[sideway]

Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so.

It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.

I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

[browningstreet]

I’m a remote work from home employee who never ever works overtime.

I do use Claude code for my personal projects and ping at them from coffee shops and micro moments during my free time.

It’s possible to engineer your own life boundaries and not be a victim of every negative trend in existence.

[throwaw12]

You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted

[sanex]

This is always the reason I'm interested in this exact workflow. Want to build something but never have the time without sacrificing significant amounts of sleep but now it's easier than ever to get things building.

[browningstreet]

Exactly. My main interest in remote Claude Code is to maintain state continuity from all client hosts. I have a lot of laptops and mobile devices and I don’t want to manage my git and cloud connections for each. Setup and rebooting are pretty disruptive to short bursts of inspiration or iteration.

[stingraycharles]

Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.

[theshrike79]

I've literally thought about getting a small display for my desk setup that's always connected to my personal machine so that I can use the "micro moments" to direct agents working on my personal projects while the main setup is connected to my work computer.

[guybedo]

> white collar workers will be working 24/7

Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore.

Only white collars Claude agents.

[echelon]

Yeah, there's no way we have these careers in 30 years.

The best we can do is wrestle the control away from hyperscalers and get as much of this capability into the open as possible.

Stop using Anthropic products and start using weight available models. (I'm not talking ICs - I mean the entire startup / tech ecosystem.)

[actionfromafar]

Maybe you can recommend some of those models? I'm honestly bewildered - what is open and not?

[rashidae]

Trust yourself to be able to handle agents. Stop trying to be too safe, you’re paying the price with ignorance. Just use Claude Code with Opus 4.5.

[ryanjshaw]

I don’t think doing that will change anything. Only real options - without a career shift - that I’ve identified are to work for companies building something that’s never been built before, or building a SaaS that serves a niche.

[mocamoca]

How stopping using hyperscalers models on their infra would "get as much of this capability into the open as possible"?

Either "we" create models better than commercial state of the art (by using whatever means).

Or we use open models AND fund organisations building such models (could be by purchasing service from these orgs or donations - in which case would these orgs be different than hyperscalers?).

But i dont see how just hosting the models on some private servers would give us an edge?

[discordance]

Or, use the best tools to make the best products you can and stake your claim before all the low hanging fruit is picked

[lifetimerubyist]

Have fun trying to afford the necessary hardware to run open models acceptably. The big labs are trying to make sure we won’t be able to in short order.

[int_19h]

You still need humans to supervise them. Just a lot less.

[SirensOfTitan]

It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.

I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.

In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.

[nunobrito]

I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family.

With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better.

My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the transformation part is all about. We all here can write products in languages we never had contact with and completely outperform any average team of developers doing the same product.

Replaces the experts and domain specific topics? Not yet. Just observe that the large majority of products are boringly simple cases of API, UI and some business logic inside. For that situation, it has "killed" software.

[rhubarbtree]

What tool do you use, which languages? Could you give us an example of something you’ve built and how you did it 25 times faster?

[oblio]

You'd be surprised what you can do with Claude Code. Pick any mature programming language, including niche ones like Ada and treat the project seriously. Write detailed agent files, features spec files, start from the bottom with CI/CD and set up a test suite, coding guidelines, static analysis. Be careful to create a consistent architecture and code base early.

You'll get a lot further and faster than you'd expect.

Things will probably plateau as you master the new tech, but it's possible you'll not write a ton of code manually along the way.

Oh, your general software development experience should help with debugging the weird corner cases.

I imagine it's really hard to do this with 0 software dev experience, for example. Yeah, you'll build some simple things but you'll need and entire tech education to put anything complex in prod.

[nunobrito]

That is correct. I'm able to steer the project and find many of the issues because of experience. Also, it is indeed a new tool so is necessary to change our own mentality about the way how code is created (generated). In overall it is fantastic despite the occasional frustration when the computer hangs (too many compilers at the same time) or when AI gets lazy and tries to avoid implementing what it was asked.

