Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size, energy budget etc).

For text generation, it seems like the fast progress was mainly due to feeding the models exponentially more data and exponentially more compute power. But we know that the growth in data is over. The growth in compute has a shifted from a steep curve (just buy more chips) to a slow curve (have to make exponentially more factories if we want exponentially more chips)

Im sure we will have big improvements in efficiency. Im sure nearly everyone will use good LLMs to support them in their work, and they may even be able to do all they need to do on-device. But that doesn’t make the models significantly smarter.

We’ve been building actuators for 100s of years and we still haven’t got anything comparable to a muscle. And even if you build a better hydraulic ram or brushless motor driven linear actuator you will still never achieve the same kind of behaviour, because the technologies are fundamentally different.

I don’t know where the ceiling of LLM performance will be, but as the building blocks are fundamentally different to those of biological computers, it seems unlikely that the limits will be in any way linked to those of the human brain. In much the same way the best hydraulic ram has completely different qualities to a human arm. In some dimensions it’s many orders of magnitudes better, but in others it’s much much worse.

It’s not just that ‘we don’t know how to build them’, it’s that the actuators aren’t a standalone part - and we don’t know how to build (or maintain/run in industrial enviroments!) the ‘other stuff’ economically either.

The thing about the latter 1/3rd of a sigmoid curve is, you're still making good progress, it's just not easy any more. The returns have begun to diminish, and I do think you could argue that's already happening for LLMs.

There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.

If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving.

Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure physics.

You will never get to full self driving, even with more processing power, because the underlying assumptions are incorrect. Doing more of the same thing, will not achieve the stated goal of full self driving.

You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Same with GenAI - the tooling factor will not magically solve the people, process, power and economic factors.

Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are cultural) but given 10’s of millions of miles driven by Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving is about how people drive far more than the rules of the road, even on the highly regulated streets of western countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing power to operate there?

I definitely recall reading some thinkpieces along the lines of "In the year 203X, there will be no more human drivers in America!" which was and still is clearly absurd. Just about any stupidly high goalpost you can think of has been uttered by someone in the world early on.

Anyway, I'd be interested in a breakdown on reliability figures in urban vs. suburban vs. rural environments, if there is such a thing, and not just the shallow take of "everything outside cities is trivial!" I sometimes see. Waymo is very heavily skewed toward (a short list of) cities, so I'd question whether that's just a matter of policy, or whether there are distinct challenges outside of them. Self-driving cars that only work in cities would be useful to people living there, but they wouldn't displace the majority of human driving-miles like some want them to.

As others will attest, when adherence to driving rules is spotty, behavior is highly variable and unpredictable. You need to have a degree of straight up agression, if you want to be able to handle an auto driver who is cheating the laws of physics.

Another example of something thats obvious based on crimes in India; people can and will come up to your car during a traffic jam, tap your chassis to make it sound like there was an impact, and then snatch your phone from the dashboard when you roll your window down to find out what happened.

This is simply to illustrate and contrast how pared down technical intuitions of "driving" are, when it comes to self driving discussions.

This is why I think level 5 is simply not happening, unless we redefine what self driving is, or the approach to achieving it. I feel theres more to be had from a centralized traffic orchestration network that supplements autonomous traffic, rather than trying to solve it onboard the vehicle.

Or actual intelligence. That observes its surroundings and learns what's going on. That can solve generic problems. Which is the definition of intelligence. One of the obvious proofs that what everybody is calling "AI" is fundamentally not intelligent, so it's a blatant misnomer.

Do you really think Waymos in SF operate solely on physics? There are volumes of data on driver behavior, when to pass, change lanes, react to aggressive drivers, etc.

And the point that I am making, is that this view was never baked into the original vision of self driving, resulting in predictions of a velocity that was simply impossible.

Physical reality does not have vibes, and is more amenable to prediction, than human behavior. Or Cow behavior, or wildlife if I were to include some other places.

This is a semantic discussion, because it is about what people mean when they talk about self driving.

Just ditching the meaning is unfair, because goddamit, the self driving dream was awesome. I am hoping to be proved wrong, but not because we moved our definition.

Carve a separate category out, which articulates the updated assumptions. Redefining it is a cop out and dare I say it, unbecoming of the original ambition.

Networked Autonomous vehicles?

Lol. If you dropped the average westerner into Chennai, they would either: a) stop moving b) kill someone

Decades of machine learning research would like to have a word.

Basically, what if GenAI is the Minitel and what we want is the internet.

I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved. But the base model powering the whole operation seems stuck.

It really hasn't.

The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only understand the large codebase but also the latest stable version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands.

Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated, CVE-riddled libraries is of limited use especially when libraries tend to be upgraded in interconnected waves. And so that component will likely not even work anyway.

I was assured that MCP was going to solve all of this but nope.

MCP would allow it to instead get this information at run-time from language servers, dependency repositories etc. But it hasn't proven to be effective.

I can't. GPT-4 was useless for me for software development. Claude 4 is not.

why don't you bring it up then.

> There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

do you know something that rest of us don't ?

3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries. It’s not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely is happening. It won’t replace traditional manufacturing at huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput). But it’s bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be made simpler by using complex pieces that cannot be produced otherwise. It is not taking over, because it is not a silver bullet, but it is now indispensable in several industries.

The same thing with AI. You'd be blind or lying if you said it hasn't advanced a lot. People aren't denying that. But people are fed up being constantly being promised the moon and getting a cheap plastic replica instead.

The tech is rapidly advancing and doing good. But it just can't keep up with the bubble of hype. That's the problem. The hype, not the tech.

Frankly, the hype harms the tech too. We can't solve problems with the tech if we're just throwing most of our money at vaporware. I'm upset with the hype BECAUSE I like the tech.

So don't confuse the difference. Make sure you understand what you're arguing against. Because it sounds like we should be on the same team, not arguing against one another. That just helps the people selling vaporware

This was never the case, and this is obvious to anyone who has ever been to factories that doing mass-produced plastic

>Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now.

But it is really around the corner, all that remains is to accept it. That is, to start building and modifying the road infrastructure and changing the traffic rules to enable effective integration self-driving cars into road traffic.

