Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs.
When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
In this shared responsibility model, if the public is mostly responsible, then what can and should be done by the public to fix these issues? And how long will it take? And how would you propose getting the bipartisan support needed, or avoid it becoming a partisan political issue? Are more high school media literacy classes realistically going to fix this problem? Today it feels to me like agenda-driven manipulative reporting is fueling a decrease in media literacy, which appears to be precisely what some people want. What can the public realistically do to counteract this?
That's true, but I don't think the burden can reasonably fall completely on schools and individuals.
I think regular "general disclaimers and PSAs" and necessary to 1) reinforce and refresh the proper lessons and 2) give them to people who never had the proper lessons in the first place.
I would call it "splitting hairs," which experts tend to do.
The practical reality is acknowledged at the end of the post.
Even if, technically speaking, using gift cards as a payments instrument is not a scam 100% of the time, anyone but a non-expert should behave as if it's 100%.
I predict certain political factions in the US will spend much of 2026 looking for ways to introduce a delay in the 2028 elections, such as pursuing a war so that Congress can postpone elections until they can be held safely. Which has never happened before, but who knows what absurdities will be given the OK these days?
As elections are determined by state and constitutionally mandated, this would be next to impossible.
It’s more likely that legal shenanigans happen like VRA section 2 going away and deepening gerrymandering wars or looking for excuses to disqualify people from voting for “election integrity” and other creative democratic backsliding that would pass muster at SCOTUS.
It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.
Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.
But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.
I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.
Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.
Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.
I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
> My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Don't have is pretty different from could not possibly afford though
Unless your company is extremely weird, I doubt that many layers of management could not afford a yacht if they wanted one
Then again, the bar for that is actually pretty low.
Source: My dad is a tool salesman, and also was the president of the local yacht club a couple of years ago. Actually thinking about it, that yacht club is surprisingly blue collar
I wouldn't ve surprised if white collar people hold off buying yachts unless they can also afford staff to pilot and manage them
There are tons of devs in same bracket, just not the most vocal ones. I could be described as one of them. In most corporations big enough, this is the only way to keep doing development instead of management, unless they have the grow-or-get-fired mentality.
As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.
At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.
No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.
The vast majority of the world population, and the vast majority of all people throughout history have not made their choices of job based on the same criteria some of us who are more privileged do today such as wanting to work on something they value.
A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.
Shameless plug, but I just wrote up an article about very similar issues, seems like me and OP are also around the same age. For me this realization was really freeing - bashing my head against "the market" for years, fighting with inconsistent values and expectations. Since I have accepted programming to be a hobby and looking for vocations without all the corporate shingles I am so much happier.
As a person that likes programming but doesn't like some parts of the job it helps me to think about this:
"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".
The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)
It is possible for a business to pay someone for the parts they don't like even when the parts they don't like do not contribute to profit or financial success in some way. This is not only demoralizing, it is usually boring, and usually not a good caraeer strategy because it is not sustainable.
I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
To gently push back, there are absolutely accountants and roofers who dedicate their free time upskilling or in adjacent hobbies. Many (perhaps most?) other fields have are conferences and journals, certifications, prestige jobs and grindhouse jobs, side hustles, and all the other trappings that feel unique to us. I'm not saying the distribution curve is the same, but it's easy to think this field is more unique than it really is.
And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.
The main argument in favor of treating it as a single condition tends to come from the advocacy side, rather than from the diagnostic side.
In terms of advocacy, there is strength in numbers, and arguably having such a large autism community has been good for both research and support. Potentially breaking that up into several smaller communities might lead to an overall decrease in impact.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone with autism, or families who have children with autism, will tell you that there is wide variation in both severity and presentation. And I think most would welcome better definition of subtypes.
I have serious doubts that an autistic advocate with low support needs, as opposed to 'neurotypicals' or impacted parents, are meaningfully more qualified to represent the needs of autistics with high support needs (e.g. severe intellectual disability, nonverbal, severe self injurious behaviors). Those autism are very very different with very very different lived experiences....and yet, well-meaning autistic advocates often bristle at that idea, almost as if it is an attempt to divide and and destroy autistic advocacy. The neurodiversity vs profound autism battle for hearts and minds continues to rage, and even threatens how and what autism research gets conducted...sometimes with good consequences, sometimes with poor consequences.
