Right, whats happening here is the first sales pitch to CEOs: "AI will let you fire everyone" is not panning out (duh)... so for the next trick, "AI will at least let you pay them less" is a natural pivot. Both are absurd. Just let the hypecycle die off in peace already.
We've seen this play out in history multiple times, already, so it's pretty ignorant to ignore the evidence.
Carpenters aren't being paid less because we have framing nailguns and pre-fabricated trusses. Instead their skillset had to evolve. In fact, smaller crews can do larger projects... which doesn't mean fire your crewmembers, it means a builder company can take on more projects in parallel, leading to bigger profits through volume.
"AI"s are useful tools. The skills in a post-AI world are different. Lower wages will be experienced by people that can't evolve, that's all.
AI is no longer the nail gun, that was auto complete with gpt 3.5. now it's like you say: "Build me a new roof" and an hour later it has materialized somehow. Not sure many carpenters would survive this.
Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system
I think the environment and landscape will change and different skills will be more valuable for developers
But I think the existing skill-sets developers use can mostly be automated away
If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.
> Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system
You are describing a templating system. It's useful to create projects from scratch, but that's not what software engineers do 99% of the time.
What software engineers do 99% of the time is modifying existing services to adapt to changing requirements that more often than not are grossly unspecified.
Also, a key part of a software engineer's work is serve as a point of contact with non software engineers to discuss what services do and plan work.
> If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.
I don't think this assumption holds water. At most your efficiency improved as short contracts to patch random customer projects now can meet the definition of done (maintenance be damned) in shorter iterations.
However, ironically we are also seeing the occurrence of consultancy firms specialized in providing software engineering services as contract engineers that are explicitly marketed as solutions to problems introduced by vibe-coding.
At this point I don't understand why to use a JVM language with anything but Java. Java is a "good enough" language now and is still the premier ecosystem driver, getting all of the big-budget upgrades and attention -- but it's still a PITA, mainly because of the terrible tooling surrounding deploying an app with the JVM. My point is, the JVM is both the best and the worst thing about Java, so if you're clojure (cough common lisps) or scala (cough OCAML/Haskell) it seems like you're making life hard for no reason -- there are at least equivalent if not better alternatives that can actually compile to a deployable binary.
No. You are beyond wrong. Personal firearm ownership is a constitutionally protected right, just as protection from unreasonable search (as this was). Arming oneself when someone breaks into your house is beyond reasonable. Police should expect residents to be armed and shouldn't be breaking into residences.
Nobody is calling your facts wrong. They are criticizing your post. You wrote as if criticizing the victim for their decision to pull a gun. If you did not mean to do that, you should simply state that. If you did mean to do that, then you are ignoring what people are saying in favor of pretending they are denying the simple facts of your post. You are being evasive in both cases - whichever it is.
Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country? Why did local cops respond to an active shooting call? Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team? Why did the victim have a gun?
>Why are there so many guns in this God-forsaken country?
Surplus arms after World War 2 led to the creation of the gun industry in the US, and thanks to the Second Amendment and the power of the gun lobby, its relationship with the Republican Party, and decades of popular media making them cool, that's a guaranteed untouchable industry.
> Why did they enter the house, instead of waiting for a specially trained team?
What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team. They're specially trained to break down doors and shoot people.
Americans get the policing they vote for, and they consistently vote for tacticool cowboys with Punisher tattoos and against... anything less than more of that.
There is probably a relationship between this and the first question.
>Why did the victim have a gun?
Self defense, presumably, as is his Constitutional right.
> What "specially trained team?" That was the specially trained team.
Weren’t they some local cops? In my country there is a handful of police teams specialised in hostage situations and the like. In case of an "active shooting", local cops would typically establish a perimeter until these guys come and handle the situation (without deaths if possible, although they are sharp shooters).
Solutions are simple and we keep making this hard:
1. Stop raising minimum wage. It doesn't do what you think it does. And if hang around any politicians' backoffices anyway, you realize the only reason this is ever raised is to manipulate voter turnout. Not difficult, just difficult to explain since it deals with second and third order consequences.
2. Do not let employers include tips as part of meeting minimum wage law. If minimum wage is $8/hr, then employers must pay $8/hr. Wages are paid by employers. Tips are not paid by employers. Also not difficult.
3. No Taxes on tips, anywhere. These aren't wages, and are not subject to wage or payroll taxes. Also, not difficult.
And lastly, tips before services rendered are stupid. Everyone knows it and is confused by it. It's something that needs to go away, but that isn't something that should be regulated into existence.
