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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#341

Post by noosphr »

xlii wrote: post #85

Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech. Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech. They wanted gold. For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're mi…

Tech means a lot of things there.

I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.

From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#342

Post by mh- »

ajkjk wrote: post #262
cheschire wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to. Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this t…

Same. HN comments would (maybe still do) accuse you of astroturfing if you said you preferred an office. Not that much stock should be put in strangers accusing you, but, it was telling how ignorant it was.

I believe "LLMs are useful"* is the current zeitgeist's version of "Working from the office has upsides", in terms of attracting astroturfing accusations over expressing an opinion held by many.

* simplifying, of course.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#344

Post by worik »

pj_mukh wrote: post #322
Muromec wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict , but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about goi…

Yes, it is a tool.

"Normal"?

It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.

But:

AI cannot do your job

Your boss bought AI to do your job

You're fired

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#345

Post by largbae »

teeray wrote: post #283
Animats wrote: post #222

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

> look at what happened to printers… I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.

Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#346

Post by messe »

greenchair wrote: post #302
pixelready wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our…

maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?

It has never been tried.

Remind us what the U stands for?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#347

Post by mrguyorama »

chasd00 wrote: post #323
Tarq0n wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.

>It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists.

We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.

Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.

The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.

Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.

Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#348

Post by RobinL »

luke5441 wrote: post #333
RobinL wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: I've been working for a couple years (not full time) on a high performance FOSS address matcher: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/uk_address_matche... Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM…

Given it is being trained on your project, the latter isn't that surprising. For the former, you could use LLMs yourself for the probabilistic matching as alternative method? Probably you don't because the trade-offs (like performance) are not worth it...

Yes - it's certainly the case at the moment that you can run a few thousand through the LLM at a reasonable price, but not, say, ten million. But the rate of progress suggests to me that this argument won't hold up forever. Eventually I think an off the shelf LLM will outperform most and probably all more traditional ML models at this task. Largely because LLMs can identify tricky ones and pick them out for more intensive effort (e.g. looking online, further searches again the canonical list of addresses)

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#350

Post by worik »

greenchair wrote: post #302
pixelready wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our…

maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?

When? Where?
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