Human delusion and loneliness not even science fiction, just a sad fact of the human condition. If a person can fall in love with a photograph or an anime pillow, falling in love with a chatbot doesn’t seem far-fetched.
5,776 karma · joined September 27, 2007
https://typicalprogrammer.com/
Represented by 10X Management.
In English we call a baby horse a foal. Deer give birth to fawns.
Abandoned baby animals die. Bonding and mirroring don’t come into it. I think you misapply a biological and developmental process observed in some animals, including humans, to software — a category error. Software has no need to bond or mirror behavior, just like animals have no need for matrix arithmetic.
Fortunately the widely-used and supported SimpleSamlPHP package exists.
simplesamlphp.org
My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.
Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.
LA specifically practically requires residents to drive everywhere due to distance and decades of car-centric urban design. I grew up in LA.
By age 40 I had three children, and I hadn't died or suffered serious illness or injury. That represents "success" in terms of evolutionary purpose and compared to the large majority of humans who have ever lived.
I have spent over 45 years working in the software industry. Not rich, but it has given me a comfortable living. I have friends and former colleagues who got rich, mostly by finding themselves in the right place at the right time and making the most of it (i.e. they got very lucky). I don't envy people who have more stuff. Desire is the root of all suffering, so you can stop feeling like you have failed by letting go of desire for superficial markers of success you apparently internalized from celebrity media meant to get you to spend more.
The Economist should look for businesses that have actually used AI to get measurable benefits, or tried and failed to do so, rather than falling back on niche studies of organizational behavior.
SQL predates almost every programming language in use today. If those languages don’t have good interfaces for relational databases that’s where the bad design blame goes. But all modern programming languages do have good interfaces to multiple RDBMSs.
A serious programmer masters many languages and tools. SQL goes in that toolkit because it gets used everywhere and does the job better than alternatives in most cases. Things like relational databases and SQL don’t stick around for decades and get used in almost every application because they suffer from bad design or programmers can’t learn them.
All of the noSQL databases have their own language too. Some of them even use SQL.
I detect laziness and a poor rationalization. Do what you want but don’t expect senior programmers or employers to take you seriously with key tools and skills missing.
100,000 years — 20 times longer than recorded history — presents a ridiculous horizon to predict anything. Whatever happens on that time scale will have nothing to do with anyone now alive, or tech companies laying people off today.
Based on the current state of AI I don’t think it replaces much economically viable human activity. Over time our definition of “economically viable” will change, as it has for the last 100,000 years.
Not fear or animosity. I have over 40 years in software development. I’ve seen numerous fads and supposedly revolutionary tech ideas get pushed hard only to fade away, or fail to deliver. Not long ago we had to endure the metaverse hype, before that blockchain. No code/ low code has been around in some form as a a holy grail for management for decades. I haven’t stayed employable into my sixties by ignoring new things. I try to discern the useful and real from the hyped and fake. I don’t claim to know how LLMs or anything else will eventually play out, but I’ve seen this money-driven hypetrain and cults of personality before.
> Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics.
That of course works both ways.
If so-called AI offers benefits I will adapt, just as I’ve adapted to many new things during my career. If it fizzles out or falls short of the promises I will still have a job. Right now the AI coding tools add nothing for me. Other programmers may have different experiences.
Programmers with years of experience in multiple business domains, like me, have the least to fear from AI. I think excluding young people just starting their careers, at a time when an LLM can plausibly do the same work under supervision, will choke off the path to senior developer and the necessary mentoring and real-world experience. AI may create a demographic crisis even if it doesn’t actually replace senior programmers. The damage will come from management short-sightedness and short-term profit seeking, not the technology itself.
In any case the question of what AI can do or might do only has a little to do with layoffs in tech and other sectors, and that was the original topic.
I didn’t address the possibility of AGI, the consensus or “delta” of smart people, the utility of LLMs, or the prospect of OpenAI et al. someday making a profit in my original comment. You raised those issues and then put words in my mouth.
My original comment amounted to an Occam’s Razor argument: we can explain layoffs in terms of tax changes, economic and political uncertainty, over-hiring during COVID, and management incompetence. The impact of AI remains to be seen. The hype and fear-mongering serves the AI companies in a blatantly obvious way, so we should take their claims skeptically. Maybe it will all come true, but even if we get AGI next week that won’t explain the layoffs in tech and other sectors that started several years ago.
In a few years we will have more evidence to support (or not) AGI, whatever it means. And we will have more evidence of the real economic impact of AI. Right now no one can claim expertise, just opinions.
