victoro

Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next decade. Yes this is grossly oversimplified but it still illustrates how crazy high of a bet they're making on AI.

The Democrats had control of the presidency and the house in 2022 when this provision first went into effect but had 2 fewer senators (1 fewer if you count the tie-breaking VP). Why didn't they try to change it? Is there some reason a change in the tax code like this can't be modified or repealed once its in place?

calls by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for Japanese companies to pay workers more as inflation takes hold

So the prime minister wants to fight a phenomenon caused (in large part) by a wage price spiral by calling for accelerating the wage price spiral... we're in for a fascinating macro-economic/political landscape these next couple years...

Haha well I'm in full agreement with you (and u/shapefrog below) on your Chamath evaluation, but the sad reality is that his influence, by virtue of both the money and attention he can direct towards projects he deems worthy, is real and serious. Though hopefully statements like "the marginal cost of energy will approach 0 in the next decade" will help erode some of that influence...

Why is the marginal cost of a KWH the main inhibitor to rapid scaling? Wouldn't the main inhibitor be the marginal cost of additional capacity?

To put it another way, if my solar panel can currently support 10 GPUs running all day but I need to run 11, don't I need to add another solar panel?

Setting aside the article's mention of moderately intensive solutions like natural gas which has a very real and obvious cost per KWH, your panels will still need maintenance and eventual replacement (the current industry standard lifetime for a panel is 25-30 years), as will any peripheral systems required for the panels to work (batteries etc) and even the space they take up has an associated opportunity cost.

we are intently focused on what we anticipate will be the two biggest drivers of the next decade:

The first is the marginal cost of energy going to zero.

I anticipate that this is the dumbest thing I will read from a supposedly serious person in the next decade.

Predicting a 0 marginal cost of energy is basically predicting a post-scarcity society... in the next decade... thanks to solar and wind. Oh and a wee-bit of natural gas thats somehow going to be magically piped out of the ground and transported to power plants free of charge... I guess by the same good folks who will be manufacturing and maintaining all of the solar panels and wind turbines free of charge...

How is one even supposed to seriously discuss or critically examine an article when its conclusion is that we'll build a perpetual motion machine in the next 10 years?

"Always have a beginner / practice mindset."

Just wanted to highlight this because it is a fantastic piece of advice to keep in mind for interviews (and honestly for your career and even crafts or hobbies too). There's a reason doctors and lawyers (for whom the stakes of failure are sometimes measured in lives or years of freedom lost) call what they do "a practice".

Honest question I constantly think about and have never been able to answer about the future of cryptocurrency development: Why/when would a government ever want less control over the primary means used to transact within its borders?

This is one of the, if not the most, important levers it has to wield power. Governments have fought wars and enslaved entire continents to protect and increase the value of their means of account. Even recently, think of how hard the US works to maintain the dollar as the only currency that can be used international oil transactions aka the petrodollar.

Ultimately, cryptocurrency is a technological attempt to solve the problem of a fundamental lack of trust in our traditional institutions. After all, its powered by a set of de-centralized, trustless protocols. If you use crypto as an inflation hedge, that means you don't trust your government to not de-value your labor via printing tons of new currency. If you use it to carry out transactions, it means at least a small part of you has doubts that our that our current, centralized payment processing institutions won't unilaterally roll those transactions back or eliminate them outright in the future. Ditto for property rights and NFTs (and all the other use cases that guarantee a transaction is recorded by distributing it on chain).

Allowing crypto-currencies to supersede local currencies would not only put governments at the mercy of the mob (or perhaps a small number of whales and exchanges) for determining the value of their citizen's output, it would be an existential admission of their failure. Other than governments that have already failed at administering a currency like El Salvador, why would any self-respecting government with a functioning currency admit defeat like this?

I like the soap opera analogy -- hadn't thought of that. But keep in mind that actors (and other folks that work in long-running shows) will still take other jobs as at the same time as their main gig -- e.g taking a part in a movie in between seasons. That sometimes happens with programming contractors as well, but from what I've seen its far more rare.

Ultimately I agree with the other responder that Hollywood agents are better thought of as deal makers/negotiators than job finders so maybe what limits it from showing up in the software contracting world (and other parts of the film world) is that contract terms are much more standardized so not as much time is needed for negotiation and thus the programmers can do it themselves.

In my younger years I spent some time working in the film industry as a PA and reading everything I could to learn about the business side of things. Needless to say, after becoming a programmer, I have often asked myself the same question.

