Generally, income distribution is a solved problem. The issue is that too many people aren't willing to take the steps necessary to get the income they seek. They'd rather scream about the minimum wage, the ultra-rich, the evil white men, etc. Redistribution schemes do not work. Bottom line, stay in school, get a functional education, stay off drugs, moderate alcohol intake, and don't have kids early, particularly when you aren't married. Yes, I'm aware that there are those people for whom such steps are insurmountable. That's where community organization come into play, e.g., churches, NGOs. It isn't the government's role to ensure equal outcomes. That's called communism. And it fails everywhere it's tried.
I love the reaction that I see when people are told they are responsible for their own outcomes and it takes work. Getting down voted for such comments is hilarious.
On that note why are the ultra-rich so dead-set on avoiding estate taxation? Shouldn't their children be responsible for growing their own billions when their inheritance takes a 50% haircut?
You don't have to wheel out the boogeyman of communism. The distribution of wealth in this country allows a person to have 1 MILLION TIMES the spending power of somebody who drives a bus, puts out fires or stitches up wounds. Crucially, the distribution is only getting worse.
I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?
Under no conditions should the government own AI companies. The government has its hands in too many companies already. What needs to happen is stricter enforcement of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. In other words, AI training data should be curtailed substantially until such time as the companies are willing to pay for it. It's no different than the various other internet piracy issues, e.g., movies and music. Just more hype at the moment. That too will pass.
Unquestionably, many people today rely on LLMs more than actually reading. Before that, many depended on the IDE and the web to teach them the language. (What taught them the paradigm?). I think one of the issues though goes back to the bookstores themselves. For years, the quality of the STEM books that were actually available in the store declined precipitously. Perhaps it was the Amazon effect. Barnes and Noble and most independent shops didn't understand the market for the professional software developer. Browsing the shelves for "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" or "Clean Code" and instead finding shelves of Dummies books and IPhone for Seniors, etc. drove buyers to the web and Amazon. Even now, B&N Online can't match Amazon for selection. Since demise of the Borders chain, bookstores have been unwilling to absorb the carrying costs for deeper books that sell less frequently. The feedback loop kicked in and now the shelves are bare. The one thing that still works for me at the local B&N is watching for special orders that were declined by the customer and subsequently shelved. That's how I scored the latest version of the Art of Electronics for 40 something dollars. Those of you who are younger and rely on the web and "AI" will someday realize that your knowledge is less structured, and probably more shallow, than those of us here who are dinosaurs and learned the old way with textbooks and the like.
Cool page. I still have a working TI SR-51 from the early 70s, probably 74, maybe 75. Blew several hundred dollars on it, only to learn that the university I attended only allowed slide rules. So it goes. Despite the rather primitive red LED, it still works. Better than my slip stick actually. It's amazing the circuits that fail on a slide rule.
Unionizing tech workers will not save tech jobs. It'll only create an additional costs to the employees. We saw similar trends in the 80s when the PC started to displace the mainframe developers/users. The pool of available mainframe jobs shrank somewhat, while the demand for PC developers exploded. Every major technology change creates these displacements. The answer isn't to look for unions to save your job. It's to figure out how to pivot and still be employable. All unionization will do is cost you mosey and stifle innovation. I grew up in a union household as did my wife. Unions aren't the answer to any question in the modern world.
Do you have any data to back up your claims? Because from what I understand, unions were the backbone of the recovering US labor market following the Great Depression, which punctuated a period of extreme speculation and inequality (the Gilded Age) similar to what we're seeing today.
The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.
As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.
I'm not advocating for not having unions, but the idea some people have and corporations push is based on a hypothesis that companies will try their best to minimize costs.
Unions do have these real benefits for the workers who are a part of them, and these benefits come at the cost of the corporations who have to pay more and implement better practices.
This increases the cost of human labor, so when doing a purely greedy analysis of costs vs revenue, the costs go up for processes which requires human labor, which drives down the profit, disincentivizing investment or even the continuation of processes that require unionized labor. Overall, there winds up being less demand for human labor and more demand for automation.
I'm not here to speak on the truth of this, I think of it from this perspective: Information asymmetry (not understanding the opposing argument) benefits the party who has the information, so understanding their argument is necessary if you want to counter it.
