I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
i completely agree with you and the post you are replying too. both are correct.
In that context the quote is about performing the duties you were born to do without overthinking the consequences.
Duty of a warrior is to fight for his country/tribe/side. Duty of a king might be to reduce suffering for his subjects.
> stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this.
You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control.
Now, one can interpret that it is instruction to "stay in your lane", but I have not seen that interpretation so far in my life in India.
I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit.
The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema over facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion labor.
For anyone who understood the whole story and backdrop of the situation, a reasonable interpretation is
- you are responsible for your actions but you cannot control the consequences of your actions due to many factors.
- When you detach yourselves from results and you can do your job without anxiety.
- do not let the fear over results be an excuse for inaction.
Give it a read and decide for yourselves if you are not convinced. Even without the teachings part, the whole story of Gita is actually an epic story/novel with some strong and conflicted characters with elaborate back stories.
This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.
The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.
Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates
A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".
Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?
1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.
2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.
I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
Though in the particular case of the MacBook Neo, I'm not sure whether we're talking about sharper or duller. Depends on the metric you're using, I guess.
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
The problem with Apple comes down to the App Store, the forced 30%, and all the apps that just don't get built cause of Apple. This is rent seeking, and this is evil.
Here's a good system for evaluating technologies: https://www.ranprieur.com/tech.html
If you don't want a MacBook Neo, don't buy one and it doesn't affect your life. But the App Store affects your life whether you own an iPhone or not. It affects the direction of the world. And that's where the rent seeking problem is.
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
Most of the US ones are. Anthropic is the worst offender.
The Chinese AI model providers like DeepSeek are not.
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
The truth is in the middle.
Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.
slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.
> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.
AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It's almost everything has some mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
What counts as a return is quite subjective — it goes beyond money. Respect, happiness, meaning — all of these count.
Given that, if there are no returns at all, I bet that is not a positive-sum game that could last long. Like if you give and create value for others, but the recipient has no respect for you and you receive nothing — it is not meaningful and will not last long. And you'd better walk away and start worrying about the returns.
And to be frank, look at who creates the most value in the world — they also could be the richest. That is no coincidence. Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who work hard and create deal opportunities that could make everyone win.
This is just so disconnected with reality. Any new worthwhile project will take few months of full-time work minimum, how many people can invest few months of unpaid full-time work with no guarantees of success. and that's not even considering the amount of time it takes to acquire the necessary skills.
When it starts to feel like work, it starts to feel like needing wages for it.
At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.
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