They used to be full of geeks building cool stuff and people would genuinely be interested in what you were doing. I made a lot of friends back in the day from those tech meetups.

What you're describing here is exactly why I dislike and avoid meetups today.

There was a shift somewhere in the 2010s where it started to become harder and harder to find good tech meetups and instead they all seemed to morph in some combination of a networking event, people trying to pitch the startup they were working on, or people just trying to practice public speaking.

The tech scene today isn't really a place for people interested in tech. It's a scene for people who want to be the next tech billionaire or want to build a following as a public speaker for their career.

And that's fine. I just personally have no interest in networking with these types of people.

I'd also note that the utility of the networking benefits of meetups today is close to non-existent due to the types of people who attend them. You're better off building professional working relationships with people imo.

I think I disagree with you on this, but I think what you've said is a perfectly valid opinion and appreciate your response. I'm sorry that it appears someone has downvoted you for disagreeing. This seems to be a new trend on HN and I wish people would stop doing it.

I do wonder if AI advancements will allow me to see these horrors play out. Hopefully not to myself.

https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cru...

I've been actively prepping for very bad economic and political scenarios, plus some doom scenarios for about 5 years now.

My assumption is that white collar unemployment will become a serious problem by the end of the decade, but potentially as soon as 2-3 years. I believe ASI will come within 10 years and it's hard to predict past the intelligence singularity, but my assumption would be that rapid ASI-assisted robotic advancements will make the majority of humans in developed nations unemployed within a two decades. But again, I can't really predict what will happen post-ASI. I could be very wrong if just a few variables change.

The unemployment concern is the bit I'm most certain of but that also worries me the least personally, since it's by far the easiest risk to prep for. If I'm made unemployed and never find work again I'll be fine.

I'm also an accelerationist when it comes to AI-driven unemployment because I think an crisis-level unemployment spike before ASI arrives is probably our only hope at getting off the AI doom train we're on before it's too late.

Can you provide a definition of "hate speech" which doesn't also apply to "mean words"?

Are you suggesting racist words are a special category of mean words or something? If so why?

Here in the UK it is illegal to be grossly offensive online. Racism for example will have you charged under the Communications Act 2003.

https://x.com/Pirat_Nation/status/2056692341399081235

While here in the UK you can be arrested and charged for saying mean things about the royal family on private whatsapp groups,

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-09-07/five-former-met-p...

I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...

History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.

The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.

This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.

However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.

Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.

Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?

The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.

Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.

Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?

The idea that productivity gains which result in more of something being produced also create more demand for labour to produce that thing is more often wrong that true as far as I can tell. In fact, it's quite hard to point to any historical examples of this happening. In general labour demand significantly decreases when productivity significantly increases and typically people need to retrain.

Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper.

Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limited demand. You can't take 50% of the current white-collar workforce and dump them in these careers and expect them to easily find work or receive a decent wage. The demand simply does not exist.

Additionally, at the same time as white-collar jobs are being lost an increasing number of "low-skill" manual labour jobs are also being automated. Self-checkout machines mean it's harder to get work in retail, robotaxis and drone delivery will make it harder harder to find work in delivery and logistics, robots in warehouses will make it harder to find warehouse jobs.

It seems to me there is an implicate assumption that AI will either create a bunch of new well-paid jobs that employers need humans for (which means AI cannot do them) and jobs which cannot be exported abroad for cheaper. What well-paid jobs would even fit the category of being immune to AI and immune to outsourcing? Are we all going to be really well paid cleaners or something? It makes no sense.

A lot of the advice we're seeing today about retraining in construction worker or plumber seems to assume that there's an unlimited demand for this labour which there simply is not. And even if hypothetically there was about to be a huge increase in demand for construction workers, it would take years to even have the machinery, supply chain and infrastructure in place to support the millions of people entering construction.

The most likely scenario is that people will lose their jobs and will be stuck in an endless race to the bottom fighting for the limited number of jobs that are left in the domestic economy while everything else is either outsourced or done by robots and AI.

The better advice is to start preparing for this reality. Do not assume the government will or can protect you. When wealth concentrates corruption because almost inevitable and politicians have families to look after too.

Please take this seriously. Even if I'm wrong it's better to prepare for the worse rather than to assume everything will be find and you'll be able to retrain into a new well-paid career.

7 months ago was early November. Coding assistants were getting very good back then, but they were still significantly poorer at making good architectural decisions in my experience. They tended to just force features into the existing code base without much thought or care.

Today I've noticed assistants tend to spot architectural smells while working and will ask you whether they should try to address it, but even then they're probably never going to suggest a full refactor of the codebase (which probably is generally the correct heuristic).

My guess is that if you built this today with AI that you wouldn't run into so many of these problems. That's not to say you should build blind, but the first thing that stood out to me was that you starting building 7 months ago and coding assistants were only just becoming decent at that time, and undirected would still generally generate total slop.

Software was really hard pre-2010. You actually had to study it because there was no AI, no stackoverflow, no NPM, etc, etc. You had to learn how to write code the hard way, typically from people who already knew how or text books, and more importantly, learn how to solve real problems often applying maths (i.e. you couldn't import a library to find the shortest path in a graph).

