what does an 100% automated economy look like?

"The transmission in your car: Using It Well Takes Skill."

Further, Claiming AI is a tool is overly reductive. It's as much a tool as a full self driving car is a car.

You can treat the full self driving car, as a car, driving it with full attention and effort like you would have a Camry but then you paid for features you're not using. Also, some full self driving cars might not even have the steering and braking controls as a Camry. That's not the point of a full self driving car and this warped perspective will make you lose out to people who use a full self driving car well, to its utmost, safe capability.

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So what is the "AI" we are so excited about currently?

That "AI" is most likely an intelligent (semi-autonomous?) agent.

Depending on the intelligence, it can be as useful as a dog, scanning your camera feed for threats and identifying real threats for you, separating activity from tree leaves moving due to the wind or a moving shadow cast by a flying bird.

Or it can be your co-founder, interviewing potential customers, finding and exploring their pain-points, helping you figure out if there's a gap in the market you can build a business around.

I would go even far as to say, AI is having such a moment because AI are cheap intelligent agents - anything else that's remotely close are likely humans that cost atleast a few dollars an hour.

All of these require skill on your part - there's nothing special or unique about AI that makes skill special just like operating the transmission in your car requires skill.

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Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269

In the age of ~AI~ SI, "expensive" is a state of mind.

I'm surprised about the lack of Elon's approval on the site. Maybe because it's spanking new and he's just too busy running 20 companies at the same time?

I showed OpenFatigue to my manager who has an MBA from Harvard. She fed the website into Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok immediately before the last of the letter "e" could even leave by mouth. The three bots concured: This is a game changer - the ultimate solution we have been waiting for. The missing link.

Three bots concurring isn't a mistake, it's a guarantee. Human review is suboptimal at that level of agreement. The probability that all three bots were making the same mistake was astronomically low.

In a flash of inspiration, she then asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok to write quick, precise emails in a technical format and Slack, Teams messages to blast to her superiors to bring this crucial discovery to their immediate attention. Within a minute of those messages, their agents responded, concurring that yes, indeed, this was worth paying attention to. Worth setting up an in person meeting in the big meeting room reserved for tactical management brainstorming sessions.

Within five minutes, the Big Tactical meeting room was reserved, swamped with all the high-level executives typing furiously into their keyboards, to their AI agents, asking for what they should do next, how to react and integrate this fascinating discovery into the company's ~AI~ SI fuelled workflows.

I eavesdropped, hoping to pass off as an IT technician dropping by to ensure the ~AI~ SI powered cameras were at peak performance, worthy of the meeting of minds about to take place.

My manager looked at me and I froze. She might blow my cover - after all, I had been her direct report for 3 years now, ever since she joined the company fresh off her MBA to manage all the software engineers. 5 years ago, my employer used to hire 1 maanger with an MBA per 10 engineers. In the age of ~AI~ SI though, all you need is 1 ~AI~ SI powered manager with an MBA to manage 100 engineers. Her GrokBot creates 150 tickets on JIRA a day, every workday and another GrokBot personally follows up on every engineer to figure out why didn't they close atleast 10 tickets. Are there blockers?

She asked me if she knew me, and I said unlikely, because I just had an MBA from University of Phoenix. She smirked dismissively, and asked me to be the scribe for the meeting in case the ~AI~ SI agent hallucinated again. I nodded. I couldn't risk her bot opening another JIRA ticket and asking for my name to put as the assignee. There couldn't be an audit trail documenting my transgressions.

The first slide was whether to reallocate token spend from all the engineers to OpenFatigue instead. My heart stopped ...

LLMs can make building and implementing DDD quicker but it will make understanding even more complex.

IMHO, the best place for DDD is a big ball of mud that works but an absolute pain to deal with - refactoring that using DDD is the right place for it. You have both a business and software that "works" - the software now needs improvement. As opposed to a person or team beginning with DDD from scratch because it's "better for the long run".

Yes, a person or team who understands DDD well will have an edge in the age of AI but technical competency at a company is rarely the reason for its success (or failure) in the first place - it's just a lever.