[rhubarbtree]

Challenge accepted. I’m expert in Ada 95, I will see how it does.

[nunobrito]

Using Claude code Pro with a maxed subscription and ChatGPT Codex with the business subscription.

The code is written in Dart and never wrote a line of DART in my life, I'm a veteran expert around Java, C++. The reason for choosing DART is simply because it is way readier for multi-platform contexts than Java/C++. The same code base now runs on Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, Windows and Web (as static HTML). Plus the companion code in C++ for ESP32 microcontrollers. It also includes a CLI for running as linux server.

Don't ask me for a hard analysis and data proving x25 performance increase, what I know is that an off-grid product was previously taking me two years of research/effort to build in Android/Web and get a prototype running. Now in about a month went far above all previous expectations (cached maps with satellite imagery, bluetooth mesh, webRTC, whatever apps) and was able to release a product several times per day that works as envisioned. Iterating quickly and getting direct feedback from users.

The repository: https://github.com/geograms/geogram

Overview of the apps being written: https://github.com/geograms/geogram/tree/main/docs/apps

IMHO, Codex is far superior at the moment for complex tasks, Claude is cheaper and still good enough quality for most tasks. In addition to keep several terminals with tasks in parallel, this gives me time throughout the day for other tasks with family/friends and a lot of motivation like a coding-buddy to try different routes and quickly implement a prototype instead of always being alone doing this kind of work. For example, it added an offline GPT bot but wasn't what was needed so could quickly discard it too.

These tools get lost on API implementations and the documentation folder is mostly there to provide the right context when needed. I've learned to use simple markdown documents with things to keep in mind like "reusable.md" or "API.md" to make sure it won't reinvent them. Given my experience, there are parts that I'd implement with higher quality on my own, the trade-off is that I can't touch the code by myself now. One of the reasons is that it would make more difficult for these AI to work since my naming and file structure would make it difficult for the AI to work with, the other reason is because I don't want to waste a full day on a single problem like before. As the product grows more stable is when more attention is given to the finer details. On early stages, that type of quality is still more than good enough for me.

You can try the Android or Linux versions if you are so inclined. Never in my life would I ever be able to build so much in 5 weeks.

[FEELmyAGI]

Would you describe this product as a whole application suite (blogging, calendar, commerce) plus its own backend infrastructure that is capable of serving these apps to the public internet and functioning offline via ad-hoc wireless peer-to-peer, with a cryptographic layer providing identity, security and censorship resistance, and that runs on phone, laptop or raspberry pi?

Quite ambitious.

Is this an LLM hallucinating? taking a break from coding? or leaking your personal desktop session?

https://github.com/geograms/geogram/blob/main/.cli_history

[nunobrito]

> leaking your personal desktop session?

I've answered in more detail on the other reply below on the conversation. Thank you for spotting that.

> Would you describe this product as a whole application suite

The rabbit hole goes even further. The reason why callsigns are used is because geogram can happily communicate using radio-waves on walkie-talkies without internet at all. On the previous iterations (before AI) it was sending free SMS using walkie-talkies and satellites (APRS), this current incarnation should soon be doing the same things too. A presentation from two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb_VUSaNw8k

This is a niche app, written for our community in Portugal to connect with each other.

[NitpickLawyer]

> Is this an LLM hallucinating? taking a break from coding? or leaking your personal desktop session?

Ha! In any case, I'm happy to see I'm not the only one compulsively "ls-ing" all over the place in every terminal I open :)

[ccoreilly]

Would you say you’re able to draw a diagram of the application architecture out of your head or do you treat it as a black box? Do you need an AI to debug issues or not? In my experience with spec driven development, even if reviewing every single PR, it is hard to develop a mental model of the codebase structure unless you invest on it. It might be fine to treat it as a black box, not arguing the opposite but will all software be a black box in the future?