I am a proponent of finding neurobiological bases for subgrouping autism into different clinically meaningful etiologies so that the debate can move forward productively. Its one reason that more and more I'd rather forgo acquiring non-autistic controls in my studies, but just look within the autism sample for how to parse the heterogeneity into homogeneous subsets
> I have serious doubts that an autistic advocate with low support needs, as opposed to 'neurotypicals' or impacted parents, are meaningfully more qualified to represent the needs of autistics with high support needs
You think a parent without any autism is more qualified to speak than someone who has autism but a different cluster of symptoms? Because being a parent makes you an expert on what exactly?
The is a video of the spokesperson of autism speaks. Her autistic child is in the room and can hear everything. She talks about how bad it is for her to have an autistic child. How she wanted to kill herself by driving down a cliff. Again, while her autistic child is in the room. She is acting like her child is not even a person.
Autism Speaks is a hate group of abusive parents.
Those advocates with low support needs are the ones that are actually making an attempt to give those high support needs a voice. Not by speaking for them but by taking down barriers so that they can advocate for themselves. Because guess what? High Support needs autistic people are still people.
Just because someone is non-verbal does not mean they can not communicate in other forms. They can advocate for themselves if given the tools.
Support needs are multi dimensional, one person might have sensory issues, another no sensory issues at all but more social issues. Who has more support needs? They are different. And they can change. You can learn better coping skills, you can need more or less support as you age.
The parents you talk about just seem like assholes.
> Those advocates with low support needs are the ones that are actually making an attempt to give those high support needs a voice.
Having low-support-needs autism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good voice for others. In fact, it can be a very bad thing, if they imply that the problems they face are similar to problems faced by high-support-needs folks. The focus in the media on low-support-needs individuals gives people the wrong impression of the autism spectrum's individual experience and broader societal impact.
I think a better form of advocacy is the YouTube channel "Special Books by Special Kids," which doesn't make a point of the channel's author having a disability (no clue whether he does), but rather just introduces viewers to a broad variety of people.
1. I am not claiming that low support-need autists cannot advocate for hight support need autists. I am saying that I have encountered little evidence to support the idea that low support-needs autists have more insight into the needs and interests of someone who is nonverbal, intellectually disabled, and has severe self-injurious behaviors than others, including those who know and support those individuals daily.
2. Sometime being non-verbal is about trouble with expressive communication. But for others, it is an all encompassing impairment and communication, if much at all, has huge subjective/interpretative component by the observer. fMRI in these indivuals show near absence of activation differences for contrasts between passively listened to language and random noise. They absolutely cannot advocate for themselves, and to not understand this, which occurs in 10-20% of autism, suggests a blindness to the full spectrum, because those people are not seen, they are not on Twitter, they are at home with their loving and hardworking caregivers who should have a seat at the table.
I'm pretty sure, that parents, that have autistic kids have not only autistic genes, but also some autistic behaviour. My mother is not diagnosed and she is quite unhinged female and sometimes also very logical. And she also have been talking about me crap with other people, so it perfectly describes autistic parent.
Unfortunately, but the main issue is that people, that are trying to take control of talking space are acting like humans do and in autistic circles they are most efficient at taking over... also, the obsession levels in activity is quite high, as that is topic that they are interested in.
> Autism Speaks is a hate group of abusive parents.
It's an indicator of the current state of affairs in the social media autism space that the only organization focusing on reducing the suffering of individuals with higher levels of dysfunction (i.e. requires lifelong support for basic needs) is demonized to this degree. Though it also makes sense as the most disabled autistic individuals do not post online.
It’s understandable that people with a milder form of autism would find it reprehensible that people want to “fix” them rather than simply accept a different type of person exists, but this really just ignores people at the harshest end of the spectrum who might be able to live an independent life if a cure were developed.
