You are being uncharitable. In fact, you're demonstrating the dynamics I spoke of in my post.

I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.

In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.

The devil is always in the detail with these sorts of online disagreements.

Let’s say you have a friend who is always miserable, always needs support, and turns every gathering into a therapy session for them and their problem. Let’s say you’ve been friends with them for say, fifteen years. Nothing has helped.

They never go and get therapy, they never go and do any exercise, they constantly do the same things over and over and still expect support.

Wouldn’t you stop wanting to hear them talk? Maybe even stop being their friend ?

What’s the limit ?

> For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress.

I landed on the opposite conclusion. People don't progress in any domain if technology doesn't force them. Sometimes the ride might be bumpy and it might be taking them forwards kicking and screaming, but without new technology no progress happens on any issue.

Science drives technology, technology drives economy and technology and economy drive culture and science. That's the virtuous feedback loop that drives itself and everything human as a side effect.

Try to register to a forum, try to actually communicate in X as a new account, try to use and discuss something in Reddit as a new account.

Between bots and bit protections all of these is practically impossible unless you build a reputation in relevant places by being a long term member.

Ar least that’s been my experience. I’m sure there are some very niche communities for some stuff that are welcome to new accounts, I had this problem in 4-5 different communities and simply given up.

"If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals.

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.

Who's making money off our misery exactly?

I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).

But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?

You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?

Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.

Can you be more specific about what S178 you're referring to? There were several results.

The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here.

All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.

I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.

We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.

Tildes is nice, Hubski's a nice slow and thoughtful

Those plans might work to give a nice sane internet experience to the folks that are willing to put in some money and effort.

But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.

Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.

Thank you. Emailed!

I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]:

> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).

That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.

I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.

1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...

People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016.

For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.

But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.

And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.

My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.

The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.

All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.

But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.

For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.

I'm not saying I can't, as someone who's abandoned almost all mainstream social media.

But I literally cannot afford to engage in this experiment since I'm still looking around on LinkedIn for job calls and have a few messages I'm waiting on.

> As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks.

The assumption I had not was false.

Look at the replies. You’re telling junkies to stop using. It won’t work. This is addiction.

My offline time is spent volunteering with asylum seekers. As an experiment, try actually caring about the people experiencing what you think of as meaningless online negativity.

That's true but it also seems to downplay how much elites + corporations have control over our society and somehow when people want to build a better world, you have to first explain the problems of the current world.

This works really well because most of us are very privileged. I'm white, I have a good job. Yes I live in a republican hellhole state with just about the worst policies on anything you can imagine. But I am isolated because of my status. Things can be shit and I can be fine, and I am. I have gone over 6 months without social media, and it works.

But... you do notice the cracks. Slowly. You see it at Walmart, I see it when I go out to the clubs. Lots of cops around. Nobody dancing. A bouncer for the bathroom? Hm, okay. I travel to south Texas sometimes and you see it there, too. Lots of protesting. Fear everywhere. You drive through maybe 50 abandoned, impoverished towns. I see it in my community. Businesses closing left and right. Replaced. I say "I give them six months". I'm wrong, they close their doors in three. Weird.

And then I got cancer. I knew the healthcare system was bad, but I was young and healthy, so out of sight out of mind. Not anymore. However bad you think it is, it's worse. 10 people in the infusion room, one nurse running with her head cut off. My IV has been beeping for 30 minutes. The oncologist? She's not in the building, because she's the one oncologist for three different clinics 50 miles apart. Luckily, I only have to pay an arm and a leg for this. They had iPads in the infusion room. They removed those after a couple weeks, I guess they were too expensive. And I can't trust my care team. I have to review every single medication, every single scan, everything. My oncologist mentions medications I've never took. She misreads tests. I don't blame her, I know she's overextended, she probably barely knows who I am. So, I review everything, which means I need to call and request they fax it to my line. I guess a portal is too expensive. My primary care? The next appointment is in two months. Well that's okay, I only have cancer. He barely knows who I am, too. "You never did chemo, right, just surgery?". No... I did four cycles of chemo, we talked about this a couple months ago. He sets his phone down on the table and records our conversation. OK, I guess that's a thing now. I go home. Bills just show up every few days. I don't even know what for most of the time. I had surgery a year ago at this point. Random departments in the hospital still send me bills. I did prepay ~3,000 dollars for the surgery, but I guess that money is for something else? Not sure. I would call the hospital and ask to speak to billing, but I don't have the time or energy to be on hold.