[nunobrito]

For a completely new project it is a high risk. While the AI is fantastic at brainstorming and writing detailed architecture, it is difficult to get the "big picture" and even more difficult to verify that it is being done correctly or which things can be improved/reused, because on this situation you don't look into the code.

I don't believe people will spend time looking at the code beyond the small blurbs they can read from the command line while talking with the AI, so I agree with you that it ends being treated as a blackbox.

Did an experiment for a server implementation in Java (my strong language), gave the usual instructions and built up the server. When I went to look into the code, it was a far smaller and more concise code base than what I would write myself. AI is treating programming language on the level of a compiler for javascript, it will make the instructions super efficient and uses techniques that on my 30 years experience I'm not able to pair-review because we tend to have our own patterns of programming while these tools use everything, no matter how exotic they will use it to their advantage.

After that experience I don't look at generated source code any longer. For me it is becoming the same as trying to look at compiled binary data.

[baq]

If you think the profession has enough time to organize reasonable unions, you’re an optimist. Pessimists are changing careers altogether as we speak.

Either way it’s been a fun ride.

[xyzzy123]

Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc.

Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.

[int_19h]

That's not an intrinsic part of being in a union, just a particular way they have been implemented in US.

The fundamental point of the union is to be able to negotiate as a group. That is valuable regardless of the industry.

[xyzzy123]

But what are you negotiating about? What do all tech workers have in common that wouldn't be better addressed with top level regulations like "right to disconnect"?

[bdangubic]

- maternity leave

- paternity leave

- overtime

- not having to answer a call or email outside of work hours

- workman’s comp / short/long-term disability for issues with my back or wrists or eyes or…

- about 100 more things

[SirensOfTitan]

Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.

I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:

LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).

The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.

For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.

... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.

In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.

[ctoth]

I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?

Consider "Uber, but for X"

This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.

I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???

Maybe something like (just spitballing)

The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?

Hmm

Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

[SirensOfTitan]

> Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.

A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.

> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.

I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

[lifetimerubyist]

If programmers think they can just learn a trade, they’ll bein for a rude awakening when Elon comes for their jobs next. Optimus will be doing your plumbing by the time you graduate from trade school and get your paper and internships.

[dzhiurgis]

Which suggests we should get into robotics. That was my conclusion too just yesterday while thinking about this.

[lifetimerubyist]

Somebody needs to be able to repair our new overlords until they can repair themselves.

[ryandrake]

Unfortunately, it's futile to try to convince the median HN poster that labor organization could help them. They've drunk the entire pitcher of corporate anti-union koolaid.

People could be directly in the middle of losing their own job or taking on the responsibilities of 5 other laid-off coworkers, and they would still ask "what could a labor union possibly do for me??"

[strange_quark]

Big tech laid off 150,000 people last year despite constantly beating wall st expectations and blowing more money than the Apollo program on a money losing technology with the stated goal of firing even more people. Totally insane that most people I talk to still don’t think they need a union.

[miki123211]

Two things:

1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.

Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?

2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.

Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.

[int_19h]

The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.

> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick

Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?

[orangecat]

The "world at large" mostly consists of workers, so things that are beneficial to workers are also beneficial to it.

When dockworker's unions are able to prevent port automation, is that beneficial to society?

[SirensOfTitan]

So do you believe that the gains from this technology will be broadly distributed? Or will capital capture the majority of those gains?

[wilg]

what technologies has "capital" captured the majority of gains from?

[squibonpig]

This would potentially be true for a lot of tech in the last five decades or so. When it gets cheaper to make the things people need and want without those needs and wants changing, you can get away with paying people a lower real wage for the same productivity. Couple that with the fact that the workers themselves also have typically grown more productive from the same tech, allowing companies to undercut competitors and capture more market share until everyone else catches on. I figure capital has benefited enormously from recent tech, very possible it captured the majority of the excess money produced.

[wilg]

name something so we can look into it and figure out if its true!

