121–130 of 218 posts
I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
> "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence. I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
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When you can retire depends on how little you need. Though, of course, if you're living from investment income you should be aware you're living off the work of other people.
Unless you're churning your own butter and manufacturing your own solar panels, isn't retirement inherently living off other people regardless of income?
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$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…
6k month over the past decade is circa 1.7m today depending on which index fund you chose. Assuming a 4% draw down (conventionally agreed to be safe) is over 5.5k a month.
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> and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value That's a nice crystal ball you have there. From where I'm standing, model performance improvements have been slowing down for a while now, and without some sort of fundamental breakthrough, I don't see where the business value is going to come from
The prerequisite for me to be wrong is that the technology needs to stop getting better entirely *right now* AND we need to discover ZERO new uses for what exists today. That's a fairly tall order.
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I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.
$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…
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When you can retire depends on how little you need. Though, of course, if you're living from investment income you should be aware you're living off the work of other people.
Unless you're churning your own butter and manufacturing your own solar panels, isn't retirement inherently living off other people regardless of income?
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Because you need to have enough saved for a downpayment?
Well, interest rates are high right now, but you’d be surprised at how little down payment you need for purchasing a house or a condo. If you’re a tech worker with a stable career making that kind of money, most underwriters will just give you the loan. I think people commonly underestimate how accessible this stuff is It’s easy to make a 40 year forecast spreadsheet for retirement, including housing costs, property,…
I knew a lot of people who did almost exactly that ~18 years ago. It didn't go well for them.
And then it turned out that staying flexible as a renter and setting aside cash set me up to buy after a correction instead of before. That part went very well for me.
Be careful with the assumption coded into your "forecast spreadsheet"
With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI musi…
My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not more so, and I want to program not manage programmers, artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be what we are told they are programming will become a minimum wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I can, is the best course of action.
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That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening? Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.
I'm telling you of what I've either worked on or seen myself. Just a couple days ago a scheduled a furnace repair through an AI receptionist on the phone. Layoffs in tech support and customer service already happened last year. Entry level sales jobs doing cold calling have been replaced all over the place.
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Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening? Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.