Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
5,602 karma · joined October 18, 2013
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Direct link to a paper in replies if you don't use X: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286203208_Effect_of...
Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect.
War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak.
Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.
And those without understanding what the number means or how it was derived write misleading articles.
Usually the CEO or investor says 30% (or some other made up number) of all code is written by AI and the number will only increase, implying that developers will soon be obsolete.
It's implied that 30% of all code submitted and shipped to production is from AI agents with zero human interaction. But of course this is not the case, it's the same developers as before using tools to more rapidly write code.
And writing code is only one part of a developer's job in building software.
But over time people learn and its standard. And as the NN group article points out: it has become familiar and known today.
My favorite iteration of this was in the This American Life mobile app that used a graphic of an actual hamburger instead of 3 stacked gray lines. This was also about 10 years ago I believe. Unfortunately I can't find any reference or graphic depicting it.
I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.
The point was to counter the statement that Meta is the most ruthless and shameless of all companies.
The most ruthless and shameless company would not give back a lot of useful free open source software for hobbyists and companies to use.
Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.
If you want cleaner air you have to move air through a filter at high speed. I have some consumer grade purifiers but the Corsi–Rosenthal Box [1] is easily the most effective of what I have. Both in feeling and measured. And it costs less than $100.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
But that doesn't mean I think my kids should primarily get K-12 and college education this way.
I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it.
But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning.
Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on:
>I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.
Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
There are tradeoffs when shaving small percentages off operating costs by eliminating staff where your customers are. This goes for software development and product management as well.
That's what read replicas with read-only access are for. Production db servers should not be open to random queries and usage by people. That's only for the app to use.
This thought exercise also gets interesting with software development. There are few prospects available for new grads and junior devs now. Relentless offshoring, headcount reductions, and AI promises from CEOs have hollowed out the tech landscape. There are very few opportunities for young people to professionally develop the knowledge to keep the systems running.
And now most startups are focused on eliminating staff via AI. The people who would keep the systems running. I'm not sure where all of this leads to in a few years.
>Without something to look at, people have to look at the each other. With that comes a lot of subconscious (and conscious) reading into reactions. Pauses in the conversation are awkward because you’re just staring at each other.
As an introverted person who overthinks and often avoids eye contact and body language, I usually stay away from social events not tied to something specific. But enjoy the ones tied to a specific interest, like a museum. I now have a better understanding of why.
Another way to think about it is SWE agents. About a year ago Devin was billed as a dev replacement, with the now common reaction that it's over for SWEs and it's no longer a useful to learn software engineering.
A year later there have been large amounts of layoffs that impacted sw devs. There have also been a lot of fluff statements attributing layoffs to increased efficiency as a result of AI adoption. But is there a link? I have my doubts and think it's more related to interest rates and the business cycle.
I've also yet to see any AI solutions that negate the need for developers. Only promises from CEOs and investors. However, I have seen how powerful it can be in the hands of people that know how to leverage it.
I guess time will tell. In my experience the current trajectory is LLMs making tasks easier and more efficient for people.
And hypefluencers, investors, CEOs, and others will continue promising that just around the corner is a future in which human software developers are obsolete.
This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."
Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.
I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.
But it's hazy and hard to measure. I am very rarely stuck on hard problems like I was 3+ years ago. But I lose time in other ways. I've never measured it so it's really just a feeling.
I am also skeptical of a company selling something to sponsor or put out a report directly related to what they're selling.
It makes my work more productive, yes. But it often slows me down too. Knowing when to push back on the response you get is often difficult to get right.
This quote in particular:
>Surveys confirm that for many workers, AI tools like ChatGPT reduce their productivity by increasing the volume of content and steps needed to complete a given task, and by frequently introducing errors that have to be checked and corrected.
This sort of mirrors my work as a SWE. It does increase productivity and can reduce lead times for task completion. But requires a lot of checking and pushback.
There's a large gap between increased productivity in the right field in the right hands vs copying and pasting a solution everywhere so companies don't need workers.
And that's really what most of these AI firms are selling. A solution to automate most workers out of existence.
You see the process and the questions they ask and evaluate how they distill the responses. The more you let the candidate use sources, the closer it is to day-to-day work.
A somewhat similar equivalent to yesterday's copying and pasting a Stack Overflow or w3 schools solution is blindly copying and pasting a chat response from a quick and vague prompt.
But someone who knows how to precisely prompt or use the correct set of templates is someone with more critical thinking skills that knows when to push back or modify the suggested solution.
Knowing the small % of difference can make a big difference long term in code readability, reliability, and security.
The other big alternative to all of this is strict debugging. A debugging test or chain of thought around quickly identifying and fixing the source of problems. This is a skill whose needs will probably increase over time.
Apple Intelligence was particularly a let down. It just got in the way, adding noise and distraction and not adding anything useful.
The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
We were indeed laughably naive.