Similarly video editing, graphic design, 3d modelling, music production, were some other fields which were really hard. Again, there was no YouTube tutorials or AI and even the software itself was so limited compared to what we have today. You had to spend years learning the craft which meant the skill difference between those who had put years into their thing and those who had not was enormous.

I miss that world so much... I liked not being good at things and finding people who had what seemed like inhuman talent at things. I had a friend who was insanely good at graphic design and the stuff they'd send me would blow me away. The level of detail and precision didn't even seem possible to me. But now I can generate something almost just as good with AI.

Other examples would be how people who spent years practising music are now indistinguishable from someone with AI. Or how people who spent years learning blender are producing models which are indistinguishable from someone with a Meshy subscription.

There's just no reason to dedicate yourself to anything anymore and even if you did you're probably not going to get a job anyway.

I am a hardcore AI doomer, but assuming the doom scenario isn't on the table and we simply see a concentration in wealth and mass white-collar job losses, I know I'd probably be fine or maybe even benefit from that because I grew up in a time where it was hard but very much possible to acquire a talent and use it to build wealth. Gen Z on the other hand stand no chance.

Today's job market feels corrupt and product of pure luck. You either get extremely lucky and somehow land a good job, or know someone who can get you through the door. In the last year I've interview some insanely talented people from the best universities and we have decided not to employ them because we just don't need to. It's honestly hard for me to comprehend being that motivated and working that hard to struggle to even find an entry level job at the relatively mediocre company I work for...

We need to question if more productivity is always good. It seems to me the way that productivity is distributed is essential. If it's largely just corporations benefitting from the productivity gains then we're creating a world that's not suitable for humans. This will create a world in which productivity, and therefore wealth, will concentrate to fewer and fewer people, whilst the average person struggles to find ways to demonstrate their employability. If AI is creating a world that is much richer by some metrics, but much poorer by most the average person cares about, then is it even a technology worth having? Why would Gen Z consent to this world we're building and not seek to overthrow (rightly imo) those who have created it? Technology is suppose to make our lives better not make them harder and financially suppress us.

There's always been low effort comments and content, here and all over the internet. A decade or so ago people used to write comments like "this" a lot to farm upvotes off another popular comment.

In comparison to other places this kind of thing is largely discouraged and unrewarded on HN, although I have noticed the quality of comments here has decreased over the years and low-effort comments are definitely upvoted more often these days.

I guess we all just need to be more proactive in downvoting them when we see them.

This was pre-2015

> Later in my career I joined a startup like this where every new concern someone could think up turned into a new microservice with new hires to form a new team. It didn't matter how small it was, everything was a reason to hire new people and form a new team. I sat in meetings where the express goal of the quarter was communicated as growing the engineering team.

This was post-2015

---

Am I right?

You're describing exactly what I've tried to express in various comments. There was a point in the latter half of the 2010s when it became genuinely hard to find tech work where you were building useful stuff. Startups become increasingly absurd and the focuses of their engineering teams even more so.

In 2019 I was working for a company who were so desperate to hire new engineers at one point they decided to just start offering jobs to candidates which failed interviews. It was absolutely insane.

They have all the fundamental human-capital strengths of economies like Germany. It's really no surprise they're doing so well.

Sensible smart people working hard will get a lot done over time.

For what it's worth Poland is the only place I've ever visited where felt I could easily see myself living there. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of Poles are moving back.

No idea about 2001, but I've heard it was fairly rough. More recently I've seen people say now it's harder to find work today, I think in part because in 2001 it was mostly tech companies laying off talent, while corporates who were less impacted by the dot-com bubble were still building out their engineering teams.

My p(doom) is now so high and I feel the singularity is so close that I've decided I'm just going to make the most of the little time I have left when my job ends.

The considerations I'm making now are more about how I can prep for whats coming more broadly. I've been prepping for the biological threats AI presents for some time now, although these timelines largely assume malicious human actors.

I've also been prepping for various AI infrastructure attacks which might leave me without energy, water or food for a prolonged period of time.

I think I may be able to survive 5% of the "doom" scenarios which I like the odds of these days...

Still amazes me people are seeing what's happening around and just looking at the immediate changes that are coming in terms of their careers to be honest. Assuming doom isn't coming what are you even planning to reskill in that a clanker wouldn't be able to do better that you within a decade or two?

And even if clankers can't take your job, if there's only a small subset of jobs that humans can still do then everyone is going to be competing for those jobs and you're going to be paid horribly any way. If you're jobless we're all jobless and the economy doesn't need 1 in every 5 people to be plumbers.

These are fundamentally unserious concerns. It's only marginally more sane that the people suggesting those losing their jobs to AI in design or consumer service roles could just become prompt engineers. Project forward a decade and start prepping for that.

Technical teams still need to design and build out the infra.

Technical teams still need to think about how to design and secure the backend systems.

The only thing that changes is that non technical people can now build UIs and internal tools on top of your core assuming you have solid APIs, MCPs, docs, and components to build on top of.

If you're allowing non-technical teams deploy mission critical software then you're not doing it right.

No one wakes up the frontend dude at 2am because the JS is doing something weird in the browser... All of the core infra and backend should still belong to technical teams.

I'm sure Coinbase understands this and when they say non-technical people are shipping software they don't mean they're vibe coding terraform infra and deploying full-stack user-facing applications.