Anyway, I guess my thesis is: yes things are good, for us. We need to remain humble and recognize our experiences are tinted by our privilege.

No thank you. I had ICE flood the streets where I live with poorly trained thugs with assault rifles recruited from the ranks of neonazis illegally assaulting, detaining and abusing citizens of my country because they had brown skin. They shot dead two citizens (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) doing what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.

I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.

Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.

I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away.

You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.

I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.

No thanks. I went too much of life being a low information mostly non-voter. This is how authoritarians win, because too many people don't pay attention, don't protest, don't vote, don't express their disapproval.

Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most unavoidable and unambiguous ways - in addition to the indirect effects I've been experiencing already.

Nah your pub is like saying "overheard online"

Oh and the actual driving mechanism was vulture capitalist takeover.

Also fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

Right now, many people do not own property and are one missed paycheck away from homelessness.

The entire premise of the article is that we're being promised that an entire workforce is going to be eliminated overnight. The people who are promising this, do not care about what happens to the working class. This is clearly causing anxiety.

The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.

The parent is making a point about the rate/scale at which technology replaced workers. If you think the hypothetical is too extreme, then what would a more realistic version be? Are you uncertain about the rate of disruption?

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero reason to think about events that haven't happened yet. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

You mean it was a whole political theory resulting in a revolution "to end class society" who immediately, nearly as a first step created a new elite class, equally impossible to enter and with far bigger wealth inequality than capitalism?

Judging by the reaction in discussions it is a very sore point of socialists to point out that Marx was obviously upper class, definitely part of the bourgeoisie and in his actions shows that he is entirely unwilling to give that up. The same goes for other famous socialists, from Engels to Lenin.

There are even voices that claim the point of socialism was never to end inequality but rather to take far more wealth for themselves. The "halfway to robin hood" jokes, they certainly take from the wealthy, and everybody else, but they never seem to get around to giving it to the poor ...

What is?

You have way higher unemployment among young people in many countries without any revolution. What are they gonna do? Randomly kill people who are ”kulaks” and that will solve their problems how? Are they gonna get to eat if they kill a guy running a saas company?

What are the unemployed going to do? South Africa has over 30% unemployment rate, nothing changes, the unemployed sometimes rob/murder farmers, and the employed live in compounds with armed guards.

And then what?

Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value?

We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?

164 million people employed in 2025 divided by 320 million people means 49% were not employed.

Raw figures.

The actual “unemployment” figure you hear is not raw figures, since you must exclude the 75 million children and elderly.

But still, 33% in that case.

The official figure you see excludes far more people from the counting to make it seem like only a tiny fraction of people are unemployed. They’ll say 4% or something. But in fact, about half of all people are not employed in the US.

> How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life?

The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.

If you're happy to live life to a 1960s standard, it'd be quite cheap. If I'm interpreting the stats properly [0], he expected to put two children through high school and the other 3 would have been contributing a lot to the family quite early on. It'd also be interesting to check whether it's legal to build the same apartment in Daly City's current regulatory environment because that isn't a given.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

How much wealth? Not really that much if you move to the middle of the country. You're thinking of San Francisco (well, Daly City) of the 2020's, which San Francisco absolutely was not in 1963. Nice place, sure, but still heavily working class, blue-collar and union. You could have 5 kids and a few apartments on a reliable, but not spectacular, income today in many cities (and suburbs of such) in the US.

Maybe the secret is in what you print?

If you're ok with 1963 living standards, you can in fact have the grandfather's same lifestyle today at a very reasonable cost.

Your point about affording the lifestyle isnt entirely incorrect, but it is skewed by what you choose to include vs ignore. Owning a house? Indeed, grandfather probably had it easier. More space per person in the primary residence? Grandson wins, most likely. Restaurant meals vs home cooked, international travel, ubiquitous air conditioning, threat of being drafted into the military (and actually being deployed!), expected lifespan, dental visit experience, number of sexual partners... I'd bet most grandsons have all of those significantly better than their gainfully-employed grandfathers.

> Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.

Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.

When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.

Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.

I live in Oregon. Up until last year, you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card into.

You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.

I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

Not doing the strike would have had similar job losses. People who have nothing to lose can at least spread the pain out.