That’s kinda the whole argument behind more subgroups. Mild autists don’t need a cure. A subgrouping would help explain this.
There are plenty of conditions which are just “part of who you are” that still probably should be cured if possible, if for no other reason than to improve their quality of life.
This is a complete lie. Autistic advocacy group care a lot about people with higher needs.
Meanwhile autism speaks spends money for anti-scientific research to find out whether vaccines cause autism and how to find a "cure" for autism. Such a cure can not exist. Autism is something you are born with and that is part of you.
If you knew anything about autism then you would know that we speak about levels of care needs, not "low/high functioning". So either you are ignorant or did choose to use hurtful language.
> Such a cure can not exist. Autism is something you are born with and that is part of you.
Signs of autism generally show up in early childhood, but it has not been proven that it is something a person is born with. Vaccines have been studied enough to rule them out, but there are still a zillion other things that babies today are exposed to that could be a factor, from antibiotics to endocrine disrupting chemicals to microplastics to viruses or even something we're not even considering medically today.
Also, tons of birth defects and inborn diseases can be cured. We cure cleft palates and spina bifida routinely. We manage diabetes and Phenylketonuria effectively enough that patients can live regular lives. Here's a paper published in the prestigious Cell journal covering 700 different genetic disorders which can be treated today: https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00110-7
It's possible that in the future autism will have a cure, a preventative measure or a highly effective treatment.
there's a bunch of BS going on with autism that I find very obnoxious
1) I see autism as non-verbal, no concept that other people or conscious minds exist. That's what -actual- autism is to me. And there are plenty of people like that.
2) In light of the above definition, I see the concept of "autism is on a spectrum" as extremely disrespectful to both autists and non-autists. For example, if I have a deformed pinky toe I'm not now on the "paraplegic spectrum disorder". If my IQ is 99 I'm not on the "braindead spectrum disorder" and so on. Such a system applies a negative label to people with the most extreme form, and simultaneous everyone else gets a taste of that label too.
3) the above smooshiness of definition has caused autism to be embraced by people - people who have legitimate mental disorders - just not autism. Moreso the cluster B family of disorders i.e. the manipulative and dramatic family. They are "neurodivergent" vs "neurotypical" and now they have just conjured manipulative leverage from thin air.
I think “neurodivergence” is a better label if the goal is gaining strength in numbers. It fully encompasses autism and autism spectrum related conditions, plus ADHD and others. A lot of people don’t want the label “autistic,” but share experiences with people who do, and would love to offer solidarity as an “inside” rather than “outside” member of the community. We now have “AuDHD spectrum” as a thing, but really, I think optimum numbers might come from including folks who identify as “broadly neurodivergent.”
It also leaves room to start distinguishing/separating out more subtle variants of what we currently umbrella as “autism,” perhaps making it better defined in the future. And I kind of suspect doing this with “less profound” neurodivergencies could help folks with “more profound” (and rarer) cases.
To look at a historical case: Gay Rights didn’t make a lot of headway. But adding lesbians, trans folks, etc. ultimately did a lot of good for that community in the US.
I was recently labelled neurodivergent by a colleague at work, as far as I can tell this is simply because I am good with numbers and don't like parties. I'm not sure how I feel about this, I wouldn't say I am Autistic or show any representative characteristics.
Autism or well any form of neurodivergence are about how you work on the inside. It is not possible to observe how a person behaves and just diagnose someone. That is why getting a diagnosis is a whole process involving a trained professional.
Your colleague is full of shit. Generally, neurodivergence is for everyone who regularly experiences that the way their brain works causes them trouble.
Self diagnosis is surprisingly accurate but people also tend to under estimate the severity of their symptoms.
Or so you think. Humans aren't any good at that whole "self-awareness" thing.
Even the "no empathy" sociopaths can spend decades thinking that they're perfectly normal, everyone is like them, and people just pretend to be sad and grieving at the funerals because that's some kind of established convention and breaking it would be very rude.
What I'm saying is: maybe you just think you don't show any signs of autism - because you think your experience is "normal", and you think that everyone has the same struggles as you do, even when it isn't true.