And each successive model that has been released has done nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all that many.

So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models because they are of limited usefulness let alone being a turning point for anything.

The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

Nonetheless it took openai til Nov 2022 for 1 Million users.

The overall awareness and breakthrough was probably not at 2020.

Around 2010 when I was at university, a friend did their undergraduate thesis on neural networks. Among our cohort it was seen as a weird choice and a bit of a dead-end from the last AI winter.

10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year"

We're 10 years into "it's just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning is going to replace radiologists"

Moravec's paradox strikes again and again. But this time it's different and it's completely obvious now, right?

Realistically, we're 2.5 years into it at most.

You're going to have to specify which 2 you think happened

They try it, but it’s not reliable

Why do I think this?

1) They smelled slightly funny. 2) They got the diagnosis wrong.

OK maybe #2 is a red herring. But I stand by the other reason.

So there's some room for interpretation, the weaker interpretation is less radical (that AI could beat humans in radiology tasks in 5 years).

> Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024, and has a long-term goal of delivering electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour. (!)

[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion

[0] https://observer.com/2025/01/sam-altman-nuclear-fusion-start...

they have failed in sfo, phoenix and other cities that rolled red carpet for them

And more specifically, I'm referencing Elon where the context is that its going to be a software push into Teslas that people already own

There's a big gap between seeing something work in the lab and being ready for real world use. I know we do this in software, but that's a very abnormal thing (and honestly, maybe not the best)

When someone talks about "having" self-driving cars next year, they're not talking about what are essentially pilot programs.

Not to mention that HN gets really tetchy about achieving specifically SAE Level 6 when in practice some pretty basic driver assist tools are probably closer to what people meant. It reminds me of a gentlemen I ran into who was convinced that the OpenAI DoTA bot with a >99% win rate couldn't really be said to be playing the game. If someone can take their hands off the wheel for 10 minutes we're there in a common language sense; the human in the car isn't actively in control.

It's pretty damning that it failed there.

And it took what like 2 decades to get there. So no, we don't have self-driving even close. Those examples look more like hard-coded solution for custom test cases.

I admit they don't operate everywhere - only certain routes. Still they are undoubtedly cars that drive themselves.

I imagine it'll be the same with AGI. We'll have robots / AIs that are much smarter than the average human and people will be saying they don't count because humans win X Factor or something.

Did the cotton gin therefore not compete with human labor?

I don't care about SF. I care about what I can but as a typical American. Not as an enthusiast in one of the most technologically advanced cities on the planet

You read the words but missed their meaning

The argument that self-driving cars should be allowed on public roads as long as they are statistically as safe as human drivers (on average) seems valid, but of course none of these cars have AGI... they perform well in the anticipated simulator conditions in which they were trained (as long as they have the necessary sensors, e.g. Waymo's lidar, to read the environment in reliable fashion), but will not perform well in emergency/unanticipated conditions they were not trained on. Even outside of emergencies, Waymos still sometimes need to "phone home" for remote assistance in knowing what to do.

So, yes, they are out there, perhaps as safe on average as a human (I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the stats), but I'd not personally be comfortable riding in one since I'm not senile, drunk, teenager, hothead, distracted (using phone while driving), etc - not part of the class that are dragging the human safety stats down. I'd also not trust a Tesla where penny pinching, or just arrogant stupidity, has resulted in a sensor-poor design liable to failure modes like running into parked trucks.

That's the main difference with a human driver. If I take an Uber and we crash, that driver is liable. Waymo would fight tooth and nail to blame anything else.

  I'd not personally be comfortable riding in one since I'm not senile, drunk, teenager, hothead, distracted (using phone while driving), etc - not part of the class that are dragging the human safety stats down.

My point was that if you are part of one of these accident-prone groups, you are certainly worse than average, and are probably safer (both for yourself, and everyone around you) in a Waymo. However, if you are an intelligent non-impaired experienced driver, then maybe not, and almost certainly not if we're talking about emergency and dangerous situations which is where it really matters.

A recent example - a few weeks ago I follow another car in making a turn down a side road, when suddenly that car stops dead (for no externally apparent reason), and starts backing up fast about to hit me. I immediately hit my horn and prepare to back up myself to get out of the way, since it was obvious to me - as a human - that they didn't realize I was there, and without intervention would hit me.

Driving away I watch the car in my rear view mirror and see it pull a U-turn to get back out of the side road, making it apparent why they had stopped before. I learned something, but of course the driverless car is incapable of learning, and certainly has no theory of mind, and would behave same as last time - good or bad - if something similar happened again.

I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.

  > it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling

I don't know about the rest, but I spoke up because I didn't want to hit a brick wall, I want to keep going! I still want to keep going! But if accurate predictions (with good explanations) aren't a reason to shift resource allocation then we just keep making the same mistake over and over. We let the conmen come in and people who get too excited by success that they get blind to pitfalls.

And hey, I'm not saying give me money. This account is (mostly) anonymous. There's plenty of people that made accurate predictions and tried working in other directions but never got funding to test how methods scale up. We say there's no alternatives but there's been nothing else that's been given a tenth of the effort. Apples and oranges...

You need to model the business world and management more like a flock of sheep being herded by forces that mostly don't have to do with what actually is going to happen in future. It makes a lot more sense.

It's all a big hype bubble and not only is no one in the industry willing to pop it, they actively defend against popping a bubble that is clearly rupturing on its own. It's endemic of how modern businesses no longer care about a proper 10 year portfolio and more about how to make the next quarter look good.

There's just no skin in the game, and everyone's ransacking before the inevitable fire instead of figuring out how to prevent the fire to begin with.

  > mostly don't have to do with what actually is going to happen

I'm saying we should have memory. Look at predictions people make. Reward accurate ones, don't reward failures. Right now we reward whoever makes the craziest predictions. It hasn't always been this way, so we should go back to less crazy

But if you had been wrong and we would now have had superintelligence, the upside for its owners would presumably be great.