Collective union Luddite opposition is one part of why there is so much of a plebeian tier pushback against unions, in the very group that should be fighting for unions with their lives. That and right wing propaganda of course.

I’m sorry this wasn’t obvious in my comment but I meant AI engineers not software engineers (and not the AI capital owners either)

Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.

AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.

> That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!"

If software genuinely becomes a solved problem, everyone is going to working in AI labs (or its verticals).

If AI is also going to maintain itself, then there is no need for AI labs either, at which point we've reached singularity and no one is safe.

You will get downvoted for saying the truth

replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required

back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max

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It's very similar to being an EM, and if you think EMs are useless, the vast majority EMs have decided it's not worth their time to educate you, and the few who have tried to gently probably went over your head.

There are sizeable camps for both those opinions.

"Fired up" as in optimistic about the future and using it to build cool new things with it.

...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah"

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

From the "About the author" page, regarding the author of this article:

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

I'd guess it just means they failed some moral purity test.

> networking frontier technologists

Means they are invested in AI companies

> shape the next narrative

With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI

Oh excellent, I appreciate you pointing that out. I love Harari’s work.

The funding source is incredibly important when it is relevant to the content of the article.

This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.

This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.

Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”

You know, convincing the masses to 'work super hard' is a good trick.

Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.

Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.

Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...

No, work is supposed to be at least useful for somebody. Ideally for the society you live in, at least indirectly. If you are wasting your work time, you are also wasting you life time in the same breath. Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice, if it was the highest paying job? No, because that's a bullshit job.

It would probably be better to make less money and do something worthwhile.

Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.

I think there's a balance between high paying and intrinsically rewarding. You dont always need to work a soul crushing job in order to make a lot of money. And I think you're kinda burying the lede on "earning maximally" and "build up a nest egg." I worked two SWE jobs for several years and had a successful exit and didnt increase my standard of living, saved most of it, and all that really amounted to was being able to afford a decent down payment on a "starter" house in my area some years later. Maybe its a skill issue but it i feel like the concept of "work hard and get ahead" doesn't work anymore. You have to work hard just to keep debt low and maintain a decent quality of life.

So, the plan is to work super hard until you are ~40, only to die in a car accident at 35?

Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.

Labour is having to eat and clip your fingernails, having to sleep and repair the roof every year. All animals have to do it, humans always will have to do at least a bit of that, producing things just for them to be consumed. But work is building a world, and of course it does have to have meaning. An animal that won't breed in captivity doesn't want to survive under all circumstances. Sometimes even "nature" just says you know what, if I can only live as someone else's furniture, why live? Burnout is probably a similar mechanism.

"the remaining time"

Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?

Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.

[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.

The FIRE model you’re arguing for isn’t realistic for most people, and besides that, spending your youth “working super hard” on a job you find meaningless will will make you a different person compared to having spent that time doing something meaningful.

And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.

We've banned this account for continually posting inflammatory comments and ignoring our requests to stop. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes

so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j

What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?

I can remember the Thatcher years when redundancies for hundreds of thousands was routine, with the unemployment figures going stratospheric.

The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.

To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.

For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.

Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.

IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.

You have a distorted definition of UBI. The B stands for "basic", as in "not dying in the street of starvation" and a "a roof over your head".

It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.

> If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.

This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.

You mean some redistribution from those with massive capital to those whose careers have been disrupted. There will always be people who don't want to work or can't. It's better for society if they live comfortably than end up on the street or in prison.

> UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.

If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.

>UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.

That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.

No UBI is taxing the surplus productivity achieved by replacing humans with robots or AI AND redistributing it to all the citizens.

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> How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?

Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?

Can you provide any links that show that every time it’s tried, it fails?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.

Can you list more failures?

you will need to provide evidence for that assertion

It has never been tried.

Remind us what the U stands for?

When? Where?

So I’ve gotten this retort (i.e. threat of starvation being the only valid motivator) from a few folks in person as well, and I always feel like it’s them telling on themselves more than the truism it’s presented as.

Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.

Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?

> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

“This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.”

Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.

The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?

I'm probably an outlier, but as someone working a non-physical job, I have been talking about how I personally would still keep working and doing jobs even if all of my basic needs are met.