Obama, no. Geoff Hinton has his opinions and I’ve listened to them. For every smart person who believes in AI and AGI happening soon you can find other smart people who argue the other way.
> AI companies' revenues are growing rapidly, reaching the tens of billions.
Trading stock and Azure credits don’t equal revenue. OpenAI, the leader in the AI industry, loses billions every quarter. Microsoft and Google and Meta subsidize their work from other profitable activities. The profit isn’t there.
> The claim that it's just a scapegoat for inevitable layoffs seems fanciful when there are many real-life cases of AI tools performing equivalent person-hours work in white-collar domains. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-lawyer-used-ai-help-win-...
A few questionable anecdotes? Given the years since ChatGPT and the billions invested I’d expect more tectonic changes than “It wrote my term paper.” Companies have not replaced employees with AI doing the same job at any scale. You simply can’t find honest examples of that except for call centers that got automated and offshored decades ago.
> To claim it is impossible that AI could be at least a partial cause of layoffs requires an unshakable belief that AI tools could not even be labor-multiplying (as in allowing one person to perform more work at the same level of quality than they would otherwise). To assume that this has never happened by this point in 2025 requires a heavy amount of denial.
I might agree, but I didn’t make that claim. AI tools probably can add value as tools. If you find a real example of AI taking over a professional job at scale let us know.
> That being said, I could cite dozens of articles, numerous takes from leading experts, scientists, legitimate sources without conflicts of interest, and I'm certain a fair portion of the HN regulars would not be swayed one inch. Lively debate is the lifeblood of any domain that prides itself on intellectual rigor, but a lot of the dismissal of the actual utility of AI, the impending impacts, and its implications feels like reflexive coping.
We could have better discussions if the AI industry wasn’t led by chronic liars and frauds, people making ridiculous self-serving predictions not backed by anything that resembles science. AI gets literally shoved down our throats with no demonstrated or measurable benefit, poor accuracy, severe limitations, heavy costs that get subsidized by investors and the public. Forget about the energy and environmental impact. Which “side” acts in good faith in the so-called debate?
> I would really really love to hear an argument that convinced me that AGI is impossible, or far away, or that all the utility I get from Claude, o3 or Gemini are all just tricks of scale and memorization entirely orthogonal to something somewhat akin to general human-like intelligence. However, I have not heard a good argument.
I have. You just need to take the critics seriously. No one can even define intelligence or AGI, but they sure can sell it to FOMO CIOs.
Actually very little debate. We get a lot of unsubstantiated hype from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft. So-called AI has barely made a dent in economic activities, and no company makes money from it. Tech journalism repeatedly fails to question the PR narrative (read Ed Zitron).
> Regardless of whether this will happen, or when, many people already have lost their jobs in part due to the emerging capabilities of AI models…
Consider the more likely explanation: many companies over-hired a few years ago and have cut jobs. Focus on stock price in an uncertain economy leads to layoffs. Easier to blame AI for layoffs than admitting C-suite management incompetence. Fear of the AI boogeyman gives employers the upper hand in hiring and salary negotiations, and keeps employers in line out of fear.
Or maybe the AIs have achieved sentience and we can interpret such statements as hope.
In the (now distant) past LinkedIn had some value if I needed to reach out to professional contacts or recruiters. Now it just has job spam and self-promotional crap. I quit LinkedIn a couple of years ago after seeing no value from it. No one I would care to work with uses it either, other than as an email directory of professional contacts.
This site has some value for keeping up with things and maybe for the job postings, I have never used those.
If you mean not having to start over or do a lot of rework, I think through my tasks before starting on them. Measure twice, cut once.
Self-employment can mean selling time and expertise in the form of freelancing. Or it can mean building products you sell. It can lead to a combination of both -- building products and then selling time/expertise to customers. The biggest SAAS companies (think Oracle, Salesforce, etc.) make considerable revenue from services along with licensing their software.
I freelanced for a long time, selling expertise sometimes (not always) measured in time spent. A lot of successful freelancers bill in terms of deliverables, or on regular retainers, rather than charging per hour like a salaried job.
The main value derived from working for an employer, especially early in a career, comes from developing a professional network and accumulating business domain expertise. Building software to sell frequently fails because of poor understanding of the target business domain, which gets wrongly interpreted as a marketing problem. Businesses don't need software or code in the abstract -- they need and pay for solutions to business problems, something that adds value, decreases costs, improved efficiency, yields competitive advantage.