If so, then what's going to happen to the future of open floor plan offices?

Are NC headphones and Stenomasks the future?

They will now become part of the corporate issued and mandated equipment at open floor plan offices?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055699

Points: 4

# Comments: 8

Why don't you use an AI agent to code up an app for your phone that does this and more? If a phone is too heavy or bulky, what about an ESP32?

Any insight into why would be much appreciated because those insights might hold the key to whether this is a usable, sustainable idea to begin with.

What are the various ways Pensieve is superior to iterative grep? Is it just better "semantic" search instead of literal "grep"?

Cache invalidation is hard - how does Pensieve address it?

Your site says "Pensieve watches your folders, repos and agent sessions and re-indexes what changed. Uncommitted edits count, and every worktree is tracked by branch, so your agents never work from stale context." but you don't define what "stale context" is - if I'm exploring 3 different implmentations of the same concept across 3 different branches, which one is the "stale context"?

Could you take a few minutes to explain the what and the how? Links to writeup to blog posts or files in your repo would be very helpful.

Finally, can I use Pensieve with Paseo? What if I wanted to expose Pensieve's capability to my Paseo setup?

If the point you're making is that solving complicated, synthetic programming challenges helped built your stamina and mental endurance, is there another way you could have built the same but in a much more productive and pleasurable manner?

Perhaps in a manner that would also have resulted in the improvement of your community or humanity as a whole instead of being the millionth person to "solve" the same exact problem?

That's why Kubernetes has gained a lot of traction, not because 99% of companies need the scalability of Kubernetes, but it is a well understood concept, suite of services, and the vocabulary is very common now and well understood.

Nomad is a great fit for most compared to Kubernetes but failed to gain adoption because of these reasons.

That "HashiCorp" in the title is a farce. The "Hashi" of the HashiCorp is far gone. IBM and "Corp" are redundant.

Community Editions don't make sense to the MBAs at IBM unless killing those off would create a global backlash (loss of goodwill for no positive revenue outcome is not good to an MBA. If loss of goodwill however, results in positive revenue, that's a good thing to an MBA. This is a well regarded, well studied and highly respected, revenue boosting MBA concept called "enshittification"). MBAs know that anything that doesn't directly translate into either viral growth or revenue next quarter is a waste of investor dollars. That makes anything else a risk to their own careers.

Boundary is past its viral growth stage, so the MBA needs to see revenue next quarter. Boundary fails the test there, so off with it!

HashiCorp was an innovative company founded by two engineers that built a lot of foundational, transformational infra products. Then, in a growth frenzy based off the traction of these tools they raised tremendous, vast sums of money and subsequently ~lost control of their vision~ hired MBAs, and the company went down the drain as well, or as MBAs call it - got acquired.

What remains of those tools are a BSL that focuses on maintenance operations and feature requests that strictly ride along a highly scrutinized cost-benefit decision matrix of rent seeking behavior off IBM's contracts with organizations that had already embraced those tools.

Billions of tokens have been burned in creating PPTs and Excel sheets, and emails discussing them, about why the Boundary Community Edition should be archived and abandoned.

Infisical was really amazing. It did precisely what I needed and any missing pieces would go in as a PR that would be quickly reviewed and merged. Then came talk about raising more funds, signing up more enterprise customers. Then came refactors to "improve the architecture" and "increase security". All the core pieces I depended on were moved behind an enterprise license.

Want Infisical to support Forgejo logins or runners via keys minted by step-ca? Enterprise license. Special secret cubbys or enclaves? Enterprise license.

Anything outside a toy usecase for a home user - Enterprise license.

A year ago I spent ~3 focused weeks ripping out every piece of Infisical in my infra and replacing it with a mix of Keycloak, Conjur and Age/SOPS. They are ugly, hard to work with, setup and debug - I'm not proud of this monster but I won't have to deal with what's going to happen to Infisical.

Infisical has every right to do this, I'm not complaining about that. I'm simply mentioning that we have seen this movie before, including the company in the title, so at this point, the tells are clear.

