I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.
Seems to be very much by design. I would call it an "artificial singularity" though. It's not the real thing, just advertise to make it sort of look like one to the plebs.
Not really, no. I was underemployed for 6+ months at the start of my career, but it's easier to take whatever is available at that point. I did some data entry and then first tier ops desk restart the server when the light turns red stuff, before I got a "real job". Doing that mid career and keeping a good attitude would be difficult.
But I would think 5 months paid time before you have to go on state unemployment is significantly better than the WARN act minimum of 60 days of notice or pay or the alternative of a campaign to raise attrition. Looks like recent google/meta layoffs are 4 months, so it's 25% better than that. I always thought I wanted to get a package, but I recognize that I would probably not have been happy if it happened.
Most people in tech still think people who are getting laid off deserve it and that they themselves are immune to it. People won’t change until they experience it first hand.
So does being dumped from a relationship. You might not be able to find another relationship in 6+ months. But I don't think people would seriously propose that people should therefore not be able to leave a relationship.
A lot of people would focus on the many obvious differences, and use those to deflect attention from the important similarity I was highlighting: That they are both things that ought to exist only so long as both parties want them to.
> Claude Code periodically likes to do that in my test environment as well, and is only hampered by the grim reality that even after being trained on the sum total of human knowledge, it still can't figure out how the hell the AWS CLI parameters and arguments work together. Neither can I. This is probably fine.
I'm dying, this is so spot on. Trying to get claude to give me the correct AWS CLI commands is like pulling teeth.
Because the BBC has been shown to be heavily biased towards the 'metropolitan' and 'liberal' sides - where London goes, so does the BBC. Trusting the BBC on its word is just as unwise as trusting e.g. NPR/PBS or CNN/MSNBC/FOX (USA), ARD/ZDF/NDR (Germany), NOS (Netherlands) or SVT/SR (Sweden). In short, trusting any of the media - whether legacy or new - on their word is unwise, verification is needed. Unfortunately it is getting harder to trust verification videos as well since the advent of generative AV-models.
If this is commonplace as the BBC claims it should be possible for other outlets to find more soldiers - in Ukraine or in Russia - who are willing to share these stories. If only Russia had independent media - https://novayagazeta.ru/ claims to be independent, maybe it is and maybe it is not but I find it hard to believe that an organisation which is housed at 101000, Moscow, Potapovsky lane, 3, building 1 (address taken from the footer of their page) can remain independent for long - it would be something for Russian media to pick up.
Enough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours."
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
Yes, many of them don't. They're fed convincing cover-stories like "we need this to stop CSAM" or "this prevents terrorism", and then put on a security theater about E2EE and military-grade cryptography. They sleep like a baby because most of them genuinely think they're the good guys, hell, even people on HN appear to buy the obvious lie whenever Client Side Scanning or Flock is brought up.
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Many tech execs operate under the thesis that china & the democratic party are existential threats that warrant a surveillance/military/police ramp up. Meanwhile, many tech employees are credulous and frequently adopt self-serving geopolitical narratives. The current macro trends don't help (huge defense budgets, bad labor market power, China is in fact more powerful)
What's crazy is I know engineers like this in real life - and they're good engineers! So I know they do exist, but their existence to serve their company or CEO no matter what is completely foreign to me. Like, you're smart enough to understand that large codebase and generally function as a member of society, but you've completely given up your higher level decision making for someone or something that would throw you away in an instant.
surprised nobody responded with the most straightforward, occams razor explanation
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
All of them are complicit. You only need ~50 greedy sociopaths to work at Persona, and 10,000 dumb-as-rocks engineers hyped to work at Microsoft/OpenAI and "stop the bad guys" or whatever the boogeyman du-jour is.
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
My employer isn't particularly bad for society, but let's pretend they are.
My company is a large employer of foreign workers. I already live in fear of being priced out by foreign bodyshop firms. If I decided what we were doing was immoral, and dug my heels in. I'd just be replaced by a H-1B worker. If everyone else in my company decided they wouldn't build the torment nexus, we'd all just be replaced by H-1B workers. It'd be a minor inconvenience to the company, but they'd weather it just fine. Under this system, any kind of collective bargaining becomes impossible, moral, financial, or otherwise.
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