Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.
I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.
I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.
It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops
I'm torn because i genuinely think LLMs absolutely completely suck ass at 99.99% of tasks, i think AI "art" is disgusting, it sucks balls at writing, it sucks at documentation, it sucks at summarizing, it sucks at research, i would never in a million years trust current AI to tell me what medication is safe or how long food is safe to eat or any of that.
However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen.
Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture
That literally has nothing to do with the pied-a-terre tax. The assessment process is not related to taxing second homes. Each can be done with or without the other.
I thought US citizens are taxed on income (but not capital gains) even when outside the US? I had friends who had to file US income tax returns while living overseas
US citizens regardless of their residency are responsible to pay taxes on all global income and assets. Thus, if you live in the US, but have a brokerage account in Bermuda or Hongkong (where there are no local capital gains taxes) you are still required to pay US federal taxes on capital gains from your overseas brokerage account. The same would be true if you lived in Bermuda or Hongkong.
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
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