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Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

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Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#431

Post by sfn42 »

tartoran wrote: post #276
dchftcs wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. First, the employer has to worry about the returns from which they draw some money to pay you. And for you to even get paid for doing a job, the company has to fear that you won't do it if you don't get paid - in most cases, it's not from the good of heart, but an implicit or explicit threat made by you or on your behalf by other people.

The current problem is automating yourself out of the job. You creating value compounds but as soon as you’re no longer needed the fruit of that compounded value is cut off from you.

Well if you want to spend your days doing something trivial enough to be automated I guess that might be a concern.

I mean I'm not sitting around doing data entry. If I'm automating something it's not my job it's someone else's. Ad a lot of the time that someone else really has other stuff they'd rather do as well.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#432

Post by bayarearefugee »

palmotea wrote: post #408
jurgenburgen wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is already fantastically profitable. Productive SaaS companies right now collect ~500k in revenue per employee. If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower. If large companies don’t pay us good salaries then why would we not go and build better competitors without the legacy and dead weight?

> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower. That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.

> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.

It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.

Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#434

Post by bayarearefugee »

torginus wrote: post #425
cardanome wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen. It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs. Your GP…

AI will be the straw that breaks the camel's back on copyright Imo. We've known since 90s Napster music piracy that copyright is broken in the information age, and its just a flimsy set of unprincipled edicts meant to protect those with power and money. Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in st…

> hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.

Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#435

Post by grim_io »

keiferski wrote: post #318

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work. I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my o…

Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#436

Post by samtheprogram »

s_dev wrote: post #235
10xDev wrote: post #179

You will get laid off but you won't if you create value and you will create value if you don't care about money and it will go recursive but it won't go recursive because there are limits. It won't change anything but it will change everything. No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.

301.9K Followers 0 posts Is this guy just paying bots to upvote and promote his stuff?

He deletes posts after they are no longer relevant. Given how people dig dirt up on people and take them out of context long after that context is forgotten, more people should do that (or delete social media altogether).

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#437

Post by acuozzo »

auggierose wrote: post #239
sfn42 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just do my job to the best of my ability. If I can help a colleague I do. I don't expect to get explicitly credited for everything I do. If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.

If you are employed, by definition you have outsourced the worries about the return on the value you create to your employer.

Not necessarily true. If you're employed by e.g. a contracting company or consulting firm, your value to your employer is in #hours_billable because you are their product.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#438

Post by acuozzo »

DangitBobby wrote: post #342
yard2010 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford. In my country the peop…

But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.

The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough.

However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI.

In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low.

Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#439

Post by greenwallnorway »

Engineers are running 8 instances of Claude Code at once. That doesn't mean they are completing work 8x faster.

If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted.

See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks.

Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You won't fall behind.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#440

Post by nyantaro1 »

pezgrande wrote: post #287
thendrill wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think that engineers that maintain and write the FOSS that runs most of the world IT infrastructure ( Linux, Curl, GIT etc. ) do it for the returns ?

aren't most of them being payed by big corps? Redhat, Google, Microsoft... you name it.

I am pretty sure not most of them. In something like linux, that is the case, but I think there are so many other projects that barely receive financial or any other kind of support
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