I agree with 2 and 3. Tipping should not be a mandatory part of someone making a living.
Regarding 1: How does society guarantee a worker gets sufficient compensation for their work, and receives enough money to live in the area where they work in order to afford housing and food and healthcare?
We see trillion dollar companies paying their workers minimum wage, and scheduling workers below full time to avoid providing them benefits. We subsidize Walmart when their workers need food stamps to survive. Without a minimum wage it would be even worse.
1) (Neutral) I'd need to see more evidence of that.
2) (Unambiguously yes) If your business does not make financial sense without tips, then it isn't a business. There are many businesses that can't currently compete with businesses' that tip, see next point.
3) (Modestly disagree) I would support a 50% tax on tips in general. It should be something that only the wealthy do as a flex, not something that we are normalizing among 95% of the population.
If it has a flashlight and is beyond waterproof, I would maybe consider it.
My Garmin Epix watch is practically bullet proof. I've dove with it in open ocean. I've jet skied with it. I rock climb with it. It's surived 108miles of Unbound (the race) in mud, sun, sweat. I've water rafted with it. I've swam in crappy lakes, streams and jumped off cliffs. Hottubs? also no problem.
Zero chance a iWatch would ever survive these conditions.
Oh and despite all of this, the screen has not scratched, not even a little. Plus it has 5-10 days of battery life... and did I mention I always have a flashlight on me?
I also don't see why an Apple Watch wouldn't survive all those mentioned things. Pretty sure I did all those things with an Apple Watch on, except for the specific 108 mile gravel race. But I don't see why it would fail that.
And both might absolutely scratch while climbing, and if you're unlucky and hit it in the wrong spot, also crack.
That said, if I were an athlete in any of those categories and did it all the time, I'd still absolutely choose a Garmin.
They are, they still scratch though (just google e.g. Fenix 7 Sapphire scratches). It's also not on all models. I guess part of it is also just layers on top of it scratching and not the sapphire itself.
But, Apple Watch Ultras and also Titanium models since Series 6? ship with Sapphire crystal too.
Until I got to the Forerunner 965, my Garmins would easily scratch. I have an Instinct with such a deep gash I cannot see the top 1/4 of the display. The 965 display is wonderful but I still have a couple minor nicks.
I disagree with 100% of everything said in this article.
> My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)....
This is why open weights win. See Linux and how it's taken over the world. Your business model will need to change eventually. Instead you're advocating trying to exterminate competition via regulation and fear mongering.
> My secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks
Yawn... this is getting old.
> We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
For as someone as smart as you guys, you sure lack common sense. China is just going to develop these technologies organically then and you lose 100% of control. It's already happened in reverse with things like Solar, rare earth minerals, etc. China flooded our market, destroyed our ability to produce things, now holds the keys. One thing they DIDNT do was stop trading to the US. They killed us with cheap goods.
> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.
Thats your problem, not my problem. Also, irony meter here hitting 11 about all those pirated books you stole...
> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing
Oh, fuck, no. This is a crackdown on free speech and rights of people to do whatever they want. My right to free speech means I'm allowed to write whatever computer program I want, no matter what its size is or how "sufficiently advanced" it is. Individual rights always win.
I really hope people don't believe this garbage. For a company with a great product, this is absolute nonsense.
Prior to the weaving loom and sewing machines, a factory might be able to make like 20 t-shirts a day with 50 workers. After mass production, factories generally employ the same amount of workers, but people aren't hand-sewing things. Instead roughly 50 people are producing thousands of tshirts a day leveraging giant machines.
Most of HN recognized the "We're firing people because AI makes people efficient" as one of the stupidest sales pitches ever and the CEOs that fell for it are just poorly ran companies that outed themselves.
AI is just another cycle in technology that is genuinely useful. The companies that are going to jump the gap are those that are hiring to use this new skill. If 10 workers pre-AI yields you 10x, and post AI yields you 100x, you don't cut down to 1 worker so you can keep delivering 10x. You invest, ruthlessly train, hire, and surge forward and leave your competition in the dust.
If there was 100x on the table for you, why weren't you already at 100x scale just with more headcount? That is the other side of this coin. Demand is a factor. Productivity goes up? Great, if there is demand to satiate that you can meet. I doubt that is the case otherwise you'd already have scaled to meet it if it were actually on the table for the taking if only you could output more volume.
