brother I've thought about the tech to blue collar transition too. for me, I would choose plumbing or electrical, but it seems like 4 years of low apprentice wages are unavoidable.

For what they are worth, nuclear weapons are still preventing large-scale conflict between world powers.

Hard to say if that is from the nukes or the global elite now being so very globally leveraged. Little column a and b probably.

We have more wars on-going right now than any other point in history, excluding World Wars.

I don't think we are doing very well in preventing "large scale" conflict between World Powers.

Russia v. Ukraine war has half a million deaths on the Russian side alone. Is this large scale?

I've started to go low-tech and ask noai.duckduckgo.com first, and then, gasp, go to the local library for some books on my hobbies.

The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!

No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.

My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

I maintain a part of my team's CD process and I've observed a 30% increase in PR velocity since we started adopting agentic tools but it was a "one-off" increase (as-in, it hasn't continued to increase beyond that since about a half-year ago).

I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).

> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.

> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.

I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.

Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems.

AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.

That simply isn't true. LLMs are completely incapable of operating without supervision, same as they were 3 years ago.

The scope and scale of the tasks LLMs can be trusted to do without supervision has increased massively in the meanwhile.

Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.

I mean, what's the goal here? AI does everything and then... and then what? We all die? Most of us die except a select few who rule the world (which, by the way, would not include you or me)?

The reason we won't let AI run rampant is because it's anti-human. Even if AI can do everything, why would we allow it to? We don't have to do that, that's very much a choice.

We're at the point where we have humans advocating not only against other humans, but against themselves. If people are going to be out here arguing for self-destruction on the order of suicide, they might as well save us all the trouble and put a gun in their mouths. At least that way, humanity might have a few less pathetic losers who put computer programs before themselves.

Maybe that's harsh, but that's how I see it.

The alternative is to let humans do everything. Think about what that entails.

I have seen enough human incompetence that AI incompetence is beginning to look quite favorable. AI performance, at least, goes up generation to generation. If you've ever faced minimum wage workers, you know that they are, at best, consistently the same level of awful.

How is that the alternative? That's not even the reality 100 years ago, let alone today.

Guess why. People did their damn best to replace human labor everywhere they could, as soon as the tech allowed for it. Because human labor sucked for everyone involved.

If we move the goalposts along, how can we run out of them? No, I find your argument flawed, sir.

But if we move us faster than the goalposts, we can outrun them.

There is nothing wrong with forking, and one man's "better" version is another's bloat. Also, making a fork rather than a PR avoids burdening maintainers.

Honestly the de facto standard is to blame: at my dev job, we vacuum up all the packages we need and get the software deployed to production ASAP, then later go over the SBOM and make sure nothing looks sketchy. I'd imagine this is the default most places; an intensive approval process would slow down CI/CD too much.

In, fire 30% of the workforce, new logo, out.

You are now a fully trained management consultant. (Alan Johnson, Peep Show)

In the good old time you at least had to spend some time coming up with the inspirational slide deck to explain the meaning of the new logo! Now even that part has been automated :(

Reddit is more or less dead to me, as the popular subs are botfests and the niche subs are empty. I'm lucky to get a single reply on gaming subs.

The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.

I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.

They also now hide the number of subscribers. Before you could see if a subreddit was popular or not. Now you really don't know. I think reddit does this so they can promote stuff to the front page for clicks even if it isn't popular.

The problem is that it has become very popular to ban people from a sub based on what other subs they post to. It was turning Reddit into a two-party universe.

The better fix would be to make the support for multiple accounts in the reddit app not so incredibly-shitty, where you're basically logging out and logging back in. Instead, just tell it "posts to this sub use this account, posts to that sub use that account", etc.

That two-party universe thing comes from the issue of having to moderate, and moderation is ideological by nature.

I enabled hiding my posts because I kept getting harrassed and even doxxed.

There's also a third category where the sub looks organic because the moderator deletes and bans anyone who doesn't post exactly what the moderator wants.

Wait isn't that every sub? /s

Plenty of good subs they are just under the radar. Once something gets more than about 10k users the quality sinks.

This makes me paranoid to buy a new car at this point. I would have to keep every single oil filter receipt and take a video of the DIY oil change.