Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?

Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.

I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.

I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.

I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.

This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.

Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.

I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.

This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.

No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.

> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living

AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.

> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.

But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.

I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.

For something like insulin a pharmacist can get you an emergency supply without calling anyone, should they see fit. Might be rare to find such a person though these days.

I did look into this briefly long ago for SpaceX. There are ways for relatively small investors (and I do mean relatively!) to get into some of these companies equity pre-exit by buying shares from employees who currently hold them for those who want to reduce risk/need the cash now vs. later.

You will likely need to have enough assets already with a single institution to have a private banking relationship with your bank. They would be the one to call to ask what options might be available. There are other options like EquityZen that make it more accessible, but I have not looked into those at all.

You will also need to be either an accredited investor or a qualified investor ($1M/$5M minimum networth not counting your personal property) depending on how each company is setup, but again I'm not entirely sure on details there.

I stopped looking into it when I was told that there was a $1M minimum buy-in at that time. More than I was looking to do at the time. I imagine it's much higher these days.

These are of course highly risk investments and I am unsure of how tested these structures are - so I imagine there is some counterparty risk on top of all the usual stuff.

Sure, people can opt out and some will. However the base human psychology is pretty well documented. If the ability to simply not engage in what amounts to addictive behavior was enough we wouldn’t have the crazy online gambling epidemic. That is at least to me obviously bad for the consumer even if you can simply choose not to engage.

Some ethical game companies will likely draw the line at what you say - but I predict far more will realize they can juice revenue quite easily by simply moving towards incentivizing more lootbox type things.

I'd much rather have an open version of Apple Home or whatnot, even if I paid for it. I really don't want to spend a bunch of time dicking around with home automation - I want it to simply do what I want it to do.

The internet? Probably not. Having smart switches is great though. Both for very basic automations and laying in bed going "oh shit I forgot to turn off the basement lights" style moments.

It's important though that all those things work together locally in a reliable manner. All mine fallback to "wired" mode if all else fails. The connectivity is just a bonus. One lightswitch near the bed to go into "bedtime mode" for all common areas of the house is pretty handy for me.

Smart locks are a great idea in theory, but the horribleness of the residential door lock standards make them kinda suck in practice in terms of mechanical reliability. I went with a full blown commercial access system and don't regret it. Being able to remotely add folks while I'm traveling or allowing temporary guest access without physical keys is great.

Honestly I find video doorbells a downgrade and an obnoxious addition to our anti-social societal trends. Although that's rather hypocritical since I also have one!

The big issue for me in the Home Automation space is every stupid manufacturer wanted their own silly standard and/or app to "own" the user experience. Fuck that.

I suppose you could put almost all my stuff under "devops" vs. "development" but the idea is the same.

Recently I "vibe coded" some IoT sensors to monitor my garden environmental parameters, and created dashboards/alerts around them. I could have done all those things myself, but I never would have had the inertia or couple weekends to burn to spin it all up from scratch and teach myself every tiny little nuance.

Now I have a mostly-okay output of some grafana dashboards and HA alerts for soil moisture, and some neat correlation between those sensors plus my irrigation and rainfall data.

Or just opening a chat with AI to use it's "WLED" skill to go change the holiday theme of my permanent RGB lights along the fenceline.

Sure, once in a while I want to drop down and learn a new skill for such projects. But there is already a whole lot of "physical" bits of these projects and the coding/IT work is just the final piece of the puzzle. These days it's much more of a chore than a discovery process to spin up the 516th Ubuntu VM I've configured over my lifetime and configure software to have it do something useful for me.

Same goes with a lot of "glue" type scripts and automations like getting backups all working and monitored across my personal IT infrastructure.

If I'm doing something for the joy of learning these days it's almost always going to be learning a new physical skill like welding or woodworking or something I can immediately see the results of my labor. I guess I'm simply burned out on computers, and find very little novel in what I want to accomplish.

For this sort of thing agentic AI has been eye opening to me. It definitely has informed how I plan to implement some tasks at work for my career, as I've seen the massive amount of time it can save for the tedium. Creative and mission critical stuff? Probably not for some time.

I've also never much been a "love of the game" sort of guy when it comes to programming. It's always simply been a means to an end. The outcomes are what matter to me. I find working with well designed architecture quite satisfying, but beyond that I really don't get some inherent joy in the process. Those late night 3am hacking sessions were always fun to me because of the result I achieved at the end of the process.

I mean, you just did it yourself. You made a great point by doing so.

It's generally the same people. Your rants pretty much prove it. Plus I've been in meetings where it's literally the same people. They will use any and all reasons to stop local development and then stick with the one that gets the most popular traction.

I'm not talking about folks against residential development. I'm talking being around projects and in local meetings about industrial development - primarily electric generation and transmission. The arguments are pretty much the same.

> The people who want these data centers are telling us that the reason that they want them is to keep momentum on their plans to destroy our entire way of life.

AI is now taking rural blue collar jobs? I find it very difficult to believe this is a real grass roots concern.

I find it very easy to believe white collar folks are using their relative positions of power to amp up concerns rural blue collar folks would actually care about. Often at the expense of said blue collar folks.

These facilities would often be a win for a local community with a little bit of foresight. It doesn't matter to your power bill if they are sited 5 miles down the county road from you, or 200 miles. Chances are they are using electricity from your regional interconnect and that's where your power bills come from.

> And more importantly, what causes you to feel that it's obvious that they are only coming to these opinions through ignorance?

