It's just harder to get the average joe charged up to fight a battle with anything meaningful on the line. Americans are used to living relatively cushy lives where they don't sacrifice their QOL to make the lives of their countrymen better. The closest thing to that are people in the military, and it's probably been a while since the US military is improving QOL, on average.
People will continue to be complacent on multiple fronts until it absolutely comes to a violent boil. I don't really see half measures or peaceful protests changing anything. And maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think the upcoming elections will either not change enough or be strongly manipulated to maintain the status quo.
>harder to get the average joe charged up to fight a battle with anything meaningful on the line
Doesn't this imply that on average people just don't care? So, school shooting preventions are just way down in the list of "things I care about", when you have "cushy lives where nobody wants to sacrifice their QOL".
It means they don't care enough to meaningfully make sacrifices for change. To deal with school shootings is to change the constitution. The American constitution is basically wired for school shootings. To change the constitution is basically a civil war.
Things aren't binary. Many people care deeply about school shootings. But they don't have the means or power to organize to stop them and, individually, they are powerless.
They’re not binary, but when an issue persists for decades, over the course of multiple administrations, and political landscape… it shows either the country is incompetent in terms of solving an issue, or the issue is not a priority.
I wholeheartedly believe US can solve issues when it’s an important one. And thus, I think, for an average American it’s not an issue.
Decades is a very long timeframe. Countries have achieved more in shorter periods.
My post was not disrespectful. It was matter of fact. And if the Petro Dollar only persists by use of force or perceived force, it's probably not a sustainable system for humanity. So hopefully we can go back to a soft power maintained Petro Dollar?
It'll be a similar theme for all facets of work involving any language, slowly - human or code. We'll parrot about humans in the loop this and that, but I think it'll be less humans in the loop over time and I think most people will even be willing to settle for a slightly more mediocre translation or coded project. It all comes back to our dopamine addiction, where we like fast feedback. And the oligarchs like tools to suppress wages. We will be our own demise for not advocating for either UBI or job protections, instead, happily using the technology while also rolling our eyes that it could never replace us.
I understand this perspective. I'll just note that as the abilities increase, the intent is to have some non -coding IC or TPM/manager literally just managing some LLMs and cutting out some software engineers. The goodness is specifically to wholly replace people who code first and foremost, at least partially. It just has to cost less tokens than the equivalent wage is the pricing goal.
And people who use LLMs to talk for them (e.g. email, slack) are deplorable. A completely disrespectful use case in my view.
The desire to get rid of software engineers is bizarre - because at the root of it, developers were there not to just write the code, but to ask right questions and based on these question build right things.
I've met in my professional life some managers or other middlemen who would be profoundly incapable of producing correct software no matter how smart of an AI agent they have access to. One of those - you don't know what you don't know.
But, I guess this is the world we live in now. Going to be Mortal Kombat for positions in companies where software engineers are actually valued.
It depends a lot where you work because there are lots of companies in the world where the business analyst does all of that and the developers exist to mindlessly translate their docs into code.
That sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.
Having worked in places across both extremes (software engineer doing lots of other things including BD, hardware, ops, etc. to just being a JIRA ticket machine monkey), I am suspicious that HN readership is biased towards the former and frankly the bulk of "software engineers" in the world _willingly_ exist in the latter category. I didn't experience the latter until later in my career and God Almighty was it uncomfortable, but I think if AI were to displace some subset of "software engineers" it would those (they also seem to overwhelmingly dislike writing any prose whatsoever, which to me is a major tell). Many, many software engineers outside of hotshot shops seem either incapable or profoundly averse to "asking the questions" as you say.
Most here on HN know sweatshops exists but seemed they think not people work there or use them. I have worked with (via clients who used them) programmers in enormous buildings in Bangalore, who have a camera behind them so you can watch your people 247 and who just mindlessly transform jira tickets into code; I keep saying; there is zero use for all those millions of people at all; seems HN does not believe that because they seem to not believe these people exist. I worked with many over the past 30 years and by far most have no real clue what they are doing so I also doubt they can be re educated for a new co existence with LLMs.
It certainly feels like we need a reset on the expectations placed upon politicians at all levels of governance. Somehow.
I think politicians have completely lost the plot in their job and who they represent. Instead, they seem all ideologically or financially motivated, and largely seem to get their marching orders from select wealthy CEOs. It's a very bad look that will get worse since trust in govern being so low goes hand in hand with voted apathy. And voted apathy means we get more of the same.
It's a bad cycle and I think we'll land on a civil esque war sooner or later.
Society's elites have forgotten that civil institutions exist to be an alternative to resolving disputes through violence. If they completely bend those institutions to their will and leave the common people out in the cold, the result isn't acquiescence, it's revolt.
I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.
Shouldn't this revolution be planned for sooner than later. I mean, after the billionaires have robot armies..
I always assumed that this was the end goal of the AI. It's not for normal people, it's for the super wealthy to magnify their power, both economically and physically.
Just this morning, someone told me SpaceX valuation proponents couldn't possibly be more obtuse; yet, this thread has blown through those expectations.
You'll be surprised how not total economic collapse it is. Population will become poor, but it only good for the strong leader since they wont have time to bother about all this politics stuff.
And country can still run like that for decades. Also get rids you from all the debt since you can easily just pay it all by printing more money.
> It's quite nice that the ipad mini does not have whatsapp or SMS plugged into it, so I can use it exclusively for reading books or playing music.
Both a phone and a tablet can come with WhatsApp, it's a user choice whether they are there and the frequency of checking them. Global muting the apps is also an option.
I understand your point, but it is a point mitigated by user intervention. Now, if we want to say reading on a bigger screen than a phone is a better user experience, I'm on board with that.
People will continue to be complacent on multiple fronts until it absolutely comes to a violent boil. I don't really see half measures or peaceful protests changing anything. And maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think the upcoming elections will either not change enough or be strongly manipulated to maintain the status quo.
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