I'm OK being left behind, thanks • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#431

Post by bonoboTP » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

slfnflctd wrote: post #392

bonoboTP wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, why don't you just go do it then? Seems strange to spread this knowledge and create competition for yourself. Theres a reason most people want a white collar job and send their kids to college instead of to such manual jobs.

> most people want a white collar job and send their kids to college Part of the reason for my prior comment is the clear fact that a not-insignificant percentage of white collar jobs are being massively devalued at the moment, which means many people who thought they'd be able to send their kids to college with income from such jobs won't. Considering that the field of robotics is so far behind LLMs in terms of clea…

I'm not sure how long this state of robotics will last. Dexterity is improving very fast. Robots are getting cheaper and cheaper.

But also, a lot of the manual labor is quite expensive and only affordable as long as there are white collar workers who can pay for fancy bathroom remodelings and landscaping and so on. I don't know how a big deluge of reskilled pipefitters and HVAC technicians will be able to find work. Will everyone just pay each other to do a bunch of handy work for each other?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#432

Post by Hasslequest » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #32

The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do? When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply…

Firstly, you can run the LLMs on your own machine. So I find the proprietary/moat narrative weak.

Secondly, I find that correct usage of LLMs can accelerate learning. My brother used an LLM to generate flash cards for a driver's license test. I use LLMs to digest a ton of text and debug issues that would have been impossible to find (I would have given up) Have it generate, explain, review, compare code or general writing.

It is like having access to wise old man in every field. They may have inferior reasoning capability, and their memory may falter, but they have seen everything in their corpus and are great at pointing you to external references. And you can delegate them to busywork.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#433

Post by locknitpicker » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #214

locknitpicker wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to estab…

> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems…

> It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads.

I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overflow just so happens to be a specialized service with a very specialized audience whose demand is perfectly dominated by LLM chatbots.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#434

Post by karmakurtisaani » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #349

jacobsenscott wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately. This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired…

~40-50% of the S&P500 rely on this continuing. S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384002 - March 2026 > No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson) OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years - https…

Elon Musk is planning to put his AI company into the SpaceX IPO, and accelerate getting it into the major indices, effectively making pension funds, banks and individual investors his bag holders.

Patric Boyle has a video on this in case you care for the details.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#435

Post by Hasslequest » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

fdghrtbrt wrote: post #38

butILoveLife wrote: post #4

This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.

"if bitcoin didn't win?" It didn't win. It's still useless.

You can use it at steak n shake

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#436

Post by duskdozer » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #294

stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

Ok, here is the risk of being left behind - if we have moderately fast take-off, the 1-2 years required to upskill in AI might mean you find yourself unemployable when your role gets axed. I don’t think folks are taking seriously the possible worlds at the P(0.25) tail of likelihood. You do not get to pick up this stuff “on a timescale of my choosing”, in the worlds where the capability exponential keeps going for an…

Eh, I'm not super worried. After all, Every six months or so, the latest model changes everything and the former model was complete garbage. It's not just a new model—it's a new paradigm shifting the landscape of agentic development.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#437

Post by skydhash » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

marcd35 wrote: post #358

garyfirestorm wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing) > There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowi…

I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored. My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software…

But maybe it doesn’t matter that much to them. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit, but that knowledge could be handy in some situations. But I don’t see myself being in that situation other than accidentally.

My mother has a phone, but only use it to call. She has never needed a computer even though I spent my teenage years glued to one. But I have like 1 percent of a skill in cooking.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#438

Post by bdangubic » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #426

II2II wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…

"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you. Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-en…

> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.

The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.

> You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today.

which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today

> A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.

This cannot be further from the truth, if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today. The best front-end devs I know are basically Javascript developers, everything else is "tech du jour" that comes and goes and the less of it you invest in the better off you'll be in the long-run.

> If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.

Hard disagree with this unless you are doing simple CRUD-like stuff

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#439

Post by Devasta » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

0x3f wrote: post #207

anticorporate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right p…

> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that spec…

I want to cure lung cancer, therefore as an Effective Altruist™ I maximize my income by selling cigarettes to children outside playgrounds. The money will go towards research in my will, and in the meantime the incidence of lung cancer in teenagers will incentivize the free market to find a cure!

People don't become quants because they are EAs, they become EAs to justify to themselves why they became quants.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#440

Post by locknitpicker » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #287

locknitpicker wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to estab…

In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history". Some of those bets were prescient but too early but many of those bets never made any sense. The dotcom bust was worse than the software industry crash we're experiencing now. "It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a tran…

> In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history".

I think you are missing the point, and also the very site you're posting on.

Look at the top 50 list of most valuable companies in the world. Over half of the total market value reported today is attributed to companies which were either dotcom startups or whose growth was driven by the dotcom growth period. Dismissing the advent of the internet as anything short of revolutionary is disingenuous, no matter how many zombo.com companies failed.

LLMs have the exact same transformative impact on humanity.