Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

harpers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 284 posts

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#221

Post by bitwize »

anon291 wrote: post #218
bitwize wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they get paid squat compared to their brainrotted silly-valley webshit-slinger counterparts. Can we pay these fine folks, as well as people in professions like teaching, more?

I mean... no? I've worked on chips for basically my entire career, and I get paid a more than when I briefly worked in web stuff. Not sure where this idea has come from. My previous startup I worked for just got acquired for 10s of billions of dollars, which is a higher valuation than my friends who have gone through acquisitions in the web-dev / SaaS space I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff…

When I lived in the northeast, every time I saw an opportunity for embedded work, or traditional UI work (Qt, etc., almost invariably for things like screens on medical or scientific equipment and almost never for desktop applications) it paid 1/2 to 2/3 the going rate for a midlevel webshit engineer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#223

Post by sevensor »

reductum wrote: post #27
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #22

I genuinely like the author's style ( not in the quote above; its here for a different reason ). It paints a picture in a way that I still am unable to. I suck at stories. Anyway, back to the quote. If that is true, then we are in pickle. Claw and its security issues is just a symptom of that 'break things' spirit. And yes, this has been true for a while, but we keep increasing both in terms of speed and scale. I am…

He writes an excellent blog: https://samkriss.substack.com/

It’s an interesting blog, he seems well read, but surely he knows better than “Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world.” Plato lived through the execution of Socrates, the fall of the Athenian democracy, the tyranny of the Thirty, the humiliation by Sparta, the demolition of the walls. I’ll grant him “aristocratic”, but that’s all he gets. Makes me wonder whether he mischaracterized Zarathustra too, and my suspicion is yes.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#224

Post by coldtea »

popalchemist wrote: post #206
PaulHoule wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach. Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for abo…

You clearly don't know what the term upward mobility means. It doesn't necessarily mean moving from one class to another - though that WOULD be included within its scope, however extraordinary an example it may be. It can mean moving within a class. Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.

>It can mean moving within a class.

It can, but it's not how it's used most of the time, so kind of a pedantic distinction.

And many do not even want to "move within a class" that much. They'd be satisfied to keep their job and retain the same constant purchasing power and ability to buy food, feed family, pay rent/morgage, year after year.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#225

Post by conz »

rootnod3 wrote: post #51

This hits especially hard for projects like OlenBSD and FreeBSD. The unsung heroes. Linux gets some fame and recognition, meanwhile OpenBSD and FreeBSD are the ones they power routers, CDNs and so many other cool shit while also being legit good systems that even deserve attention for the desktop.

OpenBSD and FreeBSD are great. This is coming from someone who used BSD 4.2 on a Vax 11/780 in the mid-80s. They don't lack in terms of 'technical architecture'.

What these dialects of the Unix operating system do lack is a licence which ensured their success.

Linux won in the end as much from its copyleft licence as from its development methodology or personalities involved.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#226

Post by martin-t »

saulpw wrote: post #123
stego-tech wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

It's charitable to frame this as resentment towards capital who gets the "credit". I'm sure people would grumble about this regardless, but the real resentment stems from them systematically eroding our ability to afford housing, healthcare, and retirement.

Their unaffordability is only the last straw that will hopefully break the camel's back and create a counter-force.

Normal people generally don't dream to be ultra rich, they just want to enjoy life (and have enough money to do so). But a small percentage is obsessed with money and they obviously invest much more energy into gaining it.

This dynamic means that people don't get paid according to how much value they produce but according to how good they are at negotiating and at maneuvering themselves into positions of power from which they 1) take a bigger cut than they deserve according to real value produced 2) further entrench themselves.

Salary negotiations are a perfect example of divide and conquer - the employer has more information, more runway, more experience negotiating, etc. And on top they negotiate with each employee one by one. Imagine a reverse situation in which the people doing the real positive-sum work sit together on one side of the negotiation table and ask their new assistant (so called "manager") how much he wants to be paid.

But the real issue is ownership. People who don't do any work get paid (if not in money directly, then by being able to sell the company). And they get to pass this "ownership" onto their children who contributed nothing at all.

I am convinced a lot of these runaway feedback loops would be destroyed if ownership of a company was by law distributed among employees according to the amount of time and skill level they worked there.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#227

Post by martin-t »

saulpw wrote: post #179
PaulHoule wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach. Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for abo…

I love the idea of "downward mobility". In particular over the past 30 years we've created a new class of ultra-ultra-rich with even more wealth than the robber barons of the gilded age had, and we need to figure out how to dismantle that entire class. A puny 3% wealth tax would take over 100 years to knock them down, and that's presuming that their wealth is static and not growing at a rate much greater than 3%.

I see an easy way, let's just take it from them.

Not nationalization, that never works. Distribute each company among the workers. Turn them all into co-ops.

(I've been thinking this a lot but have never seen it expressed so succinctly. Thanks for the new term.)

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#228

Post by jimmaswell »

botusaurus wrote: post #209
jimmaswell wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there has always been some truth to that, long before AI. Being driven to get up and just do the thing is the most important factor in getting things done. Expertise and competency are force multipliers, but you can pick those up along the way - I think people who prefer to front-load a lot of theory find this distasteful, sometimes even ego-threatening, but it's held true in my observations across my career.…

be honest, how much of this big comment was "expanded" with AI?

none.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#229

Post by agentcoops »

voxleone wrote: post #10

The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…

I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future architecture surpass even the greatest human minds in intelligence, why is that situation fundamentally different to living in a world with Einstein, i.e. a level of mastery I'll never reach before the end of my life? As one interested in the depths, I prefer to live in a world with peaks ever greater than myself---it doesn't prevent me from going as deep as I can, inspired by where they've reached, and doing the things that matter to me.

Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."

[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.

Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

#230

Post by lanfeust6 »

munificent wrote: post #52

Beautiful article. I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of: * Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again. * Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt. * A psychological compulsion…

It occurs to me a highly-automated UBI future should increase risk tolerance for average people. We (probably) won't have to work to survive with a baseline level of comfort, but it would be meagre.

If there's nothing but upside to enterprising, and less opportunity-cost (vs subsistence), we might see some innovative or very strange things.

Post reply on HN