hn_throwaway_99

My favorite example is WebVan vs. Instacart. What a difference a decade makes.

First movers often lose though in the market. Relevant to today's news about DoorDash acquiring Instacart for a few billion dollars: WebVan came out a decade earlier (i.e. at the wrong time) and went bankrupt after 3 years.

A perhaps more relevant personal anecdote: About a year ago I told a non-technical friend that I'd help him migrate his small business website that was originally set up in WordPress (by a developer who is since long gone) to a format that would be much easier for him to manage with no dev support. I planned to move him over to one of the usual suspects like Wix or Squarespace, but this is one instance where my procrastination was a virtue. In the ~9 months since he originally had an issue with his site, AI capabilities had exploded. Turned out it was a lot easier (and cheaper) to use Claude to fully migrate his site and get it up on Cloudflare workers, and I set up everything so he could manage all the content himself. Plus, it took me less than a day to do the migration off WordPress, and most of that time was just me wanting to learn the ins and outs of Claude Code because I was new to it at the time.

> top-most voted answer was most often the wrong answer

I'm calling bullshit on that one. I don't doubt that some top-voted answers were wrong, but the vast majority of the time I used it, the top-voted answer was correct. This just feels like trying to paint with an extremely broad brush. I'm not denying that SO had problems, but there's no way I'm taking "the majority of top answers were wrong" without any evidence.

Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".

And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I'll do a mea culpa then. I was uncomfortable making Google the final arbiter of place names, as I didn't find a good reason why we should trust Google more than the democratically elected government of our country.

But I really like this policy. Even though it still relies on Google's definition of "common usage", it makes naming much less arbitrary and more sensical.

I was wrong in my previous analysis. Google had a clear, sensible, defined, published policy, and they broke it to appease a wannabe autocrat.

I think you're both kind of right. The market is exceptional for the best in a very specific niche of tech.

Yes, people with specific, real AI skills (and by "real" I'm specifically excluding the "let me show you the secrets to a good prompt!!" LinkedInfluencers) are making obscene amounts of money. But there are other folks who were experts in their fields and truly the best are now having a mighty difficult time getting hired. There was a front page HN post recently by a guy who headhunters used to trip over themselves to contact, who wrote a number of programming books, who was considering leaving tech because he couldn't get hired. Now, granted, a big reason he couldn't get hired is because he was looking for a fully remote job and that world is largely gone, but I think another big reason is that he was a technology expert in specific programming languages, and that is exactly the type of expertise that AI is making less valuable.

That may be true in an industry that is growing, but the calculus changes a ton in a shrinking industry, or at least one with a ton of near and long term uncertainty.

I mean, suppose you're a star performer at Microsoft. Consider the following:

1. The FAANGs pay better than just about any corporation on Earth.

2. Most of those FAANGs have also had plenty of layoffs of their own.

3. If you are the caliber of person who works at Microsoft who could get a job at a super hot AI company (say NVidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) my guess is most of these people already left.

I suspect that most of the people who end up taking this offer have already checked out in some way, i.e. people wanting to quit and now this gives them a reason to do so.

For folks who believe that LLM-based AI only operates with the "convex hull" of its training data, I'm curious how they interpret this result.

To summarize, a lot has been discussed recently about whether LLMs are just really, really good at finding connections between existing information (i.e. the world's smartest and best search engine), or whether they are capable of discovering truly unique, novel ideas. Because many of the very impressive recent AI math results were often just tying together ideas and theories that were already known (and I don't mean to minimize those accomplishments), it was surmised (and, just speaking for myself, hoped) that LLMs operated within this "convex hull", and thus there would always be at least some axis where LLM-based AI wouldn't surpass humans.

Now, this idea of the convex hull of training data is not very clearly defined, and people can and have argued about what it means. But in this case, OpenAI disproved a conjecture that was widely assumed to be true. This was a genuinely surprising result that many experts were shocked by. I'm not a mathematician so I'm not qualified to determine if this was a "truly unique" realization, but a really surprising result seems like it would be a candidate for AI solving a problem in a manner "outside the convex hull".

I mean, in the very short term I could buy that scenario - there are a host of "AI consultants" selling their wares.

But even then, I would only buy that for the very short term, because AI is designed to (eventually) implement that step, too. As an analogy, I always wonder who is paying for these "how to use agentic AI" courses I see pop up all the time now. Literally just ask it! I asked Claude to build a course for me to get comfortable understanding agents and harnesses and it did a fantastic job.

I'll just speak for myself then. The "PC revolution" launched in the 80s. A primary goal of the PC (from a business perspective) was to allow individual workers to do much more by themselves, e.g. in the 60s and 70s you had legions of secretaries and assistants for basically every mid level or higher worker.

It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.

If you look at Microsoft's total headcount over the past decade, it's really not that outlandish, especially if you combine "over hired during the pandemic" with "end of the ZIRP era". In 2019 employee count was 144k, now it's about 223k.

That said, for the past 3 decades at least, tech was a hugely growing sector that provided ever growing employment opportunities. It seems like that time is now over. Even if you take the "Jevon's paradox view" of AI, that is that the cheaper cost of writing software will feed a demand explosion, it's just hard to imagine that many more people will be needed to fulfill that extra demand.

This is why I think it's fair to think "this time it really is different". In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from. Now even the leaders of the AI revolution think it will kill tons of jobs. I get a bit worried about the number of young people and friends' kids who decide to major in "business" in college now. It just feels very difficult to imagine a white collar career that will be stable over the next 10 years or so, let alone an individual's 40 year career.

I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.

I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.

(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.

FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.

FWIW, I agree with pretty much everything you've said. But I don't think it's unique to any profession or individual that they tend to care the most deeply when it hits them directly.

The only thing I don't really agree with is where you say "My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career." I still think of management consultants as some of the highest paid careers around, and getting a partnership track job at one of the Big 3 is one of the most desirable jobs (for MBA types anyway) there is, so I just don't know what you're talking about with this one.

> The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.

Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.

A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.

But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.