291–300 of 1001 posts
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> It's a perversion of the free market We can, together, overcome such challenges when we accept that "The purpose of a system is what it does".
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"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout" Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.
No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.
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Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…
I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier…
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With the laundry machine and dishwasher, it still requires effort. A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know when it’s done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away properly, thus starting the human side of the process again. It’s less work than it used to be, but remove the human w…
> A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know when it’s done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away properly, thus starting the human side of the process again. The really modern stuff is pretty much as simple as “load, start, unload” - you can buy combo washing machines that wash a…
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> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're bett…
>It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets. History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases. Maybe it will be different this time though.
But it is myth. It has always been in the interest of the rulers and the old to try to imprint on the serfs and on the young how much better they have it.
Many of us, maybe even most of us, would be able to have fulfilling lives in a different age. Of course, it depends on what you value in life. But the proof is in the pudding, humanity is rapidly being extinguished in industrial society right now all over the world.
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Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…
I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier…
The problem is that the left, which was historically pro-labor, abdicated this position for racial reasons, and the right was always about maximizing the economic zone.
I won't paste in the result here, since everyone here is capable of running this experiment themselves, but trust me when I say ChatGPT produced (in mere seconds, of course) an article every bit as substantive and well-written as the cited article. FWIW.
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what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what world do you people live in? the current global unemployment rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty democratised already?
What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you. Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output. That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't…
I write code to drive hardware, in an unusual programming style. The company pays for Augment (which is now based on o4, which is supposed to be really good?!?). It's great at me typing: print_debug( at which point it often guesses right as to which local variables or parameters I want to debug - but not always. And it can often get the loop iteration part correct if I need to, for example, loop through a vector. The couple of times I asked it to write a unit test? Sure, it got a the basic function call / lambda setup correct, but the test itself was useless. And a bunch of times, it brings back code I was experimenting with 3 months ago and never kept / committed, just because I'm at the same spot in the same file..
I do believe that some people are having reasonable outcomes, but it's not "out of the box" - and it's faster for me to write the code I need to write than to try 25 different prompt variations.
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I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise. Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.
The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for major metros (and in most cases that excludes home ownership). Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the "market" could bear higher prices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
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The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for major metros (and in most cases that excludes home ownership). Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the "market" could bear higher prices.
CoL in London or Dublin is comparable to much of the US, but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range. The issue is salary expectations in the US are much higher than those in much of Western Europe despite having similar CoL. And $120k for a new grad is only a tech specific thing. Even new grad management consultants earn $80-100k base, and lower for other non-software roles and industries.