping into our homeland is our strength.

I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.

Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).

>> The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P

To me having one own's company was just a means to the end: making enough money to live comfortably without the need to get a job ever again for the rest of my life. I too learned programming as a means to achieve that end but eventually realized that I don't need a company if I can short-circuit the path to money. By switching to the right domain - finance, where what I learn might be eventually put to use directly by investing capital into profitable trading strategies.

Back to OP's article, if there's a domain where money as a moat is not a problem, that's definitely finance: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

I work in this domain since almost 20 years and can tell you, noone's gonna risk a billion dollars on crap vibe coded by AI. I wrote before, I don't know what crack these AI people are smoking but when there's real stakes at play, they don't play around with toys. And AI in programming is a toy. The unlikely triumph of "Can I haz teh codez?" CTRL+C / CTRL+V "prompt experts" (mocking it, lol) strategy on Stack Overflow, along with the people who employ it.

I'm not worried about MY particular future in this industry. I'm not worried that AI is gonna replace me, us, or write anything significant here at all in the foreseeable future until it fucking evolves into AGI which is somewhere 5000 years from now, optimistically.

The party's gotta come to an end really soon along with the figures on how much money AI makes versus it's real utility - which is, simply stated, "a toy".

Not necessary but here's my mood while writing this comment: - listening to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EWqTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2c...

>> Would it really become a bottleneck ? Only if we force a human in the loop when it may not be really necessary.

Honestly, I don't know what crack you people are smoking.

Referring to another article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037628 ): "But Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, 'kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people'. This isn’t just a strange way of marketing a product, it is a completely psychotic one."

So if the psychopathic AI overlords succeed in making us destitute, no problem. They'll have about the same level of success selling Meta glasses and Netlfix subscriptions as currently in Africa, who's ahead of us in terms of AI disruption of jobs and life standard, that is, they are already there :)

Yeah well, the first time I tried to use a sling to trow a rock, I managed to knock said rock right on my head. Fortunately it wasn't too bad but it also market the last time I tried to use a sling.

And also explains why the bow was much more popular. Gotta try much harder to shoot yourself.

Strange that noone noticed the article saying "Nobody said 'Google did it for me' or 'it was the top result so it must be true.'"

Because they did. They were the quintessential "Can I haz teh codez" Stack Overflow "programmer". Most of them, third world. Because that's where surviving tomorrow trumps everything today.

Now, the "West" has caught up. Like they did with importing third world into everything.

Which makes me optimistic. Only takes keeping composure a few more years until the house of cards disintegrates. Third world and our world is filled to the brim with people who would take any shortcut to avoid work. Shitting where they eat. Littering the streets, rivers, everywhere they live with crap that you throw out today because tomorrow it's another's problem.

Welcome to third world in software engineering!

Only it's not gonna last. Either will turn back to engineering or turn to third world as seemingly everything lately in the Western world.

There's still hope though, not everybody is a woke indoctrinated imbecile.

>> I'm now in my 50s. [...] One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.

Seeing them youngsters come and go faster than batches of recruits thrown into combat at Stalingrad, I no longer care either. Have better things to do than train them so they can jump ship for a higher salary. I only relate to people with whom I can eventually connect over long term and these youngsters ain't it.