Maybe not a linear relationship, but there is a relationship, which begets the question: If the market had available space with which for you to scale from 10x-100x, why aren't you or competitors already taking advantage? The answer is that there is no free 100x scaling on the table in all likelihood. If everyone's business had 100x in front of them thanks to AI we'd need the demand of an earth of 800 billion people on it to generate that.
The sewing machine analogy is a good one. The problem I'm seeing is leadership who sees the t-shirt company succeed with sewing machines, so goes out, buys 100 sewing machines, then puts them in the kitchen because they are a bakery and gets confused why the bread production isn't improving.
Because AI can do some things. Not everything. Applying it to the wrong problem reduces productivity.
"factories generally employ the same amount of workers"
Not really. The stats should show that factory workers as a percent of the workforce has been declining.
Thw leadership at my company has said they plan to do more with the same people rather than lay off. But they also seem to have reduced hiring and are removing certain types of roles.
Agreed. When tools evolve significantly the old production process has to be reworked into a new process and that takes time. In complex production lines that will include changes to subcontracting, supply chains, and even finance models. The changes arising in software production today will take years to stabilize into a new normal, even longer if the tools continue to advance in capability as LLMs are doing. And many software-dependent companies will fail in that time for moving either too fast, too slow, or most likely, too short-sightedly.
looked around, actually love the idea of basing this on CDI instead of bloated Spring Boot.
How are transactions handled? Often I need to "do all of these things, or do none of these things" and often that includes sending emails or JMS Messages
Helidon has its own transaction manager, but the real issue here is that EclipseStore does not support transaction management out the box. Java objects are modified in memory, but stored with an explicit store() call. So in your transaction rollback you just need to reload the original data from the storage using the EclipseStore Reloader, and overwrite the dirty copy in memory. You have to track yourself which Java objects may have been changed.
I am looking into supporting LocalTransactions natively and its actually quite easy, so that might drop soon.
Also working on a full database based on eclipsestore called ZeroZ DB (zeroz4j-db). I might switch the web app development framework to use that, and that will give multi JVM capabilities and also txns out the box.
The vast majority of federal bike lane funds are misappropriated. For instance, in my local city, speaking directly with a planner, they wanted to install parking meters as a tax raising effort. They couldn't afford it, so on the random streets they wanted parking meters on, they got federal grants to "add bike lanes" and so now there's this random set of block-long bike lanes that helped pay for the changes needed to install parking meters.
In other cases, the city wanted to direct traffic somewhere else, so they installed block-long bike lanes as a traffic calming measure. No actual plan to make these useful or studies done on effective placement, just purely to reduce car volume.
What you're left with is a patchwork of non-sensical bike lines that don't really get you anywhere, subsidized for by federal funds, used against the spirit of what they should be doing: making bike commutes practical.
From my layperson perspective that sounds relatively easy to address. For example they could require some minimum distance of continuous bike lanes to get approved for funding.
Decades of this sorts of "aha I know what rule change will fix this" are exactly how we got here though. They all look reasonable in isolation but at the systemic level we get garbage.
Yeah, I consider the bike lanes around here basically completely useless. You can't actually get much of anywhere. And there are too many drivers who harass bikes. We just saw that recently with the boxer who got killed that way.
There's no thought of anything but cars, last spring at least there was a construction spot where they set up some barriers that force a pedestrian into a 35 mph traffic lane (decelerating from 55, so a lot of drivers are going faster than 35.) And while pedestrians at that spot would be extremely rare (there's nothing beyond it--the only pedestrians would be those who were actually seeking nothing. Namely, hikers) there is a decent amount of bike traffic there.
This has been going on forever. Bike lanes are just the current vehicle (heh) for financial waste.
We've got a giant 8-lane intersection on a 2-lane road in the middle of nowhere because 50% off that monstrosity because of fedgrant bucks was cheaper than just DIYing it 100% out of pocket.
We've seen this play out in history multiple times, already, so it's pretty ignorant to ignore the evidence.
Carpenters aren't being paid less because we have framing nailguns and pre-fabricated trusses. Instead their skillset had to evolve. In fact, smaller crews can do larger projects... which doesn't mean fire your crewmembers, it means a builder company can take on more projects in parallel, leading to bigger profits through volume.
"AI"s are useful tools. The skills in a post-AI world are different. Lower wages will be experienced by people that can't evolve, that's all.
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