[oblio]

Small newspapers full of classified ads used to be available locally around the world, creating local employment. Google and Meta ravaged that and sucked the money out to a handful of shareholders and tens of thousands of highly paid tech workers. That's just one market.

[igleria]

> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization

Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.

unreal? nope, totally coherent and expected.

[lifetimerubyist]

The ownership class sure did a number on the white collar working class.

“I don’t need a union, I can negotiate my wages and working conditions just fine on my own”

[parpfish]

“I’m a special rockstar guru ninja 10x dev, being held to the standards of the normals will just hold me back from my true potential”

[tehjoker]

I wish I knew which union to pitch. All I can say is what I know which is if you are dispirited with this state of affairs a great way to figure out where to go with it is to connect with your local democratic socialists of america branch, or maybe the joint union dsa effort:

https://workerorganizing.org/

[dzhiurgis]

Yes, labour unions are immoral. Curtailing growth (especially in industries where it can prevent unnecessary death) for your personal needs is plain evil. I say that as someone who is both very stressed by pressure to sustain my family while cushy life is slipping away.

[xd1936]

Did they say the same when Email took over? Or Slack?

[majormajor]

Are you suggesting that workers are NOT already more constantly "on the clock" with mobile phones/email/slack/text than before those things?

(I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)

[kevmo314]

Well yes, they did... For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201917

[xd1936]

And yet it is still possible to maintain work-life balance, given the right job at the right business, even after the invention of email.

[miki123211]

Remember "Crackberry"?

[OGEnthusiast]

That sounds more like the fault of shitty managers who would find a way to make you work 24/7, with or without Claude Code "On-the-Go".

[ctoth]

One of these is immutable (shitty managers) one of these is new. I personally am all here for the brief human funtime before we all get paperclipped and whatever, been having a ton of fun with CC/Codex, been pushing my own startup forward... but ... You do see the issue here right?

It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.

[AstroBen]

The answer is boundaries

If I get emails outside of work hours and they're not urgent - I reply during work hours. This is no different

Burnt out workers are far less productive so win-win for everyone

[oooyay]

> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.

I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.

A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.

Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.

[ramoz]

The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.

[dzhiurgis]

More like you'll manage 20 agents and will be reading, reviewing and testing in between builds. Race to the bottom.

[UltraSane]

I was juggling lots of simultaneous agents when trying to use up the $250 free Claude Code Web credit Anthropic gave me and it was exhausting.

[vlod]

>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.

It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).

e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.

Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.

[0]: https://tenor.com/view/casino-oldpeople-oldpeopleonslots-slo...

[llmslave2]

There is evidence that LLM usage is actually making people dumber. I'm not sure if they've figured out the cause/effect or not but that's enough evidence for me to avoid them if I can. They can be useful for some stuff but I found myself offloading my thinking a little too frequently.

Anyways if we do get to the point where you need to use LLMs to write code, I can make a decision then, but for now I don't feel the need to adopt agentic workflows and I think the people who don't will be better cognitively positioned in the future.

[kevmo314]

The LLMs have successfully domesticated humans.

[lubujackson]

"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." - Winston Churchill

[atomic128]

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

[dandersch]

> Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.

Is this still accurate?

[embedding-shape]

Probably always be true, but also probably not effective in the wild. Researchers will train a version, see results are off, put guards against poisoned data, re-train and no damage been done to whatever they release.

[d-lisp]

How would they put guards against poisoned data ? How would they identify poisoned data if there are a lot/obfuscated ?

[HumblyTossed]

No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up?

But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)

[nunobrito]

Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours.

You'll likely get used to this new thing too.

[wilg]

Seems more likely that that won't happen

[lifetimerubyist]

You can just say no.

[anonzzzies]

In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years.

[sideway]

I'd love to believe that, but unless our timeline is disrupted (world war / climate change / regulation re: power generation and consumption), I unfortunately can't imagine a future different to the one I described - and I've tried!