... Or at least that's the hypothesis. As a matter of fact intelligence is only somewhat useful in the real world :-)

Those people always do that. Shouting about cryptocurrencies and NFTs from the rooftops 3-4 years ago, now completely gone.

I suspect they're the same people, basically get rich quick schemers.

After their success, I definitely saw a ton of blog posts and general "AI chatter" that to get to AGI all you really needed to do (obviously I'm simplifying things a bit here) was get more data and add more parameters, more "experts", etc. Heck, OpenAI had to scale back it's pronouncements (GPT 5 essentially became 4.5) when they found that they weren't getting the performance/functionality advances they expected after massively scaling up their model.

This is an improvement for sure, but LLMs themselves are definitely hitting a wall. It was predicted that scaling alone would allow them to reach AGI level.

This is a genuine attempt to inform myself. Could you think to those sort of claims from experts at the top?

There were definitely many other prominent researchers who vehemently disagreed, e.g. Yann LeCun. But it's very hard for a layperson (or, for that matter, another expert) to determine who is or would be "right" in this situation - most of these people have strong personalities to put it mildly, and they often have vested interests in pushing their preferred approach and view of how AI does/should work.

A year ago I expected a golden age of local model intelligence integrated into most software tools, and more powerful commercial tools like Google Jules to be something used perhaps 2 or 3 times a week for specific difficult tasks.

That said, my view of the future is probably now wrong, I am just saying what I expected.

But we are going to see a huge explosion in how those models are integrated into the rest of the tech ecosystem. Things that a current model could do right now, if only your car/watch/videogame/heart monitor/stuffed animal had a good working interface into an AI.

Not necessarily looking forward to that, but that's where the growth will come.

Programmers that don't use AI will get replaced by those that do. (no just by mandate, but by performance)

> 10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year"

They're here now. Waymo does 250K paid rides/week.

We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we cared about ourselves, then we don’t need another class, or race, or whatever other grouping to do this for us.

Regarding class struggle I think class division always existed but we the mass have all the tools to improve our situation.

p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.

  > the tune is "be leaner".

It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".

At this point I'm not sure it's lack of independent thought so much as lack of thought. I'm even beginning to question if people even use the products they work on. Shouldn't there be more pressure from engineers at this point? Is it yes men from top to bottom? Even CEOs seem to be yes men in response to share holders but that's like being a yes man to the wind.

When I bring this stuff up I'm called negative, a perfectionist, or told I'm out of touch with customers and or understand "value". Idk, maybe they're right. But I'm an engineer. My job is to find problems and fix them. I'm not negative, I'm trying to make the product better. And they're right, I don't understand value. I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't. What is this, "Whose Line Is It Anyways?" If you want made up dollar values go ask the business monkeys, I'm a code monkey

So you think all bugs are equally important to fix?

Do you think every bug's monetary value is perfectly aligned with user impact? Certainly that isn't true. If it were we'd be much better at security and would be more concerned with data privacy. There's no perfect metric for anything, and it would similarly be naïve to think you could place a dollar value on everything, let alone accurately. That's what I'm talking about.

My main concern as an engineer is making the best product I can.

The main concern of the manager is to make the best business.

Don't get confused and think those are the same things. Hopefully they align, but they don't always.

funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.

If we were to unionize, we could force this machine to a halt and shift the balance of power back in our favor.

But we don't, because many of us have been brainwashed to believe we're on the same side as the ones trying to squeeze us.

Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.

AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.

We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

> We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.

The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.

I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.

What income? Income from job, or from capital? A huge difference. Also a lot harder to lose the latter, gross incompetence or a revolution, while the former is much easier.

Now what?

What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists? Same class?

And on the flip side, are pensioners, the unemployed, and people on permanent disability part of the same class as the dilettante children of billionaires?

We are talking about class, and if we should be making distinctions between groups of people who work for a living based on their wealth, income, and economic stability. I believe there is a fundamental class difference between people who work, but are rich enough to stop working whenever they want, those who can't quite stop working but are comfortable enough to easily go 6 month without a pay check, and people who are only a couple of missed pay checks away from literal homelessness.

Coddling poor people is so severely out of touch with their reality, they most likely resent the hell out of you for it, I know I did.

The original claim was a proposal to increase the resolution of class analysis one degree "higher" than Marx and no longer differentiate between the modern proletariat (working class), bourgeois (middle class), and aristocracy (upper class), in this case proposing to lump together the bourgeois and proletariat because they both have to work or they'll starve to death.

In this world, being born from the orifice of an aristocrat means you never have to work (have meaning, "or you'll die of exposure"). That's a frank reality. If your reaction to being born from a non aristocratic orifice is to shrug your shoulders and accept reality, great, nobody's trying to take that from you.

However you seem to be taking it a step further and suggesting that the people pointing out that this nature of society is unfair are somehow wrong to do so. I disagree. I think is perfectly valid to be born from whatever orifice and declare the obvious unfairness of the situation and the work to balance things out for people. That's not coddling, it's just ensuring that we all benefit in a just way from the work of your grandfather. Cause right now, someone has stolen the value of his work from you, and that's why you (and I) had to work so hard to get where we are today.

If you love that you had to work so hard, fine. I could take it or leave it. Instead of working a double through school I would have preferred to focus more on my studies and get higher grades, find better internships instead of slinging sandwiches. Personally I look at the extraordinarily wealth of the aristocrat class and I think, "is it more important that they're allowed to own 3 yachts or that all the children of our society can go to college?" I strongly believe any given country will be much stronger if it has less yachts and more college-educated people. Or people with better access to healthcare. Or people with better transit options to work. Etc.

And even you strongly disagree with that statement, it is important to have framework within which your opinion of that statement can be analysed.

Satya Nadella doesn't read his emails, and doesn't write responses. He subscribes to podcasts and then gets them summarised by AI.

He turns up to the office and takes home obscene amounts of money for doing nothing except play with toys and pretend he's working.

They are "working", but they are actually just playing. And I think thats the problem with some of these comments, they aren't distinguishing between work and what is basically a hobby.

> What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists?

Its a hobby. They don't have to do it, and if they get fired for gross misconduct then they could find alternative things to pass the time.

