161–170 of 270 posts
I thought it was threat of being fired and left without means to pay for rent and food?
The ruling class will work you as much as possible – to the point of death – unless stopped via labor co-ordination, mass strikes, and force.
The 40-hour week w/ fair overtime, fair breaks, etc. could be enforced and expanded to include software engineering.
For me, it is making my work miserable. I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'. It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are in…
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My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…
I read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app. When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed". Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't kno…
The requests to my team are:
build what product says
close out 90% of the defects you find by priority order
deliver in the priority of feature > security > accessibility
once delivered move on to something else we only have time to work for 3 months on an initiative before we move on
These requirements don't end up with a well working product. They end up with gaps in product, defects that are obvious, non-accessible site. Things take time to polish and be made right, but that's not what is requested. Wanting to iterate and measure isn't important because its not more features.
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I want to create automation and greater efficiencies because I believe it is good for the world to have better goods and services, cheaper. The bigger problem I see is not automation, it is the exploitation of addictive behaviours to “capture attention”.
I don’t give a fuck how cheap you make bread and circuses. The only goods and services I give a fuck about anymore are the ones that won’t be made cheaper with automation.
Bread is already so cheap as to not notice the price most of the time. But other goods and services are absolutely not that cheap. And there’s certainly higher quality that could be achieved, especially in areas like medicine. It is a lack of imagination to not see all the ways in which cheaper goods and services could improve our lives.
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The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.
When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.
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Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as t…
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 1…
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The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.
When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.
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> For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the promp…
> See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test…
This assumes you're working with text files.
What if you're working with ~100MiB (each!) frames from a scan of a 35mm movie?
(Note: This isn't fictional. I've worked with file-sets like this in film restoration many times.)
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I don’t give a fuck how cheap you make bread and circuses. The only goods and services I give a fuck about anymore are the ones that won’t be made cheaper with automation.
Speak for yourself. I want cheaper building costs so we can build more housing, cheaper and safer vehicles, higher quality food so we can all be healthier, better medical technology and medicines so we can solve more diseases, and new washing-machine-like technologies so I can spend more time with friends/family. That’s not to mention that greater leverage on my labour would give me even more flexibility to choose th…
Instead all these automation tools are and will be used to cut corners and optimize on cost. Quality, peace-of-mind, and increased free time will be the sales pitch used to placate us plebes. But we all know what the executive dipshits will really care about.