I do work purely because of idealistic reasons. I'm not actually owed anything, I'm working because of us, humanity. Yeah, people are going to slack, and that's just life. It's just statistics, optimize society to such a configuration that people acts have a place and get the support they need. Most of the "slackers" who represent the people just living on the UBI type system you described, probably don't do it as a direct choice. Most likely they feel like they can't contribute to society, but that's something that's solvable. It's a matter of education and culture.

About your quote:

  "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

Of course, the good times also had their downsides, lots of complacency in politics and not feeling the need to fight for better, because things were already better than they've ever been!

Tax payers don't fund governments, governments fund tax payers. Taxes are there to encourage certain economic activities and discourage others.

Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.

Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.

Not for long, anyway.

> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).

There are lots of countries that have a form of this and survive. Almost every country in Europe has a social welfare system and free healthcare for instance. I

I think I understand now.

You see "work" as a transactional unit.

I just don't see this with our current safety nets, particularly SSI disability. SSI disability will pay you not to work if you have a disability. A lot of people think that surely it's abused. No. Everyone I have seen on SSI disability is doing everything they can to not be on SSI disability. They would MUCH rather work and earn a reasonable wage than be forced to live on SSI disability.

Now, not everyone can, because some people are very disabled. But the internet has brought new capabilities, and some disabled people are able to work remotely. And guess what, they do. They willingly give up the "free", say, 900 dollars a month on SSI to work for a salary.

>I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.

If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.

Which is why I still think that the only way forward is that the EU becomes a country of its own. I'm aware that's deeply unpopular, partially due to The forrogn influence, but thr alternative is catastrophic - stagnation and letting US, China and Russia dictate our way of life.

What does winning even mean for the USA here? I'm not going to benefit if OpenAI or Anthropic become trillion dollar companies, and I sure as fuck won't benefit when more myopic business leaders become billionaires that have some of the most anti-human ideas that decide they want more control of society.

Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?

80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.

i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.

You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid

If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.

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The industry may be getting close to an NS-5 but the physical complexity of nursing means we would really prefer a Nexus-6.

Police robots and drones.

You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.

It would get officers out of harms way.

Not imminent but not zero risk either.

We've already defunded the police, and you can see the ramifications all over the world.

A camera with a gun on it can go a long way though.

"with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again"

Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.

I've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.

What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.

what were you doing in 2012?

Indeed, all I do is live performance.

Recording is too much work. ;-)

HN moment. The median lawyer isn't who you think it is.

That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.

On top of that, it seems the WFO crowd simply can't help exploiting it to their advantage once they are there. They get less work done, but they hoard higher level decisions about what work should be done. They will say "oh we had this corridor conversation and decided X and Y", and then they will even present the fact that happened as compelling evidence that everyone should work in the office. Whereas I see it as evidence of dysfunction - you want to make a decision you get all the stakeholders in the room and you ensure it's transcribed / recorded. Basically an online meeting is the ideal form of it.

Oh I get it, I was an early adopter and advocate for working from home. Hell, it was my job to write code to help tens of thousands of people work from home when the pandemic started. I gladly did it, assuming they would all enjoy it as much as I did at the time. But I was only 6 years into it at that point, it was barely a walk in the park.

Here at least, I see it as the complete opposite: extroverts have normal lives, families and lack time that commuting eats up even more, so WFH is a boon to them.

Actual introverts (especially in our computer world) don't have that and often lack a healthy social life, which can be partly fulfilled by the office's interactions. Some of us even are chronically depressed, which means escaping home is important to allow changing our mindset (which becomes attached to a location given enough time).

NB: in Europe and worked mostly for small to very small enterprises.

I'm not an extrovert, I'm more or less on the line between the two extremes, and I prefer WFO or hybrid.

Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.

I prefer WFO. I just think it has hurt me physically and mentally over the last 12 years.

Commutes can also be forced meditation, exercise, and exposure to sunlight and fresh air.

If you don't naturally prioritize those things, the impact of missing them will sneak up on you.

Salary jobs let you pick your price. How much more as a % of your yearly would it cost you to commute every day, amortized over your ~2000 hours of expected work at said office? 10%? 20%? For me, it’s probably 10% for the right gig.

Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore

I'm not paying anyone to do anything, please don't tell me to fuck off for expressing my personal experience.

This is the kind of thinking that makes hn the best place on the internet. It is a shame that it is not the most upvoted.

It is a C-suite power trip.

There are dozens of us!

