Top quality comment here, and 100% agreed. The influencer/crypto bro mentality has dug its heels into the space and I don't think we are turning back anytime soon. We always had the get rich quick and Grant Cardone types, but now that you can create a web app in a few minutes we are overflowing with them.
How much AI and LLM technology has progressed but seems to have taken society as a whole two steps back is fascinating, sad, and scary at the same time. When I was a young engineer I thought Kaczynski was off his rocker when I read his manifesto, but the last decade or so I'm thinking he was onto something. Having said that, I have to add that I do not support any form of violence or terrorism.
IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now.
If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.
The printing press also led to books changing from being something only rich people had to everyone having books. This also enabled the industrial revolution, as books made literacy worth having, newspapers, and became a great storehouse of knowledge.
I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.
I have not heard even the most enthusiastic AI booster describe net job creation as a possible outcome. If you have any details on that prediction, I'd be interested to hear what they are.
Net job creation will be the outcome as the insane number of businesses that were once too expensive to start due to lack of knowledge labor suddenly come online.
I mean... you can't think of any ways that AI could actually generate new value? Or more abstractly, of a way that Jevons' paradox can't apply in the case of AI?
One wonders if a German in 1600 would have cursed the invention of the printing press. The printing press accelerated the reformation, which led to over a century of bloody religious wars. Something like a third of the German population died as a result. From the perspective of 2025, the printing press was undoubtedly positive for humanity. But millions of people suffered.
Indeed, and I think this is one of the things Hazlitt mentions. After the first initial shocks, opportunities and pathways will eventually present themselves.
I have friends in commercial sheet metal/plumbing/electrical, and the work is endless right now in my area in the Midwest. My immediate goal would be to get on a journeyman program making a fraction of what I make now, and then onwards and upwards from there as I know the more skilled people in these jobs are making top tier money in my area. When I was in college I worked part-time in residential, so it seems logical that I would gravitate in this direction, especially with the supply of work.
At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first.
I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without.
I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.
Your plan, whatever it is is still predicated on the world as it is today being more or less as it is today. The problem with anything truly disruptive is that it may very well cause your plan to become infeasible for a variety of reasons. For your sake I hope that you were aware of that little detail and made your plan bullet proof or flexible enough that that is not going to cause you any headaches.
Of course things can change and I wholeheartedly agree with you. If a plan goes bad you adapt and overcome. Also, I've experienced being poor and lived in warzones/slept in terrible places, which gave me a very positive look at life in the USA. No need to worry about me as I assure you I'll be good either way.
Life is actually very good here and there is a lot of mobility if you have even a small amount of motivation. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here though jacquesm - if I recall correctly (I'm not going to look at your comment history), I feel like I read once that you come from a family of first gen immigrants that experienced conditions similar to what I did when I was younger, and I would love to hear more about their/your perspective on being in a place like the USA and the opportunities it did/didn't bring.
I've moved around a lot in my life but I would not describe myself as coming from a background of family of first gen immigrants, however, I do have family that is in that position. My family was well established (since the 1600's or so) in the country where I was born.
No... You make enough quality comments that I remember your username, so I think you already have that one in the bag. Looking forward to more from you as well.
All very well to have a plan, and I'm sure some people manage to successfully "repurpose" themselves, but historically the way this plays out is that redundant workers live out their days in relative poverty and it's their children/grandchildren who find new opportunities out of economic necessity. Usually takes 2-3 generations for the impact on workers to fully shake out.
Just to clarify, you didn't actually look up the publications it was citing? For example, you just stayed in ChatGPT web and used the resources it provided there? Not ridiculing you of course, but am just curious. The last paper I wrote a couple months back I had GPT search out the publications for me, but I would always open a new tab and retrieve the actual publication.
I didn't because I wasn't really doing anything serious to my mind, I think? basically felt like watching an episode of pbs spacetime, I think the difference is it's more like playing a video game while thinking you're watching an episode of spacetime, if that makes sense? I don't use chatgpt for me real work that much, and I'm not a scientist, so it was for me just mucking around, it pushed me slightly over a line into "I was just playing but now this seems real", it didn't occur to me to go back through and check all the papers, I guess because quite a lot of chatting had happened since then and, I dunno, I just didn't think to? Not sure that makes much sense. This was also over a year ago, during the time they had the gpt4o sycophancy mode that made the news, and it wasn't backed by webserch, so I took for granted what was in it's training data. No good excuse I'm afraid. tldr: poor critical thinking skills on my part there! :)
I think I've said several times over the years here this is the phenomenon that happens on HN - basically being a contrarian just to be a contrarian. HN users are extremely intelligent, and many of them seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Prime example is this thread and many like them, which end up going into a different universe entirely. I totally get it though - in my younger days when I had more time for myself, I was capable of extreme forms of abstract thought, and used it like a superpower. Now though with a lot of software to write and a family, I try to limit to 15 min per day.
