bwestergard

Avoiding predation is a pretty small part of the life of a house sparrow. There is no reason to believe a cat brain would do a good job with handling the demands of flight (avian brains process visual stimuli roughly twice as fast as mammalian brains, for one thing).

But even if we focus on avoiding predation: would a cat brain in a sparrow body (a silly premise, I'll admit!) do better at avoiding cat predation than a sparrow brain in a sparrow body? I doubt it!

How do we decide which version of thinking a model is good at?

A house sparrow (Passer domesticus) doesn't have a worse brain than a human. Nothing does house sparrow thinking better than a house sparrow brain. Not even a human brain.

What is the unit for productivity here, though? Time required to complete this one task, which was never attempted before and never will be again? That's fine, but economically uninteresting.

Ultimately, the economic analysis needs to use monetary units. How much faster can return on investment be realized, and at what scale? This analysis has proven elusive because people believe that the very definition, not just the execution, of a task can be delegated to an LLM (which in some trivial sense must be true because means and ends are never sharply distinguished).

"Many of them have switched to gig work like Uber or Doordash, which makes them considered "employed" in employment surveys."

That's true for the classic "U-1" unemployment rate. But the U-6 captures the "marginally attached" as well, and it hasn't shot upward.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate

I speculated about this possibility back in February.

https://bjornwestergard.com/firms-combine-software-roles/

Does anyone know of this being done in any large software development organization?

The article states that she was seeing a doctor regularly.

Is that going to be mathematically useful?

I think the OPs argument (which I am not endorsing) is that they in fact enjoy a higher quality of life even if their "standard of living" (measured in purchasing power) is higher.

The premise here are essentially those of logical atomism and the unified science movement. The authors would do well to learn about why those projects were abandoned.

It does very poorly in detecting Dutch vs. German for this Flemish-accented speaker.

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe." - Douglas Adams

When the test code "looks like a mess", how do you get assurance it is testing the right properties?

Like you, I've found that LLMs can improve test coverage by decreasing the amount of developer time spent writing tests. But generally, it takes a lot of manual work to set up the initial testing framework, and even then, a lot of vigilance to ensure that what is actually tested corresponds to the description of the test.

Their alternative explanation seems, uh, pretty sensible to me?

"On the other hand, cybersecurity practitioners have largely viewed these incidents as consequences of companies failing to adopt basic security precautions. They do not see the incidents as a sign of AI reaching a new milestone in cybersecurity. This is also the dominant reaction in the tech community outside AI, which has largely treated the incidents as a result of ineptitude and negligence by AI companies."

"The contemporary rate of extinction is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural background extinction rate—the typical rate of species loss through natural evolutionary processes."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Extinction...

"People weren't their strongest even when most did manual labor."

Is there good historical data on some measure of strength across representative populations over time in the modern era? I'm doubtful.

We do know that the introduction of agriculture diminished strength:

"Bone mass was around 20% higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.

After ruling out diet differences and changes in body size as possible causes, researchers have concluded that reductions in physical activity are the root cause of degradation in human bone strength across millennia."

cam.ac.uk/research/news/hunter-gatherer-past-shows-our-fragile-bones-result-from-physical-inactivity-since-invention-of

The worse the experience of working life gets, the more important an idealized family life becomes for many downwardly mobile or precarious people. Most people's family lives cannot actually live up to this fantasy, so scapegoats - gender non-conforming people, feminists, immigrants - are required to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

It is remarkable that we cannot figure out how to organize ourselves politically in a manner that would ensure everyone had access to this ordinary abundance. Instead, our institutions largely focus on new goods and services for those who already have such access.

I'm not sure the extended imaginary friend metaphor will catch on with professionals.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology studies wild birds.

"the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins"

I don't doubt that's an unregretted side-effect for political leaders in China.

But the major motivation is to accelerate diffusion within their own massive economy in the pursuit of an across the board productivity boost in the face of an aging population.

A counter argument: A strong distinction between "intelligence" (understanding what is) and "values/principles" (understanding what ought to be) was characteristic of much early modern European philosophy from Descartes to Kant, which received its influential strong formulation from David Hume.

But trying to maintain this distinction leads to insuperable difficulties. Our conceptual framework for understanding the world are always value-laden. There is no "view from nowhere", no historically unconditioned set of values or concepts. Your framing, in which "values" are external to "intelligence" and must be imposed on it (on pain of intelligence being "value-neutral"), leads inevitably to the dead end of "AI Alignment", "superintelligence", etc. Which is a kind of pseudo-theology.

"We humans better [be] refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant."

In light of the untenability of a strong fact/value or intelligence/ethics distinction, I would suggest this alternative advice: humans should focus on critical appropriation and extension of the received wisdom, whether that comes to us directly from human beings or indirectly through an LLM. Perhaps this is compatible with the spirit of your original suggestion.

All good advice. I'm a unionized software engineer (CWA at National Public Radio) in a unit with all my tech worker colleagues. Happy to answer questions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832370#48837175

I don't understand how the throttle and RPM can be modified independently. Surely the RPM depends on the throttle?

About $153k a year gross take home pay, or around $180k total compensation (including retirement contributions, healthcare, etc).

You can see the wage brackets in our collective bargaining agreement here: https://tinyurl.com/dmucontract

I'm a unionized software developer, and have been part of two separate organizing campaigns at two different employers.

Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around.

Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are:

- Guaranteed remote work.

- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.

- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.

- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.

- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.

- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.

Git annex is a remarkable piece of software and I've been inspired by lead developer joeyh's approach to both FOSS and life. For example:

https://joeyh.name/offgrid/

This made my day. These workers will be better stewards of Wikipedia than management.

Former BLS officials still believe the numbers are reliable, because the methodology is public and there are lots of ways for well-financed actors (e.g. wall street traders) to spot manipulation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5530733/bls-jobs-report...

To go by the numbers, it's pretty good. Not as good as the truly anomalous post-pandemic peak of hiring. But still good compared to almost every other occupational group.

https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/tech-jobs-r...

I think many of these problems still arise if inference is effectively free in monetary terms to the end user. In many economic processes, time to getting the final and correct answer is the major driver of profitability.