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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 mrguyorama »

chasd00 wrote: post #317
Tarq0n wrote: post #272

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

#342

Post by RobinL »

luke5441 wrote: post #327
RobinL wrote: post #281

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

#344

Post by worik »

greenchair wrote: post #296
pixelready wrote: post #246

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?

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

#346

Post by hollowturtle »

THX1137 wrote: post #286
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me. I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new…

> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking…

I mean in which lucky place of the planet you live in? I dunno u but where I live it's 40 degree celsius out there and all over europe. I'm a remote worker and most time of the year going outside is just not possibile, over heat or too cold or raining like it never did before(climate change you know)

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

#347

Post by mh- »

THX1137 wrote: post #286
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me. I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new…

> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking…

There are different kinds of people, and a considerable % of folks rely on some foundational structure in their day-to-day to drive many of their other habits.

For a lot of people, that was commuting to a job outside of their home.

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

#348

Post by elzbardico »

[Verse 1] Stand up, all victims of oppression

For the tyrants fear your might!

Don't cling so hard to your possessions

For you have nothing if you have no rights!

Let racist ignorance be ended

For respect makes the empires fall!

Freedom is merely privilege extended

Unless enjoyed by one and all

[Chorus]

So come brothers and sisters

For the struggle carries on

The Internationale

Unites the world in song

So comrades, come rally

For this is the time and place!

The international ideal

Unites the human race

[Verse 2] Let no one build walls to divide us

Walls of hatred nor walls of stone

Come greet the dawn and stand beside us

We'll live together or we'll die alone

In our world poisoned by exploitation

Those who have taken, now they must give!

And end the vanity of nations

We've but one Earth on which to live

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

#349

Post by worik »

mrguyorama wrote: post #341
chasd00 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, do…

Yes, mostly true

But there is still journalism.

* Propublica

* The Economist

* The Guardian

* 404 Media

Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists

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

#350

Post by pixelready »

elmer2 wrote: post #273
pixelready wrote: post #246

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…

"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." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the governmen…

So I’ve gotten this retort (i.e. threat of starvation being the only valid motivator) from a few folks in person as well, and I always feel like it’s them telling on themselves more than the truism it’s presented as.

Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.

Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?

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