The main difference I can think of is that unlike films, which are discreet projects with hard beginning and end dates, software projects never really end. Maintenance can go on indefinitely and usually the most knowledgeable people to do that maintenance are the people that built the project in the first place. That makes some proportion of people likely to stay with a project for a longer time than it takes to just code up the requirements and generally makes turnover cycles less predictable than they are for people working on films. With less predictable turnover, agents (who generally make money at the time a transaction completes rather than continuously) would have less predictable income streams so they are less incentivized to do it. Also, even in movies, from what I saw, outside of top talent who command large contracts, all the other folks didn't seem to have agents. Thats probably because the transaction amounts for a given contract don't make sense for either party to participate. All the grips, electrical people, PAs, costuming, craft services etc workers were finding work just as a software contractor might -- through connections from friends, colleagues, and people they worked with on previous projects. Many are also part of unions for their respective part of the business so I would expect they get some assistance in finding projects from that as well (e.g. if there is a union production in town they are usually required to hire only people part of the various unions -- so if you're one of the only union members in a region you could get work that way).

I don't think agents are totally incompatible with the software industry, but I do think it would take a somewhat rare combination of highly paid project with a discreet, somewhat consistent term of employment (maybe coding up financial some kind of financial model or data pipeline for a hedge fund would fall under this?) to make it worthwhile for agents to specialize in.

It's tough to avoid this thinking because examples of employees being treated like cogs are often systemic and very public -- like stack ranking at big companies that everyone (even people that don't work there) either knows about or ends up knowing about. Meanwhile, examples of managers risking their own skin are more likely to be individual and private -- sometimes to the point that the affected employee doesn't even know it happened because it was behind the scenes -- like a manager defending a performance review of an employee in a calibration meeting with other managers.

This response strikes at the heart of the issue. Until the wild distortions in the property market are fixed (imo, specifically until Prop 13 gets repealed or significantly amended) big, expensive cities in California will continue have increasing crime problems.

As you can probably imagine, community policing is difficult if you're not a member of the community. And as the cost of living goes up while property taxes remain artificially depressed due to prop 13, the disparity between what municipalities are able to pay for police (which is partially funded by property taxes), and how much those police will need to afford to live there, will continue to grow. It seems like a slow, self-reenforcing downward spiral that will only get re-set if the quality of life deteriorates to the point where people actually start moving out of these communities.

Exactly. Government has been backstopping/de-risking asset ownership since the Great Recession and massively increased that program in March 2020. At the same time, they started to de-risk the asset consumer class with eviction moratoriums and significantly increased unemployment benefits.

Seems to me one of those two classes will need to be inconvenienced if we don't want inflation to spiral out of control, because otherwise the asset owners will continue to buy more assets with cheap money that will push prices up, while asset consumers will continue to require higher and higher salaries to afford to pay the increasing rents to the asset owners.

Asset owners should be the ones taking the hit since they have been backstopped for far longer and are in a much better financial position to deal with it. But the asset owner class is also the one running the country and its tough to imagine them doing something against their short-term self interest.

Gonna be interesting to see what kind of equilibrium shakes out. I hope this plane can be landed without crashing...

My browser (when behind work VPN) is showing an untrusted SSL cert error so probably the issuer is not whitelisted in some employer's systems.

I'm wildly out of my depth, but why couldn't Uber drivers be regulated effectively as micro-franchises? The dynamics seem pretty similar -- drivers benefit from the Uber marketing, brand (which brings trust which is necessary in a business as personal as getting into a stranger's car) and "secret sauce" (the dispatch network and app experience). Uber wants to control some aspects of each "franchise" like the cleanliness of vehicles, making sure that they don't discriminate against customers in unappealing areas, and, to some extent pricing. This is necessary to maintain the Brand and keep customers coming back. Uber doesn't want to get into all aspects of running the franchise (setting hours, making sure drivers are only driving for them etc), because it would un-profitable to do at such scale -- just like McDonalds doesn't want to get deal with the management of individual restaurants.

Anti-trust enforcement can take many forms -- breaking companies up is just one of the most extreme and obvious ones -- but often just the threat of action was enough since for a while the US government backed it up.

A big reason Bell Labs was created and perpetuated was because AT&T feared being broken up. Bell Labs was effectively a PR vehicle they used to show the US government that they were giving back to the community, and an excuse to continue operating as a de-facto state-sanctioned monopoly. Today's toothless FTC and DoJ don't really inspire that kind of fear.

Source (sort of, paraphrased) - This is a big theme of The Idea Factory which describes the heyday of Bell Labs.

(Edited to further develop my thought)

It seems to me that a relatively simple to implement (I'm not going to say simple in aggregate, because the knock-on effects would be hard to predict) solution to all of this is to make student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy.

At the very least, this would shift the burden of determining which degrees are "worth it" from high-school-aged kids and their families to large lending institutions that are much better equipped to analyze risk.

