It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.
AI will accelerate the decline in the world’s population. No job, no marriage and no kids will be the norm for most people. For many years to come. Some will say it’s good for the planet and especially for other species of vertebrates. Others will see it as a personal failure to not have any living offspring when they get old.
In ancient Greece, Diana was the goddess of hunting, wildlife and personal freedom and Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.
Not many people see that the end result is that when ordinary people stop earning money, and stop buying products, all the money will be used purely for B2B transactions.
Money will still exist, but people will not see hardly any of it. To break out of being just a person and start a business you will still need money, but be unable to get any.
Thus, the endgame is revealed. You don't need to form a dictatorship, you don't need to have a war, you just need to remove all real choice from people, and then you have complete control over what they are able to do by simply making it cost too much. There will be a firewall between ordinary people, and the people who own businesses where all the money sits.
We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
Sure, you may get universal basic income, have a nice house, car (food, clothing etc of course) but there will be a massive air gap between what you could obtain in a lifetime and the minimum you would need to move from that situation into the world where the real money is.
Corporate saving rose by nearly 5 percentage points of global GDP between 1980 and 2013, and since the 2000s the corporate sector flipped from net borrower to net lender in many advanced economies — the "corporate saving glut." Much of it just piled up as cash reserves. Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.
AI didn't make this situation, it is just speeding it up.
I have been at it for 20 years now and have started to feel my time is up as well
As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you.
My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot.
When I started my career I thought I would love doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.
The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.
I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.
Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.
To me, this kind of talk exhibits the very cultish and con side of the whole genAI train. In a way, it does a poor job especially when the intent is positive about the technology, it sheds a bad look on it.
Generally, and more so with paid products, one should expect to get something that is ready to be used, tuned by who's selling it at the best of their efforts. Instead, this is basically saying that the product is actually not much more than an empty box, and that it is your responsibility to augment it with third-party plugins and markdown texts that make it finally useful. And you better be carefully selecting the skills you install, you don't want to end up with second tier material made by GithubInfluencerA, you definitely need the work of GithubInfluencerB.
In the end, it's what is giving companies fuel to keep the hype running, because it allows to counter every possible argument or doubt about the technology, especially the ones made in good faith. No matter the problem you're facing, the blame is definitely on you, the user, for not setting up the tool in the right way.
I'm struggling in a lot of ways in accepting LLMs, but if I'll ever come completely sold on them and take this technology seriously, it won't be before this mood has gone away.
By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...
Yes... but that's Google from the moment they started monetizing.
When it was a research project at Stanford in 1996 it was genuinely about making the World information accessible.
The day in 2000 when they decided to sell advertisement is exactly when this process started, not just now in 2026. Since that day they transformed from a knowledge management project to an advertising company that used knowledge management, among other tools, to influence people effectively.
It's the same for Meta except they had Google business model as an example.
Those are advertising company that use tech, not real tech companies like e.g. ASML or IBM.
The thing that really gets me as a small-time OSS maintainer is that none of us asked for this. The social and technical millieu where most of us started our projects is not the one we find ourselves in today, and the forces behind this are wildly asymmetric.
Security findings are one place where we as maintainers simply do not have the choice to not play ball, whether we like it or not. It seems likely that the only way that we meet the moment is to adopt these tools ourselves -- once again -- whether we like it or not. Reconciling this with the ground truth that 'OSS doesn't owe anyone a goddamn thing' is proving to be really hard for me.
This news has to be read alongside the immigration visa emission pause for 75 countries by DOS[1].
Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
It really depends on the task, but, in my experience, small to medium and bigger codebases, the amount of steering to get quality code is not worth it.
I see patterns and solutions emerging from hand coding, I'm not the other way around, I can't start with a prompt, unless again I have the feeling that the task can be one-shot with minimumn effort and context.
Starting with a prompt, or in plan mode, it's not how I trained as an engineer, I cannot foresee what something should be/look like until I explore it myself with code I can relate to, that I'm connected with and that I fully understand, for example my muscle memory suggest me to use a specific data structure only after I see some code patterns emerging, hard to explain hopefully makes sense.
If I ask the agent to do that initial exploring, even with a tremendous amount of instructions, guidelines etc. it usually start with a path I wouldn't have started with. What I tried in such cases is to stop it, correct it and generate again, only to end up with more prompt words than lines of code. This is true for every visual task I'm working on (I program non web UIs). Let alone doing it via spec files, if it's something I don't care about yeah sure, maybe a little tool for entering/editing data, but alas it always default to slop web apps, and I get it I mean most of the training set is on web apps
The superhuman efforts that folks on HN make to find technical workarounds and solutions is wonderful to see, but we must realize that this is not a technical problem. It's a social and legislative one. It can't be fought on technical grounds. The push back has to be via putting pressure on politicians by making regular people more aware.
Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narrative of how 'insecure' their devices are. They read almost everyday about someone losing their life's savings due to 'hackers'. In this environment, they genuinely believe locking down their devices will make them more secure and prevent them from being 'hacked'.
The powers that be make sure that the people never hear the other side. That people are giving absolute control to large corporations. In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged.
If you want to make a meaningful contribution, however small, then make it a point to educate people about the control they are giving to large corporations like Google. It doesn't take much to convince them that Google et al don't have their best interests in mind. They already know it and have experienced it. The second thing to do is to encourage them to reach out to their member of congress via letters. It's easy enough to do, and politicians are terrified of going against voters. They rely on people's ignorance to quietly work against their constituent's interests while supporting whichever special interest happened to donate the most to their campaign fund.
This is the story that's been written since the Luddite revolts, as far as I know. The successors in that case were the capitalists who spent a significant amount of time and money convincing the constabulary and political figures to side with them. People were shot and jailed in the worst cases. The best case, workers were left without work or sent off to work-houses where they became indentured servants to the state.
The last work-house closed in the 1930s.
That all started not because people were afraid jobs were going to be replaced by the new loom. People had been using looms for centuries. They were protesting working conditions: low wages, lack of social protections when people were let go, child labor, work houses, etc. There were no labor laws at the time to protect workers... but there were these valuable new machines that the capital owners valued greatly. The machines were destroyed as leverage: a threat.
Since the capitalists ultimately "won" that conflict it has been written, by technocrats, that technological progress is virtuous and that while workers will initially be displaced the benefit to society will be enough such that those displaced will find productive work else where.
But I think even capitalist economists such as Keynes found the idea a bit preposterous. He wrote about how the gains in productivity from technological advances aren't being distributed back to workers: we're not working less, we're working more than ever. While it isn't about displacement of workers, it is displacement of value and that tends to go hand in hand.
I think asking, "Where do I go?" is a valid question. One that workers have been trying to ask since the Luddites at least. Unfortunately I think it's one that gets brushed under the rug. There doesn't seem to be much political will to provide systems that would make losing a job a non-issue and work optional.
That would give us the most leverage. If I didn't have to work in order to live I could leave a job or get displaced by the latest technological advancement. But I could retrain into anything I wanted and rejoin the work force when I was good and ready. I wouldn't have to risk losing my house, skipping meals, live without insurance, etc.
No, I don't think people love that, I think it's in the LLM company and the bourgeoise class of people who push and shove AI down everyones' throat for more money and control though to puppetize people. I mean, like it's been an active part of leadership history and much of what shaped our times today: people get comfortable and even self grandiose with their place in life, and to hold on to and further their power its not hard to see others as below them and use their power and influence to do things that are otherwise harmful to others.
The lost of identity is imo this. It's people being given horrible harmful options for their meaning, health and wellbeing and so we get a general sense of most people being lost. Lost in identity as you asked, though I think it's more than that. In my initiatory work with men (being initiated, not initiating others) we learn that part of the breakdown in this for most people is being given harmful identity frameworks of dependency and reliance on others. In the initiatory process we learned an identity of service beyond ourselves through deep embodiment, and exercise and practice beyond just an intellectual grokking of it, edit: this is what we used to have through human history but today now as is described in the works most people have only what would be called pseudo-initiations (marriage, school graduations, children & work changes) which do not meaningfully contributing to meaning, contribution or purpose.
What most of us have today and what the AI companies want us to believe: We will give you the money to live (though of course, when you're truly dependent on others, and they see no purpose or value for you and even your entertainment value has gone, why would they keep you around?)
> Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?
The first question, answer is yes - most people live their lives mindlessly, with or w/o LLMs (think every idiot you knew 20 years go throwing in punch lines from "Friends" to sound "funny"), To the second question - most people have a twisted view of identity. It is supposed to mean something identifying you uniquely,but to the most people it means, identifying you as a member of a large group (nationality/political view/religion/major music genre you like). So, now when every proverbial Dick, Tom and Harry use LLMs to generate Confluence content with shiny emojis, what are the proverbial Emily or John to do? Of course, they will adopt this new identity - its who people are now - shallow, hollow puppets for LLMs to fill in.
And to think of the irony - mother Nature perfected this super-efficient, low energy and highly capable thinking machine, each and every one of us holds in their skull. Its already put us on the moon once, before we even had a semblance of a functioning computer! And we choose to throw it away, for fucking what? Verbal diarrhea and pain inducing coloured walls of texts?
All so some retarded antisocial VC-funded "AI founder" can call themselves a tech visionary?
