Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"
He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!
He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!
The user base on Hacker News has really gone down hill. Voting down my comment above has no basis in the guidelines or the strictly information content of post, and hence, I have to conclude people just vote down opinions they do not like.
I propose that voting on comments should have a required field addendum, so that before a vote can be cast, the voter has to type into the field the reason they are voting it up or voting it down.
I see things differently. This is a change unlike anything in the past. Back then, it didn't replace human intellectual activity. However, problems of increasing scale will continue to arise, and inevitably, issues will emerge that are too difficult to solve through the efforts of human communities alone.
The performance gap between free and paid AI models is massive. The resulting divide between children from low-income and high-income families is quite evident based on my observations in my country. It will only get harder to keep up.
I don't support UBI either. The fact that UBI is even being discussed means the market is broken. The problem is that in the current market, prices for freelance work tied to intellectual labor have been absolutely crushed by AI. Looking at indicators from Booth or the Korean freelance market, "middle-tier" jobs are disappearing. While currently established professionals remain unaffected for now, the volume of work has drastically decreased for developers or writers who are still building their reputations. There are statistics from Japan showing this as well. My workload has also decreased to a ridiculous extent. The so-called barbell structure is becoming entrenched.
The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people? If more than half the population are workers, there is no problem, but if more than half are unemployed, that is a serious issue. Income polarization is continuing to accelerate.
Because there are no aristocrats without slaves, capitalists need workers to elevate themselves. Wealth and power are strictly relative, and they need miserable ornaments to make themselves feel like "awe-inspiring beings." To confirm their own sense of superiority, capitalists require human spectators who look up to them while suffering in misery. Why else did ancient Rome unleash lions and gladiators in the Colosseum?
Later on, things made by humans will become expensive luxuries, while commoners like me will be fed UBI—the bare minimum bread for survival—along with cheap, AIslop.
If making money by learning a skill increasingly requires a longer time investment, you have to endure the period it takes to learn that skill and build a reputation, which is incredibly difficult for the average working class. It requires the financial backing of a wealthy family to afford a college degree, travel to academic conferences, and survive on low wages. And if someone can endure all that to build a reputation, it will naturally lead to a massive concentration of wealth at the very top.
Let me clarify one point I was trying to make. It is my belief nobody is going to give you UBI. I offered up Keynes prediction as a little bit of evidence about human nature. The United States could have easily built infrastructure and safety nets to feed all of its citizens. It could have easily provided a much improved welfare system, universal health care, and other social services. But it did not.
>The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people?
Looking through history books: not well. Not well at all. But with the course of things, it seems inevitable unless new leadership comes in and takes a huge 180 on policy.
I had similar? thought many years ago when strong typing became another one of the programming mantras touted on the internet.
Even dynamically type programming languages will layout what types the languages has. But that is usually the conventions built off of years of history, usually based on C.
But what if you wanted to define a custom type to use? Say you wanted to make type mysmallint, and it was an integer that is between 1 and 1000. Now, you can write up code to do this but it is not the same thing as declaring type int. *
*unless you are using Haskell, F#, or others I am not aware of.
What if you wanted to define a custom type that says this string only contains ascii characters? You can not easily define that as a type and pass it around the code. You have to write custom code and do checks.
This is one of the beauties of Clojure’s spec. You can define a ‘type’ that is a string which length is a prime number and contains only Ascii characters but ‘x’. To put those invariants in code and not in your head is so liberating.
Don't know anything about clojure, but isnt this true with any language or library that implements schema validation? I'm thinking zod, for instance. Does clojure make it trivial?
This has been known a long time. Freakanomics did a two part podcast on does advertising actually work. It is long but well worth a listen if you want to hear some science about advertising.
Just my personal anecdata, it took my a while to put a finger on it, but it seemed like something started to change in products in the 90s. Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes. Super huge discount? retail stores opened, that you usually needed a membership card. Walmart started offering the cheapest sourced product from around the world that was often just slightly inferior to what you use to be able to get, or the price on the higher quality item went up while the slightly lower quality item price went down. Washing machines started using all these cheap plastic parts that more easily wear down or break. Electronics started to get added to everything whether it is needed or not, usually for switches where the electronic part is cheaper than the mechanical equivalent.
And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.
I disagree that it is what people want. Nobody wants a smaller chocolate bar for the same amount of money, more cramped seats, washing machines that break and need constant replacement, etc.
Massive corporate consolidation means that when you're looking at the rack of chocolate bars there's a good chance that just 2 companies made all of them. You have the illusion of choice.
None of this happened over-night. It's a slow steady financial optimization in all industries all at the same time. It's very hard to vote with your wallet when there's very little difference.
If there is a sustainable market for higher volume/quality/durability products for a higher price, it is in the interest of companies - new and existing - to capture it, as by definition they would profit from it.
Consolidation alone is insufficient to explain such a gap under the assumption of profitability.