To everyone commenting on the looming job-pocalypse that will be caused by the automation of trucks, please explain why much simpler transportation systems to automate have not resulted in wide-scale job loss. Last I checked, airplanes still had multiple pilots accompanied by significant ground control crews operating them, despite significantly fewer environmental challenges to their operation. Freight trains and subway systems - even simpler closed-loop transportation systems that have working fully autonomous examples in most major airports - still employ conductors. Why will trucks be different?

I like the concise summaries of each pattern, but it looks like most of the actual implementations are still under construction.

Going after AirBNB (barring those running large hotel-like operations) isn't addressing the supply issue.

What is the definition of a large hotel-like operation exactly? I have a friend who lives at his parents house, rents 2 apartments and then re-rents them out exclusively on Airbnb. He lives off the difference between the rent he pays and what he earns from re-renting on Airbnb, basically arbitraging the difference between the long-term rental and short-term rental markets in his city. His small hustle is no Hilton, but it affects the property market in a small way by taking two properties off the market.

Airbnb takes a lot of the pain out of running things like this, and enables a lot more people to do it on a small-time scale. Taken together, it will affect the market as much, or more than a few large operations.

Left unchecked, I think such practices will, in the long term, push housing (both rental and purchase) prices up while pushing traditional hotel rental prices down, so I think the interests of home renters/buyers are actually aligned with those of the lodging industry.

Increasing housing supply is one tool we can use to control housing prices. Zoning laws, when enforced properly, are another tool. This investigation seeks to address that second tool.

If everyone did the right thing all the time, then no industry would ever need to be regulated in the first place.

Carl Zimmer's very interesting book Parasite Rex (though now over a decade and a half old) cites some studies on using worms to treat Crohn's disease and googling around yields this a more recent paper published in Science about studies done on mice [1].

[1] Layperson Summary - http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/parasitic-worms-may-p...

[2] Actual Article - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6285/608

Perhaps you should crack open that Econ 101 textbook first, because that same Econ 101 textbook would likely have water as the canonical example used to explain elasticity of demand. Demand for water is inelastic, both for agriculture and home use, so letting the "supply and demand curve" take care of it would likely cause a sharp increase in price in a very short period of time, which, from a policy perspective, seems like a terrible idea that would cause panic and economic instability.

Distasteful? Maybe. Ineffective? Quite probably (considering the decision makers who are buying a Social Media tool are often Social Media Managers). However, if you're going to be as uncomfortable with software eliminating certain job categories and putting people out of work as the OP claims they are, you probably shouldn't be working in technology.

Salesforce (a company specifically mentioned by OP) certainly didn't aim to put salespeople out of business. It did, however, greatly reduce the need for assistants and secretaries that used to be instrumental in keeping salespeople organized, thus eliminating many such positions. Mailchimp (another company mentioned) certainly created some new email marketing positions, but in the process it helped optimize email-use, which is itself a kind of optimization of traditional mail. Thus one could reasonably argue that Mail Chimp helps put people in the paper industry and in the Postal industry out of work.

> No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to

This.

Every time I hear an organization brag about how many jobs they "create" I can't help but think about how much of an oxymoron that is. Any half-decent business owner wants to get a specific job done at the lowest cost possible -- if it can be done equally well themselves without paying anybody for anything, thats the best possible scenario. Bragging about creating jobs is basically bragging that your costs of production have gotten higher.

I think the parent was commenting on the irony of this statement considering that the big US automakers were recently recipients of a large government bailout precisely because they couldn't "successfully adapt to competitive and technological displacement risks over the medium to long term".

I'm surprised that so little consideration seems to have been given to the marketing of this framework. Your landing page should be optimized for the audience you are expecting to sell to. Running a general release aimed at developers on a Monday afternoon, they should have expected that most of their target audience would access their page from a desktop environment because they are likely programming. Having a page that seems to be optimized for mobile, albeit poorly considering the scrollbar didn't work on my iPhone any better than it did on my laptop, was a pretty egregious oversight, especially considering they constantly remind their audience that choosing reliable tools is important for their career.

The author took 23 paragraphs (with outlandish detours that equate technologists sleeping in cars and participating in CrossFit to "fetishizing the homeless" and trying to make a connection between that and libertarianism) to basically say that the tech community should get mad at institutions that lead to homelessness instead of the homeless individuals themselves. No concrete advice was provided on how to improve said institutions except for a quick mention of how Salt Lake City and Phoenix have helped reduce homelessness by giving away homes -- of course the caveat that those places have far more affordable housing and far more units to actually give away was not at all mentioned even though ~22 paragraphs previously the author was talking about how expensive 1 bedroom apartments are in SF and other tech hubs.

yes also using Chrome v33