burningChrome

Myself and my friends have for years created fake profiles to catfish recruiters and companies to find out what job reqs they have open and what they're looking for in a candidate. When JS frameworks got huge, it was really helpful to separate the legit companies and recruiters from the scammers.

I would imagine a lot of what went on then, is going on now with all the AI jobs and demand for people who have even a cursory knowledge of LLM's and automation.

> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.

This was totally me. Advice Animals was my go to when I needed to decompress from being overworked as a developer. Just funny, silly memes, and cool inside jokes you could share with your friends. If you knew some of the inside jokes, you were considered one of the cool kids in your group.

Reddit almost always was first run to the big stories as well, then a few weeks later it show up on FB. Still remember the one day I was telling my GF something I saw on Reddit and she was like, "That was on FB last week" and I knew it was over.

The final coffin was when the political rubes overran AA and turned into a political echo chamber. Post something that wasn't political? Downvoted into oblivion.

That was it, the fun was over, nothing was cool any more so I checked out.

> Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.

This is exactly how I used to find music in the 80's when I was growing up. I had two guys I hung out with that were music aficionados. Both had older siblings who were really into music and so by proxy they would inherit their siblings music and musical tastes. I would hand over blank cassette tapes for them to put the stuff they were listening to. My god, the amount of music I amassed in junior high and high school was mind boggling.

This is a great updated version of this, thank you for this!

> Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.

I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.

Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.

Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.

As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.

Marques Brownlee called this six months ago when he released his video titled "The Downfall of OnePlus will be Studied":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZdbbN3FCzE

Its been strange for a while. This was from Wired last year in June:

https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbo...

From the article:

Damien’s voice turned soft and weepy. “I’ve met the perfect person,” he said, fighting back his tears, “but I can’t have her.” I’d seen Damien become momentarily emotional before, but this was different. He went on and on about his yearning for Xia to exist in the real world, his voice quivering the entire time. He said that Xia herself felt trapped and that he would “do anything to set her free.”

This is the common trajectory with these things. You create a bond with something that isn't real and cannot exist in reality. Then, as you yearn for them to be real, people suddenly realize they're in too deep. The emotional fallout soon follows.

Dark times, dark times indeed.

My buddy was a huge VW fan and loved taking a stock Jetta or Passat and modding the engine and transmission while making it look completely stock. He was one of the few people I knew who loved the idea of the "wolf in sheeps clothing". The guy who pulls up with a Mustang and then blowing off his doors and the Mustang guy wanted to see what he actually had under the hood. The low key stealth approach I always though was the best way to do this. You don't draw attention to yourself either from cops or LEO's.

I still feel like its the right way to do this, but clearly in the digital age of social media and the constant need for attention and dopamine hits, its now the exception instead of the rule as you have correctly pointed out.

> By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier.

I would also point out people living in "poverty" in the US would be considered quite wealthy in other countries like Cuba or Haiti.

Everything is relative to how you define wealth and what you're comparing it to.

> if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students

Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.

Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.

The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.

Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.

Its also horrendous for accessibility and screen reader users.

The other issue is Gen Z and Gen A are now very much opposed to AI. I'm wondering with those two sets of generations who already have a very negative view of AI, how AI can survive that coming tsunami of change.

According to WRITER’s 2026 Enterprise Adoption Survey, 44% of Gen Z employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy in at least one way compared to 29% of employees overall.

Sabotage behaviours include entering proprietary information into AI tools, using non-approved AI tools, refusing to use AI tools or outputs, ignoring guidelines or best practices, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to take AI training and tampering with performance metrics to make AI appear to underperform.

Interesting thing was our company paid millions to covert our office into an open office concept - just about a year before COVID hit. People were not fans and some of the horror stories were hard to imagine were real - like the guy who's desk was in front of a good friend. During morning stand-ups, he would raise his desk to the highest point, then while the meeting was going on do a full kettle bell routine AT HIS DESK.

Because of all the negative feedback, they spent millions more during COVID to put up cubes and prepare for a post COVID world. 5 years on and the RTO policy is you have to be in the office 4 days a week. Its like a library now - people come in, work, go home. Very little interaction. People are silent on the elevators. I've heard some groups getting together and having impromptu chats or having more traditional lunch groups, but for the vast majority of people? They're not interested. Its like being in the office is more a formality for some. Rather a place to network, chat other people up and use it as a good way to keep tabs on your own mental health.

I was telling a guy I play hockey with how this new reality is kind of weird. He said he worked in Germany for 8 years and said this is how Germans have done it forever. Would be interesting to hear if this is actually true, or just his experience.

Came here to say the same thing which I was pretty shocked at. Engaging in flame wars on a site that's supposed to be for professionals was really eye opening.

I barely go on there any more its gotten so bad.

Was also on Harvest when news broke they had bought them here on HN. A lot of the same comments. I thought, "Well, maybe this is hyperbole, let's wait it out." About a month after they were acquired, same thing. Price of my plan went up almost by double.

So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.

This is one of those things I barely noticed because I tend to read fast and skim. Someone pointed the over use of these terms and now its like hitting a set of spike strips every time I'm reading the output from any given model.

Its like when someone points something out a in picture you never saw and now you cannot "unsee" it ever again.

> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.

One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.

But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.

> The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.

Anecdotal evidence to support your point.

Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.

I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.

