I certainly don’t look at my savings gaining or losing 30% to 50% of its value every year. In fact, it’s actually more than that, as bitcoin has traded sideways compared to USD, which has lost 30% of its value in the past year. Catastrophic use of spare funds compared to the S&P 500

Been told this every bear market since 2017. Who said I dont have own the S&P?

Yeah unemployment famously doesn’t include those who’ve given up… I fear there are many more than we’re willing to admit

Taken seriously how? People talk about this constantly, and the overall tenor of the tech blogosphere has basically accepted that LLMs are here to stay, and that this spells doom for tech workers, but what’s a guy to do? You can’t “ban” AI, I suppose you could tax tech companies, you can’t just give people jobs or money.

I suppose you could take the accelerationist stance and try to massively overinflate these companies to crash their funding apparatus by intentionally electing dullards who cause the cost of capital to far outpace its returns, which is what seems to have happened in the last 2 years.

For starters, I'd love to see someone with hiring or legislative power tackle the subject of displacement without being dismissive.

For example, anyone who dedicated a bit of brainpower could understand that prompt engineering was bullshit from the beginning. Yet today we're still seeing it being rehashed as an alternative to knowledge work in the form of harnessing, guardrailing or context engineering. This is scaleable neither size-wise (how many different wrapper-builders do you really need?) nor time-wise (how long until model providers vertically integrate that, too?).

The reactions that we see today - the calls to ban AI or implement UBI, or even the race to escape the "permanent underclass" - are some symptoms of this lack of direction, IMO.

Personally, I'd like to see:

- Automation tax in line with displacement, which is then directly funneled to services and fund pools that mitigate the effects of displacement. If you want to reduce the winner-takes-all outcome, you should provide the capital to many more to own the automation tech, robots, whatever.

- Firing moratoria as an industrial policy tool. IIRC, the Chinese implemented something of this sort: you can automate, but you have to retain a certain amount of jobs. Obviously, it's a transitional solution.

- Aggressive expansion of software- and model-auditing & engineering jobs and education. If this is the direction, more people should be able to understand the systems in detail, not fewer.

No, in many of the games it’s not like she’s a damsel in distress, and usually helps like to defeat ganon

I think people are missing the joke...

I struggle to understand this. I use AI quite regularly and find it frees up hours of my day to do consequential “understanding” work that previously got eaten up by there literally not being enough hours in a day to solve my own problems and understand others enough to help them solve theirs.

Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.

For all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.

For real. It’s such a weak cop-out of an argument to lead with that I clicked out, never to read this blog again.

We really don’t celebrate enough how much AI has saved us from terrible SO interactions. Not being entirely serious here, because the site had its good parts, but arguing in threads or having your questions randomly eviscerated or threads closed was a hard way to learn programming.

I think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.