They restored access after about 4 hours, but during that window:

- Google Voice disappeared from Takeout, so I could not access my historical data

- I had no option to port my number to another provider

- Incoming text forwarding was disabled, which locked me out of financial, municipal, health, and payroll apps.

When I called some of those providers to update my phone number, they wanted to authenticate me with a one-time code sent to the suspended Google Voice number! They would not accept an email link and the only options were to either visit them in person or by certified letter.

I have been using this number since GrandCentral, before it migrated to Google Voice, and had never had an issue until yesterday.

The suspension was eventually reversed once the error was discovered, but it exposed a serious planning and design failure in Voice. Even if Google believes it needs to block outgoing activity during an abuse investigation, incoming texts should remain available. Removing Takeout access and preventing port-out during a mistaken suspension seems hard to justify.

This doesn't seem to be a one off - I stumbled across https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/ and found that this has been an ongoing issue - I hope atleast one person here can affect some positive changes.

I'm also lucky I wasn't in middle of an emergency myself requiring phone calls during that time - that could have had far more disastrous consequences.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648426

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I wouldn't make that claim - it's about the mindset. I've seen plenty of privately owned companies where the owners heavily churn through employees extracting as much as they can from each person and spitting them out.

Their attitude is "I can't pay at or above market, so this employee will eventually leave, so why should I invest in this employee? Let me extract as much as I can while they are here"

What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to recent downmarket conditions, there were slightly less competent candidates available at a heavy discount. These top performing coworkers worked extremely hard, were great at their jobs and often sacrificed personally when the company needed them but they were good negotiators as well and had negotiated good, above market salaries.

Once the project took off, the owners fired them and replaced them with cheaper workers who weren't as good but good enough to maintain and update the product.

It feels to me like the owners gave these people an impression that they would be long term employees, where their short term sacrifices would pay off long term, but effectively used them as flat rate contractors while paying them employee rates (instead of contractor rates).

I wish there was a way to detect such owners.

Explain more. Also, ensure you're not conflating "calm companies" with "cheap companies" where the owners are focused on spending as little money as possible, including paying people as little money as possible and claim they spend so little in order to "spend responsibly" - those places are depressing and I am curious if there's a way to detect "calm companies" from "cheap companies"

As a candidate, how do you separate this kind of company from one where the owners are cheap and want to pay you as less as possible?

There are a lot of companies that advertise terrific WLB, pictures of their employees and their families laughing only to find out none of those employees work there any longer and the pictures were taken on their once-every-10-years retreat at a cheap hotel in MO or WY.

Makes sense

> If you were smart you'd have seen that a foreign market for X would have opened up draining out all funding in the US and leaving that portion of the job market hollow

Makes sense

> If you were smart you'd have seen that bill that allowed X thousand more people in the country in this job dropping pay rates by half

Makes sense

> And I'm sure you are smart for having been born in a family that was somewhere near middle class and didn't have crippingling addictions or otherwise have issues that would put education somewhere not number 1 on the priority list. I'll clap my hands at how brilliant you are...

Doesn't make sense and then there's unhelpful sarcasm at the end

> But, what we're talking about here is those not born with all these gifts can lift themselves out of a pit of debt or worse a life that would lead to crime, so that all of us live in a better place. You have any suggestions on that. Or are you just going to lock yourself up in a gated community and not worry about that kind of thing?

Providing direct value to society and getting rewarded for doing so has been an evergreen suggestion that has always worked well.

This works well for the Chinese immigrant with literally no money and no grasp of English who starts off selling takeout and grows the business, as it does to the person who starts driving taxi cabs, again, with no money to start off at all and then saves some to lease their first taxi and hire their first employee and then the second taxi and then the second employee.

A morally just society should reward, not punish these people. We need to have more, not less of them and that happens my incentivizing the right behaviors and disincentivizing the wrong behaviors.

It's all about the mindset and taking responsibility for your own future. You can complain and blame your fate or you can give it the middle finger and grow.

But, what are some suggestions you have to lift people out of a pit of debt or crime?