I went on a tangent... Ultimately I'm not saying abstract thought and/or being contrarian is a bad thing, because it's actually very useful. But I would agree, it can be a vice when taken too far. Like many things in life, it should be used in moderation.
I've been selling options for almost a decade now, including running trading algorithms, and was laughing a bit to myself because it was basically just the math in an everyday option chain. As you already know, anyone can look at the strike they are talking about, with the IV already cooked into it, on platforms like Think Or Swim or even Yahoo Finance. Some of the stuff can be pretty useful though in backtesting and exploration.
All that aside, I'm impressed it made it to the HN front page.
It's very sad, but this applies to what seems like everyone now. Required reading for internet users should be The Anatomy of Peace by the Harbinger Institute. I suppose you'd have to peel people away from their social algorithms though, which might be an impossibility due to the decreasing attention span. The more I live in this world, the more I realize that this seems like the new norm, and hate it. I grew up around a lot of great people with big hearts, and I just don't get it. I think John Coffey said it best when hes said "Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other."
I am still surrounded by people with big hearts, but I think they have separated themselves into a family/friends/acquaintances persona and a "political entity" persona which is increasingly hostile and more frequently exercised due to social media bubbles. People who are openly hostile (and sometimes outright homicidal) on social media are still cuddly teddy bears in person, but the more they access that anger and hate for people they'd normally foster relationships with, the more our ability to find commonality erodes.
I have an uncle that I've always been fond of who recently has spouted some mind-bending support of the current administration, and it was like talking to someone who lives in another dimension. My Dad too was indoctrinated by Fox News (because he was spending a lot of time with my grandparents) and some of his political views are irreconcilable with the man I knew growing up.
This is very well said. I've also noticed the jekyll and hyde thing - for several years now and I've seen people that act basically like extremists online be some of my favorite people in person. Both right and left leaning. Very bizarre and sad stuff. I'm fairly conservative, but we need to be able to call a spade a spade when it comes down to it.
Interestingly, in all my volunteering experience with the homeless and also hurricane relief in Tennessee/North Carolina, there were many conservatives there helping alongside us, in many instances most of of them - assuming so as they were from Christian churches and organizations. This is an anecdote of course, so please correct me if you have actual statistics that prove conservatives are incapable of empathy.
My theory is that there are a whole lot of really good people in the middle, with the extremes on each end having some brain issues with empathy and whatnot. To cast such a wide blanket on conservatives doesn't seem like critical thinking to me and will not help anything.
Piggybacking off your comment, I just completed a detailed research paper where I compared Haskell to C# with an automated trading strategy. I have many years of OOP and automated trading experience, but struggled a bit at first implementing in Haskell syntax. I attempted to stay away from LLMs, but ended up using them here and there to get the syntax right.
Haskell is actually a pretty fun language, although it doesn't fly off my fingers like C# or C++ does. I think a really great example of the differences is displayed in the recursive Fibonacci sequence.
In C#:
public int Fib(int n)
{
if (n <= 1)
return n;
else
return Fib(n - 1) + Fib(n - 2);
}
In Haskell:
fib :: Integer -> Integer
fib n
| n <= 1 = n
| otherwise = fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2)
As you might know, this isn't even scratching the surface of the Haskell language, but it does a good job highlighting the syntax differences.
This is well said here. Off on a small tangent, but I received my undergrad from a well known for-profit technology school that isn't respected at all. My understanding is that a resume with this specific school is sometimes thrown out by hiring managers. I am now finishing up my Master's from a very well known and respected NY private university. I have noticed no differences in the caliber of students or quality of education between the two. The students that live and breath software engineering excel, while the others do not.
I was aware of all this before, but the experience has tainted my opinion even further of higher education. Graduates of the for-profit tech school are likely to face professional discrimination, while students from the more prestigious university will receive interviews and opportunities because of a name listed on their resume.
The word "super" is enough to make my red flags fly. As a millennial the word super is something that I remember only being used around the house, or between young friends. Fast forward to the last few years and the casual use of the word super, along with uptalk, is being used what seems like every other sentence in the professional setting. It's strange to me and immediately makes me think of the person using it as childish or otherwise not know what they are talking about. I'm not surprised about the "Super secure" app not being secure.
How much AI and LLM technology has progressed but seems to have taken society as a whole two steps back is fascinating, sad, and scary at the same time. When I was a young engineer I thought Kaczynski was off his rocker when I read his manifesto, but the last decade or so I'm thinking he was onto something. Having said that, I have to add that I do not support any form of violence or terrorism.
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