Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
We're at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.
Inevitably, Anthropic will increase their subscription costs or further restrict usage limits. It feels like they're giving compute away for free at this point. So when the investor bux start to run dry, I will be ready.
This has to be satire, but oh my god.
My velocity has increased 10x and I'm shipping features like a cracked ninja now, which is great because my B2B SaaS is still in stealth mode.
Yeah it's satire, but effective satire means you can never really tell...
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called "I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)". Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:
If I lose my job due to AI, it will be because I used it so much it made me lazy and stupid to the point where another human has to replace me and I become unemployable.
I shouldn't invest time in AI. I should invest more time studying new things that interest me. That's probably the only way to keep doing this job and, you know, be safe.
Check out this sneer on the EA subreddit
"I’m employed, can someone explain what either of these mean?"
"i'm employed, what does it mean?" is common on r/shitposting when some obscure online/weeb thing surfaces. probably in a dozen of other places also
Im only on the normal parts of reddit, so had no idea.
This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for... checks notes... noting that Eliezer wasn't clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
You want my take, I expect this article's gonna blow a major hole in STEM's public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM's major selling points (especially compared to the "useless" art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
Quick update: I've checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM's expense. From the replies, I've found:
Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
Mockery of the long-running "learn to code" mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
Plus one user mocking STEM in general as "[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”" out of greed, and another approving of others' dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM's been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their "high-paying" reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM's ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
I hate the fact that now someone might look at me and surmise that I do something related to blockchain or AI, I feel almost like I need a sticker, like those "I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy" they put on Teslas
"I learnt to code before this stupid bubble"
stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of "capitalism make computer bad"
As an aging dev, we kind of do deserve some of this flak lol. Funny thing is, I went into SD because my first STEM degree made me as unemployable as a humanities major (a B.S. in physics is good for not much).
On one hand, this is another case of capitalism working as intended. You have the ruling class dangling the carrot of the promise of social mobility via job. Just gotta turn the crank of the orphan grinder for 4 years or so, until there's enough orphan paste to grease the next grinding machine. But it's ok, because your experience in crank will let you climb the ladder to the next, higher paying, higher prestige crank of the machine. Then one day, they decide to turn on the motor.
On the other hand? There is no other hand, they chopped it off because you didn't turn the crank fast enough when you had the chance.
To extend that analogy a bit, the dunkfest I noted suggests that a portion of the public views STEM as perfectly okay with the orphan grinder's existence at best, and proud of having orphan blood on their hands at worst.
As for the motorised orphan grinder you mention, it looks to me like the public viewed its construction as STEM voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party (with predictable consequences).
The whole joining of the fascist side by a lot of the higher ups of the tech world, combined with the long-standing debate bro both sides free speech libertarianism (but mostly for neonazis, payment services do go after sex work and lgbt content) also did not help the rep of STEM, even if those decisions are made by STEM curious people and not actually STEM people. billionaires want you to know they could have done physics - Angela Collier
you say STEM, but you seem to mean almost exclusively computer touchers, already mentioned biologists or variety of engineers won't likely have these problems (i'm not gonna be excessively smug about this because my field will destroy you physically while still being STEM and not particularly glorious)
also it's not a complete jobocalypse, there's still 93% employed fresh CS grads, they might have comparatively shittier jobs, but it's not a disaster (unless picture is actually much bleaker in that that unemployment is, say, concentrated in last 2 years of graduates, but still even in this case it's maybe 10%, 12% tops for the worst affected). unless you mean their unlimited libertarian flavoured greed coming through it, then yeah, it's pretty funny
even then, there's gonna be a funny rebound when these all genai companies implode, partially maybe not in top earner countries, but places like eastern europe or india will fill that openai-sized crater pretty handily, if that mythical outsourcing to ai happened in the first place, that is
Except biology isn't being hit as badly and that's also STEM. I wouldn't be surprised if other life sciences have also done better, at least until Trump started fucking with the grant system.
It's specifically computer-touchers who are in the toilet.
It'll be interesting to see if that holds up, with all the cuts to research funding taking place.
continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
You know stuff is bad if the margins aren't "low" or "razor-thin" but "very negative".
The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we'll make up for it in volume?
Forwarding this discussion to here:
News from r/philosophy: OOP, Richard Y Chappell, posted an article containing image slop, landing them a 3-day ban. OOP writes a new article that DESTROYS the r/philosophy moderation policy on AI generated content with FACTS and LOGIC. For added flavour, OOP is an EA. OP is an SSCer. Both are participants in the thread.
Guess either term hasn't started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.
FWIW I'd say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.
Forget being exposed to the elements to build character. People should be randomly temp banned and use that to build/judge character. (Also a good judge of the power balance in a community, if the mod team can temp ban a power poster that predates the mod team, say lesswrong giving Yud a timeout).
power poster that predates the mod team
Does Yud predate for food or sport?
he predates for iq points
every time i read what he writes i feel dumber from the contact
Fullsquares Basilisk. Either yud stops writing, or we commit to building a basilisk which forces 2^^^2 copies of fullsquare to read more Yud. And this does more damage than a dustspeck.
Sorry did I use the wrong word there? I sometimes mess up stuff like that due to not being a native speaker, and being bad at spelling/grammar in general.
No predate was fine. I was joking and using it as in “predator”
Ah now I get it. Lol, yes. Would be amusing of they banned Yud from lw/ssc events like they did to other predators. (and that is the bans we know of).
I'm reminded of the comedy/gaming stream that I watch that opens every episode with banning a random member of chat based on a spin of the wheel. It certainly lends the community a certain flavor, even if it is more "jingly keys" rather than "strong community."
Now im wondering, where the people of the stream itself also included, because that is what I mean. The people with the power shouldn't be excluded from the moderation or get special privileges. (See what Twitter did to protect Trumps account, and where we are now).
The on-camera duo are exempt for obvious reasons, but they've definitely hit at least one of their mods. Before The Wheel was implemented I seem to remember they even specifically targeted them sometimes for the joke.
Having one of the duo just step out would also be amusing. Esp if they full chaos and roll twice.
Not sure myself, but the mods are probably either excluded from being banned by The Wheel™, or unbanned immediately afterwards, just to keep things running smoothly.