danans

> just that they are sufficiently efficient that beating them is a genuinely hard job requiring heavy, expensive analysis

No expensive analysis is needed. Beating them just requires (1) having disproportionate capital to others, and (2) having disproportionate control (and therefore know in advance) whatever the markets are pricing.

It helps that there are enough believers (in the religious/cult sense) that markets are 100% efficient, that they will deny that any of that is happening - even while they lose their shirts to those who are doing the market manipulation.

> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels

A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.

> I’ve only ever worked at messy mid-size software companies and have never once had a legit product manager guiding feature work, it’s generally been up to the developers to figure out what needs doing

That's because the systems and problem spaces at FAANG companies are so large that you need(ed) a lot more division of labor to make anything work. The division of the technical side of the house between those focused on product management and those focused on building software allowed both to be done more effectively, but both roles have had a lot of their work overtaken by LLMs.

Also, From what I've heard, FAANG companies are going through big (and painful) transitions to align their staffing with the reality of what current AI tools are capable of.

> I’m working on a program for myself and the overall architecture of the program as well as some parts of its implementation are clever and compose well to make the codebase a joy to work in. I am not simply “mapping features to mundane technical details”.

You said it: you are working on a "program for yourself". Hobbyist craft programming will always be here. The question is what kind of software engineering will be paid for, and a career can be built on.

I don't see much of a market for pure software engineers anymore. You also need to be a product manager, scientist, or have some other domain knowledge adjacent to software that relates to the real world.

I say this with empathy for those who just enjoyed the craft of designing and building software, and thought that alone would provide them a livelihood and career in perpetuity, but have found a big chunk of what they loved doing (and getting paid for) overtaken by AI coding agents.

> It's a quite a bit broader than that: for instance most of science and engineering is heavily supported by simulations (very useful when the system you're considering doesn't have perfect spherical or cylindrical symmetry),

That isn't the vast majority of traditional software engineering work, and arguably is better called applied physics or applied science. Super interesting though - and definitely uses programming as a core skill/tool - but it leans heavily into traditional engineering and science.

> Someone asks you to add a feature to an existing program

While I empathize with the tone, even before AI the creativity was largely at the feature definition step, not in the implementation.

Outside of the very few computer scientists working on novel algorithms, the vast majority of software development is a mapping problem between the feature request and the mundane technical details, something repeatedly (and correctly) mentioned here in the context of FAANG algorithm fixated interviews. This has now largely been automated by LLMs

What is left is just creativity part - defining the use cases and features to develop in the first place. But the corollary is that software engineers that start after the requirements have already been defined are obsolete, which is a sobering thought for any of us in that vocation.

> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.

People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.

Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.

That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.

> Whilst true, its your generation who got us here.

You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.

> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.

Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.

> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.

Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).

Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.

The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.

> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing

Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.

> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.

The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.

Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.

I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.

Not more efficient at heat dissipation, but radiative cooling panels can achieve sub-ambient dissipation in conditions (like high humidity) that evaporative cooling performance declines in, and with no water consumption.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13594...

I was thinking the justice system, but yes the entire concept of government and law is built upon the monopoly of violence. Bringing it into this discussion is reductio ad absurdum. Even property rights are protected by the same monopoly (and even more directly).

My point is that the so called "social contract" has never been upheld by large corporations - it may have seemed that way at times but it was mostly self serving marketing, not anything that would influence their treatment of employees vs their shareholders and executives.

Furthermore I'm arguing that we shouldn't rely on them to uphold it. If we have a belief in what is universally fair or just (i.e minimum wages, no child labor, no slavery), we should encode it in law, not hope corporations find their conscience to renew the social contract.

> I don't know how the social contract between employees/employers gets rebuilt.

The only social contract that is guaranteed is the one written into law. That's why we have government, but the problem is that the government is (for a while now) captive to / bought by large corporations, not responsive to employees/workers/voters.

Whatever principled social contract you may have thought large corporations upheld was smoke and mirrors. It just worked for enough of the right kind of person for a while.

> Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok

The UK might have paid the biggest price due to Brexit, but the EU also lost a significant trading partner for it's goods and services. Arguably it was a lose-lose outcome.

> We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.

The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.

> before pulling into a Texaco to pay $0.34 per gallon for low-lead Fire Chief gas and fill up your "Mellow Yellow" AMC Gremlin.