I’m not buying it. This sounds like bog standard anti-union FUD. There are plenty of reasons to organize a labor resistance that’s not just job preservation. One example that very few are willing to discuss or let alone negotiate is a reduction of the work week. If AI is making all of us so much more efficient, let the worker benefit by reducing from 5 days to 4 days. AI productivity gains only favor the managerial class. It’s lop-sided. We can do better.
Another issue is that AI is human replacement strategy and isn’t necessarily the same as the mainframe dev displacement. A new career filled the void because the work still needed to get done by people. New opportunities emerged out of the ashes. The vision from tech oligarchs isn’t that - it’s elimination. It’s centralized power.
I grew up in a household with a parent in a union. We had a pretty darn good quality of life. My dad wasn’t overworked had great benefits, a pension and was able to provide.
Finally, the solution to this problem does not explicitly have to be union. This is a community of builders and thinkers and problem solvers. Maybe you could tell us what you think could affect some change then instead?
Unions aren't just about protecting jobs. They play a critical role in job conditions as well. The most obvious example is the unpaid overtime we all are forced to provide (on call, weekend work to meet crazy exec deadlines etc) simply because we are classified as 'exempt' employees.
Also, classic factory unions are not the only kind possible. The SAG is a good example of a union representing (often) highly paid workers and primarily negotiates working conditions and a (low) floor on pay.
The fundamental reality is that except for a vanishingly small number, tech workers have zero leverage against employers individually.
The tech folks mistook a longish boom as evidence of their genius and skill. As long as demand outpaced supply of tech workers, the going was good. Once the tides turned, we're finding out the reality of where we stand with respect to the oligarchs.
This isn't new however. We've always been subject to these cycles. Expecting a union to mitigate cycles is a fantasy. All it can do is protect the mediocre that are displaced by the AI. We saw the same reaction when companies began to employ more contractors and offshore more work. The mistake is to believe that we are somehow experiencing something new. We're not. If you've ever worked in an environment where the management supported "top-ranking", it's similar, except it occurred once or twice a year. No one is guaranteed a job. What I see here are concerns from people whose primary job seems to be coding, likely most on the web based applications. These were always commodity jobs as Amazon told me a decade ago. The value that tech people bring are understanding the business, the problem, and proposing solutions. As of now, AI cannot do that effectively. Instead of hoping for unions to mitigate the displacement or shorten the work week, a better strategy is to figure out how to be irreplaceable. If you're slinging code for 40+ hours a week, you have ALWAYS been disposable.
And those that believe unions benefit workers, particularly in the tech space, are the same people that think life would be better under a collectivist form of government and that the minimum wage needs to be raised continuously. Unions had their place in early 20th century. Those conditions are in the past. If your "conditions" in a tech job needs improvement, get a new job. Anyone that went into tech expecting it to be like a 7-3 manufacturing job, went into the wrong business. I spent years working 60+ hours a week and loved it. If you don't, change careers.
Working 60+ hours a week for years is nothing to brag about. It just means your projects were mismanaged, done poorly and you were absolutely taken advantage of. You also mentioned in another comment that you are disposable if you are "slinging code" 40+ hours a week.
No, we weren’t being taken advantage of. We were working a project that changed an industry dramatically. The projects weren’t mismanaged. They were very aggressive to be sure, but that’s sometimes what it takes to be first and change things. We did it voluntarily and were well compensated for the times. As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.
So which industry was changed dramatically by your team working 60+ hours a week for years? If you we’re compensated for overtime you can thank unions for that, if you worked voluntarily overtime you were by definition taken advantage of.
> As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.
The last 30 years saw massive growth in SWE salaries. That doesn’t happen if SWEs are disposable.
