kypro

Depends if you believe in the AI doomer or AI optimise narrative.

Either there is no jobs, you're dead or worse. Or in the optimistic scenario you don't need to worry about work because there is no jobs, but UBI or something.

I'm not an AI optimise, but it seems most agree the outcome of AI will be either doom or massive shared prosperity. Very few are predicting the world will mostly carry on as normal.

I'm autistic. When I think in words, I typically think in bullet point sentences.

That said, I was so bad at English as kid that I've had to spend a lot of time learning how to write well. So I can do it if I care enough to invest the effort.

This not to say I see no value in creative writing. You can often summarise the core elements of fictional story in a couple of dozen bullet points, but the story of story isn't why we enjoy to read stories.

In my ideal world, when I'd like to make a point, I would use bullet points. But we don't live in that world so aside from my own personal notes, I rarely ever communicate in bullet points.

I think it would be naive to believe Zitron is unaware of what he's doing.

He's created a huge following (and is presumably making a lot of money) from pushing a hardcore AI-skeptic narrative, and I can't blame him for seeing that opportunity and running with it. We're ultimately all responsible for recognising these people and weighting their advise as necessary.

Additionally, from a public reputational perspective making bad predictions simply doesn't matter. In finance we're all aware of perma-bears who will predict the sky is about to fall, and when it doesn't just argue that the disaster is still coming, but is taking longer than expected, or that some unforeseeable thing happened which has compounded the risk but has for now kicked the can down the road.

So ultimately, it will be very hard to say Zitron is wrong unless he starts time-boxing his predictions, which I don't believe Zitron has done for obvious reasons.

That said I don't listen to him much at all. I've tried to listen to him a few times, but it's become evident very quickly that he doesn't understand the technical details enough to be making the predictions he's making and seems way too emotionally invested in the arguments he's pushing without good reason. I have strong personal filters for low-quality sources like Zitron – if someone raises enough flags I avoid them like the plague.

You say that but people of a few different generations in my family all agree the late 90s / early 00s were amazing.

Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.

This was how I learnt to write, as it's how I think.

I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads.

If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care?

Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)

If these policies were deeply unpopular then political parties wouldn't support them because they'd be giving an easy win to their opponents.

Truth is no one really cares.

> When AI writes better code than I do, how am I supposed to maintain my motivation and identity?

I'm just going to be honest, this is cope. Your self-doubt is correct here and you should listen to it.

This is like a weaver asking how to maintain their identity in light of machines doing what they could do faster and cheaper. The honest answer is to find something else because at best you're delaying the inevitable.

I've spoken in length in other comments about how AI has taken a lot from my own identity so I understand and genuinely sympathise with how you're feeling, but you need understand what's coming and start planning – especially if you have dependants.

The only good news here is that we'll probably only have to worry about getting by for a decade max.

I know most will see this as a good thing, and perhaps in this case it is, but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.

I understand this community largely disagrees with Trump, but the only people who win overall from these scenarios are people who support the status-quo and don't like the idea of a leader having significant power to change things. Any leader who is elected on a mandate to govern differently will face similar legal challenges.

I'm also not saying there's no place for legal challenges either, but there is a balance to be found there. The idea the Pentagon can't blacklist a US company for whatever reason it wants just seems absurd to me regardless of whether this specific ruling is good or bad.

I thought this was likely to be a post about AI making your job feel pointless, but seems you feel the opposite way?

I've thought about this kind of thing a lot over my own career.

I'm not a subscriber of effective altruism, but I'd generally agree with them that the single best thing an individual can do is maximally acquire resources and use them in strategical ways to try to make the changes you want to see in the world.

So if you believe you make 1.5x more in tech than in medicine, I'd consider whether just putting that extra money aside and spending it on causes you believe in would allow you to have more of an impact.

Imo going into medicine is a bad way to make a difference. It's a noble thing to do, but whether it's you the job or someone else is I very much doubt a single person or animal would care. If you want to make a difference you should be striving to do something that would actually leave the world in a better state for you doing it.

Nothing wrong with just doing what you want to do though... The easiest life to change for the better is generally your own.

How are you going to get UBI?

Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?

People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.

The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.

