bwestergard

This is a really cool idea.

I'm trying to envision the attacks and countermeasures for this approach. I suppose what I would do to fake this is write a program that takes text and the desired output histogram of edit timings and randomly introduces jitter into the typing. Then, I'd imagine you'd develop more sophisticated statistical tests, and so on. My intuition is that eventually there would be no statistical test that reliably discriminates real human typing.

In 2024, the Silent Generation and baby boomers represented 25% of the population, but held 65% of all wealth in the US.

The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.

My coworkers and I organized a union five years ago. We're about to enter bargaining for our second contract.

https://code-cwa.org/

Your hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't accord with the reasons these workers organized. They did not conceive of the issue as primarily about multiplying all worker compensation by some large factor (e.g. 2x). While they were certainly fighting for higher pay, it was as much about the arbitrariness of career paths as anything. Sexual harassment, crunch time, and layoff cycles were all problems they sought to address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...

Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.

"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"

You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

"The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration."

Sure, but if there is no where you can legally stay, because the sole landowner prohibits it, how do you migrate?

Yeah, the post you're responding to quotes "The Prize" (an excellent book), but draws a conclusion that the quote doesn't support.

Interestingly, the Teamsters (IBT) represents a lot of oil pipeline workers today.

https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/6617pipeline...

Do you have a citation for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (today's "Teamsters") ever trying to ban automobiles? That doesn't really make sense to me chronologically.

It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

Lately I've been thinking that what people want out of graph databases is a better query experience for queries that are built around pattern matching and transitive closure. For those cases, datalog is the most expressive language, and compilation of datalog to SQL is probably the best implementation.

Thanks for drawing attention to cases of involuntary childlessness.

I'm not sure I agree that it is unfair, I'd need to give it more thought. My initial reaction is that there are all sorts of burdens that we want to incentivize people to take on that not everyone can take on, through no fault of their own. For example, we want people to serve in the military, and we provide all sorts of benefits to people who do, but some people are unable to join the military through no fault of their own (e.g. they are blind).

"The bill would have contributions from childfree adults increase by 0.7% over a period of years, meaning they would pay 2.5% of their income each month. Their employer will be expected to pay 1.8%. For adults with children the rates will remain the same: 1.8% for people with one child, 1.55% for people with two children, and 1.3% for people with three or more children."

I don't have children and this doesn't seem inherently unfair to me. It's an acknowledgement of the care labor these households are doing.

That said, I'd prefer to see it be progressive by income as well. A couple without children in the bottom income decile shouldn't be paying more than a couple with children in the top income decile.

This is not what happened historically.

Right, because to trust that those "formal specifications" are correct, you will have to write them by hand.

I agree with the sentiment, but I think the conclusion should be altered. When you hit the limit of prompting, you need to move from using LLMs at run time to accomplish a task to using LLMs to write software to accomplish the task. The role of LLMs at run time will generally shrink to helping users choose compliant inputs to a software system that embodies hard business rules.

No disagreement from me there. I am a stalwart financial and activist supporter of LaborNotes, which organizes across unions to eliminate two-tier contracts.

But two-tier contracts are the result of employer power. Employers always portray them as an inevitable outcome of the legal form of collective bargaining; the historical record cannot sustain this reading.

The solution to two tier is more powerful unions, which are inherently more democratic unions, because wage workers only have leverage if they act in concert.

The only way you could arrive at such a high figure is if you included transfer payments like Social Security and Medicare in "the cost to run the government", which is not how most people understand "the cost to run the government".

Cool. Sounds like it went well?

What sort of work were you doing?

Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?

There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).

For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.

For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).

https://koncontributes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...

I'm glad to see this.

I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.

I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.

Doesn't this assume that what humans are current doing with LLM agents is working out? Isn't it a bit early to bet on that to this degree?

This study and the studies it relies on are based on O*NET descriptions of jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Taxonomy. Here is the entry for Software Developers:

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1252.00

The "exposure" of a job is based on the degree to which its "tasks" can be substituted/augmented by LLM-based tools. Some example tasks are:

- Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures, programming, or documentation.

- Determine system performance standards.

They are predicting roughly one quarter of U.S. software developers will lose their jobs over the next two to five years.

If you believe that one could quantify how much time could be saved on each of those "tasks" across all software developers as a whole with current and near future LLM-based technologies, you should take these results seriously. They are doing so using data about actual LLM requests and using LLMs to compare the content of those requests to the O*NET task content.

If you don't find that methodologically plausible - as I don't - you shouldn't take the final outputs of their study seriously.

There could of course be other convincing arguments for pending degradation of the software developer labor market that don't rely on this type of task analysis.

The "blue-zone" studies are flawed, so we shouldn't infer too much from lifestyle generalizations about people in them.

https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...

Poignantly in this instance, Utopia is from "ou-topos" (coined by Sir Thomas More in the early modern period). It literally means "no place".

I think these arguments tend to reach impasse because one gravitates to one of two views:

1) My experiences with LLMs are so impressive that I consider their output to generally be better than what the typical developer would produce. People who can't see this have not gotten enough experience with the models I find so impressive, or are in denial about the devaluation of their skills.

2) My experiences with LLMs have been mundane. People who see them as transformative lack the expertise required to distinguish between mediocre and excellent code, leading them to deny there is a difference.

To the original poster: I don't know you, but based on your posting history I am worried about your well being. Please talk to someone in person about how you're feeling, even if you feel okay (or better than okay).

Amazing bit of history, thank you!

It isn't. See: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708045

They wouldn't profit if the cases didn't have merit.

Have you seen the meme with three spidermen, labeled "Designer", "Product Manager", and "Engineer" wherein each is pointing to the other two and saying "I don't need you anymore!"?

Most of the time, the person saying that is wrong.