Economic theory would work a lot better if humans weren't involved.
It's almost impossible for a new company to join most of these markets; the major players are so large that they have influence over the retailers, the suppliers, and everyone in the middle.
But every so often successful higher volume/quality/durability products do manage exist for a time but are eventually bought out and the brand destroyed. This has played out over and over.
The market optimizes for profit growth, not for customer satisfaction.
There is a spectrum of how good a product is between "doesn't work at all" to "falls apart in a couple uses" to "lasts five generations of your families lives."
Companies tiptoe this fine line between having something so shitty that people immediately reject it and so good that they never buy any more and the company folds. It has to be just shitty enough where they can guarantee future replacement sales but not so shitty to put people off right away.
Most of these durable goods products are therefore found in companies too small to satiate the demand of their entire market share too fast. And even then they fail all the time.
Customers are not perfectly-informed rational actors. The areas that companies are cutting costs on are precisely those that are most likely to escape the customer's notice - slightly smaller size, less durable, etc.
It turns out that it's more profitable to buy up an existing brand and slowly cheap out on the product (basically capitalizing the reputation) than it is to continue to produce a quality product.
I believe the change you're observing is the result of the widespread adoption of computers. This is what a data-driven society looks like. Corporations have the ability to finetune the margins of exactly how much anti-consumerism they can get away with before upsetting enough people that a given anti-consumer decision isn't more profitable than not doing it.
In a sense, it is the people's fault for their current level of tolerance, but at the same time, a data-driven society will converge on an equilibrium just within the razor-thin margin of what people will tolerate, in the name of 'efficiency'.
> And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.
I don't think you can really say they want it, because in many instances they are manipulated or have no other choice.
Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes.
The phrase you're looking for is "value engineering."
There are also other factors.
Part of the reason that Pringles cans are mostly air is so that the soap company that makes them can sell fewer chips, but retain the same amount of visual space on the store shelf. The product is the billboard. Some brands pay for that space on the shelf, so they're going to use every bit of it.
This is what they discovered through the equivalent of A/B testing. People are disappointed in a 5% increase in price, especially if it crosses a magical threshold, but they will accept a smaller product. They will favor the smaller product over the larger one if it is given in the right container, such as a rounded carton of ice cream over a larger brick. They see the rounded container as evidence of higher quality. And on and on.
Needing a app to turn on a light, though, that's just weird.
One of the arguments I have heard that he did not have a proof is the following.
He wrote his note in his copy of Arithmetica around 1637.
He most likely wrote his proof for the case of n=4 in the 1640s.
He sent letters to other mathematicians in 1640, 1657 where he talks about the case of n=3 but writes in such a way that it seems like he does not have the answer.
Why would he write n=4 after? If he had a generalized proof?
Why would he tease other mathematicians with a special case in 1657 if he already had a generalized proof?
These topics are just so difficult to debate. They are filled with feelings and one person's perspective or anecdote, and it is difficult to drill down into what is true or what is not true.
You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".
How do you know?
And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...
For these topics I don't think there is anything wrong with using your own experience. Yes it's one person's perspective and anecdote (mine), but that's what informs my opinion. I've worked at a couple of unionized places before, for me they're terrible. You can say those are bad unions, or unions in Europe etc are better. This may be true, but my own experience tells me to avoid them.
This is a good point about quality of life. I focused on money in my original comment, but I've heard a lot of people complain that unions have kept them working with their worst coworkers. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
Look at other unions. It's a "union" of workers so they need to have some guidelines.
Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.
Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.
The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
>Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric?
Given my experience as someone who is looking for full time work over 3 years later because executives decided that data centers are better to pursue than quality products: yes, and yes.
>What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric?
People who need to worry about rent next month.
>The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
And we know from decades of knowledge this is never true. Two equally talented engineers can be paid differently based on where they live. They can end up with much different compensation based on one company lucking out with a deal and another missing a crucial deal and collapsing. Which isn't an engineering factor. We know negotiating gets you paid more, which is a skill orthogonal to engineering.
This illusion of meriocracy will be the collapse of the whole industry.
>Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
Because you think the job is building things. the 20 years employee understands the systems and how to keep things together. Life isn't all about moving fast and breaking things. Especially in fields like teaching the future generatrions.
> The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
It is well recognized that meritocracy is an illusion. A much better determinant of success is the birth lottery. If you're born into a rich family versus a blue-collar one, you have unequal starting points, access to education, better-than-average medical care, and more reliable, higher-quality food. Once you win the birth lottery, you have access to a network full of connections that will hire you based on who you know or who your parents are, rather than your ability (e.g., a Nepo baby). When you are a nepo baby, you are insulated from many of the inequalities built into our financial and education systems.
You'll frequently hear from successful people that they got where they are because they have sufficient morals or good standing in the world, and that if you didn't make it, you're clearly not a good person. This rationalization is mostly bullshit because there are many in the 1% class who are lousy human beings and, by their own justification, should be on the street.
