DragonStrength

Sounds like your brain was cooked by sound bites over reason and statistics! Culture war indeed!

In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.

Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.

15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...

It's funny because Apple said on stage Lightning was their connector for the next decade in 2012 then shipped it for exactly a decade, despite being the first to ship a USB-C device. When they switched to Lightning in 2012, the peanut gallery complaint was Apple making everyone buy new cables and accessories. Either too fast or too slow for their critics with the same timing.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.

If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.

I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?

I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.

Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.

I know plenty of engineers with expensive trucks used to carry their families around during the week and haul their hunting bounty home on weekends. In that scenario, the Cybertruck is a total failure. Where's the exposed bed for a deer? How about hauling the boat to the lake?

Cybertruck is a product management failure.

BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.

Open up an Amazon media app and navigate around enough, and you'll encounter a page with all their "Third Party Software Licenses."

For instance, here's one for the Amazon Music apps, which includes an FFMpeg license: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

There are no empty slots for med school in America. We turn qualified kids away.

As my manager at Amazon once told me, “Amazon prefers H1Bs because they take more abuse.”

Exactly. The difference is doctors were able to cap the number of doctors graduated, and now we have a shortage. Welp, I know the solution to that.

This article is saying the slowdown started as early as a year ago. That of course opens up the discussion of whether this new revision is political cover for the current administration since they just removed the BLS head.

Amazon's hallucinating a fake 1-800 number for me to call is both peak Amazon and peak AI bubble.

Yes, but when Marc Benioff says he laid off thousands of customer service agents, the reporting is "Salesforce cuts tech workers using AI." The narrative in media is a total mess right now, and there are many in VC and AI-related companies ready to help muddy the waters further for their own benefit. Obviously, many small companies follow the media narrative.

From the subhead

Money earmarked for semiconductor company under Chips Act could be converted into equity

They’re already getting federal money.

For sure, the Dotcom crash didn’t mean the web was bad technology.

You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.

Could you please point to the whining? He says MPEG is broken, but AOM will stagnate. You’re mad at the messenger.

You missed the first part of that quote:

At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke

And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies in MPEG. He's an MPEG member saying MPEG's business model is broken yet no one has a desire to fix it, so it will be beaten by a competitor. Would you not want to see your own organization reform rather than die?

Reminder AOM is a bunch of megacorps with profit motive too, which is why he thinks this ultimately leads to stalled innovation:

My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for companies to develop new video compression technologies, at very significant cost because of the sophistication of the field, knowing that their assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted and used by AOM in their video codecs.

Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut. A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

Money is the motivator. Figuring out how to reward investment in pushing the technology forward is his concern. It sounds like he is open to suggestions.

The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...

Thank you. This thread is full of people acting as though price gouging during emergencies hasn't been illegal since before the Internet.

Not a California thing either. Southern states have similar laws thanks to common natural disasters like hurricanes.

That's a great point: immigrants are great for the existing voting populace. They count for the census, but if you keep them on a program like H-1B, they'll live their whole lives without being able to vote. The existing voters have their votes count more and more with H-1B population growth. A great gig when you've got something like Prop 13 making sure the newcomers pay most of the taxes too. What a racket!

It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.

Yup, if you take the restrictions off, none of these companies would want them. They love the restrictions. Americans can just up and quit on them, but not temporary workers.

You're arguing with the article not me. I replied to

How is your brain doing it then?

Do you have an answer? What indication do we have that any AGI we would create would have to follow the same process to achieve the result? Can humans recreate all phenomenon observed in the universe? You're arguing yes in all of these then? I'd love to read more of that argument. I don't care about this proof though. I don't think I've indicated I think AGI is impossible. I care far more about why someone would be convinced it must be possible for humans to recreate in the exact same manner as the brain, which this commenter and you seem to think. I know humans have not shown we can fully model our observations cohesively.

But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.

record scratch What? Did I agree to all of these premises? Do you have some backing for the three or four assumptions you've made in this sentence? You still need to show humans not only could be but are capable of replicating the system. I am asking you for some argument out there that says everything we observe in nature humans can replicate in the exact same way it occurs. That's a much stronger statement than such intelligence exists. You can just link a book. I am not sold on one way or the other, but you seem very confident. Is there some argument I can read? To me, our models in physics point to a fragmented and contradictory understanding of our world to get results. But yes, results are results, but that doesn't mean we are doing anything but modeling -- but can we model everything? Is that the implication of evolution?

We seem to be wandering into capital-S Science vs. science, and I'm not really into religious discussions here. I would love to understand why you seem to think I'm so dimwitted as to dismiss with an edge, when all of this stems from a glib reply to a glib reply that I am no less convinced is in fact glib and fatuous. (And that original comment was not yours, lest you feel insulted in the same way you have insulted me.)

I am replying to "How does your brain do it then?" So I guess we agree. You should take it up with OP.

I was responding to the claim that an observer bound by a system may understand and replicate all phenomenon within that system. It's quite a bold claim which has already exited the bounds of science, IMHO. That you're using the language of religion and philosophy is the point.