It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.

https://berggruen.org/

Which is an AI booster:

https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries

You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.

In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.

Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?

Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this thing that made their lives worth living or whatever.

When it first happened I thought it was a weird interpersonal conflict situation. Maybe I had broached it wrong. But it kept happening! So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.

But I’m an extrovert and working from home was suffocating.

Did someone just say "WFH"?

You are the art.

Maybe anyway. I think that probably depends on at least a couple of more breakthroughs - at least a solution to the hallucination problem, and probably some kind of true on-line learning, not just writing stuff down and reading it again later.

Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).

When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.

Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.

For cowork you don’t often have to commute as much (more options around), can arrive late, don’t have to dress to nice. For some you can still change your homebase at least for few months temporarily.

But you can still have physical coworkers (even if you don’t work with them), have chitchat not relate to work, go to lunch together. You can also have routine and separate your professional life from personal one.

I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.

From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.

Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.

Then other is artisan, those who took pride in organizing and craft.

Second one is having miserable time. The former like me are having a blast. I love tech for that reason.

I stopped talking to people who think LLMs are waste. It's because they don't even touch it. They think it's a taboo to touch it.

So anything in tech is exciting because it enables us to do so many random things. Wish more people learnt about it.

Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.

I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.

And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.

It all feels wrong.

I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.

This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...

Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.

I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.

This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts

I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".

I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?"

I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't around on the phone? If two people can speak in that place, it's not weird for someone to have a phone discussion.

Now playing music speakers or watching TikTok videos on your phone in a public place...psychotic!

On a recent plane ride some old guys were watching movies on their phones on full volume. I complained and they stopped, but another guy in another row started doing it again. It gets tiring.

Last week I was on a NYC subway train to JFK Airport and there was a guy blasting some loud hip-hop/trap and a small kid playing some loud game, totally oblivious to the people on the train. After they left some older guy stepped in talking on full speaker to someone for 10 minutes.

It was quite crazy tbh, and I guess people here have already given up and start accepting it since it is tiring to police somebody new every 5 minutes and could also end in violence.

My very limited understanding of farming is that it takes a huge amount of time, and you're usually up and working before sunrise, even with automation.

And a lot of them don't?

A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.

"Bullshit Jobs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.

In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.

This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.

"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.

As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.

There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.

By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.

It feels to me like the change from:

- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.

- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.

there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.

Agreed.

From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."

I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.

All options are good because they are all true.

I think you can extend them.

Too inward for what?

Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.

https://vimeo.com/127605643

University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?

My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.

That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"

They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.

He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.

And this is different than other industries how?

Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.

At no point in history was it ever thus.

I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.

Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.

I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.

The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.

We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.

For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.

And it’s a goddamn tragedy.

I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.

At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.

Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?

I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here

people could convene in secret, organize, and coordinate without leaving a digital trail

impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes

There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.

In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.

Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.

But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.

Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).

it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job

I am back at the office now, and am enjoying the separation between work and home.

Is it really surprising that people have this preference?

Their reaction to you in the moment might not be reasonable, but it's coming from an injustice done to them, and one they perceive you to be in favour of.

Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

The about page says this:

> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.

The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?

Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”

Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.

I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.

For a lot of people, that was commuting to a job outside of their home.

it doesn't but it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes.

Someone talking on the phone but facing away from the room isn’t usually considered rude, either.

In a waiting room or train car, if you’re sitting and talking on the phone or Zoom, you’re broadcasting into the room with your posture. Your voice tends to broadcast as well with no wall or other conversant as an immediate barrier.

Everything has this arc.

A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.

By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.

We do, it's known as the halfalogue and has been found to be more distracting/annoying. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20817912/

It's also why calls/online meetings are banned in many coffeeshops in Japan.

You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.

All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.

But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.

I think people get this meaning wrong all the time. The love of money doesn't buy happiness. Having money can definitely make your life easier, and you can spend it on things that make you happy.

Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.

Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM can either do the classification itself (when given agentic access to the canonical list of addresses), or write a classifier itself if given enough labelled data. Of course these two are complementary

If you are ever in a situation where you are alone and no person works for you, realize you are most likely the problem. It took me a while to figure it out and it’s hard to make friends that you resonate and align with. But there are billions of people around the world and unless you live in a small village, there are always people looking to strike a conversation; and some of those will make good/reliable friends.

Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.

But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”

So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."

Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.

Only poor people are required to humiliate themselves by asking every tom, dick, and harry for their opinion on if their behavior is acceptable.

SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.

We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.

A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.

Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.

I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.

like particularly this:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.

I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.

Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.

To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing:

The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage.

The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours.

In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.

...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.

so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E

I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.

There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).

But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.

This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.

This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.

You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.

I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s.

I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech.

If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.

For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.

I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

Means they are invested in AI companies

> shape the next narrative

With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.

(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)

Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.

* simplifying, of course.

I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.

Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?

I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly

Wow, what a way to be bitter and defensive.

It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.

It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this

There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.

Find some shade and don't stress it Europal! (I hate climate change too.)

There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.

Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".

I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.

I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”

Just thinkin out loud into the internet

I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.

Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).

I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.

In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.

But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.

Maybe AI people specifically get that kind of reaction, but that's a pretty hot topic at the moment.

I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.

Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.

Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.

No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.

I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.

There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.

So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?

The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.

I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.

It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.

All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.

"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.

Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.

I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'

Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.

The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.

Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?

The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.

I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.

"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...

I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.

I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.

Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.

Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).

"Normal"?

It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.

But:

AI cannot do your job

Your boss bought AI to do your job

You're fired

Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades.

I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.

But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.

It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.

I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.

I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).

But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?

EDIT: wow, I had this lodged in my brain without even realizing it was an XKCD reference

https://xkcd.com/2167/

I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtACIFEddhM

"If you're not taken, gay, or furry, the consensus is that dating in SF sucks..."

I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.

That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".

He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen

In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.

To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.

I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.

I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.

I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.

Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.

This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.

[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...

On the other hand investors benefit when they competitors are crashing.

For many labor is just expensive cost running company - I can see how some people salivate

So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.

Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications

Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.

>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something

Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.

Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.

Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.

Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"

Not a joke.

All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.

To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.

How so?

> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.

The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?

> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away

Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.

And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.

If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.

Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.

Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.

So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).

Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?

On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.

The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.

Most trains however have a space [0] at the end of each car where you enter and exit. That space can also have a toilet, bike storage, various (locked) train controls, sometimes even a few seats [1] where you can sit if your call will be a while.

0: https://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/uploads/7/6/8/3/76...

1: https://www.modernrailways.com/sites/modernrailways/files/im...

I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.

> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is

The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...

Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already always management (where you include computers as something able to be managed), even if there was a brief moment in time where it was more than that.

I get that it's cute and philosophical to think everything is management and I'm one to generalize stuff as well ad-nausea. But when people don't find satisfaction in their work anymore and the excuse is "well, think of it as a promotion", that to me is taking the analogy too far because it suits the current trends.

But we're discussing now what it means to do management. We'll just have to agree to disagree and call it a day

What other branch is there? You are either delegating or doing all the work yourself. Those who delegate become seen as managers, as that delegation requires managing the people (or, possibly things, depending on how you see that) that the work was delegated to. Those who receive the delegation and carry out their task individually are those considered to not be managers, but rather individual contributors.

> However, never would I say that when coding, I'm "managing the computer".

Why would you say anything while coding? I guess if you had some kind of voice-to-text system you might say something, but it wouldn't be "whee, I'm a manager now!!!!" — it'd be specific instructions directed at the computer so that it knows what task you are delegating to it.

> A compiler is a tool, not an unpredictable process I need to manage.

A compiler can be predictable if you perfectly describe the task you want it to carry out. However, that rarely happens in practice. Communicating your intent is always the hard part.

Which isn't much different than people. There are exceptions, but generally if you clearly define what you want them to do, they will execute it perfectly. Management of humans is all about coming back to make sure that what you described was correct and made sense to the receiving party. Which is the same thing you have to do with compilers.