YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.

But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.

Code was never the bottleneck.

I've worked with plenty of teams that did the "in prod the same day" trick without AI.

The problem was just fucking ego. Designer has an ego, product owner has an ego, QA has an ego, stakeholder has an ego, platform teams have massive egos, developers have egos.

Unrelated but: the only reason people are shipping more with AI is because more people are ok with slop now.

This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.

Ego and agendas multiplied by 1000.

More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.

The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.

Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.

Which doesn’t play well with “savings for consumers”, because these consumers will be unemployed.

You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.

It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.

RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.

You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.

No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.

We're automating high paying careers and making what, the consumer's todo list and budgeting apps cheaper for them? My expensive smartphone is going to cost me ~$10/mo over its lifespan. I don't care if most of these consumer products get cheaper when they're a tiny portion of my spending

Bud, thinking that for-profit corporations - many of whom are in an oligopoly or monopoly position in their markets - are going to pass along savings from not paying people is like thinking the stripper really likes you.

Remember how things were cheaper before the pandemic? Well, there were supply shortages and prices rose accordingly. Supply and demand at work, nothing surprising there. The supply chain shocks eventually went away. Some prices have sort-of come down, but many just haven't. Why? Because the people selling goods and services now know that people can and will pay the higher price.

Now, they might do that through taking on debt and working additional jobs to the detriment of themselves, their families, their communities, and their country, but no one who both matters and can do something about it keeps track of those things.

I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets

not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing

It's just harder to do. Would not be at all surprised to see e.g. Autodesk bought out for exactly that purpose.

Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.

Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.

Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.

AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.

> ...

> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.

No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.

Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.

> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.

Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.

That is the only path under Capitalism, so we shouldn't expect any different.

That's a bizarre non sequitur, pure wishful thinking. Its like saying Maybe getting cancer is good, because it will cure my arthritis.

Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha

The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.

The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.

I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.

Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.

It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.

You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.

I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.

The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).

It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.

But is it cheaper than paying someone around $5 in labor to do it? Because until it is, it's not economical to have a robot do it.

Like what? There is no things that will get an average engineer or lawyer better result in the future than retraining and adjusting their living standards.

> I'm already a part of a generation that's the first in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.

Good. While US dominance over the world and it's ability to rob other countries will continue to decrease, your living standards will continue to decrease as well.

The actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.

Leaving that aside I'm quite puzzled about something.

"Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently. The first time I read it I thought you were being sardonic, but you sound quite earnest.

Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs.

Yes, I'm sure all the wage slaves who are suddenly forced out of the labor market that was barely allowing them to scrape by paycheck to paycheck will suddenly start creating new businesses and become investors in new technology and not just become homeless leading to a massive increase in diseases/crimes of despair.

If (and it's a massive if) what passes for AI these days gets good enough to replace any substantial number of workers it will be a disaster.

Company stock value goes up when they lay off staff. Next quarter shareholder maximization is the goal. AI and layoffs is the strategy to get there.

Some of the projects we've done would have required 4-6 additional people, but realistically, pre-ai, we would just not do the project or we would do it over a period 3-4x longer.

There's just so much to do.

As far as I know, that's how the lump of labour fallacy actually works! There's an equilibrium between supply and demand for labour such that workers are (more or less) choosing the best jobs they can find. There's infinite demand for labour, but not at any price, so demand destruction of the best jobs can still happen. There will be infinitely more jobs, but they won't be as good as the ones that were destroyed.

Of course, demand creation for really good jobs can also happen. What the GP is saying is that they believe demand destruction will outpace demand creation for really good jobs and everyone will be forced into less desirable jobs. I don't see how this is inconsistent with the lump of labour fallacy.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.

Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.

Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.

If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.

Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.

I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.

"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.

2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.

2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.

Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.

Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...

(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)

In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.

I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.

That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.

From what I see on many recent TV ads, not really.

One of the most troubling aspects of human's poor planning ability is they're absolutely sure something is valuable until they have to make a skin-in-the-game commitment to how much value it provides them personally. Then it turns out they weren't serious.

First they provide real security an intercom does not. They know everyone and won't let an unknown go through the door without checking in.

The courier leave their wares to them, and can hand over packages for the courier.

There's no extra cost, really, to having them do dry cleaning since all they do is hand over all the dry cleaning to a service that comes by.

I’m sure it’s similarly true for travel agents, real estate agents, probably lawyers, etc. Just because there are circumstances when someone values them doesn’t automatically justify them everywhere or refute that many of them basically don’t do anything.

The value of the doorman isn't the intercom functionality.

People like doorman buildings because the building has a real person with eyes on the premises at all times.

An intercom or automatic door opening system can't deal with delivery people who can't figure out the intercom system, don't follow delivery instructions, leave your package/food somewhere random, etc. And that's only a fraction of the value a doorman provides.

An intercom system won't deter trespassers, petty crime, etc.

As long as the building is large enough, the cost is negligible.

I randomly picked a listing in NYC, 219 East 69th Street. 145 apartments on 13 floors.

Let's say you're paying a doorman 24/7 at $30/hour, that's $150/month/resident.

The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.

<edit> Ah, my Oregonian neighbors inform me that in the last few years, this mandated institution is no longer in force.

It's the fact you were not there.

Low end labor costs tend to track cost of living costs. In high cost-of-living places, you have high labor costs and vice versa. Most places are much cheaper than America, which means you can afford to hire more people to do tasks that would otherwise be uneconomical.

There's a couple types of companies where the reverse is true: young companies trying to grow, and dying ones that need a turnaround.

Out of those two, young companies are less likely to be set in their ways. So the first place you really see the result of development moving faster with AI is probably going to be in future months and years when suddenly-big companies start getting widely known with products and business strategies that wouldn't have made sense a decade ago because writing code to try different things to even get the ball rolling was a bottleneck, and you could only do things that wouldn't scale for so long.

Spot on!

Usually, most work in corps is slowed down by executive decisions. It takes 3 - 9 months to get a yes/no on something and for most things that are obvious that need to be done need to go up the chain of command. The decision takes forever, but when the decision is made, they want things to be done quickly, which creates unreasonable stress on the ICs.

The first step to see real productivity gains is for AI to eliminate the executive and middle-management layer, this starts a virtuous cycle, destroys both empire building and massively accelerates true productivity, not just meaningless metrics like LOC.

- Identifying suspicious people and situations.

- Helping people carry things through the lobby.

- Passing messages before cellphones.

- Receiving packages.

- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.

And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door".

Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.

I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.

There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.

It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?

Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.

So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.

Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.

Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.

It's sad how the stupidest forms of cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business.