Or maybe you genuinely aren't autistic at all! It's just very, very hard to say at a glance.
> The main argument in favor of treating it as a single condition tends to come from the advocacy side, rather than from the diagnostic side.
Seeing it as one single conditions is established scientific consensus not some advocacy thing.
The diagnosis "Asperger's" was invented by Hans Asperger, a Nazi scientist that was responsible for the murder of many autistic children. It was never about science. It was invented because he thought that some autistic children might have a potential to become scientist and the like and therefore useful to Nazi Germany and some might not.
Hans Asperger decided which autistic children should be murdered and which one to be spared purely based on ideology.
Autism is something you are born with but support needs can change over your life depending on many factors like you environment, if you are diagnosed early and so on. They are not fixed.
> The diagnosis "Asperger's" was invented by Hans Asperger
No, it wasn't. The diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy”, which loosely corresponds to much of the range of the modern diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was invented by Hans Asperger (Asperger does not seem to be the first to have described the condition, though he invented that name; a Societ doctor seems to have recognized a similar condition a couple decades earlier.) The distinct separate diagnoses of “Asperger’s syndrome” was invented later (the term seems to have first been used in 1976), and roughly corresponded to the “higher-functioning” individuals within his diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy” that Asperger described as potentially socially useful.
I bought a second-hand unicycle with my own money in eighth grade and spent nearly all of high school trying to ride it well.
At my best, I could ride forward with no problem, but never quite mastered how to remain in one spot by rocking back and forth.
The answer to the "Does it hurt?" question is very accurate. There's just no getting around the fact that the saddle is going to be mildly uncomfortable all the time, and more than mildly uncomfortable the longer you ride.
But I was surprised that one question does not appear among his FAQs, because it is one that comes readily to mind to me.
"Does it help with the ladies?"
The answer is a resounding no. It does not help with the ladies.
Yes. The really weird thing is that guys tend to be really offended when you tell them that. Even if they themselves dont fill whatever criteria they have in mind.
Yep. I've been through almost exactly that, and know many other folks who have. If you're working in the US or other places that don't have really good labor regs, "RTO exemptions" are temporary, no matter what you're being told today.
Though, in my case bullet #1 was more like
No more remote hires. However, we will more than backfill the folks quitting or being laid off in the US and the EU with folks in India and China. We hope you enjoy the in-office synergy when communicating with your new teammates who are literally half a world away!
It’s amazing how much intense of a Scrooge McDuck vibes we’re getting from the MBA executive class.
Crank the screws, tighten the belt, offshore, increase profits at all costs. The next generations are going to have it rough since these elites have intentionally hoarded prosperity at the expense of their countrymen
I'm thankful I was "grandfathered in" by starting a remote role pre-COVID. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy) but I overwhelmingly prefer remote work.
I'm one of the rare remote in an office where most are full time there and I'm there one day a week.
I have no idea how they get anything done in there. I feel they only can focus before and after business hours.
So don't be so sure. Home has distraction when the mind is distracted. But once working I feel we are much more productive and capable due to long uninterrupted stints.
It does take discipline but that's what deadlines are for.
>Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy)
As a hiring manager, I appreciate the honesty and nuance. There is so much bullshit about remote work from the people doing it that it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
“I get so much more work done and I cracked the code to productivity, and surely no one would abuse this system, especially not you ultra worker 5000. Anyone who disagrees with me is a threat to the oversightless system I have an I must try and protect this by attacking them.”
Depends what you see as “abusing” the system. By working from home, I can take a walk in the garden when I find it hard to think, it energises me. At my office I can (and do) take a walk in the car park, but inevitably I leave the office with a headache caused by constant noise and fluorescent lighting
At home, I can put my family first if needed. When I’m at the office and something comes up at the kids’ school that I need to deal with, it’s a mad dash to get away soon enough that I almost have to drop everything and run
The times working in the office has been good as a software engineer: when we are prototyping on physical hardware I do not have at home. That’s it
It’s great if people love to go to the office. That’s fine. It’s managers that enforce it who are the problem — the people who work for you aren’t children and if you feel like you can’t trust them to make the decision to work from home, why on earth would you trust them in your office?