I’m willing to bet you haven’t lived long enough to know that’s a more or less a proxy for old age. :) That aside, even homeless people acquire possessions over time. If you have a lot of homeless in your neighborhood, try to observe that. In my area, many homeless have semi functional motor homes. Are they legit homeless, or are they “homeless oligarchs”? I can watch any of the hundreds of YouTube channels devoted to “van life.” Is a 20 year old who skipped college which their family could have afforded, and is instead living in an $80k van and getting money from streaming a “legit homeless”? The world is not so black and white it will turn out in the long run.

https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-to-crack-down-on-rv-re...

Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with their children outside of working day to day? Do they have the ability to take reasonable risks without chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better opportunities?

These are things we typically attribute to someone in the middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions to “you work and they don’t” misses a lot of opportunity for tangible improvement to quality of life for large number of people.

If you have an actual job and an income constrained by your work output, you could be middle class, but you could also recognize that you are getting absolutely ruined by the billionaire class (no matter what your level of working wealth)

I agree with your point. Now doctors are working class as well.

I think progress (in the sense of economic growth) was roughly in line with what Keynes expected. What he didn't expect is that people, instead of getting 10x the living standard with 1/3 the working hours, rather wanted to have 30x the living standard with the same working hours.

Throughout human history, starting with the spread of agriculture, increased labor efficiency has always led to people consuming more, not to them working less.

Moreover, throughout the 20th century, we saw several periods in different countries when wages rose very rapidly - and this always led to a temporary average increase in hours worked. Because when a worker is told "I'll pay you 50% more" - the answer is usually not "Cool, I can work 30% less", but "Now I'm willing to work 50% more to get 2x of the pay".

Can you give a single example where that happened?

During the industrial revolution it was definitely not what happened. In the late 1700s laborers typically averaged around 80 hours per week. In the 1880s this had decreased to around 60 hours per week. In the 1920s the average was closer to 48 hours per week. By the time Keynes was writing, the 40 hour work week had become standard. Average workweek bottomed out in the mid 1980s in the US and UK at about 37 hours before starting to increase again.

That never was the case (except for short periods after salary increases).

And this is not a question where there could be any speculation: in those days there were already people collecting such statistics, and we have a bunch of diaries describing the actual state of affairs, both from the workers themselves and from those who organized their labor - and everything shows that few people worked more than 50 hours a week on average.

Most likely, the myth about 80 hours a week stems from the fact that such weeks really were common, but it was work in the format of "work a week or two or a month for 80 hours, then a week or two or a month you don't work, spend money, arrange your life"

There is also agriculture, which employed a significant part of the population in the past. There, on average, there was usually even less than 40 hours of productive work, it's just that timing is of great importance there, and there are bottlenecks, and when necessary, you have to work 20 hours a day, which is compensated by periods when the workload is much less than 6 hours a day.

Take the Philadelphia carpenters' strike in 1791, where they were on strike demanding a reduction in hours to a 60 hour work week. The strike was unsuccessful. In the 1820s there was a so called "10 Hour Day" labor movement in New York City (note that at this time people worked 6 days a week). In the 1840s mill workers in Massachusetts attempted to get the state legislature to intervene and reduce their 74 hour workweeks. This was also unsuccessful. Martin Van Buren signed an executive order limiting workdays for federal employees to 10 hours per day. The first enforceable labor law in the US came in 1874, which set a limit of 60 hours in a workweek for women in Massachusetts.

right?

pact of steel?

anyone?

No need for AI. Troll farms are well documented and were in action before transformers could string two sentences together.

All the free money dried up and the happy clapping Barney the Dinosaur Internet was no more!

I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.

Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.

When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.

That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?

"Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an objective analysis framework for culture. Typically people who study culture avoid moralizing like this because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish. What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so freely?

If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity politics. Too often these conversations are completely presumptive.

What's the sense in asking for examples? If one person sees ubiquitous cultural decay and the other says "this is fine," I think the difference is down to worldview. And for a pessimist and an optimist to cite examples at one another is unlikely to change the other's worldview.

If a pessimist said, "the opioid crisis is deadlier than the crack epidemic and nobody cares," would that change the optimist's mind?

If a pessimist said, "the rate of suicide has increased by 30% since the year 2000," would that change the optimist's mind?

If a pessimist said, "corporate profits, wealth inequality, household debt, and homelessness are all at record highs," ...?

And coming from the other side, all these things can be Steven Pinker'd if you want to feel like "yes there are real problems but actually things are better than ever."

There was a book that said something about "you will recognize them by their fruit." If these problems are the fruit born of our culture, it's worth asking how we got here instead of dismissing it with "What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't?"

I also wholeheartedly disagree that, vaguely, diversity has something to do with the reduction of material conditions, or gay people, or whatever tf, so I wanted to allow the op the opportunity to be demonstrably wrong. They wouldn't take it of course, because there's no evidence for what they claim, because it's a ridiculous assertion.

The reasons things are they way they are today are identifiable and measurable. Rent is high because mostly because housing is an investment vehicle and supply is locked by a functional cartel. Homelessness is high mostly because of a lack of universal healthcare. Crime is continually dropping despite what the media says, and immigrants commit a lower crime per capita than any other demographic group - but the jails remain full because the USA engages in a demonstrably ineffective retributive justice system.

I'm so tired of conservatives walking around flinging every which way their feelings as facts. Zizek has demonstrated the potential value of a well considered conservative ideology, and unfortunately today all we get from that side is vague (or explicit) bigotry.

The OP didn't just claim that there's cultural degeneracy happening (which again, they didn't definite very well), they blamed real-world outcomes on it. That's a challengeable premise.

Capitalism arrives for everyone, Asia is just late for the party. Once it eventually financializes everything, the same will happen to it. Capitalism eventually eats itself, doesn't matter the language or how many centuries your people might have.

Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was doing the same!

AI isn't going to generate those jobs, it's going to automate them.

ALL our bullshit jobs are going away, and those people will be unemployed.

When kids stop learning to code for real, who writes GCC v38?

