691–700 of 830 posts
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Well... 19th century engineer could have a large multi-story brownstone with family and , more importantly, servants and house personnel. A butler, etc... Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!
>servants and house personnel Which you mostly don't need today. You may have a lawn guy, take your car to a mechanic, and use a washer/dryer to do most of your laundry.
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I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headline…
They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.
What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.
> Prospective clients ask Claude to do the work they might have hired me for In all the 10 articles, I think this is the only thing really. I think we have to learn how to overcome and thrive in the new world. The gravy of CS careers is gone for all :(
"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…
I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately: "Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive] Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world…
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> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…
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I have (1990s Ukraine emerging from the ruins of the USSR).
>The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.
Yeah, on that... Nope.
Dunno where you fantasized that from.
Prostitution for basic necessities existed, as it does in the US today (and everywhere else: poverty is the #1 reason for it).
Gangs did form. They didn't quite "seize everything they can". Protection racket was common, and preferred for the same reason that taxing a market economy is usually more profitable than a planned one.
"Invaders" weren't a thing.
Mass rapes weren't a thing.
People who "bulked up" and joined gangs, in their masses, weren't the winners.
Berezovsky, one of the most infamous Russian oligarchs, came from an academic background, with multiple publications in applied mathematics.
(Berezovsky number is a fun alternative to the Erdos number; mine is four [1])
Khodorkovsky was a chemical engineer by education who bootstrapped his business career by importing and selling computing equipment for a science education center he opened during perestroika. He used the funds to open a bank.
Gusinsky, Russia's media magnate, dropped out of engineering studies to major in theater. His diploma work was on Moliere's "Tartuffe".
Another theater major, Vladislav Surkov, went on to become Putin's chief propagandist and is primarily responsible for shaping the post-truth world we live in today.
Turning to Ukraine:
Kolomoyskiy, one of the most infamous Ukrainian oligarchs, was a metallurgical engineer.
Pinchuk, another oligarch, got a doctorate from the same university.
Poroshenko, an oligarch and a former president, got a degree in international relations and started a legal advisory firm for international trade before the USSR collapsed. His school buddy Saakashvili became the president of Georgia.
I can go on and on. A few thugs did make it big (e.g. Akhmetov); they were exception rather than the norm.
As the USSR collapsed, the people with enough smarts to be able to "seize everything" were either politicians or nerds.
Your strongman fantasy has no basis in reality.
"Nature" valued people with PhDs, it turns out.
[1] https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/freetools/collab-dist?...
> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…
My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…
When I was in school (US, Ohio, 48 y/o) we got the "if you don't go to college you'll flip burgers" spiel from our teachers / guidance counselors.
Last week she got a variant of that except the teacher thoughtfully added "and burger flipping will be done by robots so you can't even fall back to that". The teacher threw in a healthy dose of suggesting creative jobs will all be destroyed and that "learning to manage AI" is the only viable future career path.
Trades are what my daughter brought up as a viable career path (and I was proud when she did). She also pointed out her school focuses heavily on "college prep" and is loathe to even mention that trades exist.
Edit:
I'm telling my daughter to lean on her interpersonal skills and charisma, and take every opportunity to lead groups. Being a physically present, inspirational, and effective leader is, I figure, a role that isn't going to go away any time soon.
I didn't go to college (beyond an Associate I grudgingly completed) and I didn't end up "flipping burgers". I concentrated on marketable skills in an industry that was growing, and I leaned into good writing and communication, and entrepreneurship. I've tried to hold this up to her, though I am quick to concede that the world is different now, by a large margin, from when I got started.
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I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headline…
They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.
Security, Guards, Locks, Cameras, the mockery of the naive, bumbling fools who easily trust one another - as if that ability to not be capable to form such members of society is something to be proud about. The endless self upselling "protectors", the shards of glass on the wall, the scams, the con artists, proud in ripping of the "Naive and stupid" all these zero-sum gameplayers, producing nothing and furiously proud of their retardation. A whole industry to support a mountain of dysability. If the culture you grew up in is not capable of forming such a society, you are not part of the west. You can not be and never will be. All the shoring up work named above, even with society enforced norms be damned.
If your presence is a detriment, the answer is to build a society without you. Arcologies, cooperate cities, Amish towns - call it what you want. Place where the "stupid" can be "easily gullible" and cooperate and work. And others where the "real ones" can roam around and rip each other off to their hearts content. A harsh wall in the middle, razor-wire on top - and thats the end of that illusion.
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Yeah, I think about this a lot. Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight. Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding. Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again. This effor…
What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a…