You seriously think this clown cares about any of this? I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that, only some miserable sod living in a shoebox who hates everyone around them.
That’s a fancy “no u” but it doesn’t make any sense.
I have remote employees, and I have people I would never allow WFH because they can’t handle it.
I don’t care what you do. I’m explaining from the position of someone responsible for a team that MANY people who are strictest about WFH being absolute are the people abusing it. This shouldn’t even be remotely controversial… yet… all I see is more protest and digital foot stomping.
You're a hiring manager, obviously your perspective is warped. Naturally you want good little code monkeys who will sit at a desk and pump out code.
Nobody steps back and asks - wait, is that good? Is there a point where "productivity" becomes negative because we're pumping out shitty half-baked code from a workforce who despises everything the company stands for? Nobody asks, is it possible that employees who contemplate suicide every day might not make the best product.
?
No. They don't. It's work, work, work and the end result is a piece of software so unbelievably shitty and barely functional that you require a commission-based Salesforce of sleezebags to sell it to some poor soul who doesn't know the difference between Git and GitHub.
Ultimately, and I know this is very old-fashioned, your company IS your workforce. Keeping them happy makes a good product and keeps the profits flowing. Every company in the Golden Age of the American economy knew that. Few remember it.
Right, but if you didn't want code monkeys, you wouldn't be talking about productivity and getting your 8 hours worth.
The only people who think that engineers are actually doing a straight 8 hours of work are so delusional they're not worth mine, or anyone else's, breath.
Most of the time is spent thinking anyway. Coding is, like, 5% typing in a chair and 95% thinking about what to type. You don't need to optimize for the chair.
What's the fear with WFH? Your employees might not despise you? Your company might accidently create a culture that doesn't suck donkey dick? People might actually agree with your mission statement for once?
Is that really so bad? And all it takes is not intentionally fucking people up the ass. It's so easy, so accessible.
Yeah, people differ, and there are different forces that can increase and decrease productivity in an office and at home. If I'm honest with myself, being remote gives me more opportunity to slack off and do whatever I want, which often is not really working. But if I'm in an office I also am less able to get in a flow state.
An ideal working environment for me would probably be working from home, alone, perhaps with some stimulants (I have severe ADHD, or at least am diagnosed as having it and perceive myself as having), a close deadline, a lot of intrinsic motivation and interest in a task, and no distractions. In practice, most of the time I find working on a laptop at a library or cafe or on a laptop/desktop in an office does push me to do more work-related stuff more frequently on an average day, since I know people near me may notice I'm spending ages on Twitter or HN or whatever and that somewhat discourages me from doing non-work things.
I don't think you deserve to have been downvoted. I love having a work-from-home job and love that I was able to get one pre-pandemic, but I also don't necessarily blame higher-ups for wanting more people to work in an office. It's complicated.
I'm starting to notice a pattern with these AI assistants.
Scenario: I realize that the recommended way to do something with the available tools is inefficient, so I implement it myself in a much more efficient way.
Then, 2-3 months later, new tools come out to make all my work moot.
I guess it's the price of living on the cutting edge.
The frustrating part is, with all the hype it is hard to see, what are really the working ways right now. I refused to go your way to live on the edge and just occasionally used ChatGPT for specific tasks, but I do like the idea to get AI assistants for the old codebases and gave the modern ways a shot just now again, but it still seems messy and I never know if I am simply not doing it right, or if there simply is no right way and sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. I guess I wait some more time, before also invest in building tools, that will be obsolete in some weeks or months.
I think the stories told about this time in particular will be the same as the stories told about any boom/bust cycle: a frenzied feeling of progress which resulted in a tiny handful of people getting outrageously wealthy, whilst the vast majority of people and society as a whole loses a whole lot of time, money and dignity.
The consequences of having the world's smartest people working on those things 24/7.
Often, either the model itself gets improvements that render past scaffolding redundant, or your clever hacks to squeeze more performance out get obsoleted by official features that do the same thing better.