I believe "LLMs are useful"* is the current zeitgeist's version of "Working from the office has upsides", in terms of attracting astroturfing accusations over expressing an opinion held by many.

* simplifying, of course.

Bullshit. If the company stops renting office space to save money, or hires you to a team that lives far away, you are forced to work from home.

I'm lucky that I can do something that aligns with how I like to live and work. I guess my question to you is why you don't seek to return to the office yourself? I might not understand the attraction of the commute but "different strokes for different folks" is like a bedrock of western society.

Unless you live in a self isolated monastery you have neighbors and the only person stopping you from making friends is yourself.

I’m don’t know how to say this, but if you’re claiming that there’s a place anywhere in Europe where going outside is “not possible” for more than a handful of days of the year (like extreme heatwaves), you definitely have some kind of problem that other people don’t have. And I mean it, it isn’t normal to be this scared of going outside.

In Canada - and it does get cold here, and hot here. You can't work outside every single day, but you also do not have to stay at home or indoors every single day. I lean toward being outdoors for as much as possible of the year. There's no perfection about it.

There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.

Find some shade and don't stress it Europal! (I hate climate change too.)

You live somewhere where you can't go outside "most of the year"? Did we evolve on the same planet?

Not the person you're replying to, but this is genuinely the killer feature of the UK. Yes, we get heat waves and more of them now, but it's much better than mainland Europe. Especially if you stay away from London (which I would recommend).

The poster didn't say they want everyone to go back to the office, they said they preferred to work in the office. Maybe cool off before bashing

> Makes you wonder why no one wants to be his friend?

Wow, what a way to be bitter and defensive.

Dude. This is too mean. I'm a real person.

I was homeless for a year. My experience is that the best way to help homeless people is in giving them housing while mandating extensive drug/alcohol counseling and/or extremely invasive mental health treatments. There are some people who have just fallen on bad times (I was that), but a WIDE majority of the people I was around that year needed extreme help. When I say extreme, I mean borderline removing their agency to make decisions for themselves.

It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.

It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this

I did what you dream of. It's fun for 3-6 months. But it's only fun - not an existential cure. That could only be found in friends/loved ones.

Hold on a second. You can get up between meetings, go for a jog, use a home gym, lay down and read, sit in your yard in the sun with your eyes closed, pet your dog, call your significant other or sit with them, shop for new shoes, study for a new job, take a video call from a recruiter, do your laundry, clean your bathroom, the list goes on.

Discipline is a personal problem not an office policy issue.

> I just don't think it's healthy to wake up, walk down the stairs and sit in front of a computer for 8-15 hours every day, rinse and repeat

Yes obviously?!? Nothing about work from home makes you sit on your ass all day.

You're projecting your lack of discipline about the things that make life worthwhile (feeling good physically, bettering yourself mentally, enjoying the world around you, and sharing it with others) onto a working model.

Yeah absolutely. And obviously I’m overplaying my naïveté and idealism for effect here, a little bit, but I was still surprised how much it really did improve my quality of life.

I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.

I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”

Just thinkin out loud into the internet

Money doesn't buy happiness but definitely makes pursuing it easier.

Ok so this isn’t really a serious conversation?

The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.

There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.

Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".

> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.

Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem?

Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.

> The burnout is a separate topic

I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly

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disagree

I didn't use the internet until 93, and didn't own a modem until Christmas of 94. I'm part of eternal September, but I always identified with the elders of the internet.

The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both.

I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.

Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).

I feel like that applies to all labor. labor is just business at ransom with productivity that they themselves cannot (or do not want) to do. If they could automate out humanity tomorrow, they would.

In comes the snake oil salesmen telling them they can finally do this. Of course they will fall for the notion, even if they know it's not true. It's what they want oh so badly to be true.

The patient with heart disease doesnt give a shit about exercising and eating healthy they just want the doctor to make them better.

No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.

The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.

When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.

I suppose I should be grateful, if it means the mercenaries are leaving.

In that context, a couple of programmers yelling about this on HN also isn't enough. If the group was big enough, we'd hear more talks from policy makers about it. But it's not.

Clearly the tech industry isn't big enough (nor at least, in enough lockstep enough) to push back against this either. So we're still the same as the translators.

Or, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!

Have you seen this 1-acre Vermont farm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E

I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.

> I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.

It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.

(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)

That has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.