In the 1300s you could be broke but if you had the blue blood you still had power.
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
I still argue that our current capitalist system is nothing more than an extension of the Norman system. Only capitalist executives see even less of the humanity of their ‘customers’ and the damage from their policies/maximal extraction than medieval lords saw in the serfs of the village that their policies/maximal extraction impacted.
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.
I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people.
It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.
You need to take every comment about AI and mentally put a little bracketed note beside each one noting technical competence.
AI is basically an software development eternal september: it is by definition allowing a bunch of people who are not competent enough to build software without AI to build it. This is, in many ways, a good thing!
The bad thing is that there are a lot of comments and hype that superficially sound like they are coming from your experienced peers being turned to the light, but are actually from people who are not historically your peers, who are now coming into your spaces with enthusiasm for how they got here.
Like on the topic of this article[0], it would be deranged for Apple (or any company with a registered entity that could be sued) to ship an OpenClaw equivalent. It is, and forever will be[1] a massive footgun that you would not want to be legally responsible for people using safely. Apple especially: a company who proudly cares about your privacy and data safety? Anyone with the kind of technical knowledge you'd expect around HN would know that them moving first on this would be bonkers.
But here we are :-)
[0] OP's article is written by someone who wrote code for a few years nearly 20 years ago.
It is possible that AI is both over-hyped and is (or is becoming) a useful tool. The two can co-exist. Based on my own experience it is useful and it is a huge time saver, especially for experienced engineers who can figure out when to use it and when to avoid it. Trying to ignore AI is as unwise as ignoring any other new tool. I imagine lots of people thought static analysis tools were never going to live up to the hype and didn't need be part of a standard build/debug flow.
I don’t think it’s a group psychosis. I think it’s just the natural evolution of junior engineers. They’ve always lacked critical thinking and just jumped on whatever’s hyped on Twitter.
It’s a group psychosis fueled by enormous financial pressure: every big tech company has been telling people that they’re getting fired as soon as possible unless they’re one of the few people who can operate these tools. Of course that’s going to have a bunch of people saying “Pick me! Pick me!” — especially since SV has become increasingly untethered from questions like whether something is profitably benefiting customers. With the focus on juicing share prices before moving to the distilled fiat pricing of cryptocurrency, we have at least two generations of tech workers being told that the path to phenomenal wealth comes from talking up your project until you find a rich buyer.
I’d really love to see some data on the age and/or experience distribution of these breathless "AI everywhere" folks. Are they mostly just young and easily influenced? Not analytic enough? Not critical-thinking enough? Not cynical enough?
Crypto hasn't really passed. It's just not talked about on HN anymore. It is still a massive industry but they have dropped the rhetoric of democratising banking and instead let you use cryptocurrency to do things like betting on US invading Venezuela and so on.
By "passing" the GP presumably meant that the fad phase has passed. The hype cycle has reached the natural plateau of "I guess this has some use cases" (though in this case mostly less-than-scrupulous ones).
No one can really figure out what legitimate uses crypto has that can't be covered by normal payment systems.
Everyone can immediately see how useful AI is, and tons of people are using it. Pretending it will pass would be like saying the Internet was a fad in 1997.
If you can’t see why something like OpenClaw is not ready for production I don’t know what to tell you. People’s perceptions are so distorted by FOMO they are completely ignoring the security implications and dangers of giving an LLM keys to your life.
I’m sure apple et al will eventually have stuff like OpenClaw but expecting a major company to put something so unpolished, and with such major unknowns, out is just asinine.
At the end of the day, the choices in companies we interact with is pretty limited. I much prefer to interact with a company that at least pays lip service to being 'good' as opposed to a company that is actively just plain evil and ok with it.
That's the main reason I stick with iOS. At least Apple talks about caring about privacy. Google/Android doesn't even bother to talk about it.
That's probably not true - government regulators require a lot of privacy work and Android certainly complies with that. Legal compliance is a large business strategy because small companies can't afford to do it.
> We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the interface library.
People heralding this as a good thing is extremely disturbing.
I think AI will be a disaster for the human race. We'll be more isolated, lonely, and unemployed. Power and wealth will be accumulated even faster by the owning class. Labor will be devalued.
I'm just sitting here guessing about what that disaster will taste like.
The freezer one is so weird because there is an even simpler solution to the problem. Just buy less shit! If you have so much stuff that you can’t keep track then don’t have so much stuff, simple.
I think there is a common psychology when people notice a problem they first think about what they can add to solve the problem, when often the best solution is to think about what you can remove.
I follow the OrganizationPorn subreddit because sometimes I like looking at pictures of neatly organized stuff. But so much of the photos are from sprawling suburban houses with enormous pantries and "craft rooms" with just So. Much. Stuff.
Unless you're feeding a family of 12, I don't know how anyone can keep that much food without half of it going bad before you get to it anyway.
We just have a magnetic whiteboard on the refrigerator and write down things we need to buy when we run low/out. A true modern marvel, and no AI bot required!
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