A few things stand out:

The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye. The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms. The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage. A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency. The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable. The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans. Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it. Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning.

Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well.

But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.

http://www.battlestarlocations.com/locations-guide/the-minis...

I am embarrassed this “rationalist, I’m so much smarter than you, so I know better” asshole Scott Alexander hasn't been skewered yet for promotion of gambling (prediction markets) that people like Trumps son are making millions of on

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...

Anyone who says LLMs can't reproduce intelligence I mean really? can you make this? its not just a talking database guys or a stochastic parrot...

too bad Fable was nerfed/gatekept by the Trump corruption selection committee..but the technology will not be silenced.. we just need to get humans ready for this capabilities. the jury is out on the future of that.

Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong)

(ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program...)

but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, various models, tokens LLMs etc all work so a new abstraction is born..

layers changes, nerds and ultra-specialist nerds will remain

nostaliga is always for the last layer- the one you remembered from your teens and 20s.

Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy

God I cant believe I wrote that

Greed mixed with analytical thinking on industrial scale - graham, thiel, musk, hoffman, bezos, zuck all symptoms of “smart” people who screwed this country ultimately - all for what?

Has the changed world that resulted been for the better?

https://youtu.be/SpEO-jIKhE8?si=89Qw1_AOXYow9PfR

But ramjets have been promised to us for years

LLMs write working code, but have trouble following the script. They are slot machines of code. Human oversight is under pressure to deliver faster but code takes time to comprehend and analyze. Also in LLM coding, we end up with lots of natural language based spec files to manage and code we don't have an intuitive feel for unless we commit to the rigor of deep code review..(which no human really does anyway)

The author is this guy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biltahir/

Bilal is not a writer he is a developer and founder. he founded a two person startup to use AI to produce podcasts. He calls himself a 'Product Engineer' which just means he is using claude and AI to develop..

The article he wrote has all the hallmarks of a lot of AI hyperbole and style. The author has some education in economics but no indication of any writing ability. so who knows what his real writing style is. I too can generate a similar article with Claude in about 30 seconds. Does that need to be read on top of HN too?

e.g this use of AI of the word 'line' is sooo annoying: The "they just overhired during COVID and are self correcting" line was the dominant"

So this ai article about ai is out there.. its out there influencing us even though it is largely speculation, hype and AI-content. The site he has is all AI written (which I am not opposed to but Bilal never worked at Meta, he never spoke with anyone in senior leadership.. So this is an opinion piece driven by AI influencer..that reaches the top of HN

Ok so what about its content here is the points he made (who knows how many he really thought of or that Claude created)

1. AI layoffs structural, not cyclical—"measurers" (middle management, finance, legal) hit hardest Only producers/sellers and top leadership safe; the coordinating middle gets cut (WHO knows if this is correct?)

2. Founder-led firms cut first—board trust buys 12–24 month head start (Everyone is laying off, economy sucks, AI Cap expenditure and uncertianty..)

3. "10x engineer" becomes "1000x"; token data makes leverage brutally measurable (not right now..yes for quickly built MVPs hardly as fast -1000x is just hyperbole)

4. Inequality explodes—first trillionaire soon, many to follow (Pure speculation) 5. 2028 political backlash predicted: anti-elite, anti-AI populism, plus xenophobia (sure maybe)

5. Regulation may cost U.S. the race vs. China (hype driven influencer speil - AI is barely speeding up as fast as VC Bros are predicting)

I'm working with 3 other startups, but work is contract based, no healthcare and flaky..