This whole LLM is just the next bitcoin/nft. People had a lot of video cards and wanted to find a new use for them. In my small brain it’s so obvious.

to compare that to NFT’s is pretty disingenuous. i don’t know anyone who has ever accomplished anything with an NFT. (i’m happy to be wrong about that, and i have yet to find a single example).

Trying to make them more than they are is the issue I have. Let them be great at crunching words, I’m all about that.

Pretending that OpenAI is worth billions of dollars is a joke, when I can get 90% of the value the provide for free, on my own mediocre hardware.

Maybe consider it's not all on the AI tools if they work for others but not for you.

Human-written code also needs reviews, and is also frequently broken until subjected to testing, iteration, and reviews, and so our processes are built around proper qa, and proper reviews, and then the original source does not matter much.

It's however a lot easier to force an LLM into a straighjacket of enforced linters, enforced test-suite runs, enforced sanity checks, enforced processes at a level that human developers would quit over, and so as we build out the harness around the AI code generation, we're seeing the quality of that code increase a lot faster than the quality delivered by human developers. It still doesn't beat a good senior developer, but it does often deliver code that handles tasks I could never hand to my juniors.

(In fact, the harness I'm forcing my AI generated code through was written about 95%+ by an LLM, iteratively, with its own code being forced through the verification steps with every new iteration after the first 100 lines of code or so)

You can feel free not to believe it, as I have no plans to open up my tooling anytime soon - though partly because I'm considering turning it into a service. In the meantime these tools are significantly improving the margins for my consulting, and the velocity increases steadily as every time we run into a problem we make the tooling revise its own system prompt or add additional checks to the harness it runs to avoid it next time.

A lot of it is very simple. E.g a lot of these tools can produce broken edits. They'll usually realise and fix them, but adding an edit tool that forces the code through syntax checks / linters for example saved a lot of pain. As does forcing regular test and coverage runs, not just on builds.

For one of my projects I now let this tooling edit without asking permission, and just answer yes/no to whether it can commit once it's ready. If no, I'll tell it why and review again when it thinks it's fixed things, but a majority of commit requests are now accepted on the first try.

For the same project I'm now also experimenting with asking the assistant to come up with a todo list of enhancements for it based on a high level goal, then work through it, with me just giving minor comments on the proposed list.

I'm vaguely tempted to let this assistant reload it's own modified code when tests pass and leave it to work on itself for a a while and see what comes of it. But I'd need to sandbox it first. It's already tried (and was stopped by a permissions check) to figure out how to restart itself to enable new functionality it had written, so it "understands" when it is working on itself.

But, by all means, you can choose to just treat this as fiction if it makes you feel better.

E.g. a real example: The tooling I mentioned at one point early on made the correct functional change, but it's written in Ruby and Ruby allows defining methods multiple times in the same class - the later version just overrides the former. This would of course be a compilation error in most other languages. It's a weakness of using Ruby with a careless (or mindless) developer...

But Rubocop - a linter - will catch it. So forcing all changes through Rubocop and just returning the errors to LLM made it recognise the mistake and delete the old method.

It lowers the cognitive load of the review. Instead of having to wade through and resolve a lot of cruft and make sense of unusually structured code, you can focus on the actual specific changes and subject those to more scrutiny.

And then my plan is to experiment with more semantic checks of the same style as what Rubocop uses, but less prescriptive, of the type "maybe you should pay extra attention here, and explain why this is correct/safe" etc. An example might be to trigger this for any change that involves reading a key or password field or card number whether or not there is a problem with it, and both trigger the LLM to "look twice" and indicate it as an area to pay extra attention to in a human review.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just need to provide enough of a harness to make it easier for humans in the loop to spot the remaining issues.

So, no, I'll keep doing this because doing this is already saving me effort for my other projects.

Writing code is often easier than reading it. I suspect that coders soon will face what translators face now: fixing machine output at 2x to 3x less pay.

It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct sense.

One class of people that needs to be kept happy are managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is actually most productive. What makes managers happy is their perception of what's most productive, or having their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.

This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do nothing useful. People get paid to do things that satisfy a need that managers have perceived.

NONE of the bullshit jobs are going away, there will simply be bigger, more numerous bullshit.

I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.

So it's only men who got relief?

I've done some 3rd world travel without washing machines for a while and my laundry was once a week dunk stuff in the sink for 5 minutes with shampoo + rinse water, wring and hang up. I don't buy the whole day being necessary thing.

OK, but I doubt we're washing 10 times as much clothes, unless are people wearing them for one hour between washes...

Citation needed.

(Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)

> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...

Before teaching your children to do chores: x hours per week for chores

After teaching your children to do chores: y hours per weeks to have annoying discussions with the child, and X hours per week cautioning the children to do the chores, and ensuring that your children do the chore properly. Here X > x.

Additional time for you: -((X-x)+y), where X>x and additionally y > 0.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...

Policy matters

There can be a certain snobbishness with academics where they are like of course I enjoy working away on my theories of employment but the unwashed masses do crap jobs where they'd rather sit on their arses watching reality TV. But it isn't really like that. Usually.

Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.

I don't know that I've ever heard this rationally articulated. I think it's a "gut feel" that at least some people have.

If taxes take 10% of what you make, you aren't happy about it, but most of us are OK with it. If taxes take 90% of what you make, that feels different. It feels like the government thinks it all belongs to them, whereas at 10%, it feels like "the principle is that it all belongs to you, but we have to take some tax to keep everything running".

So I think the way this plays out in practice is, the amount of taxes needed to supply everyones' basic needs is across the threshold in many peoples' minds. (The threshold of "fairness" or "reasonable" or some such, though it's more of a gut feel than a rational position.)

Literally unlimited needs, term "basic" does not apply to them.

I'll take capitalism with all its warts over that workers paradise any day.

This creates supply-demand pressure for goods and services. Anything with limited supply such as living in the nice part of town will price out anyone working 15 hours/week.

And so society finds an equilibrium…

If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.

The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium. But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...

Require anyone working over 15 hours to be paid time and a half overtime. If you want to hire one person to work 40 hours per week, that is 30% more expensive than hiring 3 people to work the same number of hours. In some select instances sure, having a single person do the job is worth the markup, and some people will be willing to work those hours, just like today you have some people working over 40, but in general the market will demand reduction in working hours.

Similarly, there is a strong incentive to work enough hours to be counted as a full time employee, so the marginal utility of that 35th hour is pretty high currently, whereas if full time benefits and labor protections started at 15 hours, then the marginal utility of that 35th hour would be substantially less.

> If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.

That would be true if 100% of the coffee shop's revenue went to wages. Obviously that's not the case. In reality, the shop is buying ingredients, paying rent for the space, paying off capex for the coffee making equipment, utilizing multiple business services like accounting and marketing, and hopefully at the end of the day making some profit. Realistically, wages for a coffee shop are probably 20-30% of revenue. So to cover the increased cost of labor, prices would have to rise 53%. Note that in this scenario you also have 267% more money to spend on coffee.

Of course there are some more nuances as prices in general inflate. Ultimately though, the equilibrium you reach is that people working minimum wage for a full workweek wind up able to afford 1 minimum-wage workweek worth of goods and services. This holds true in the long term regardless of what level minimum wage is or how long a workweek is. Indeed you could just as easily have everyone's wages stay exactly the same but we are all working less, then we all have less money and there is a deflationary effect but in the long term we wind up at the same situation. Ideally, you'd strike a balance between these two which reaches the same end state with a reasonably steady money supply.

> The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium.

No, it isn't. It is an arbitrary convention, one in a long series which had substantially different values in the past. It has remained constant because it is encoded in law in such a way that it is no longer subject to simple pressures of labor supply and demand.

> But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...

There are a lot more than just doctors and lawyers and bankers working long hours. 37% of americans work 2 full time jobs, and most of them aren't exactly in a position to afford extremely desirable real estate. If the workweek were in a equilibrium due to supply and demand, wouldn't these people just be working more hours at their regular jobs?

Most people with a modest retirement account could retire in their forties to working 15-hour workweeks somewhere in rural America.

And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”, possibly before your kids head off to college.

Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the hedonic treadmill.

Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2].

> then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”

This is the real hurdle. Ultimately, however, it's a choice. One chooses to work harder to access a scarce resource out of preference, not necessity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...

CA probably nowhere on the list because its such a small state that any Silicon Valley premium gets diluted at the state level average.

I am not finding a clear definition of this index but it appears to be $saved/$income (or $saved/$living expenses) right? So 114% in CT dollars is probably way more than 102% Kansas dollars..

It's also worth noting the point I was making is - if you take a "one years NYC income in savings" amount of money and relocate to say, New Mexico.. the money goes a lot further than trying to do the opposite!

instead, corporations chose to consume us

That said, I’m not what you’d call a high-earning person (I earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes’ vision is a reality, but it’s a mindset and we also have to know when enough wealth is enough.

The arrangement was arrived at because the irregular income schedule makes an hourly wage or a salary a poor option for everyone involved. I’m grateful to work for a company where the owners value not only my time and worth but also value a similar work routine themselves.

I've come across people like you and they don't produce as much value as they think.

It came about late last year when the current employer started going getting gently waved off in early funding pitches. That resulted in some thrash, forced marches to show we could ship, and the attendant burnout for me and a good chunk of the team I managed. I took a hard look at where the company was and where I was, and decided I didn't have another big grind in me right now.

Rather than just quit like I probably would have previously, I laid it out to our CEO in terms of what I needed: more time taking care of my family and myself, less pressure to deliver impossible things, and some broad idea of what I could say "no" to. Instead of laughing in my face, he dug in, and we had a frank conversation about what I _was_ willing to sign up for. That in turn resulted in a (slow, still work-in-progress) transition where we hired a new engineering leader and I moved into a customer-facing role with no direct reports.

Now I to work a part-time schedule, so I can do random "unproductive" things like repair the dishwasher, chaperone the kid's field trip, or spend the afternoon helping my retired dad make a Costco run. I can reasonably stop and say, "I _could_ pay someone to do that for me, but I actually have time this week and I can just get it done" and sometimes I...actually do, which is kind of amazing?

...and it's still fucking hard to watch the big, interesting decisions and projects flow by with other people tackling them and not jump in and offer to help. B/c no matter what a dopamine ride that path can be, it also leads to late nights and weekends working and traveling and feeling shitty about being an absentee parent and partner.

Yeah, I'd say I get up to 15 hours of work done in a 40 hour workweek.

I suspect he didn't factor in how may people would be retired and on entitlements.

We're not SUPER far from that now, when you factor in how much more time off the average person has now, how much larger of percentage of the population is retired, and how much of a percentage is on entitlements.

The distribution is just very unequal.

I.E. if you're the median worker, you've probably seen almost no benefit, but if you're old or on entitlements, you've seen a lot of benefits.

Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it.

The point is he’s powerless not to. The alternative is allowing a bond rout to trigger a bank collapse, probably in rural America. He didn’t do the prep that produces actual leverage. (Xi did.)

edit: grammar

Current issue is community banks have 3x the commercial real estate exposure of other banks [1]. They're also less liquid and have a lower ROA. So in cases where the shock comes from outside the financial sector, they tend to be the first we worry about.

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/quarterly-banking-profile 33% vs 11% of total assets

"You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics" (D. D. Eisenhower).

Trump did zero preparation for this trade war. It's still unclear what the ends are, with opposing and contradictory aims being messaged. We launched the war simultaneously against everyone. The formula used to calculate tariffs doesn't make sense. And Trump decided to blow out the deficit and kneecap U.S. state capacity at the same time he's negotiating against himself on trade.

The U.S. President can take on the bond market. Most simply by taking the budget into surplus, thereby threatening its existence. But Trump didn't do that. He didn't even pretend he was going to do that. Instead, he's strategically put himself in a position where he has to chicken out, and it honestly seems like he's surrounded himself with people who are too high, drunk and/or stupid to see that. He's the poker player who shows up at the table, goes all in, looks at his cards and folds in one move.

Same behaviour that bankrupted every institution he's ever been in charge of before. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting different results.

It's possible he'll stop chickening out to win his internal argument against that reporter who said he always chickens out. Feeling like he's winning seems to be important to him and he holds grudges for a long time. In that case the American economy goes bye bye.

We already know he wants to end the dollar reserve currency status, because he said so - trade deficit and reserve currency status are different words for the same thing.

So many dumpster fires but only a few official bankruptcies, well that's always what's on the table and anything goes.

Back in the 20th century almost everybody knew that Trump was not trustworthy, especially not with money, give me a break, that's what made him such a tragic/comic character.

It's almost like people forget with any org where he is the ultimate decision-maker, if there is challenging debt with no quick way out, he is more likely than most to declare bankruptcy. Otherwise it would require acumen he has never had to right a faltering ship. Plus he would be bogged down when he wanted to shift his focus to schemes that were more promising to him personally. Like other pie-in-the-sky deals back then, or something like his memecoin today. So many times in different orgs with different/leading personalities it's only a declaration away anyhow. Not normally on the menu for the best of the real decent businessmen, but what do you do when you get one that's far from the best and not even decent?

If there were some deep insight into his personal financial situation over the years, especially recently, there might be a more accurate picture whether he would be inclined to "one day" just decide to declare the whole USA bankrupt and move on to greener pastures himself. Or if the decision has already been made, who knew? Or would believe it yet anyway?

Any President could always have made more money doing something else, the whole time it's only been a matter of integrity, or lack thereof.

Mission accomplished.

I would add one more: me too-ism from CEOs following Musk after the twitter reductions. I think many tech CEOs (e.g., Zuck) hate their workforce with a passion and used the layoff culture to unwind things and bring their workforce to heel (you might be less vocal in this sort of environment... think of the activists that used to work at Google).

I see evidence of a collusion. My friends at several tech companies (software and hardware) received very similar sounding emails in similar time frame. I think the goal was "salary compression". Management was terrified of the turnover and salary growth so they decided to act. They threw a bunch of people on the labor market at once to cool it down. It would normalize eventually but you don't need long. Fired H1-B holders have to find a new job within 2 months or self deport.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donal...

It was the war with Russia that drove the fed to raise interest rates in 2022 - a measure that was intended to curb inflation triggered by spikes in the prices of economic inputs (gas, oil, fertilizer, etc.).

The tech layoffs started later that year.

Widespread job cuts are an intended effect of raising interest rates - more unemployed = less spending = keeps a lid on inflation.

AI is just cashing in on the trend.

Of course, nothing is further from the truth. "Russian invasion of Ukraine" is what should be written there.

Perhaps "Russia's war" would have been a better phrasing that captures both spirits (but it's not a phrase you hear said much).

For example, Ukraine was a very important food supplier -- one of the top grain suppliers in the World -- and the invasion caused shortages of some foods. Another example is that Ukraine provided a good source of iron ore for EU-based manufacture. If nothing else that would be important to USAmericans as indicating a market opportunity.

Without that invasion and Putin's inspiration, would Trump have threatened invasion of USA's neighbours? That's got to be vital to USA finances too.

Heroyam Slava.

That is, until 10 years later when they have a new narrative about a different military rival. They quietly stop pushing the old narrative and everyone quietly admits the old one was kinda bullshit all along.

E.g. my views didnt change one iota since 2003 but these views at some point magically stopped conferring a "Saddam sympathizer" moniker from people who demanded unthinking ideological commitment.

It works the same way with people who live under and unthinkingly consume Russian imperialist propaganda too. The more passionate ones make routine demands for ideological purity similar to the one above.

  That is, until 10 years later when they have a new narrative about a different military rival. They quietly stop pushing the old narrative and everyone quietly admits the old one was kinda bullshit all along. /---/ It works the same way with people who live under and unthinkingly consume Russian imperialist propaganda too. 

Then we went through a lot of bullshit - that Ukrainian nationalists were committing genocide in Donbas, or that Ukraine was secretly developing nuclear and biological weapons.

Now, 10 years later, the narrative has shifted to how this has always been a major confrontation with the USA and NATO, a "proxy war". No doubt, it will shift many more times. Looking forward to when the current "supreme commander" Putin will be regarded as a failure, much like Gorbachev, and blamed for causing the difficult 2030s.

Nobody has ever been jailed for this terrorist attack and all the evidence points to Ukrainian fascists being culpable, including:

* The Berkut who were there being tried and the trial falling through because all of them were too obviously very far away from the protestor-controlled hotel where the snipers nest was set up.

* A Ukrainian war hero who had no reason to lie who was there telling people who was responsible (before being thrown in jail).

* A group of the snipers (mercenaries who were there who never got paid) went public.

It was as much a proxy war back then, it was just fought under the surface with NGO agitators instead of weapons deliveries.

The fact that you have to make something like this up within the first ten words of your narrative really shows just how detached from reality it is.

I wonder what narratives will dominate after the war, when reality sets in: hundreds of thousands dead and never returning home; several times as many disabled, many of them severely; the might and pride of the Russian military sunk or blown up; returned soldiers running massive criminal rings like in the 1990s; state budget empty from massive military spending, leaving people to survive on their own as safety nets crumble. Some conspiracy story about snipers 10+ years ago in another country doesn't really cut it, and getting beaten in an imagined confrontation with the "collective West" sounds really pathetic too, especially when the other side didn't even step into the boxing ring. The USAF hasn't flown a single sortie against Russia, yet strategic bombers are already burning on airfields like in the opening hours of Operation Barbarossa.

Reichstag fire. All the nutter conspiracy theorists think Hitler did it. Obviously you know better.

>The fact that you have to make something like this up

Evidence doesnt mean much to some people. They will follow the narrative of their leaders whether it is dictated via Moscow blabbing about biolabs or Washington that they allied with freedom loving democrats in Ukraine rather than Nazi goons.

Also even some of Trump's team.

The establishment doesnt suddenly get swapped out because a new President gets in (even if the tides are shifting).

Here's the BBC using it[1], CNN[2], The AP [3], The Conversation [4]

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0l0k4389g2o

[2]https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/21/europe/europe-conscription-wa...

[3]https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy-star...

[4]https://theconversation.com/why-russias-armed-forces-have-pr...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine however caused a whole bunch of economic inputs like energy and fertilizer to spike, and central banks world wide didn't want economies to "get used to" constant high inflation rates, causing a perpetual problem.

But instead all the productivity workers just switched to their home office and things just kept working. The stimulus should have been shut off in early-mid 2021 when this was abundantly clear. But the government let it run because people were so jubilant in the money shower.

That was not entirely true.

Trump’s pandemic spending (lockdowns, vaccines…), and subsequently Biden’s, but most importantly the curiously named Inflation Reduction Act were obvious drivers. You can’t stimulate an already overheated economy to the tune of 2 trillion without getting Larry Summers a bit worked up.

Prices and unemployment really started to rise after that. The EU buys overpriced LNG from the US, so the US is somewhat isolated from that. But the US is not isolated against the general economic downturn worldwide.

Politicians do not care. Merz, with barely 25% approval of the German population, continues the policies outlined by Hegseth during his visit to the EU. Trump still plays theater to appease his MAGA base, but Senators Rubio and Graham increasingly start holding the reins.

The near zero interest rates, pause on student loan payments, pause on rent payments, doubling of unemployment pay, and then the dustings of stimulus checks and bonus childcare checks, all while most white collar workers just continued working like nothing happened, created an incredibly cash rich environment that most people have never seen before.

And the PPP loans handouts to business owners just to throw more gas on the fire.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fed-response-to-covid19/

Software in the US has (aside from maybe finance) been an almost uniquely well-compensated field. That will probably adjust over time especially given the inflow of grads primarily in it for the money.

Software industry was over hiring probably ever since dot-com bubble because after the bubble burst revenue and profits were rapidly growing and it never really stopped. I would rather blame the managers who constantly pushed for more workers instead of increasing the productivity of the existing workforce.

And that's only the indirect effect on equity funding; debt funding just directly becomes more expensive.

Was actively looking at this time for months prior and it went from a few recruiters a day reaching out to a few a week.

And remember when they first said inflation was "transitory" and caused by supply chain issues from the economy reopening after covid? They didn't raise interest rates then because, like I mentioned above, interest rates don't help with supply shocks. If they did, the Fed would have raised rates then.

Because he suddenly had to pay interest on that gigantic loan he (and his business associates) took to buy Twitter.

It may not be the only reason for everything that happened, but it sure is simple and has some very good explanatory powers.

Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell you, and that's what any investor will expect.

Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust parameters to make number go up again.

At least in my professional circles the number of late 2020-mid 2022 job switchers was immense. Like 10 years of switches condensed into 18-24 months.

Further lot of experiences and anecdotes talking to people who saw their company/org/team double or triple in size when comparing back to 2019.

Despite some waves of mag7 layoffs we are still I think digesting what was essentially an overhiring bubble.

That said, the vibe has definitely shifted. I started working in software in uni ~2009 and every job I've had, I'd applied for <10 positions and got a couple offers. Now, I barely get responses despite 10x the skills and experience I had back then.

Though I don't think AI has anything to do with it, probably more the explosion of cheap software labor on the global market, and you have to compete with the whole world for a job in your own city.

Kinda feels like some major part of the gravy train is up.

That part is so overblown. Twitter was still trying to hit moonshots. X is basically in "keep the lights on" mode as Musk doesn't need more. Yeah, if Google decides it doesn't want to grow anymore, it can probably cut it's workforce by 90%. And it will be as irrelevant as IBM in maximum 10 years.

In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 good friends working at the company including the CEO, and I was guaranteed the job in software development at the company. The interview was supposed to be just a formality. So I moved, and went in to see the CEO, and he told me he could not hire me, the funding was cut and there was a hiring freeze. I was devastated. Now what? Well I had to freelance and live on whatever I could scrape together, which was a few hundred bucks a month, if I was lucky. Fortunately the place I moved into was a big house with my friends who worked at said company, and since my rent was so low at the time, they covered me for a couple of years. I did eventually get some freelance work from the company, but things did not really recover until about 2004 when I finally got a full-time programming job, after 4 very difficult years.

So many tech companies over-hired during covid, there was a gigantic bubble happening with FAANG and every other tech company at the time. The crash in tech jobs was inevitable.

I feel bad for people who got left out in the cold this time, I know what they are going through.

AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.

And of course ZIRP was pioneered in Japan, not the US.

You're right that we should see comparisons in other developed countries, but with SV being the epicenter of it all, you'd expect the fallout to at least appear more dramatic in the U.S.

And an overwhelming number of (focusing exclusively on the U.S.) tech "businesses" weren't businesses (i.e., little to no profitability). At best they were failed experiments, and at worst, tax write-offs for VCs.

So, what looked like a booming industry (in the literal, "we have a working, profitable, cash-flowing business here" sense) was actually just companies being flooded with investment cash that they were eager to spend in pursuit of rapid growth. Some found profitability, many did not.

Again, IMO, AI isn't so much the cause as it is the bandage over the wound of unprofitability.

It's not like companies laid off whole functions. These jobs will continue to be performed by humans - ZIRP just changes the number of humans and how much they get paid.

> These workers need to retrain and move on.

They only need to "retrain" insofar as they keep up with the current standards and practices. Software engineers are not going anywhere.

https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.

But for software, it's a lot smaller.

I wonder what happened in January 2025...

Almost no one has seen a world where the price of money wasn't centrally planned, a committee of experts deciding it based on gut feel like they did in command economies like the Soviet union.

And then thousands of people's lives are disrupted as the interest rate swings wildly due purely to government action (corona lockdowns and fed zirp response), and it all somehow just ends up people talking about AI instead.

The true wrongdoers get absolutely no consequences, and we all just carry on like there's no problem. Often because our taxes go to paying hordes of academics and economists to produce layers and layers of sophisticated propaganda that of course this system is the best one.

Absurd and shitty world.

"When interest rates return to normal levels, the ZIRP jobs will disappear." -- Wall Street analyst