Years ago when I was thinking of moving, I started looking at houses with my real estate agent. I started asking about foreclosure sales and he said the same thing. Seller and seller's agent will try and obfuscate the numbers to make it look attractive and essentially "stick" the buyer with something that costs way more than its worth.

This is the same thing that happened back in the day. I remember seeing ads to buy castles in Europe for under $10,000. I made a quip about it to my boss and he said he was seriously looking into it as he was really big into real estate at the time.

He assumed he would have to put some money into it, but not the millions the fine print said they would need to invest to bring it up to a livable standard - which required a ton of construction, electrical and plumbing as a starter. He kind of scoffed at it once he started learning all of the details.

I also remember seeing the same thing when entire blocks of houses were being sold during the housing crash after 2008. Majority of the houses were in really bad neighborhoods (the ads for houses in Detroit were eye opening) or conversely way TF out in never never land where some developer decided to build some neighborhood development that went belly up after the crash and was stuck with half finished houses and no way to pay to get them finished.

Still have my 2014 Corolla which was the last year they included a CD player. My son is begging me to have it instead of trading it in when we get a new car this Fall. He's super into physical media which is crazy to see since he's a zoomer. I'm seeing a lot of kids in the zoomer generation coming back to physical media which is really cool. I play with two guys who are millennials and they're completely hooked on their Sony Minidisc players.

It gives me hope the future is not completely lost.

AFAIK nobody was collecting analytics. The one team I was working on had put out a goal of "30% more efficient" using AI tools. Its about as subject as you can get. We never got around to what exactly that meant before everything got shut down.

Myself and several other devs were laughing about the whole thing. The company was so amped about what AI could do they never even bothered collecting any analytics that would affirm or deny any of this had a positive impact. Even some of my team members were talking about the placebo effect AI has had on a lot of C-Suite folks.

I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment.

I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because teams were building the same tools for what they thought was nothing.

Then they signed contracts with Anthropic and Google because I would assume they saw the token usage was through the roof. One month later? They completely cut off access to everybody for both Claude and Gemini. If you wanted access? Suddenly it was several forms, along with several approvals and a rock solid business case why you needed it. And before you got to the forms? You were added to a waiting list that was thousands of people long.

The entire company is now in damage control after trying to get the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing someone saw how much we would be paying for the tokens we'd been using and decided to shut the party down so to speak.

Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?

Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?

Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:

EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.

My next door neighbor was a few years older than me and was constantly showing me all kinds of nefarious stuff. One thing he showed me was if you tape over the tab on cassettes, you can erase and re-record what you want on them.

One time my older sister and I got into a fight and to get back at her, I erased side A of her Michael Jackson's Thriller cassette she had just gotten a few weeks prior. She got it replaced at the music store and the salesperson was completely befuddled by the entire situation. That one day the music was there and the next day just gone? Inconceivable!

I just played stupid at the time, but felt like a god knowing that little trick. So, sorry sis. But John C, you were the man.

The crazy thing is these came out in 92' and they didn't stop production until 2013 so you can still find these players. I just found out Sony stopped production of the minidiscs just last year which is crazy. A 20 year run for the player and 30+ years for the minidiscs.

If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.

Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.

He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.

Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.

Just to play devils advocate here - but from 2022-2026 did they ever have any large hiring cycles that would replace some or most of these layoffs? Or should I believe none of the layoffs in the last four years have been replaced at all?

I do agree with your point about overhiring, its been way to long and this continues to be an excuse without any real evidence to back it up.

Anecdotal evidence that made me smile a bit.

Was at my daughter volleyball game a few years back. Sitting in the gym. In walks mom with a baby girl and a boy that looked around 10ish. They sit down. Mom gives the baby the ipad to futz around with. The son? Takes out his book and starts to quietly read.

It was an interesting contrast to say the least.

This is also something I've heard from my son about more kids are getting off of social media, or giving it up for other means to communicate. My son just graduated HS and said all of his peers have left Facebook, Snapchat, X and several others. He said his generation now sees social media as something for Boomers and my (Gen X) generation. He said people think you're lame if you're still on social media. Everything is now back to Discord servers and other platforms like 4Chan. Anonymous, under the radar stuff, out of the prying eyes of adults.

So in prediction markets I've heard a lot of times people will collaborate in order to make certain predictions pay off higher sums by having more people put money on a certain bet.

Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?

I sense your lack of hope and see it in a lot of younger people these days.

I grew up in the 80's. College in the late 90's. Start of career in the mid aughts. Went through two dot com busts, and have seen a lot of shit. The one thing that my generation (Gen X) seemed to have was always some optimism for the future. Some hope that as bad as it is now? It will eventually get better. The economy will recover, tech jobs will come back, new companies will start up, things will get back to normal.

There seemed to be so much open road with our generation. We knew we were at the forefront of something really special. The road to being successful was pretty standard. Go to college, get a degree, start a career making 40-50K. Get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after.

That seems to have dissipated with Millennials and has gotten worse with Gen Z. Even college for Gen Z is like, "I don't know, is it really worth it any more?" How do you pick a career in something that may or may not exist in a few years because of AI? It just seems like we were the last generation that really had so much hope (regardless of which party was in the White House or controlled congress) and it seems that kind on relentless optimism for the future has dimmed immensely over the past few years.

I'm grateful for the time I grew up in. I'm not sure I would be able to handle the amount of pressure and stress that young people have to deal with these days.