I think this is specifically the consequence of smart people working in a bubble: there's no clearly defined problem being solved, and there's no common solution everyone's aiming for, there's just a general feeling of a direction ("AI") along with a pressure to get there before anyone else.
It leads to the false feeling of progress, because everyone thinks they're busy working at the forefront, when in reality, only a tiny handful of people are are actually innovating.
Everyone else (including me and the person you responded to) is just wasting time relearning new solutions every week to "the problem with current AI" .
It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month", especially when that solution is almost always a synonym of "prompt engineering", "software engineering" or "prompt engineering with software engineering".
> It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month"
At least for the current iterations that come to mind here, every advanced new solution solves the problem for a subset of problems, and the advanced new solution after that solves it for a subset of the remaining problems.
E.g. if you are tool calling with a fixed set of 10 tools you don't _need_ anything outlined in this blog post (though, you may use it as token count optimization).
It's just the same as in other programming disciplines. Nobody is forcing you to stay up to date with frontend framework trends if you have a minimally interactive frontend where a <form> elements already solves your problem.
Similarly, nobody forces you to stay up-to-date with AI trends on a daily basis. There are still plenty of product problems ready to be exploited, that do well enough with state of AI & dumb prompt engineering from a year ago.
Hah I’m only on the cutting edge part time on the side so my experience has been more like - start thinking about the problem and then 2 or 3 days later new tools come out that solve it for me
Honestly… was having a conversation with my aunt about this last week. Knitting, crocheting, and quilting are all high-skill activities and no one charges enough for it.
I used to joke that I made some of the most expensive socks in the world: 20 hours per pair, and I’m a run-of-the-mill IT ops person in western Europe - do the math.
I have decided to up the cost by taking up fleece processing and hand spinning. Even on the wheel, it takes another twenty hours to clean, comb, and spin enough wool for a pair of socks.
If I were doing this for income, I’d definitely get faster at all the steps.
As I pick up more of the steps in making clothes, it’s mind-boggling how cheap even “luxury” clothes like the 500 EUR pants discussed above, much less my sturdy midrange jeans (Tom Tailor, 60 EUR, pockets that hold an iPhone 13 mini, even in a ladies’ cut), are.
Yep, lots of people doing knowledge work vastly underestimate the material cost, effort and skill associated with artisan goods. On one hand I blame modern manufacturing which justifies this ignorance somewhat but on the other hand I die a little inside when I hear about people willing to fork over large sums to something better advertised.
Though it's worth mentioning that some people are jumping into hand crafted stuff as a business first, cranking out subpar cookie cutter designs and while not terribly expensive and still a minority it's worth making sure you support people who care about the craft first. A category to watch out for is minimal leather wallets, while quality leather and correct thread selection practically guarantee the wallet will last, the care put into making it determines how enjoyable it will be to use.
The vast majority of people making handcrafted do not charge enough for their items. If they did, nobody could afford them. Most items are priced based on the cost of the material with little consideration to the time to make them. I have a friend that is a very skilled knitter, but for large items like blankets and sweaters, there are weeks of effort involved. When broken down, "kids in Chinese factories" make more per hour.
The great thing is that this type of person will tell you they are not in it for the money. As long as they can "buy more string" with the proceeds (or whatever their materials are), they are quite happy.
I don't think this is the answer you think it is. Every person that I know that knits or crochets is not doing it to make money, or even when selling items are not charging because they think that's all someone will pay. They do it because they like doing it. If they were doing it to make money, then the fun and relaxing nature of it is lost. If you've ever been to or around a stich-n-bitch, you'd understand. It's cheaper than a therapist. Plus, there's usually wine and baked goods. I'm in Texas, so it's not like the items knitted are used for more than 2 weeks out of the year. That doesn't stop them. To blame it on the "what people will pay" is grossly not understanding.
My friend made a rule that no new yarn could be bought until the same amount of yarn from existing inventory is used first. An entire closet was dedicated to said inventory. Receiving yarn as a gift does not count.
Maybe the author would be in a better place to do that, having the expertise already. Also, as a user I'm quite happy with jq already, so why expend the effort?
When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
reply