[lifetimerubyist]

Join a union.

[anonzzzies]

Move somewhere with strong worker rights/laws even if you are not in a union. Here no with a normal job (not freelancers / contractors etc) is looking at their work phone/email outside 9-5/4-5 days a week; this frustrates US companies who merge/acquire companies here greatly but they cannot do much (firing for no cause is very expensive) except slowly move the operation to the US and wind down here, which is expected; everyone is already looking for new jobs as no one wants the 'performance reviews' with the broken records like 'you are not a teamplayer because your colleague was trying to reach you at 22:00 Friday night'.

[gloomyday]

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.

[dzhiurgis]

This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.

[jlengrand]

Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?

[sieep]

You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing.

[asciii]

An LLM send may send the work ticket or work order lol but i get your point

[gnatman]

Are there really that many “things to do” that anyone, let alone everyone, will need to work that way?

[22mhz]

This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it.

When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight).

You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles.

Best of luck to you.

[esafak]

The Chinese are not doing 996 as much these days. It is illegal for starters.

[bdangubic]

Chinese are way past 996 and onto 007

[catigula]

People need to start having conversations about existential risk here. Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in AI, thinks there's a decent chance AI executes the entire human species. This isn't some crank idea.

[blitz_skull]

[flagged]

[wiseowise]

Experience.

[clanky]

This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.

The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.

[ryanjshaw]

> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs

What alternative do you propose?

[throwaw12]

I would like to propose a cap on net worth.

Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.

People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)

[globular-toast]

So let's say we implemented this and the government suddenly receives billions of credits from wealthy individuals. Would anything actually change? Is this what's holding us back from repairing all the roads to a fine standard? From implementing universal basic income?

It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.

We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.

We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.

[GoatInGrey]

Instead of an arbitrary net number, why not a multiplier of the median? For example, capping at 300x the median citizen/household.

[andrew_lettuce]

This is so arbitrary and incredibly naive. How did you come to with 300M, why not 300k or 300 billion? How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time? And the government is going to "make billionaires whole again" if they crater their wealth?

[throwaw12]

You are asking me about implementation difficulty, difficult implementation doesn't mean idea is not worth it.

One example:

* 300k vs 300M - doesn't matter if I said 100M, 200M, 550M, if you think 300M is not enough for you and your family to afford anything, not sure how other people are surviving for even less.

Here is why I think this is good:

1. Ambitious people will still be ambitious, its rare some genius kid says: I know this is 100B idea, but I won't build it, because I will only own 1B of it.

2. Limits the power, when power is really limited, people will be forced to focus on different things. For example, if you had plans to take over the world by making $10T and creating an army to kidnap president of another state you don't like, then you would know, it is not possible to make 10T, its not only about how much, its about suppressing hungry animal in you by capping your limits.

3. There is a chance "bad" ambitious people, will be converted to real philanthropist, because they know it doesn't matter to own more than 1B anyway and they can't own it.

[jjice]

> You are asking me about implementation difficulty, difficult implementation doesn't mean idea is not worth it.

I can agree with that idea, to an extent. If something is near impossible (not saying this is), then it does become not worth it.

The other questions the parent posed are more interesting to me:

> How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time?

Another I wonder is that (ignore all specifics of the values, just the concepts matter here), let's say you own a private business that then becomes valued at 1.5 billion dollars and this individual has 20 million dollars liquid. How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights), and the 20 million liquid wouldn't come close to what this plan would value. What do we do then? Plenty of billionaires don't really have liquid cash and forcing liquidation of assents in such a way seems like it would be very difficult.

I'm all for more taxes on higher net worth individuals, but I think there's a lot of talk to be had on how one can implement this. It's going to be really difficult to find a way that makes sense.

[Fin_Code]

They would break ownership into trusts. The caps idea has forever been dumb.

[oceanplexian]

Doesn’t the US have an almost $2T deficit?