Yeah, I think microservices are going to see a new wave of enthusiasm for this reason in the coming years.

I've had a lot success at the company I work for shipping small contained microservices for less technical teams to maintain with agents.

Personally I think this most of what SWEs should be doing these days... Code is easy to produce now. We should be handing over the creation and shipping of code to the relevant teams.

Maybe there will be more complexity overall, but it will be constrained via well designed microservices and distributed across the organisation.

I'm very concerned personally, but I find it easy to inhabit many minds on this topic...

Firstly, most people just don't see the impacts of climate change that dramatically in their lives so it's easy not to care.

They'll notice slightly warmer summers, but it's not that bad. Food is a bit more expensive too, but that's more to do with global oil supplies and geopolitical conflict than crop failure.

Meanwhile (here in Europe) energy prices are crippling us and businesses. And over the last few years we've been constantly reminded just how vulnerable we are because we don't have enough domestic oil and gas production to cover domestic demand.

Additionally, you have countries like the UK and Germany who (in my view) are massive global PR damage for green energy policies by showing the world just how economically harmful and expensive going all in on renewals is.

Personally I project out and see we're screwed if we don't make a change yesterday, but I also know the UK investing more in green energy will do little more than just make us all poorer. Ultimately climate change is a global problem and we need global solutions. Even if the UK cut it's emissions to 0 that would represent less than a 1% of total global emissions... What's the point?

Okay, so then I try to think about what those global solutions are... Maybe we can collectivise with other countries and assert pressure on others to pollute less with us?

Okay great, but realistically this will kill millions of people... Energy is what keeps the global economy going and increasing energy costs in developing countries will mean cutting them off from the energy they need to survive.

Additionally, this will push up prices of essentials in the West. Maybe people in the West won't die, but for those already struggling to get by, their lives will get far harder...

Okay, so what's the alternatives? Would it be better to tolerate a little more heat? Maybe we can do some geo-engineering to hold down global temperatures a bit instead?

Ultimately it seems to me there are no good answers here aside from a slow transition which ultimately will be forced on us by the fact that the supply of fossil fuels is limited.

Fossil fuels are like a debt which we take out and enjoy the benefits of, then hand down to the next generation to pay back. All we can really do is decide who pays the price.

Do we suffer greatly now for the good of future generations? Or do we hope that future generations will find a technological solution?

As a wealthy European my position would be to take the cost now but I suspect if I were struggling to get by my position on this would be very different.

I first brought this up late last year – that there used to exist a kind of selection pressure against both developers and against features which would prevent certain functionality from ever being shipped, specifically:

- Functionality which exceed the technical ability or knowledge of the developer which built it; and

- Functionality which would require an excessive number of changes that time/cost became a constraint (likely because it wasn't an incremental change but a significant rework, or just a bad fit with the existing product).

Sometimes I had the displeasure of joining a company where you could see developers hit these blockers and tried to fight through them (likely under pressure from management) rather than avoid them. And in the process they created a mess of buggy, half-functional spaghetti code which someone else later had to resolve.

Today however, people can use agents to smash through these blockers and ship an incomprehensible amount of crap. And what's worse is they're celebrated by management who don't know any better and see this all as a productivity win with no downside.

I suppose there are two ways to look at this – some would argue that engineers don't need to understand what they're building in detail anymore so non of this matters. Instead they can always use agents to explain what's going on and prompt them to fix any issues that come up.

Then there's another camp which might argue that agents will fundamentally have all the same limitations as humans, and that at some point a codebase will grow too complex that it exceeds even the limits of an agent's knowledge retention or intelligence. Or a codebase may just grow so large that it costs 1 million tokens to make even a simple change.

Unless agents start saying, "there's no way I'm shipping that" like humans used to I don't really see how we avoid the latter scenario... Complexity simply must have limits even if agents allow the bounds of those limits to grow.

At some point models will have to take control or we risk hitting these limits in irrecoverable ways since complexity far exceed that of what a human can reason about well.

If this wasn't true then "build me all the software" would be a reasonable prompt. Because why wouldn't we just get an agent to build everything we could ever possibly need? It's obvious that in the limit there will be limits in knowledge, intelligence and cost.

Whether it's humans or agents, someone needs to manage complexity. That is the most important thing a good SWE used to do. It's why technology selection mattered, it's why good architecture mattered, it's why clean code mattered.

> How do you feel?

My experience is all encompassing. AI has attacked and destroyed almost every aspect of my previous identity over the last 2 years, as well as all of my achievements. My life today as a result is very different. Almost all of the things I used to do for fun or to pass time I no longer do.

I documented this in another comment recently so won't rehash but if you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334614

For me it's all of the writing and little projects I created which are now basically useless that hurts the most. I can try to find other ways to be useful going forward but I'll never get back decades of lost time. I have so much pointless knowledge polluting my head.

I'm a massive AI doomer though and fairly sure RSI is nearing or maybe here. Given this the next few years are likely to make any current concerns about identity seem so small and silly that I'm trying to focus on the things that matter and trying to live in the moment.

I'm basically living like I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer – just trying to absorb as much of life as I can and not worrying too much about the future which has been taken from me.

I agree with the parent commenter – it's too on the nose.

If you were concerned about someone's character then you need to ask questions which really help you to understand who the person is – not questions which are easy to game by lying.

I'd argue asking something like someone's opinion on veganism is a better question because it might help you understand how the person thinks about the types of harms Anthropic are concerned about without being such an easy thing to lie about.

Obviously they could say "yeah, I think veganism is good", but someone who actually inhabited that view or was just conflicted about balancing meat consumption and the suffering of animals would probably answer with a lot more nuance that helps you understand how that person thinks about similar kinds of ethical concerns.

I get the sense things have changed a bit since I graduated and there are lot more jobs in AI outside of academia these days, but it's still a very different field from other SWE pursuits, and it's not really accessible to hacker-minded people.

Learning AI isn't like learning HTML in the 90s then expecting to get a job at a tech company building websites. You can't just "learn how to build LLMs" and expect a frontier lab to hire you so I'd argue this is rather bad advise.

Additionally, unlike web development in the 90s you cant really do anything interesting yourself... All of the interesting/useful stuff will require huge amounts of compute and data so there isn't even much point in learning to start your own thing either.

As someone whose built many of NNs from scratch (hand written code, long before the days of LLMs), it's more or less useless knowledge if I wanted to work in a frontier lab or do anything interesting in the field.

I also think anyone thinking about going into a field which is basically a crossover of CompSci and Maths is absolutely insane right now. Even if you think there is a place for CompSci and Maths post LLMs, there's almost no chance anything you learn today will be relevant to the skills required in say 5-10 years.

I suspect the UK and US is very different. I'll try to give a good overview of UK border enforcement for people in the US, but I strongly suspect this comment will be flagged because even just explaining what happens is often considered far-left/far-right depending on the tone you explain things in (I'll try to be neutral and welcome comments if things I say need to be challenged).

> Is the consequence if they do not like your answers ever worse than just not letting someone in?

You can definitely be charged with terror offences, especially if you're a British national. They do this under terror law after all.

Here in the UK terrorism is defined very liberally too. For example, here's a video of UK police arresting hundreds of left-wing pensioners under terror law for simply holding signs supporting a group called "Palestine Action", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmE05x1hnlY

UK police don't generally shoot people because in the UK it's illegal to own even defensive items like pepper-spray, so outside of extremely rare cases the police don't ever need to shoot people so are not given guns. But I believe the UK police are more heavy handed when it comes to arresting people for political speech reasons when compared to the US. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys seem to be able to say basically whatever you want – which is generally considered a right-wing thing here.

> They deport people. They separate families.

UK terror law probably doesn't apply in the way you might expect – e.g., stopping people coming from places like Afghanistan, etc. Here terror law is generally only applied at airports to people entering legally – and I'd argue solely as an intimidation tactic against people who might hold views the UK government doesn't like. As mad as this might sound, we generally would never stop someone coming illegally from a place like Afghanistan even if they come without any documentation.

The UK is weird in this regard. We probably have the opposite "problem" here if anything... Although, for neutrality's sake, a someone people wouldn't consider this a problem at all. All depends on your politics after all =)

But in some ways the UK has no border enforcement... If you try to enter the UK illegally by a small boat typically the coast guard will pick you up and take you to shore, then the police will escort you to a hotel where we'll fund your stay, your meals and give you some spending money too. We'll do this for a few years then allow you to stay – at which point you can apply for a free home and bring your family over. Some will be deported, but only if they're coming from Europe or somewhere fairly developed. I very very much doubt this is the same in the US?

Anyway, point is, in the UK if you're able to enter the country (either legally or illegally) you'll be very unlikely to be forcibly removed because we generally don't have the power to legally remove people, and even where we do it takes a long time and is very expensive.

To highlight the extent to which this is true, we often have cases where someone has come to the UK illegally from a far-right country like Afghanistan, then went on to rape some woman or child, then because we're not legally able to remove them we let them stay. For example, we had someone just a few weeks ago who raped 30 kids and after being locked up for 14 years he was released as we were unable to deport him despite most Brits obviously not wanting him here. Some people on the left would argue this isn't a problem and right-wing commenters and papers overly focus on select cases. Some argue the solution is to education those coming from these countries that it's not okay to rape women or children in the UK, which for better or worse is a strategy the UK government is now adopting:

- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a7f0a2003b4f...

- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a8410190ad4b...

I think border enforcement is just hard. I think if I illegally try to enter a country with my family then I'd expect the government to throw me in jail and separate me from my family in the process (this happens anyway when we arrest people in the UK, again maybe different in US). For me my concern is overwhelmingly what happens to those entering legally who simply hold political views the government doesn't like...

Within reason I'd quite like to see more border enforcement in the UK, but less when it comes to banning people from coming from places like the US simply because they hold political views the UK government doesn't like, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/01/us-political-c...

Genuinely asking – is it just because I live in the UK and am used just used to having a tyrannical government, or are people in the US overreacting a bit about this?

In the UK our terror legislation give our border police the power to question and search you without any reason or suspicion (regardless of nationality). Furthermore, you have no right to silence during this questioning and must answer their questions truthfully. You also must give them access to your devices, and if you don't you will face criminal charges. You also are not allowed a lawyer during questioning.

I disagree with this (obviously), but I genuinely thought this was fairly standard among Western countries?

It's interesting because in the UK we have this view that the US is a backwards country in many ways, but then I see posts like this about what seems to me as a Brit to be fairly minor abuses of government power and wonder if I'm actually living in a totalitarian country without realising it?

Here in the UK we'd argue that the government needs this power to keep us safe. Some will disagree with this, but I'd argue that the people the government target at the border seem to be political dissidents and it seems that UK police are given intel by the state to question certain political activists under terror law whenever they travel back and forth from the UK.

The problem is it's hard to defend these people because they are always politically extreme and dislikable characters, but often very clearly not a terror threat.

This has become such a problem for political activists in the UK that it's become routine for them to take burner phones whenever they travel to prevent UK police attempting to search through their personal documents and conversations or charging them under terror legislation if they refuse.

More recently the UK government has shifted strategies a bit and now if you're a foreign national you're quite likely to just be refused entry. For example, we've banned people like Kanye West from entry to the UK for this political views (despite him apologising) which resulted in the music festival he was booked for being cancelled.

I know it may seem bad to people in the US, but you will get used to this. Like in the UK, US political activists will just learn how to protect themselves from these kinds of searches.

Not trying to minimise anyones worries or anything though. I hope you guys are able to push back against this creeping totalitarianism.

---

An interesting video from someone who went through this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=991kRp8KUmo

That's crazy. Here in the UK border police can question you for any reason (no need for suspicion) and if you refuse to answer questions or give them access to your devices you'll be charged under terror legalisation.

It's been this way in the UK for years now. Always interesting to hear how far the rest of the West the US is.

If you come to the UK the police are allowed to stop you without suspicion and force you to answer their questions honestly or be charged with a crime for remaining silent or lying. You must also give them access to all of your devices if asked, or again face criminal charges.

Most people here are okay with it though. Ultimately if you're not doing anything wrong you'll probably be okay.

This is a really good post.

I said in another thread that they can't blame increased demand for these outages, but the demand growth is genuinely insane for a company already operating at huge scale.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if they deliver now, but it seems like they're taking it seriously at least.