We aren't talking true software engineers. We're talking about people that think their job is to write code and nothing else. Yes, SWE salaries have gone up a good deal in recent years. However, we heard the same outcries about unions in the late 80s-90s when outsourcing and offshoring began to flourish. As for compensation for voluntary overtime? It had nothing to do with unions and everything to do with visionary management and aggressive, committed team members. The average person in the industry today doesn't have the same drive. I saw that repeatedly the last few years I managed. Their expectations were based on what they had read about FAANG jobs, which didn't reflect the typical commercial situation. So while salaries did rise, they weren't competitive with the Big Tech firms. That's just reality. But those applying to the jobs thought differently. It was common to get college graduates from middle and lower tier schools or junior developers with 1-2 years experience expecting to make $150K+ and get 4 weeks of vacation. That's just not realistic at most companies. And if you were able to reach a mutual agreement, they seldom stayed more than a year or two before trying to leverage up another notch.
Brother, you voluntarily worked overtime without compensation because you "loved it" and thought you were already highly compensated. All this means is that your company took advantage of free labor and you missed out on being paid for your work. Whatever your compensation levels are, giving free labor to your employer is a foolish game. 60+ hours a week for years, come on...those projects are absolutely mismanaged if the work can’t be done without that much overtime.
Another concern is how to weather the AI bubble. Right now, everyone going all in on "AI" reminds me of the 90s when companies like Exodus Communications, Level 3 Communications and others built out heavily only to see it all evaporate. Yes, eventually what these companies were doing became the cloud but none of them are active participants. I would argue that before jumping into reliance on current AI trends that one evaluate where on the Technology Adoption Curve that the industry is. I suspect we're still at the Early Adopter phase and the build out is based on a bit of irrational exuberance. Couple that with the growing backlash against new AI data centers and depending on current trends seems exceedingly risky. Everyone argued in the 90s that "it was different this time" as they are arguing today. It's not. It rarely is. Go back and read the history of the PC starting with Apple and moving into the 80s Compare that to today's market. Same with the emergence of the Internet. Where are companies like Prodigy, Compuserve, or the incubators such as CMGI. Sometimes people have ideas and can ride technology waves and make huge money. But at the end of the day, that's far rarer than "having a good idea".
Insanely difficult and borderline idiotic to ignore what you've stated. Difficult to know where we are on the curve and what will happen next.
I think there are a lot of similarities and parallels to those times happening now, maybe even more with more money and investment depending on it and expanding.
There are a lot of arguments to made on both sides. I guess the one i'd lean on is "Do we not build Amazon, Google and FB b/c dot com happened?" and the companies that I'm trying to build inspired by those guys.
I'm not trying to discourage innovation. Your idea seemed to be based on an infrastructure solution to current technology. Perhaps I misinterpreted. And as a starting point, it may be a good venture. However, I would be looking for the next wave of opportunities to capitalize on. Obviously, Google succeeded Yahoo. Facebook succeeded the various bulletin board systems like Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy (though I still preferred the Usenet days). Amazon set out to be the Walmart of the web. While I doubt any of these companies will go away, they will become less significant over time. The high flyers today will eventually face significant competition or government action/regulation, though Palantir may get an pass. I had the privilege of working on two major industry changing projects, and though they weren't my ideas, they were still a rush. And code I wrote 30+ years ago that is still in operation. That's something many people never get to experience. I wish you luck. Just keep your eyes on the industry as much as the technology and be prepared to pivot. I hope you wind up with mountains of cash.
Appreciate and grateful for your kind words :) Happy to hear of your success as an example of what makes this industry motivating.
You are correct my idea is infrastructure atop of current LLM technologies. Competitors exist and it may be that the LLM providers provide their own solution(s) as they have unlimited resources. I will be the first to admit that it is not "ground breaking" but rather boring but useful. I think personally if I have one success I can look at broader trends, but there is a real fear of the unknown.
I am curious on your opinion coming for government regulation just because it does not seem to be happening. I'd love to invest in the cloud companies (AWS, Azure, GCP etc) without being exposed to the broader business.