What do you think all that money you taxed from billionaires will do in the hands of the “government”, pay the bills for 12-24 months? Then what’s your plan after the government has spent it all? No amount of taxation can solve a spending problem.

[sejje]

Would SpaceX exist if your ideas were in charge?

[throwaw12]

it would.

Some options why it should happen:

1. Assuming Elon is curious person, he will still build it out of curiosity.

2. Assuming Elon is not curios person, just power hungry, he will probably think its not worth building it, but someone else who is curious will build it eventually. This is even better, because when power hungry person owns such thing, they might use it for bad things as well (e.g. to gain more power, eventually interfering with elections, oh wait, it did already happen)

3. Government will build, because government will have more money now, but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top. Assuming people won't have more than 1B, maybe there will be less lobbying? because its not worth as much as it was before?

[oceanplexian]

Is the reason NASA couldn’t build reusable rockets because they didn’t have enough money? Honest question?.

[nlitened]

> because government will have more money now

Ah, so your idea is the good old “only the emperor who controls the violence apparatus should have a lot of money and power”?

It’s not a very original idea, and it has been tried many times, and it failed many times.

> but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top

Right, so “for some reason only the greedy power hungry psychopaths get to the top in the current system — let’s fix it so that there can’t be many of them, only one government who has power to take away other people’s wealth and concentrate it immensely, surely we will figure out how to make sure it’s not filled with greedy power hungry psychopaths as we go”

[CalRobert]

Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.

Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.

[olmo23]

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

[euroderf]

A reference to France in May of 1968: "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible."

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti

[mlnj]

"I demand a purple unicorn build the things I want to."

Now what?

[indigo945]

Claude Code already is the purple unicorn. We're already there - the only problem is that regulatory systems are set up in a way that benefits a small minority of capitalists, rather than the majority.

[lm28469]

The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"

Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.

Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.

Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

Perceived success of 1950s and 1960s does apply to non-white people, women or countries destroyed by war.

[lm28469]

And it still mostly doesn't so it's not really a good argument. Meanwhile the share of women in the workforce more than doubled but households' purchasing power isn't even as high as back then when it comes to the basics like cars/energy/housing, if anything it's down quite a bit.

We should unite, not fight about who's whitest, XYZ gender or a minority, you'll always find someone who has it better or worse than you, what matter is the average is going down, while back then it was going up, the rest is mostly noise.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

It was going up because half the world was suffering results of war, of course untouched countries saw economic growth.

[tern]

It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.

This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.

But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.

The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.

[clanky]

"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."

[syndacks]

It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.

[clanky]

We should all hope so. It's clear that mass surveillance, the vast psyops architecture including social media platforms, autonomous drone warfare, Starlink & Neuralink, the whole Silicon Valley project in general is intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It's either social rupture or total oligarch victory in the class war and a 10,000-year Thielreich.

[lelanthran]

> s intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can).

It sounds like you have not read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

[clanky]

Yes, the real danger we face is that the sorts of special, gifted people who "seek tax advice" from Jeffrey Epstein might some day have all their brilliant, wondrous contributions to the world stymied by oppressive systems of control. Not sure what systems those would be, since they own and are building all the ones we can see around us today, but still: collectivism ooga booga!

[brid]

Do the owners of capital work less?

[clanky]

The numbers of hours that they work relative to the average wage laborer bears absolutely no relationship to whether they are the beneficiaries of an exploitative socio-economic arrangement. But they all certainly work much less than the laborers in the most precarious positions who are forced to work multiple gig economy jobs to make ends meet, yes.

[spir]

> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital

This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners.

A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities.

Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis.

No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.

[llmslave2]

This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.

[jaccola]

Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.

For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.

Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".

I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.

But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)

[risyachka]

>> only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable

the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation.

There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced.

Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it.

So if software goes down - everyone will go down.

[llmslave2]

> I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate.

What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less.

That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing.