bwestergard

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology studies wild birds.

"the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins"

I don't doubt that's an unregretted side-effect for political leaders in China.

But the major motivation is to accelerate diffusion within their own massive economy in the pursuit of an across the board productivity boost in the face of an aging population.

A counter argument: A strong distinction between "intelligence" (understanding what is) and "values/principles" (understanding what ought to be) was characteristic of much early modern European philosophy from Descartes to Kant, which received its influential strong formulation from David Hume.

But trying to maintain this distinction leads to insuperable difficulties. Our conceptual framework for understanding the world are always value-laden. There is no "view from nowhere", no historically unconditioned set of values or concepts. Your framing, in which "values" are external to "intelligence" and must be imposed on it (on pain of intelligence being "value-neutral"), leads inevitably to the dead end of "AI Alignment", "superintelligence", etc. Which is a kind of pseudo-theology.

"We humans better [be] refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant."

In light of the untenability of a strong fact/value or intelligence/ethics distinction, I would suggest this alternative advice: humans should focus on critical appropriation and extension of the received wisdom, whether that comes to us directly from human beings or indirectly through an LLM. Perhaps this is compatible with the spirit of your original suggestion.

All good advice. I'm a unionized software engineer (CWA at National Public Radio) in a unit with all my tech worker colleagues. Happy to answer questions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832370#48837175

I don't understand how the throttle and RPM can be modified independently. Surely the RPM depends on the throttle?

About $153k a year gross take home pay, or around $180k total compensation (including retirement contributions, healthcare, etc).

You can see the wage brackets in our collective bargaining agreement here: https://tinyurl.com/dmucontract

I'm a unionized software developer, and have been part of two separate organizing campaigns at two different employers.

Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around.

Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are:

- Guaranteed remote work.

- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.

- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.

- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.

- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.

- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.

Git annex is a remarkable piece of software and I've been inspired by lead developer joeyh's approach to both FOSS and life. For example:

https://joeyh.name/offgrid/

This made my day. These workers will be better stewards of Wikipedia than management.

Former BLS officials still believe the numbers are reliable, because the methodology is public and there are lots of ways for well-financed actors (e.g. wall street traders) to spot manipulation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5530733/bls-jobs-report...

To go by the numbers, it's pretty good. Not as good as the truly anomalous post-pandemic peak of hiring. But still good compared to almost every other occupational group.

https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/tech-jobs-r...

I think many of these problems still arise if inference is effectively free in monetary terms to the end user. In many economic processes, time to getting the final and correct answer is the major driver of profitability.

I could only laugh out loud at this.

I'm no expert in European religious history, but it is an interest of mine and I've read a fair bit more than the typical American about it.

I am certain that every church father and major theologian from antiquity to the early modern period would have condemned without reservation the very idea of building a machine to answer theological questions. Possible exceptions, like Ramon Llull, prove the rule.

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

Given the prevalence of stories about Djinn and Golems in Islamic and Jewish literature, it feels safe to say they would have looked askance at this idea as well.

"There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human."

I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.

Birding is also a great way to discover interesting environments in your home locale.

Why prove the Pythagorean theorem rather than just prove 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2?

For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities, so anything beyond that is surplus to requirements, surely?

Seems right, ship it.

I am very sympathetic to your situation, and fear something similar happening to me. But the article is addressed to investors, who are interested in aggregate labor demand declines.

"A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful."

It is meaningful in answering the question being asked, which is whether the hype around labor displacement, which has been growing for nearly five years now, is actually occurring in a way that would justify some of the higher valuations for AI firms.

The "AI jobs crisis" is generally understood to mean a sustained downturn in demand for all labor due to AI substituting for labor across a huge range of tasks.

They do track median and 25th/75th percentiles.

The decline in junior hiring began before ChatGPT had wide adoption, so AI is not a likely cause.

https://www.employamerica.org/labor-market-analysis/dont-bla...

The New York Fed has also released some research suggesting remote work has been a major factor differentially affecting early career workers.

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/remote...

"But then people who work in actual tech companies come in and explicitly say they are not hiring any juniors anymore specifically because AI is good enough to do most of what juniors do, and that senior engineers can now write 3x as much code, etc."

If you want an anecdote: the media company I work for just started hiring interns and juniors in software career tracks again after a lengthy hiatus.

Not really a question of linear versus non-linear change when we see, in aggregates, almost no change at all.

The shift toward healthcare employment is a very long running trend driven by the greying of the Baby Boom generation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562000101

"It will end up a cheap commodity that is basically free to produce."

Wouldn't this just mean that hardware manufacturers capture the profits, not hyperscalers?

This is a really cool idea.

I'm trying to envision the attacks and countermeasures for this approach. I suppose what I would do to fake this is write a program that takes text and the desired output histogram of edit timings and randomly introduces jitter into the typing. Then, I'd imagine you'd develop more sophisticated statistical tests, and so on. My intuition is that eventually there would be no statistical test that reliably discriminates real human typing.

In 2024, the Silent Generation and baby boomers represented 25% of the population, but held 65% of all wealth in the US.

The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.

My coworkers and I organized a union five years ago. We're about to enter bargaining for our second contract.

https://code-cwa.org/

Your hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't accord with the reasons these workers organized. They did not conceive of the issue as primarily about multiplying all worker compensation by some large factor (e.g. 2x). While they were certainly fighting for higher pay, it was as much about the arbitrariness of career paths as anything. Sexual harassment, crunch time, and layoff cycles were all problems they sought to address.

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

Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.

"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"

You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

"The Constitution also overrides any attempt to prevent interstate migration."

Sure, but if there is no where you can legally stay, because the sole landowner prohibits it, how do you migrate?

Yeah, the post you're responding to quotes "The Prize" (an excellent book), but draws a conclusion that the quote doesn't support.

Interestingly, the Teamsters (IBT) represents a lot of oil pipeline workers today.

https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/6617pipeline...