The one thing about government regulation is that it is slow moving, both in initiation and resolution. In my career, there were the ATT, IBM, and Microsoft antitrust cases, all of which took years. In many cases, the market resolves the issue before the government does. The FTC as well as several states are going after Amazon currently, though it's not getting a lot of media coverage. Amazon will likely take a hit comparable to ATT in the 80s, e.g., the divestiture of the Bell system and Bell Labs. I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook go out of business. The social media addiction lawsuits are proliferating and they've already lost in New Mexico at the state level. The AI companies are just beginning to draw attention, mostly at the state level. The federal government thus far has been slow and inconsistent. Throw in the use of copyrighted material for AI training data and the likelihood of politicians jumping on the bandwagon is high. Already, entertainment figures, authors, publishing houses, etc. are suing. I doubt companies continue to survive these lawsuits under fair use doctrine. And it's hard to see how Google, Microsoft, and others ultimately win any lawsuits that involve using private data to train AIs (despite their denials), e.g., GMail, GitHub, etc. This doesn't even touch the use of images and voices, which AI companies are routinely using as training data. All of this is chum in the water for politicians, regulators, and lawyers who can't resist grandstanding for media attention, regardless of the facts or outcome. As for the cloud itself? I suspect we'll see more pullback by companies using the cloud in the coming years as cyber attacks, outages, costs, etc begin to pile up, and risk premiums exceed cost savings for select industries, e.g., medical and insurance firms. Already you see a few companies popping up to support a move from the cloud. Will it happen? I have no idea. The bottom line, by all means, push your idea to the limit. Just don't lose sight of the fact that it's less a technical issue and more an environment/trends issue. Best of luck.
I do see glimpses of lawsuits here and there on these guys. They all seem to just be flybys on the news to never appear again. Maybe something is happening and the resolution doesn't make the headline.
I think Facebook has been a shell of a useful company for a long time. Maybe some value in Instagram but I don't quite see it. It does seem like the AI companies are beginning to become unfavorable, with that being said, unsure how much of this is geopolitics where this is less of an issue with China and competing with China. I dont think I see the current administration/government doing anything.
Appreciate the message - I'd like to take the necessary steps to push my idea forward. In the ocean of everything AI, this idea is a single celled organism.
Yes, I'm 70 and continue to reinvent myself. After high school, I blew up my undergraduate studies because my head wasn't in the game. I took jobs in my 20s that addressed what I thought of as social weaknesses. By my late 20s, through aggressive self study and a couple of college classes, I switched careers and entered the software development world. Again, a lot of time spent on aggressive self study to be competitive with established developers. Realizing in my mid-30s that my lousy undergraduate showing was holding me back, I re-entered school and subsequently completed two masters degrees, an MS and an MBA. The MBA granted me credibility with senior management and propped up my management career. I did that for a few years until I and friend of mine started a consulting/development business, which we did for about 8 years. At that time I was offered a job with a Fortune 500 company that was too good to pass up. Following a series of takeovers, my job morphed repeatedly until, at age 65, the last company bought me out. Now, at 70, I've been accepted as a freshman at a major university to study things for fun, not career prospects. The bottom line, you can always reinvent yourself. It's not always easy, e.g., going back to college while working 50-60 hours per week, but it can be done. All it takes is planning, sacrifice, prioritization, and deferred gratification. In the end, it can be transformative. But, it will always be a hard journey.
Fundamentally, if it comes from AI, I'm not interested. I would not rely on AI summaries, and certainly nothing identified as AI produced. AI is not creative in the human sense. I would never knowingly waste time reading something produced by a room full of monkeys banging on a keyboard. The same is true of AI produced code. LLMs are a malignancy that needs to be excised from society.
Simple, politicians are short sighted and do what gets them the most votes. They’ll get more votes by virtue signaling about the poor, the environment, or whatever the hot topic of the day happens to be. And it’s incredibly easy to rationalize. Since government spending is boundless, especially in the modern monetary era, hard decisions aren’t necessary. So politicians latch onto the same types of arguments presented in this thread and focus on pandering for reelection. In reality, yes landing on the moon is dangerous. Contrary to the posts here, the moon is incredibly valuable and thus ultimately profitable which is why private companies will likely beat the US back to the surface. An argument can be made that no one other than Trump would have pushed this as hard AND how hard would he have pushed without China’s growing space program? As for things like teacher salaries? Yes, in some places, they are abysmal. OTH, overall US educational quality lags other countries significantly. Higher teacher salaries must come from reforms, which includes reducing the bureaucracy surrounding education substantially, starting at the federal level and working down to the local. I live in a major US city where the superintendent of schools makes roughly 10x the average teachers’ salary, despite presiding over a failed school system. That is unacceptable.
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