The nostalgia aside, that's $3.23/gallon today. Cheaper than today with our ongoing war, but same price as Nov 2020. At 20mpg that AMC gremlin was about as fuel efficient as our modern huge SUVs though.

> But they will never be “retrained” to roles that offer them similar income, status, and leverage over employers. Instead they’ll be sucked into an ever-expanding economy of service work.

Which will probably depress wages of service workers - unless somehow there is a dramatic expansion in service demand, which apart from particular industries (i.e elder care), seems unlikely.

What's the old saying? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

Most common people throughout history made their living working in the systems owned by aristocrats whose wealth was usually built on both corruption and theft. Guess that hasn't changed much.

> the thing is while something is better than nothing, new drug development is critical

> there is absolutely no cure for certain types of long-covid and me-cfs right now

> no repurposing any drug is going to cure it, they've tried everything after six years

Then repurposing should free up resources for new drug development for those conditions that it can't address.

Sounds like a win-win, unless the goal is somehow not to most efficiently allocate resources to maximize health outcomes. But at least in the US, that's clearly not the goal.

The consumer-opinion perspective of this survey misses what I think is the main factor in the general public's feelings about AI.

People have a huge capacity to absorb enshittification of everything they consume, from goods /services to culture to politics, if they receive some kind of short term gratification.

But in the back of people's minds, when people hear "AI", is the underlying question: "is it going to take my livelihood?"

IMO that's what motivates the negativity, not some miscalibrated branding.

> I can use Gemini 3 Flash with the harness I built for around 8 years and still not exceed the cost of a Mac Studio with 128GB

And sounds like you haven't factored in the cost of electricity to run that Mac Studio as an LLM machine. Probably get a few more years.

> Shouldn't a bad job market convince people to get a degree?

Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.

> How much more software does Uber need? > Unless they are iteratively replacing expensive vendors and optimizing other headcount costs?

Yes and yes. Also the world changes and software has to evolve to model that change, especially at a place like Uber whose software models phenomena in the real world.

> Mathematical Operation tables are not a language.

Not a natural language, but they are certainly a language as in a symbolic representation of information.

> How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

It probably allowed them to avoid hiring as many people to build a certain amount of software. Even if it didn't increase revenue, it could have lowered human labor costs.

> 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k.

Don't forget the energy costs. Searching around, advanced models use an average of 25 Wh/1000Tok.

$1500/month gets you about 150M tokens.

At the aforementioned energy/token, that's 3750kWh.

What are your local office electricity rates/tariffs? (Hint: they are going up because of AI data centers). Even if my price and energy assumptions are wrong above, you probably aren't going to get the rates that the hyperscalers do.

Even at cheap (i.e Texas) retail electricity rates, that many tokens will probably cost you hundreds per month. In most other electricity markets, probably far more.

> Entire civilization flourished for 2000 years and then disappeared without any clue why.

I think it's well understood that upliftment/desertification of the lower Indus valley resulted in many of the rivers the civilization was built around drying up.

Ancient DNA studies (Reich et. al) have shown a scattering of Indus peoples in all directions after that - including back to the southern Iranian plateau where they came from originally, and across the Indian subcontinent, forming a substratum of various populations across South and Central Asia.

They also reverted to smaller scale settlements, although with echoes of their previous material culture, eventually merging with later migrants and pre-existing indigenous populations.

After that, they very likely played a significant role in the second great urbanization of the Indian subcontinent [1], which took place in the first millennium BCE in the Gangetic plain, and also possibly in the parallel development of Iranian civilization. It is thought they were the original inventors of the famous Indo-Iranian oven known the tandoor, which seems to have remigrated back into South Asia long after the Indus people took it to Central Asia.

So while their original cities were abandoned, their influence was felt far and wide in the ancient world.

1. The first being the Indus Valley Civilization itself a few millenia earlier.

Musk poured lots of money into FL governor Ron Desantis's 2024 presidential campaign.

> Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails.

> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit

Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."

Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.

> This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.

Filing frivolous lawsuits is also a right but we don't withhold our criticism of that practice. What Atherton did seems like the wealthy person's equivalent of that, down to it being dismissed. Legal? yes. Cynical and amoral, also yes.