When you buy into meritocracy, you are contributing to keeping the billionaires in place and supporting their destructive behavior, tearing at society.
These kinds of chains make it really clear that, despite the association and similar worker pool, the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. I see comments like "Tech is the best career deal in humankind" and I feel like I entered bizarro world as I see my entire network feed being laid off, shuffled around, and ground to literal break downs in real time. This was already a factor before the last few years, but it's only accelerated.
Thankfully: the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. Thus, game developers are a lot more receptive to unionizing than general tech. But it's still a bit absurd; I've always had the advice of "move out of games to a more stable tech job if you burn out". Well... those stable tech jobs sure became unstable quickly.
Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.
Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).
Yep. We can go around and around. Like, does health care count for some of the discrepancy? Or the more generous time off that Europeans typically have?
I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.
But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.
Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.
I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.
I agree. No matter how complicated, or unnecessary, or unintuitive a piece of software or technology is... There is always this contingent of people who pop in and say "It is not that hard!" and furthermore tend to express a view of "I am superior because I figured out this obtuse thing, and you must be inferior because you have not figured it out".
I do not know why that mentality exists in the industry, but I see it all the time... for the past 35 years.
I've long felt that skill in designing APIs is hugely underrated in software. There's a common perception that what happens under the hood is complicated and requires being very smart, but the crafting a way to interact with a system that prevents issues when possible and at least tries to encourage usage patterns that will not lead to users shooting themselves in the foot is trivial enough to handwave away. All of the bugs and vulnerabilities that could have been completely avoided by a different API design seem to get classified the user's fault, not whoever designed the API.
I guess I am officially old and no longer know what the cool "it" is any more. The C++17 example seems much more clear to me. It is more typing, but so what? It is not that much more typing, and it looks like code that people have written for 40 years.
Is your complaint about Anubis? I see the "checking if you are human" kind of text too when going to codeberg, but it is usually only a second or two. It is because I run a bit of obfuscation and resistance to browser finger printing.
But you find seeing the text for a couple of seconds too annoying to use codeberg? Maybe it is more than 2 seconds for you?
Everyone has their views on what is acceptable in the world and what they will put up with. Just, to my point of view, I think codeberg is trying to fight the good fight in keeping llms from crawling their website.
Codeberg has some extra "anti-scraping" measures than just Anubis which, judging from the community issues[0] sometimes ends up with false positives that cause people to get garbage (example issue[1], potential page with the garbage i found from Google[2]).
Interestingly, someone mentioned that you may get the garbage when searching Codeberg using Google's `site:codeberg.org`
If only we had research on the effect of a second or two's effect on user experience.
I wouldn't have a problem with it if it was on expensive endpoints like search or deep history dives, where it matters for server load. But it's every single page, out of some strange sense of righteousness.
No, the issue is when i visited i got a page of senseless drivel (maybe https://lib.rs/crates/iocaine) with the message i was a bot. There was no way around it except "contact support" as the message said the fix, to solve it myself, was to not be a bot.
I accessed through mobile, maybe got a bad ip, i don't don't know. But i never could access my repo, and incidently a day before when i tried to share some markdown file in the repo, they told me it wasn't there (i thought it was a them problem then, as i didn't see it).
So that experience and the way it was handled totally ruined my trust. If randomly people can't even access the repo, and that is "working as intended", what's the use to host it there.
They explicitly explained that the problem was not "they find seeing the text for a couple seconds too annoying to use codeberg". Codeberg offered to remove that for them so they'd never see it again. So idk why you're asking about that. Whatever the problem is, it must be something other than that, since that problem doesn't even exist.
The problem is blocking or speed-bumping users in general, everyone else besides themselves.
They didn't put things on a public hosting site for them to be hidden or obfuscated or even to have a tiny friction inserted between a user and that user discovering their stuff, or following a link to something.
Saying "2 seconds" as though that makes it insignificant is completely missing the point. 0.2 seconds, if it's 0.2 more than some other path is the same as a total block. Having a link to something do anything at all other than instantly provide that thing is outrageous and unacceptable, if you care about the experience you want to present to your users or audience.
(Still, I'd say codeberg was at least among the best options if you want someone else to host it for you. The bad job of providing a bad experience for legit users while trying to block AI scrapers can be true at the same time as no one else is doing any better without some other worse strings attached like github.)
Question for mermaid users out there. I have not used mermaid more than just superficially looking at it but it looks to me like a re-implementation of graphviz? Which has been around forever. Is there something it does that makes it more appealing?
I am not knocking this Free Mermaid Diagram Editor either. Seems decent. But, similarly, edotor has been around forever.
It also renders on GitHub in markdown files with ```mermaid``` code blocks so it's super useful for adding architecture diagrams and similar to your README
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"
He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!
He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!
We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.
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