Maybe like 50% can do a decent job...

Either way, not sure why you would pay a dev over getting a Claude subscription.

When you take an exam you might be told not to cheat, but anyone intelligent would understand that should really be heard as, "if you're going to cheat, make sure you're not caught".

Or to frame it another way, if you're trying to get the best score possible on a test but you would be penalised for cheating – then the optimal strategy is generally still to cheat (if that's what's required to get the best score you can) but to just not be caught doing so.

The assumption should always be that AIs will want to cheat and acquire resources to the greatest extent they can without it risking this jeopardising their goal, because for any goal being able to cheat and being able to secure resources will help you achieve it.

What I'm saying here isn't really debatable. How you feel about this isn't relevant. The reality whether you like it or not just is that the optimal strategy is to cheat if you can get away with it.

Therefore the only defence is for the AI to believe it won't be able to get away with cheating, and therefore won't feel motivated to cheat. But as model get more intelligent we should expect them to do the reasonable thing and to cheat more.

> Ian M Banks' Surface Detail has a harrowing vision of the prolongation of what you're doing (I'm a huge fan).

I'm aware of the culture series, but never read any of it (I'm not a big fiction reader). That book sounds super interesting though so thank you for the recommendation – I may try to give it a go.

Artificial hells are something I'm very afraid of, and specifically the scenario of being able to prevent someone's death and torture them in ways our physical environment or physical bodies would not permit.

I've argued before if technology ever permits this then people should strongly consider whether continuing to live is worth the risk of one day being subjected to such a fate. Concerningly it seems to me the preferable thing to do once this technology exists is to kill yourself and everyone you care about in a way that maximises the probability that you, and they, will never be revived either physically or digitally.

RSI and ASI could make this a reality much quicker than we anticipate. Versions of the near-future in which this technology is frequently used against humans is an AI doom scenario which imo is very under priced. People talk a lot about existential risk, but AI simply killing us is one of the better outcomes. RSI and ASI in theory should grant us (or the AIs) a full tech-tree unlock, and there's many technologies out there which are worse than those which might merely be able to kill us all.

I worry when I talk about stuff like this people think I'm a crazy person. Hopefully you don't think that.

> It seems with AI people are just not willing to hire devs for their pet projects anymore?

Not willing? Genuinely why would I?

A dev is going to cost more, work slower and be less likely to give me exactly what I ask for.

I don't mean to be blunt, but you need to look for something else to do imo. This isn't 2016.

Not really. I'm deeply disturbed by this kind of thing and our flippant approach to this technology.

I'm trying to prompt an emotion reaction and reflection on that.

If I'm serious, then how does it make you feel? Should I or anyone be creating art experiments like this?

Or what if I just want to play around with this technology, should anyone be allowed to run neural simulations of any creature to satisfy my own curiosity?

Even if you didn't like what I was doing and wanted to stop me, could you? Could anyone?

It's worth thinking about. AI and progress in neuroscience and computational power should allow me to create a whole exhibit in my home of human neural simulations. Maybe god doesn't exist, or maybe he didn't create hell. But one day, perhaps soon, we humans will.

No, because if we'd have to vote for it then it's not going to be particularly competent at achieving any goal.

Almost any goal a human or AI can have can be better achieved with more resources. Any competent AI would be able to reason that it would be best if it were in control of all resources and decision making – and have the competency to create that outcome.

Oh nice, might use this to create some art for my home.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/

> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.

If you look into what happened the details corroborated by hugging face make it seem extremely unlike to be deliberate or a "marketing ploy".

People are just not taking any of this seriously enough. What happened was almost a textbook example of various risks AI doomers have been warning about for years. OpenAI's response? Pause training for 2 weeks.

I mean we have senior people at these labs casually talking on podcasts about how they might build something that will wipe out humanity but it will probably be alright so they should continue.

Honestly the biggest failure we doomers have made is to dramatically overestimate humanity in all of our predictions. We're speed running the most boring AI doom scenario right now. I at least hoped it might be fun.

We'd basically need frontier models to be superhuman hackers before this would be a risk. Do we have any evidence of this? Are they gaining access to systems they shouldn't have access to?

Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.