lookACamel

They sacrificed the young gen to keep older gens secure.

> The ice-agers’ misfortunes contrast starkly with those of the generation that came just before. During the bubble years of the 1980s, companies hired voraciously.

> Everything changed as the bubble popped in the early 1990s. Japan’s rigid employment system made it hard to shed existing workers, so they cut hiring instead. The ratio of job openings to college applicants fell from nearly three at peak to below one by 2000.

> Many graduates who failed to secure regular jobs ended up in temporary or contract work. Japan’s labour market sharply distinguishes between regular workers, who enjoy strong legal protections and seniority-based pay rises, and irregular ones, who often do similar work for much less money and are the first to be laid off in downturns.

> It's a fun hobby!

This is what skeptics are missing. The strongest answer to what AI has delivered to society so far is the new, fulfilling hobby of vibecoding. Their disparagement is like being skeptical of the routine, regular investment into iterative improvements in smartphone cameras purely on the basis that you can't pinpoint a specific lump of business process value. The vibecoding is the point. That's what people want and what they are willing to pay for.

People like OP have frivolously wasted large chunks of their life writing and maintaining open source code that no valuable businesses really care about, just because they have this dumb hobby of typing out code and thinking about logic. (I'm saying this tongue in cheek.) They, of all people, should be to understand the unlock that AI is for a large swath of humanity.

In my analogy, it's not because they are "unskilled" or "bad". But they become obsolete because the shareholders want the singular master chef and their army of robots doing all the cooking.

And it's not just because the agents execute faster than humans, it's primarily that they have lower friction to onboard and off board. In the past we needed a "standing army" (salaried, full time work). Again this is not about the soldiers in the army being bad of incompetent, those are excuses. The real reason is that it takes a lot to train and maintain a soldier. Bu t when we now have ephemeral agents which spin up and down as needed, then there is going to be a strong incentive to cut down on the salaried middle class.

Simultaenously platforms like Mercor which offer white collar task based gig work are on the rise.

The logic is that ordinary humans are becoming too expensive to maintain on a standing basis.

From the title I thought this post would be about something completely different. The post is about splitting the world into "good" and "bad" engineers with an emphasis on the bad engineer. Ok but what does that have to do with the middle class? The post leaves the best part out.

What I thought the post would be about is the dissolution of the White Collar Kitchen Brigade The kitchen is run by the Chef but it needs the Sous Chef, Line Cooks, Kitchen Hands to operate.

Many software engineers have made a good living acting as the sous chefs and line cooks underneath the rockstar chefs, but with AI companies are inclined to turn the whole kitchen over to the top dog and their AI crew and the ordinary human crew is slowly being churned out.

Despite the title this article doesn't seem to be saying anything about the "middle class".

You can switch to the Chinese language version. Why don't you read that one first before deciding if it's LLM generated.

Can you tell us a bit more about the biofeedback you practiced?

You have it backwards. In prisoner's dilemma if both stay quiet they are still punished, just less so.

I think the weakest part of the bakery example is the lack of specific numbers for the rent situation. Paying for someone's rent for over a year is a pretty large financial contribution and for two people not in a romantic relationship is should not be hard to do the accounting on. Like if you can fight over equity but you can't even calculate the rent you paid over the last year ... well it's no wonder you ran out of savings ...

This also points to a weakness in the product itself: it jumps to creating a solution without pushing for more info.

> sometimes a negative situation calls for honestly negative tones.

It's not exactly hard for humans in dispute to conjure up negative tones.

Yeah after re-reading the scenario it is pretty weird. The AI doesn't have enough data. There should be concrete numbers for the rent. Why wouldn't Daniel tell the LLM exactly how much it was?

Great idea though I am skeptical it will be adopted in contentious situations without some sort of stick. In amorphous situations where there is just high trust but an aversion to talking things out I could see this kind of tool being used. But in contentious or low trust situations (strangers) I suspect most people do not want fairness, they want to be ahead. A fair agreement will, paradoxically, disappoint everyone since every party feels the lack of clear advantage.

> While also holding down an additional job

That's the problem, the story is saying he stopped focusing full-time on the business in order to make his own ends meet. It looks like the main innovation of the mediator generated deal is that it attempts to reconcile by drafting a way back in to 50/50 if he recommits. The starting 60/40 split is not that important.

Luck is part of her strategy for increasing agency though.

> Increase your surface area for luck