Only? Of course not. Primarily? Obviously. For the simple fact that dozens of people in my orbit who never knew datacenters existed near them all of a sudden Care Very Much(tm) about the subject after watching a few very low information videos. These are folks who drove past local facilities most of their lives and never had a clue.

> If this was a real, actual job-creating industrial project, people would react differently.

Not in my experience. Pretty much every single industrial project is nearly impossible to build in the US. Heavy industry sounds fun until someone wants to build an aluminum smelter, copper mine, or wind farm down the way. There are tons of infrastructure projects that need to get done which will not because they are not point-source locations that employ lots of jobs for a single community.

My previous example are wind farms. Typically those are best sited a few hundred miles away from a major metropolitan/load center. Good luck getting anything of scale built these days now that we've more or less burned up every ounce of spare electric transmission capacity leftover from before we de-industrialized ourselves. Once you get out of re-using existing right-of-way you see nearly the same backlash as AI datacenters. The difference? The urban laptop classes don't take your side and the outrage tends to stay localized.

It's very interesting to me a certain class of folks have convinced people that the closest thing to "free money" for a local community is a bad thing. Construction phase might suck, but assuming it's simply a datacenter and not a power plant with a co-located datacenter off the to side, you really can't get any lighter-touch land use than this. It's probably less environmentally impactful (in a negative way) to the local community than the 100 acre corn field it replaces. And employs more people to boot.

I would 100% agree with you on any tax abatements/credits/etc. These facilities do not need them and would be quite happy to pay full-freight on taxes on top of contributing towards upgrading local infrastructure far beyond their expected impact on it. This is where I feel that local politicians have seriously shit the bed all over their communities.

This is really the only point that matters. It's held true my whole life, and I expect it will be true until I die. Doesn't matter what you build. I was watching a couple transmission line projects over the past decade that are still in the "lawsuits and community rage" phase - proposed to bring wind farm watts to load centers - and now they will likely be killed since the anti-development folks can pretend they were always due to Datacenters.

Datacenters are just an easy scapegoat for the anti-development crowd. It's been amazing to watch how quickly it's gone, and how folks have such a strong opinion on stuff that otherwise would have been built half a mile from them and they'd never have known any better until they were told to care.

The rest of what you wrote is largely social media driven ragebait in comment form. Kernels of truth, but largely immaterial.

Datacenter land use is the least interesting thing you could possibly discuss. Knocking out some corn fields and building some warehouses off the road no one can see or hear, with almost no traffic to/from them after construction is pretty much the lowest possible bar for local community impact for quite literally any project. It change nothing for anyone, other than the farmers who sold the land and that a few local trades companies have a couple decades of stable highly paid employment.

Therefore, the only way to get communities up in arms about these things is basically lie about it.

It's going to be a real head scratcher to folks when electricity rates continue to march upwards even if they get all AI datacenter construction banned. The green tech crowd who had the datacenter bogeyman land in their lap is playing an exceedingly dangerous game here. What we are largely seeing is the bill coming due for generational lack of investment into the grid.

If your local community can't figure out how to get the money raining down from the skies like it is now to subsidize the build out of your local infrastructure for something as minor as municipal water treatment in Wisconsin You likely will never be building anything at all.

Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.

> not overactive safetyism.

Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.

I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.

And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.

Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.

I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.

Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.

Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.

Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.

You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.

I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.

I was skeptical of the "lopsided" design at first but it grew on me and is what I'd prefer in future devices from here on out.

You can... turn them upside down to become a left-handed device. That way you can be weak-handed with either hand!

So until they can figure out how to make touch screen work in those conditions, any device released without page turn buttons is useless to me.

It's not a preference thing for me. It's simply a physical requirement for my environment.

Yes, I do understand I'm a rather niche use-case and don't really expect them to pander to me. But I will be vocal about it just so they know I exist! There are at least dozens of us!

The fact I can continue to buy refurbished Oasis units whenever I leave one in airplane seatback pocket is the only reason I'm still on the Kindle ecosystem. The second I cannot make that work it's off to third party for me and they will lose an infinitesimal portion of their captured audience for future book purchases.

To me it would. If they don't have a similar device released by that time.

It would get me motivated enough to finally de-DRM all the books on my device (or pirate copies I can't otherwise decrypt) and copy them to a third party something like a Kobo Reader or whatnot.

I am firmly in the Kindle ecosystem sort of by accident and inertia, but if they were to end support of the only device that meets my needs (page turn buttons and waterproof - which for the latter to be useful you need the former) it'd be the end of Kindles for me forever, and I'd certainly bitch a lot about it on-line!

If they end support for it 12 year after release but offer a reasonable upgrade path? I'd grin and bear it. 12 years is a decent amount of time for a $200 device.

I’ve looked at the outputs here and there - and holy hell would it never pass review if I were trying to make something robust and anti-fragile. But since I can just have AI spit out a fix for the horrific “code” when it breaks in a totally predictable manner it’s just not worth my time to try to actually sit down and get it done right. Or even fight with AI by providing a good specification and design guidelines.

I imagine this is how things are going in the real world, given 30 years of working with various levels of humans. So long as the output is “good enough” it is the extreme minority of folks who care about much else. And that’s for mid-level to senior folks who have the experience to know better. Juniors wouldn’t even be able to pick out most of even the most obvious anti-patterns AI tends to spit out such as putting configuration within code, etc.

Refactoring is just in a new world too, that us olds probably have a hard time with. It’s no longer examine the code, identify design gaps, find high leverage places to start fixing, etc. It’s now “this is broken, rewrite from scratch” when it eventually turns into too much spaghetti.

In some ways being entirely focused on the outcomes is freeing in a way. But man under the hood is crazy and a whole new world.